That model made certain assumptions, and allowed me to produce two projections (well, many, but I picked two) depending on how each candidate actually fairs with different ethnic groups (White, Back, Hispanic, since those are the groupings typically used).
The two different versions of this model were designed to favor each candidate differently. The Clinton-favored model started with the basic assumption that among white Democratic Party voters, both candidates are similar, and that Clinton has a strong lead among Hispanic voters and an even stronger lead among African American voters. The Sanders-favored model assumes that Sanders has a stronger position among White voters and less of a disadvantage among non-White voters.
The logic behind the equivalence among White voters is that this his how the two candidates did in Iowa, which is a representative of the United States White vote, unadulterated by a favorite son effect in New Hampshire. Nevada failed to indicate that this assumption should be changed.
The favoring of Clinton among non-White voters is based on national polling with respect to ethnic effects. The logic behind the Sanders-favored version is that Sanders’ strategy, to win, has to involve a large young, white, male turnout (evidenced in the polls) and a narrowing of the gap among African American and Hispanic voters.
In that model, presented here, I used statewide demographic data to establish the ethnic term. However, that is incorrect, because one’s chances of engaging in the Republican vs. Democratic process in one’s state is tied to ethnicity. More Whites are Republicans, more Blacks are Democrats. I knew that at the time I worked out the model, but sloth and laziness, combined with lack of time, caused me to simplify.
The newer version of the model adjusts for likely Democratic Party membership. The results are the same but less dramatic, with a much longer slog to the finish line and the two candidates doing about the same as each other for the entire primary season.
The outcome of my modeling (reflected in the non-adjusted and adjusted versions, each with a Clinton- and Sanders-favored version) is different from the expectations of either campaign, as far as I can tell. Clinton boosters are claiming that the Democratic Party is mainly behind her, and these first primaries are aberrant. Sanders boosters are claiming the Sanders strategy of having a surge of support will carry him to victory. Both of these characterizations require that each candidate surge ahead pretty soon, and don’t look back. The opportunity to surge ahead is, certainly, Super Tuesday (March 1st).
The models I produced, with the assumptions listed above, show a close race all along, so either the campaigns are wrong or I am wrong.
The graphic at the top of the post represents how far ahead each candidate will be across the primary season, for each of their respective favored strategies.
So for Clinton, the ethnic gap is maintained as wide, and the blue line shows that she will surge nearly 40 committed delegates ahead of Sanders (a modest surge) and continue to develop a wider and wider gap past mid-March, and thereafter, maintain but not increase that gap, of about 80 committed delegates, until the end.
For Sanders, the orange line, the initial gap formed on Super Tuesday, does not start out very large, but his gap steadily increases until the end of the primary season, ending with a gap of over 120 committed delegates.
So, that is the new model. But, it is a bogus model.
I’m trying to stick with empirical data that do not rely on polling. Why? Because everybody else is relying on polling, and this is an election season where the polling is not doing a good job of predicting outcomes. Also, my modeling gives credit to each campaign’s claims, which is at least interesting, if not valid, as a way of approaching this problem. If Clinton is right, she wins this way. If Sanders is right, he wins that way.
However, the data are insufficient to have much faith in this model. Super Tuesday will provide a lot more information, and with that information I can rework the model and have some confidence in it.
Who will win the South Carolina Primary, Clinton or Sanders?
While working this out, I naturally came up with predictions for what will happen in all of the future primaries. So let’s look at some of that.
In South Carolina, according to my model, if Clinton’s strategy holds, she will win 29 delegates, and Sanders will win 24 delegates. If the Sanders strategy pertains, they will tie, or possibly, Clinton will win one more delegate than Sanders.
Who will win the Super Tuesday primaries?
The following table shows the results predicted by this model, for both the Clinton-favored and Sanders-favored versions, for all the Super Tuesday state primaries or caucuses.
The Clinton-favored model suggests that Clinton will win six out of 11 primaries, and take the majority of uncommitted delegates. The Sanders-favored model suggests that Sanders will take 9 out of 11 primaries, and win the majority of uncommitted delegates.
Notice that I put Vermont in Italics, because Sanders is likely to win big in Vermont no matter what happens. This underscores the nature of this model in an important way. I’m not using any data from the actual states, other than the ethnic mix from census data, with an adjustment applied to produce an estimate of Democratic Party membership across ethnic groups. That estimate is based on national data as well as data specifically form Virginia, to provide some empirical basis.
I suspect most people will have two responses to this table. First, they will say that a model that incorporates Clinton’s strategic expectations should have her winning more. Second, they will say that all the numbers, for all states and all models, are too close.
These are both legitimate complaints about my model, and will explain why it will turn out to be totally wrong. Or, they are suppositions people are making that are totally wrong, and when my model turns out to be uncannily accurate, those suppositions will have to be put aside for the rest of the primary season. (Or, some other outcome happens.)
I will restate this: I’m looking for Super Tuesday to provide the best empirical data to make this model work for the rest of the primary season. But, in the meantime, this seemed like an interesting result to let you know about.
It is far too early to predict the outcome of the Democratic Party primary. Personally, I like both of the candidates and will support whichever one is selected to run in the general election. Both candidates have strong reasons to vote for them, and each candidate has their own “electability” issues. I vote on March 1st, and have not yet decided whom to vote for.
Why would I start out an essay, an essay that is meant to be an objective analysis, with that statement? Because the validity of a statement, opinion, or analysis of the current primary process is inevitably evaluated in terms of the leanings of the source. I have found that when I say (or, more likely, post on Facebook) something that favors one candidate, some supporters of the other candidate assume that I have formed an opinion, and they go on the attack. In the extreme, I have been told that I am not being truthful about my uncommitted and undecided status. To that, I say this: when I have decided which candidate to support, there will be no mistaking my position and I will be fierce about it.
With that aside, I have a few thoughts on what may happen over the next few days as the Democratic Nevada caucus (February 20th, Saturday) and the Democratic South Carolina primary (February 27th, Saturday) play out; about the overall race within the Democratic Party; and a few observations on the differences between the candidates. I’ll also point out an analysis by my friend Shawn Otto, who wrote one of those things that when I read it, I think, “Damn, why didn’t I think of and say these smart things, that’s brilliant.”
The Nevada Caucus: who will win and what will it mean?
Polling shows a dramatic recent shift in the standing of the two candidates in Nevada, though there have not been a lot of polls. Last year, Clinton held a strong but variable lead in various polls, ranging from as little as 16% to as much as 45%. I know of no polls from January, but polling conducted in February shows the two candidates nearly neck and neck, with Clinton up by no more than 6% in the poll favoring her the most.
One of those polls, actually reported by Real Clear Politics (which is a handy but not unbiased, and often inaccurate) source for polls, showed the two candidates in a tie, but we have learned since the poll was done that it was probably biased, some claimed a fake. Of this poll, Jim Newell at Slate says:
It was commissioned by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication that exists largely to terrorize Hillary Clinton. The poll was conducted by TargetPoint Consulting, a conservative firm stocked with Republican operatives whose clients in 2012 included Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, Mitt Romney’s super PAC, and Karl Rove’s super PAC. This is either a solid poll or it’s a well-conducted effort to stoke the “Clinton in disarray!” narrative swirling around the Clinton campaign following New Hampshire. We will know more soon.
Despite the questionable nature of that poll, other polls such as a recent CNN/ORC poll, show the two candidates in a statistical tie. The CNN/ORC poll indicates that Clinton was ahead late last year by about the share claimed by Biden, suggesting (maybe) that Biden supporters broke for Sanders. This poll also indicates that the percentage of respondents who are undecided has dropped significantly, but 25% are still “trying to decide.”
I’ve written before about the Ethnic Effect, which is important this year for a number of reasons. I’m looking to both Nevada, with a lot of Hispanic voters in the Democratic party, and South Carolina, with a lot of African American voters in the Democratic party, to inform us, at least initially, as to how this is going to play out.
In Nevada, voters concerned with “race relations” favor Clinton by a strong majority. Related, voters who are concerned with immigration strongly favor Clinton. These observations indicate a strong diversity effect favoring Clinton over Sanders, as has been repeatedly suggested by expert commentarians.
According to the CNN/ORC poll, almost everyone in Nevada is “white” and few are “non-White” (suggesting that Hispanic voters are conflated with non-White Hispanic), and thus, this poll provides no information for us to evaluate the Ethnic Effect. I suppose we will learn more after the event, with exit polls. The pattern of men favoring Bernie and women favoring Hillary is extant in Nevada, according to this poll.
There are three answers to the question of who will win in Nevada.
1) Can’t tell, polling is too close.
2) Both, because it will be a statistical tie, though maybe not as close as Iowa, and thus, Nevada will be sending the Iowan message to Democrats: “You have two good candidates here, carry on.”
3) Sanders, because the trend has been for Clinton to slowly leak support while Sanders slowly adds support, and Clinton was way ahead before. So, Sanders will likely squeak past Clinton, and this will be viewed as a big win for the insurgent candidate.
The South Carolina Primary: who will win and what will it mean?
Clinton has been ahead in the under-polled state of South Carolina all along. Recently, Sanders has shown some increased support there, and Clinton has lost some support there, but this change is well within the range of what we expect to see as campaigns evolve and background effects such as name recognition come into play. There is no apparent Sanders Surge happening in South Carolina. This means two things.
1) Clinton will win this primary, affirming her hold on the African American constituency.
2) Sanders needs to do better than expected to a certain degree in order to make South Carolina a bellwether of his future success.
In the current poll, Sanders leads Clinton among white Democrats, 51 percent to 46 percent. But Clinton crushes him among African Americans in the state, 68 percent to 21 percent.
Even among African Americans under the age of 45, Clinton is ahead of Sanders by 17 points, 52 percent to 35 percent.
I’m not sure what percentage of the South Carolina vote Sanders has to get to show that he is eating some of Clinton’s lead. Clinton is up by an average of about 24%. But the most recent polls show her closer to 24%. Taking out the uncommitted, Sanders is expected to get about 35% of the vote between the two candidates. It seems to me that if he gets 40% or more, that is big.
What does all this mean?
The Democratic race is evolving in two ways. First, Sanders is simply picking up support among his base. Those new voters, millennials, as well as a lot of regular Democrats, but more men than women, and mostly white, are joining up. At the same time, Clinton is holding her position, and possibly expanding a bit, among African Americans, women, and traditional Democrats.
The “electability” argument is most often used these days against Sanders, but has traditionally been used against Clinton. I’m reminded of the joke of how fast you have to be to out run a lion on the African Savanna. (I take this personally having been in that situation a number of times.) The answer is, of course, faster than the one you are with. The common culture seems to assign more unelectability to Sanders than to Clinton, but this culture forgets that Clinton has always borne this burden. In any event, I think the electability argument is starting to fade as we are told by the primary voters that we have two good candidates, move on to the next state. I suspect this will continue to happen over the next eight days.
Who will win the nomination, and how will they win the presidency?
Both campaigns require a surge of support in order to win the general election.
As Bernie Sanders himself noted the other day in Saint Paul, when voter turnout is low, the right wing wins. When voter turnout is high, progressives and liberals win.
But each candidate may have a different subset of voters who will turn out. Sanders has the young, the millennials, the doods. This subset of voters is among the most unreliable when it comes to showing up at the polls. Can they be counted on?
Clinton has women, who are good at showing up at polls, and African Americans, who are traditionally thought of as a weak voting block, but who have in fact been strong over the last couple of election cycles. So for Clinton, the question is, were African American voters so involved only, or mainly, because they were supporting the first African American candidate, and if so, do they not constitute an important part of Clinton’s path to the White House?
The details of the South Carolina primary, and the collection of primaries and caucuses on March 1st, Super Tuesday, may answer that question.
There is a reason to say that Sanders will win the nomination.
This is the first time I’ve said anything like this, on behalf of either candidate, but I have reason to say this now, provisionally, as a working hypothesis and nothing more. As I noted at the start of this essay, we simply don’t know at this time, and it is way too early to say. But there are a couple of reasons for the Clinton campaign to worry.
First, look at these two graphs from Real Clear Politics. The top graph shows the march of polling results during the entire 2008 primary. The second graph shows the current polling results to date. See the pattern? Is is possible that the Clinton-Sanders race is mirroring the Obama-Sanders race of 2008?
A second, related (not independent) reason supporting this pattern recognition exercise is the simple fact that Sanders seems to exceed expectations and Clinton seems to not meet expectations. Again, this is too early to say, but if that pattern continues in both Nevada and South Carolina, then there might be something to this.
The third reason, which is more fundamental and explanatory and less reliant on seeing patterns in the data, is that proposed by Shawn Otto in a recent essay at Huffington Post, called “What the Clinton Campaign is Missing.”
In this essay, Otto, who is an astute political observer (and author of Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America), notes that the effectiveness of a campaign is partly tied to the effectiveness of that campaign’s story.
As a touchstone to the deeper concept, Otto reviews and critiques the various campaign slogans.
On the Republican side…
Bush: Jeb!
Carson: Heal + Inspire + Revive
Christie: Telling it Like it Is
Cruz: Reigniting the Promise of America
Fiorina: New Possibilities. Real Leadership.
Kasich: K for US
Rubio: A New American Century
Trump: Make America Great Again!
Bush’s slogan says nothing beyond emphatically asserting his first name, suggesting a lack of purpose in his campaign beyond entitlement that is completely at odds with an otherwise thoughtful man. Carson’s is obtuse and intellectual… Christie’s and Fiorina’s were both full of corporate-style bravado but said little beyond bluster, while Kasich’s is opaque and too cute for prime time. The only candidates who are telling voters stories about why they should be elected are Cruz, Rubio, and Trump…Trump has the stronger and more emotional narrative…
On the Democratic side we see the following:
Clinton: Hillary for America
Sanders: A Future to Believe In
Here, Clinton’s static, self-referential message isn’t telling a story that connects with voters’ lives in a meaningful way, and much of Sanders’ rise can be attributed to the fact that he is. … Voters will connect deeply and passionately even with a grumpy old socialist if he tells them a story that intersects with their lives…
Finally, I’m going to make an observation about the difference in style between Clinton and Sanders. I’ve seen Clinton speak (in person) twice, and Sanders once, but I suspect these observations are accurate.
When Sanders speaks, he speaks in bullet points, each internally well worked out, and each delivered with roughly equal levels of rhetorical energy. When Clinton is at the podium, the entire speech as a whole has a larger pattern. She begins by making personal connections to her audience, and to others who have been on the stage before her. She moves from this introduction to historical context and backstory about her own experiences, and then eventually moves on to the key issues of the day. As this happens, the rhetorical crescendos start off small and infrequent, then strengthen, and eventually merge into a short but powerful set of rallying cries that gets everyone on their feet.
It is not the case that either of these approaches is newer or more traditional. Bernie sounds like the old timey liberal activists that I remember getting to know back when I was a teenager working on my first campaigns. Indeed, he sounds like an old fashioned socialist. Hillary sounds like a traditional fire-and-brimstone orator, reminding me of Ted Kennedy and, actually, his brothers. Both methods are good.
There may, however, be an unintended consequence of these two rhetorical styles. Clinton is a great novel or an engaging TV series with the cliffhanger in the last episode of the season. Sanders is a series of eye-catching facebook posts or compelling tweets. Even in the debate context, Sanders hits the points again and again with each arm-waving opportunity to speak, while Clinton weaves a narrative across her speaking opportunities. Sanders jabs and jabs and Clinton plays rope-a-tope and eventually lands the uppercut. Sanders is a football team driving down the field, making third down conversion after third down conversion, while Clinton is a baseball team wearing down the other pitcher and stacking up men on base for the grand slam. Sanders is the insurgent rebel force hitting target after target, Clinton is the big army strategically moving all the troops into place and then closing down the enemy’s options. If someone does not stop me now, I’ll probably think of metaphors in the areas of evolution, education, and housecleaning.
If Shawn Otto is right about story, this difference between Sanders and Clinton may be a difference in the structure of the story, how it is delivered to the reader. If so, this may be a factor in the difference between the two candidates in who supports them, as categorized by age and maybe sex.
Much has been made of the fact that Sanders got 55% of female votes, more than 44% for Clinton. That is indeed significant. But little has been said about the fact that among males, 66% voted for Sanders and 32% for Clinton. (55% of the Democratic Primary voters were female, 45% male.)
Race/Ethnicity
93% of the Democratic Primary voters were white, 2% black, and the numbers are so small that almost nothing can be said about this important distinction among voters. This is unfortunate because this will impact several upcoming races. But grouping all nine of the non-white New Hampshire voters together (I exaggerate humorously) we see that among the 7% of non-white voters, they broke nearly evenly, with Clinton getting 50% and Sanders getting 49%. Some will find that unexpected. Still, it is hard to say what this means for, say South Carolina.
The Youth Vote and New Voters
Much has been said of the age distribution of voters. Sanders took a lot of young votes. Sanders took a majority in age categories from 18-64.
This is good news and bad news for Sanders and for the Democrats. First the good news: Insurgent elections have been won with emerging, excited young votes piling up behind and candidate. This suggests that Sanders can surge across the country, and then, in the general election, do well. It also suggests that if Clinton ends up as the nominee, she will have some newly engaged youth vote behind her, if they stick with the process.
Now the bad news: Young voters seem to have a lower chance of actually showing up at the polls even if they are engaged in the process. This is a long election season. There are constant GOP efforts to interfere with college voters, playing on the residence issue (many young voters move to or from home during the year, and the GOP tries to get them to not vote at all costs.) So, this youth vote may not be as big of an effect in November as it is now. Also, if Clinton ends up as the nominee, will the Sanders-energized youth vote simply stay home, or worse, vote for a Republican?
More importantly, when asked about levels of satisfaction vs. dissatisfaction if a particular candidate won the nomination, the level of dissatisfaction among Sanders supporters is much much higher than among Clinton supporters. If Clinton wins the nomination, she may not carry with her much of the Sanders surge.
83% of the New Hampshire Primary voters had voted in earlier Democratic primaries. 57% of these voters voted for Sanders, 41% for clinton.
17% of this year’s New Hampshire Primary voters had not perviously voted in a Democratic primary. That may be a big number, but it would sure be nice if it was bigger, indicating a bigger groundswell for either candidate. Among those new voters, 78% voted for Sanders, 21% for Clinton, confirming the idea that Sanders is bringing in voters, at least to his side.
Income
Sanders beat Clinton in all family income levels except the top range, but the differences near the top may correlate with, and be caused by, the age distribution of voters. But at the lower end, Sanders did way better than Clinton. He took 71% of the under 30K range, 60% in the 30-40K range, and 64% in the 50-100K range. It was more even in the 100-200K range, but Sanders still won there, with Clinton beating sanders only in the 200+K range.
Political Proclivities
Sanders voters were generally more liberal, but as we go from very liberal through moderate, the overall balance between the two candidate changes very little. People are not picking Sanders or Clinton on the basis of their own self identification of liberal vs. moderate to a very large extent, though Sanders did do better in the “very liberal” category. There is a difference, it is just not that large.
Issues
Astonishingly, shockingly, embarrassingly, and annoyingly, almost unconscionably, NBC did not think to ask about climate change. Just as important, when asked what issues were important to them, voters didn’t seem to mention climate change either. This is bad.
Sanders did a little better than Clinton among those who consider Health Care and Terrorism important, but not more-better than overall in the primary, so there is not a difference here. He did about the same on economy and jobs voters as he did in the overall polling, so again, not a meaningful effect. However, it was Sanders at 70% to Clinton at 29% among voters who identified income inequality as their most important issue. I suspect young, somewhat more male, new, income-inequality (read, perhaps, #occupy) voters brought in by the Sanders campaign that gave him his win in New Hampshire.
When asked “who shares your values” 11% thought only Clinton, 33% thought only Sanders, and 51% thought both of them. This conforms to what I’ve seen as a Sanders-supporter vs. Clinton-supporter difference the vilification/deification ratio. Importantly, though, a slim majority of voters feel that either candidate shares their values.
Both candidates are seen as good for handling health care, in the majority. The ability to handle the economy is a bit more ambiguous, with a starker split between “My candidate only” and “Either.” With respect to handling income inequality, Sanders was seen as the strong candidate by a plurality of voters.
When asked if the next president should continue Obama’s policies, 82% said yes, or be more liberal. Among those who chose more liberal, more were Sanders supporters.
For “cares about people like me” and “is honest and trustworthy” Sanders rolled over clinton by a landslide. For “has the right experience” Clinton trounced Sanders.
Everybody wants to tax the rich, more so among Sanders supporters.
Electability
Among those who think general election electability is the most important quality to use in choosing a candidate, 70% broke for Clinton, 19% for Sanders. In a way, one could argue that Clinton is the more electable candidate, but only if she doesn’t win the nomination. That may be the most important message given us by New Hampshire. Thanks, New Hampshire!
At about 9 PM eastern, with 90% of the votes counted in the Democratic primary, Sanders is showing a strong win. He is currently at about 60%, while Clinton is at 38%. That gap is significantly larger than what I had intuitively established at the cutoff for a Sanders “lower than expectation loss.” So, congratulations Bernie Sanders! If those numbers hold, that is a decisive win.
(A lot of Sanders supporters were crowing about a 20% lead in the polls, which seemed kind of extreme at the time. They may end up being proven right!)
In the Republican primary, with about 90% reporting, Donald Trump has been declared the winner, with 35% of the vote.
Kasich is being declared second, with 16%
Then we have Cruz (11.6%), Bush (11.1%), Rubio (10.5%), and Christie (7.5%) followed by Fiorina and Carson (insignificant).
Note that the gaps between the third and lower candidates is so small that the sum of “write in” and lower level candidates that could not possibly have won is enough to have allowed for a strategic repositioning of second or third place.
And, perhaps more important, who will come in second, third, and fourth?
We know that Donald Trump will win the New Hampshire primary. Polls show him up far above the other candidates, he has been on a modest upward trend since the beginning of the year, and the most recent polls show an abrupt upward swing. He now stands at about 17% above the second place candidates.
New Hampshire seems to like Rubio and Cruz to about equal amounts, but has been showing a preference for the up and coming Rubio over the last week or so. But, Rubio’s performance in the GOP debate is widely seen as abysmal, even embarrassing. The most recent polls seem to show a drop in Rubio’s share since the debate. It looks like nothing more than a squiggle of the magnitude one expects in such polls, especially with so many candidates, but given the debate, it is quite possible that his support is rapidly declining.
So, even though Rubio’s average poll rating over the last several days suggests he is a weak second place contender, I’m going to predict that he does not come in second place. I suspect Kasich and Cruz are tied for that honor, but Cruz has consistently polled ahead of Kasich, and seems to be preferred over other candidates, even Trump, in head to head polls among many New Hampshire voters. In other words, when supporters of Rubio, Kasich, Bush, Christie, and everybody else have their candidates taken away in a hypothetical, they break for Cruz, not Trump.
For this reason, I’m going to predict that Cruz will come in second. The amount of damage suffered by Rubio will determine if he comes in third, or possibly fourth behind Kasich. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, at least until tomorrow night when we find out what actually happened!
Who will win the New Hampshire Democratic Primary?
All the numbers suggest that Sanders will win in New Hampshire, so that is pretty much settled. The question is, by how much. Sanders’ lead over clinton has been steadily increasing in the Granite State since mid January, and it was starting to look like he could be way ahead of Clinton. But, as is the case with the GOP race, the last few days has shown a narrowing between the two candidates. The last few polls have them between 17 and 13 points or so apart, with the gap closing.
While everybody thinks their own candidate nailed the New Hampshire debate, the fact is that Clinton may have faired better, or Sanders worse. Sanders produced at least to really bad answers on foreign policy, and Clinton parried questions that has been raised about her fairly effectively. New Hampshire voters tend to keep themselves open until fairly late in the game, it is said, and these factors may influence the outcome.
If the gap closes to 10% or less, that is bad news for the Sanders campaign and good news for the Clinton campaign. If the gap ends up being around 13% plus or minus a few, then the message being sent by New Hampshire would be similar to that sent by Iowa: “You Democrats have two roughly equal candidates, carry on!” If the gap re-widens to beyond 15%, the there is evidence of a Sanders surge. If one take Iowa’s message as also meaning “Sanders, previously low in polling, rose quite a bit before the caucus” and New Hampshire says something similar, then that would be a very strong message in favor of Sanders.
(We do not expect equal numbers in New Hampshire because of the modest favorite son effect.)
I watched the debate pretty closely, and in my opinion, both candidates did pretty well and it was mostly an even contest. (Note: I am not committed to one or the other candidate, I happen to like them both.)
Sanders did very well in getting his message across, but he demonstrated weakness in foreign policy.
Clinton did a good job at addressing the alleged Wall Street ties and addressing the email issue.
But there is another way to answer the question. How much did each candidate strengthen their own support, and how much did each candidate do to convince undecided individuals to prefer them, especially those individuals in New Hampshire?
One way to asses that is to see what happens next Tuesday. As previously discussed, Sanders is expected to win the New Hampshire Primary by about 20%. If, in the end, he falls short of this, then perhaps Clinton did a better job of convincing undecideds to pick her. If Clinton does worse than 20% down, then perhaps Sanders did a better job of convincing undecideds to pick her.
Meanwhile, we have the online polls. Across a range of polls, Clinton gets number in the 10% – 20% range, and Sanders gets numbers in the 80-something% range. It has been suggested that Sanders supporters are better at gaming the on line polls than Clinton supporters. With numbers like this (8:2) that is almost certainly what is going on. Or, at least, it is a reasonable hypothesis. It is also possible that Republicans are clicking on Sanders because of the widespread belief among anti-Democrats that Sanders is the candidate the GOP prefers to run agains, even though the evidence for that is rather weak. In any event, an 8:2 (or, really, closer to 8.5-1.5) ratio does not accurately reflect the Democratic voter’s position. It is poll gaming of one kind or another. Does poll gaming indicate fishiness among Sanders supporters, with BerniBrah’s acting in their established somewhat obnoxious pattern? Or does it indicate a good GOP strategy? Or does it indicate that the Sanders campaign is doing something right? I suspect this is a question that will be addressable at a later time, not now.
And, to be clear, the political experts are generally in agreement that the debate was fairly even and Clinton addressed some concerns very well.
So putting this together, a few things things seem to emerge. First, realistically, there are two excellent campaigners running in this primary, each very able to handle themselves. Sanders has not done his homework on the foreign policy issues, as he really should have done by now. (One of his answers was almost GOP-esque, when he was asked about one country but spent a couple of minutes not addressing that country at all, and instead talked about a different country.) Having said that, I suspect that Sanders and Clinton supporters are different. Sanders is an insurgent candidate, and his campaign is following, in part, an unconventional path to the nomination. Last time that happened, the unconventional path worked. Sanders supporters hope this will happen again. But usually it doesn’t.
Someone who has been following the race very closely (full disclosure, a Sanders volunteer) recently told me she felt it was “easier to switch from being a Clinton supporter to a Sanders supporter than the other way around.” In a way this may be the definition of a (successful) insurgent campaign. The reason, she said, is because one of the main reasons to pick Clinton over Sanders is electability, and as Sanders demonstrates that this is not a issue, things change. We start out with Sanders the Socialist vs. Hillary the Hated. The Hillary the Hated persona is not going to change because the GOP has ingrained that as part of American political culture. But the Sanders the Socialist trope cold tear off the mask and become Sanders the Insurgent.
ADDED: Following the GOP primary, there has been another development. In most recent polls, Trump is clearly ahead in New Hampshire, with Marco Rubio a moderately strong second or third. In various polls he is second in most polls (by a few points) and tied in one. Kasich is generally right behind Rubio, with Cruz in third place in a few polls.
Rubio crashed and burned in last night’s debate, according to most observers. And he really did. So, this may be reflected in New Hamsphire with Rubio moving down quite a bit. He crashed in part because Christie skillfully skewered him. I suspect this could bring Cristie’s numbers up a bit. We ight be looking at an order something like this: Trump, Kasich, Cruz, Christie, then Rubio and Bush coming in fourth and fifth. Carson will not do well, and this may be his last primary.
Who will win the GOP primary?
First, let us dispense with the Republicans. (If only it were so easy!)
Trump is so far ahead in the polling that it is impossible to imagine him not winning. He is so far ahead, that if he doesn’t win, the we can expect most of his financial backers to back away and his candidacy to be severely damaged.
Of course, since he is probably his own main financial backer, that will mean that a damaged candidacy will continue to lead the Republican pack for a while. But, really, that is not likely to happen. He is going to win the primary.
The more important question is who will come in second and third. There are actually three candidates that have a good chance of coming in second: Rubio, Cruz, Kasic
h and Bush. (In that order according to FiveThirtyEight’s Polls-Plus forecast). This turns out to be a fairly complicated matter, then, when tying to interpret the meaning of New Hampshire going forward. So, I made a chart:
Who will win the Democratic primary?
This is more interesting at this point. We can see from polling data that Sanders is likely to with the NH primary. But the amount he wins by is going to determine a partial answer to that question of viability for him. Meanwhile, if Clinton does better than expectations, she will win kudos for organization and appeal. If Sanders and Clinton come in about as expected, meaning they both show well but Sanders wins, then New Hampshire will be sending roughly the same message as did Iowa: Dear Democrats, you have two viable candidates. Continue with the primary process.
But what is the number and how far off do the final results have to be before we can say someone did better or worse than expectations?
Looking at just the last ten non-partisan polls (ignoring likely voters vs. not likely, because that is part of the ground game) with all these polls overlapping January 20th or later, the Sanders-Clinton breakdown is 56.3-35.6. There is some O’Malley and undecided in there, so the ratio is more important than the number. So, the expectation for Sanders would be about 60%.
This conforms to the most recent polls, so any recent change (to date) is probably captured here. The total range is close to about 10 points.
So, I would argue, using gut instincts and nothing fancy, that Sanders will meet expectations with a percentage anywhere from 50% up. In other words, any level of win by Sanders meets expectations. If he gets more than 65% that may be meaningful, but since he is a) expected to do well and b) the state (within the party) matches him fairly well, I’m not sure how many points he gets.
Conversely, since we are so often asking the question in terms of insurgent Sanders’ viability, if he loses by only a few points, a signal of concern will be sent to his campaign.
Looking at it from Clinton’s point of view, every percentage point below 40% that she achieves will be a mark against her, showing weakness against the insurgent.
One thing is almost certain. New Hampshire will not be splitting hairs. This will not be close. Most likely the New Hampshire results will conform to the current polling, and the result will be that the hypothesis that Sanders can’t be a viable candidate will not be falsified. I’m wording that in a fairly negative way, i.e., a good win in New Hampshire does not push Sanders viability estimate much at all. That sort of outcome is more likely to happen in relation to South Carolina and Nevada.
Not looking at specific numbers yet, if Sanders does not lose by too much in South Carolina, the hypotheses that he will do poorly among African Americans is not supported. If he wins in South Carolina, that hypothesis is in serious trouble.
In Nevada, if I’m reading things correctly, the outcome is likely to be stark, one or the other candidates winning handily, it can be either one or the other, and it will be a signal as to which candidate labor and unions is breaking for. To me, Nevada may be the most important of the first four races. (Aside from the unlikely scenario of the insurgent losing badly in Iowa or New Hampshire, in terms of meaning.)
The reason I say that Nevada will likely break either one way or the other is that I expect the unions to make a relatively unified decision I just don’t know what that decision will be.
Was the Iowa Caucus outcome determined by a coin flip?
We have seen several reports that Hillary Clinton won the Iowa Caucus by a coin toss, or by six coin tosses. Or some other number. We’ve also seen reports that six delegates were awarded to Clinton on the basis of coin tosses, implying that of the 44 delegates determined on Monday in Iowa a large percentage were chosen by the toss of an unfair coin, that somehow the Clinton campaign controlled the coin tosses causing them to all come out in her favor. And so on.
After a barrage of these reports, we are now seeing a small number of reports trying to describe what actually happened, which was very different. Some of these reports are somewhat accurate, but most leave the reader not fully understanding what really went down. Here, I want to ‘splain this one more time in a way that I hope makes sense. Warning: This is not simple. Which, really, is the point I want to make.
Then, I want to make a couple of meta comments about what this all means.
Most of the difficulty in understanding what happened in Iowa arises from the fact that Iowa uses a caucus system, not a primary. So does Minnesota and over a dozen other states and territories. This is important because quite a few convention delegates are determined by this system, and those involved in the political process need to understand how a caucus works in order to effectively engage.
I’m going to generalize here, mainly from my Minnesota experience; your caucus may vary. But there are some general principles that seem to apply widely.
How does a caucus work?
The exact rules of how a caucus works vary from state to state, but also, from year to year. The rules are determined by the party officials through an arcane process that anyone is welcome to join in but few do. The rules are handed down and enforced by those leading local meetings. The people running local meetings are always experienced dedicated party officers and volunteers. Except when they are not because they ran out of party officers or experienced volunteers, then the meetings are run by confused and frightened citizens who do their best. This is the first thing that makes a caucus system different from voting. Voting is easy. Caucusing is harder, and how well it goes at a given site can vary.
The next thing you need to know is that the caucus system often addresses many issues, not just a presidential nominee. There may be local candidates, state wide candidates, and congressional candidates chosen by the caucus process.
Normally a caucus system, therefore, happens at near or at the lowest geographical level for a state. This then leads to a second caucus later at a higher geographical level. Then, at the state level. For instance, Minnesota will caucus on Super Tuesday (March 1st this year). But we will have another caucus in April at the State Senate district level. Eventually there will a meeting at the Congressional District level. Then a statewide convention. Depending on the state or year, the national political party convention delegates may be chosen somewhere along the line. In Iowa (and in Minnesota, and may be everywhere) number of national delegates representing each presidential candidate, are chosen at the first caucus, at the lowest level. Which, of course, makes no sense until you understand the entire system. (If it makes sense to you then, please let your local Democratic party officials know because they need you.)
There may be delegates at each level. Indeed, everybody who shows up and is a legal voter in the precinct or district might be considered a delegate. So there can be many many thousands of delegates involved in the caucus system, depending on how it is defined. But, at the lowest level (a precinct, in Iowa) these people use a system to pick a subset of themselves to be the delegates that advance to the next level. Typically, these delegates are committed to a candidate. In the case of Iowa, they all had the potential to become Clinton, Sanders, or O’Malley delegates. And there were thousands of them.
These delegates then advance to the next level at which a subset of them is selected to go on to yet another level, etc. Eventually, in Iowa, 44 delegates are chosen. Except the actual delegates do not winnow down to 44. Rather, the distribution of the thousands of delegates by preferred candidate is used to determine the distribution across the candidates among those 44, and who those individuals actually will be — who gets to go to the national convention and party, er, represent — is a whole other system not addressed here.
The initial selection of the lowest level of thousands of delegates is chosen at each local site using one or more methods. The methods, as I said, follow the rules handed down by the party. I don’t know the exact rules used this year in Iowa, but there are two methods that are generally used. For small groups, it is not uncommon (if the rules allow) for the group to sit down and talk in a room then vote for how many delegates of each type they will put forward. In some cases, such as when a party has an incumbent president, they don’t even do that, but rather, use a simple ballot system to chose one of two “candidates,” the sitting president or “other” (or write-in). The point is, the process can look like a mini election that results in some paperwork and that’s it.
But the more traditional and more fun way is to use a Walking Caucus. Here is a typical framework for Walking Caucus (but, again, the rules vary).
Everybody who is properly signed in gets in one part of a big room. The number of people involved is known because they checked in, so there is a number, we will call N, of individuals. Using duct tape or some other means, the rest of the room is divided off and no one who is not a delegate can cross that line. Party officials are usually standing on a stage or table nearby directing things.
Some people have signs they hold up with the name of a candidate or issue on them, like “Clinton, Climate Change, and Jobs” or whatever. They are all yelling things at each other. Over time people move into clusters where each cluster is a group of people who favor a given candidate or set of issues.
Variant: Sometimes people are not running around and shouting, but rather, sitting around and talking, and not all caucuses address issues. But it amounts to the same thing, people will move to physical proximity to each other by candidate or issue or something.
Either way, you get a bunch of clusters of people. We will call these clusters “sub caucuses” because that is what they are sometimes called.
It might look like this:
There is a time limit on this process, and eventually the party officials “freeze” the caucus. At this point, or some other later point, delegates are told they can’t return if they leave the room or cross the line. Some delegates will leave because they are tired, need to go to the bathroom, are annoyed, or have something to do. These become “missing delegates.” Sometimes they are let back in later, sometimes not.
Meanwhile, the party officials have taken two numbers, D, which is the number of delegates that can advance from this caucus, and N, the number of people supposedly in the room, and applied some basic integer math. They need to use integer math if they can’t advance proportions of delegates (i.e., they must use whole numbers) and because they are not allowed to saw the actual delegates into bits even if they sometimes want to. This integer math results in a Viability Number. If you are allowed to put ten delegates forward, and you have 100 participants, the viability number is 10. Any group of people fewer than 10 does NOT get to advance a delegate.
Now, back to the frozen caucus. The party officials demand a count of each cluster of people. Each sub caucus is then determined to be “viable” (the number in the group is at or above the viability number) or “not viable.” At this point, the “not viable” sub caucuses are dispersed, not with dogs or firehoses or anything, just told that they are not viable and should break up and find somewhere else to go.
This is when the shouting starts again, as the non-viable people are invited to join viable caucuses.
Eventually the walking caucus is frozen again, and counted again.
A lot of things can happen at this point in time. Ideally, no one has left the room, and everybody has divided themselves into groups that are exact integer multiples of the Viability number. In this case, each sub caucus is simply counted (how many people in it) and then that number is divided by the Viability Number. The result is the number of delegates that sub caucus can advance. Those delegates are typically committed to support the candidate the sub caucus they were in represents, if the caucus is choosing state level or congressional candidates.
For the national convention, this simply translates into a number that is passed on via a form or electronic device, and the people standing in the room will have little to do with what happens next. The party will figure out who gets to go to the convention, and the number sent representing each candidate (if proportional representation is used) will be decided later. But the actual delegates that are actually advanced from each sub caucus will, in theory, go on to the next level (state Senate district, or US Congressional district, or whatever). So, typically, there will be a tiny little election within each sub caucus to elect their moving-on delegates. In my experience, this is often the most important moment in the caucus, because you have to send someone on you can trust, but you don’t know these people and suddenly you are faced with choosing them.
In Minnesota, we require gender proportional representation (male and female only at the present time) so if your sub caucus has two delegates one has to be a boy and one has to be a girl. The party may reserve the right to remove and add delegates later if they need to to make sure the gender proportionality is 50-50.
Now, imagine the following scenario. The exact number of people who ended up on the floor exactly matches the number of people who are properly signed in. Nobody leaves for any reason. The number of people who showed up happens to be an integer multiple of the number of delegates your caucus gets to put forward. There is no confusion. As the people make their sub caucus, they all, each and every one, understand the above described system or its applicable variant, and have thus formed perfect sub caucuses, each divisible by the viability number. So, when the sub caucuses are polled as to how many delegates they represent and for which candidate, absolutely nothing goes wrong.
LOL
Now, imagine this scenario. It is late. The party officials have burned off half the scheduled caucus time dealing with esoteric party decisions. Half the delegates are retired older people with weak bladders. Some are parents with a time limit on their baby sitter. Nobody really knows how to do math these days. The psychic unity of humankind has failed to make sure the number of people who showed up is an exact multiple of the viability number. And so on.
So, you end up with a set of sub caucuses that does not perfectly produce the exact number of delegates required.
This will be, typically, off by one. It really can’t be off by two, because if the number of people in the room changes that much during the process, the actual viability number is simply changed. This should happen before the walk, and when the viability number changes, there is a lot more movement between sub caucuses. In any event, a little adjustment there, a bit more shouting and cajoling and walking around, and counting and recounting, and with luck the number of delegates that is required from that meeting can be assigned.
Or, one will be orphaned. Because of all of these sources of error, it is possible via many possible sequences of events to end up not being able to fairly assign one of the delegates to a candidate.
There are various ways this can be dealt with, but a common and accepted method is to flip a coin. If there are two candidates, each has a 50-50 chance of getting a delegate. This is interesting because it gives candidates that have a low representation a small chance of getting one delegate more than they deserved, which is considered both harmless and polite. If the split is very close, it could determine whether or not a single meeting location sends one more or one less than the other on to the next level.
What has not happened is that the outcome of that caucus, at that location, was determined by a coin flip. In Iowa, the average precinct has about 7 or 8 delegates, I believe. The number of delegates that are passed on because of a coin flip should usually be zero, but now and then, one. One out of seven or eight. Not all seven or eight. One.
In Iowa, over 11,000 delegates were chosen with the caucus method. About a dozen (according to reports, though I suspect a few more) of those 11,065 delegates were the result of a coin toss.
Iowa will send, using this process, 44 delegates to the national convention. They determined the number that would represent each candidate by using integer arithmetic to divide up the 11,065 precinct level delegates into 44 national delegates. So if there was a coin toss for a dozen precinct level delegates, then one tenth of one percent of that decision was influenced by random chance. The rest of the allocation was determined by the totally sane non-random process described above.
There is more, of course. The actual delegates and the actual numbers depend not only who shows up on caucus night, but who shows up later. Given this number of delegates, and the fact that they are regular citizens, means that many individuals will abandon the process along the way. As noted, there may be issues of allocation by gender, or other factors.
Because of the possibility of little things going wrong along the way, I think it is typical for party officials to have a lot of leeway in who ends up being a delegate. During off years, the number of people who show up at the first meeting during which people are recruited to be delegates is often so small that anybody who calls up the precinct captain (or some other official) later on can probably become a delegate. During presidential or, even, midterm years, there may be a lot more public involvement, but it might be highly variable across the party’s geographical space, so the number of people involved in selecting a given delegate may vary. This may also be a difference between states (such as Iowa vs. Minnesota). The point is, if you want to find randomness, capriciousness, or arbitrariness in the system, there is plenty.
But not the coin toss. The coin toss is an effective and fair way to allocate the occasional orphan delegate. It will favor low-number candidates slightly, and mean nothing in a close race.
What can we learn from coinflipgate?
Coinflipgate got legs because the people who initiated the meme, or later spread it, were ignorant, willfully or otherwise, of how the caucus system works.
Coinflipgate was a political ploy exploited inappropriately by anti-Clinton or pro-Sanders activists for the purpose of affecting people’s attitudes about the Clinton campaign.
Coinflipgate, because of the thinness of its veneer and its inherent absurdity, was not a good political strategy.
An important aspect of the caucus system is that it is complex, confusing, and difficult. Contrast the following two scenarios.
Scenario A: Dozens, maybe close to 100, people show up at a caucus site because they feel strongly about a candidate, but have never been to a caucus before and have no clue as to what to do. Party officials are barely able to manage the ensuing fray. The caucus happens, but inefficiently. Delegates are advanced, but several people leave the room realizing they were in the wrong sub caucus, or an orphan delegate emerges and is randomly assigned.
Scenario B: The candidates being considered at a caucus recruit experienced caucus experts to attend a caucus and help guide their supporters to form efficient sub caucuses, and to effectively persuade the undecided to join them, or occasionally, to turn a delegate to their side. These activists may not even be voters in that precinct or district, and in fact may even be from out of state (because you don’t want to use individuals who should actually be caucusing). Each candidate also has several supporters among the delegates, and those supporters have met once or twice with an expert who has trained them in how to caucus.
One could easily imagine one candidate following scenario A and a different candidate following scenario B at the same caucus. If those two candidates are roughly even in their support, the candidate that runs scenario B at most of the caucus sites will come away with more delegates. This is very different from voting. In short, the “ground game” wins the day.
This may seem rather capricious but it is not, for one of the reasons that the caucus is a good system. The candidate that can run a good ground game in a caucus is the candidate that can manage everything better, run a better campaign, have a better chance of winning in other contexts, in other caucus states, in non-caucus states, and in the general election. This is the candidate that has good people working for them. All else being equal, you want to support the candidate that can do this better. Ability to manage a caucus is not the only criterion on which we chose our candidates or leaders, but it is one criterion that is meaningful and a valid test of skill, level of organization, commitment of supporters, and so on.
That is certainly not the only goal of a caucus. The main goal of a caucus is to get people together to make an important decision in a way that goes beyond merely showing up and checking off a candidate’s name in a box.
My description of how a caucus works is based mainly on my experience in Minnesota and some reading and conversation about how Iowa works. If you are an experienced Iowa caucuser, feel free to add or correct details in the comments below. But the basic idea is there, and similar across cases.
People who are repeating the absurd idea that national delegates were chosen with a coin flip, and people who are calling for a “recount” of the caucus, are either not understanding how the system works, or are exploiting the fact that most people don’t know how this system works, to toss some mud and cast some doubt. That is not helpful, no matter which candidate one supports, because it is a less than honest and, in the end, very ineffective, likely to backfire tactic.
Increasingly, I feel the need to declare my position on the candidates before commenting on the process, because, increasingly, the conversation has become one of comparative litmus tests. So, here’s the deal on that: I like Clinton and Sanders both, and I like each of them for both overlapping and different reasons. As a life long Democrat I’m glad to see such good candidates running. I will decide whom to support in the Minnesota Caucus some time after I walk into the building, most likely. Then, later, I will decide which candidate, if any, I might work for during the time between our caucus and the convention, though most likely it will be neither. I don’t have a lot of money to donate to anything, but so far I have split my financial support evenly. After the convention (or a bit before if there is a clear winner a priori) I will do everything I can to move the chosen candidate into the White House, while at the same time working on my Congressional District and state wide races or issues.
The first thing we learned from the Iowa Caucus is that Bernie Sanders is a viable candidate who can win. I didn’t doubt that before, but his showing in Iowa, a statistical tie, demonstrates this. This is not really too important in the big picture, partly because it simply reifies what was already known, and partly because Iowa (and New Hampshire) provide only a part of information needed to think strategically about the process. The way things are set up, we really won’t know until Super Tuesday, I think, how the two candidates stand. South Carolina may tell us something about the alleged demographic disconnect that favors Clinton over Sanders, and Nevada may show us if Unions matter in this election, and who they matter to. But from that perspective (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada) it will be very difficult to predict Super Tuesday’s outcome.
But, here’s the thing: Bernie supporters who have shown a great deal of angst and jitteriness, to the point of sometimes acting inappropriately for a Primary, can relax a bit now. Your candidate is for real, we all know this. And best of luck to you and to us all.
At the same time, Clinton supporters who may have viewed Bernie as an anomalous inviable insurgent now know that isn’t true. This should have been obvious all along, but for the doubters, stop doubting.
The second lesson is a bit more complex. On one hand, Clinton should have done better in Iowa, given the demographic match up. This puts Clinton on notice. Every campaign is like a herd of bison moving across the plains, with each bison being unique and likely to go in any of several directions. The efficient campaign tends to ignore the bison that are going in the “right” direction (for that campaign) and focus on those that seem likely to stray. I think Iowa demonstrates that some of Clinton’s bison need to have a good talking to.
On the other hand, the Sanders campaign makes the point that the #FeelTheBern surge will not only carry Sanders past the demographic disconnects he faces, but that it will sprout a long and stable coat tail to bring Congress with him. Did going from an obscure(ish) Senator from an obscure(ish) state to nearly besting The Anointed One (for good reason) in Iowa constitute a Bern-Surge? Or was it not enough? The turnout in Iowa was pretty good, but it was not Obama-esque. To the extent that Obama’s 2008 campaign is a model for a 2016 Sanders campaign, something is lacking here. This may or may not be important.
One test of the surgosity of the Sanders campaign may be South Carolina and Nevada. He is unlikely to win in South Carolina and Nevada is obscure. But if he does way better than expectations, that might mean that the surge if getting fueled (by itself, as surges do). I suppose New Hampshire could also be an indicator. Sanders will likely win that state. Not because New Hampshire and Vermont are clones — they are very different. But because among Democrats, Sanders will be seen as something of a favorite son. (New Hampshire and Vermont share a long border, but most cross-state interconnections, I think, are: Vermont-Update NY, and Vermont-Berkshires/Pioneer Valley, MA; and New Hampshire-Greater Boston Areas.) In any event, if Sanders does better than X percent over Clinton in New Hampshire, that could be a post-Iowa surge-fueling effect. X is probably around 12% .
On the Republican side, there are more lessons than I want or need to discuss, but I’ll mention two. First, as per this item, no matter how out of the box some of this year’s campaigns seem to be (i.e., Trump’s celebrity approach), the political process is a real, living entity that can’t be ignored. Trump risks loss for doing so.
The other major lesson, I think, is that the field is now much smaller than it used to be. I’m not sure if any of the bottom tier candidates can recover, however, New Hampshire might bring one or two back into the race. But right now, it is looking like Trump-Cruz-Rubio. I’ve seen some convincing commentary that Cruz is actually not viable long term. I don’t know if I believe that, even if I can hope it to be so. So, the Trump Will Burn Out theory says that Rubio is the GOP nominee, and based on overall patterns, likely the next President unless the Democrats pull their heads out of each other’s butts and start focusing on the end game. I suppose it could be worse.
The answer: One Republican and One Democrat/Independent.
The Iowa Caucus is pretty much up for grabs in both parties. Over recent days, a clear Trump lead has been erased, and Cruz is now ahead in recent polls. Over roughly the same period, a clear Clinton lead has been erased, and Sanders is now ahead in recent polls.
FiveThirtyEight (Nate Silver) is still predicting a Clinton victory for the Dems, but a Cruz victory for the GOPs. The Clinton victory prediction is of high confidence, while the Cruz prediction is not, and Trump is close behind.
One way to look at the polls is to track changes and put a lot of faith in the most recent information. Another way is to use as much data as seems relevant (even looking outside polls) and assume that this gives a better prediction, and go with that. The latter is the method used by FiveThirtyEight. So, Nate Silver’s method will be a big winner if Clinton and Cruze cinch the Caucus, but not so much if Sanders sandbags Hillary and Trump trumps Cruz.
People put a lot of significance on the Iowa Caucus because it is the first real contest among candidates. But then, after the caucus has become history, they are less likely to care too much about it. How important is it as a predictor of the outcome of the entire primary season?
That depends on the party.
Barack Obama, John Kerry, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter and George McGovern all won the Iowa caucus (or came in above the other candidates) and went on to be the Democratic Party nominee. Dick Gephardt and Tom Harkin also won the caucus, but did not become the nominee. One might say that the Iowa Caucus predicts the nominee pretty well for Democrats.
Gerald Ford, Bob Dole, and George W. Bush all beat the other contenders and went on to get the nomination. But most of the time, the Iowa Caucus was either won by an unopposed Republican (so we can’t count those years in assessing its significance) or was won by a candidate other than the eventual nominee (such as Rick Santorum in 2012, Mike Huckabee in 2008, and Bob Dole in 1988). Overall, the Iowa Caucus means little in the Republican Party, if we go on history, especially in recent years.
Despite FiveThirtyEight’s claims, based on a good analysis of hefty data, I’m going to say that there has been too much flux in the polling numbers to call the caucus at this stage, just over a week prior.
I have studiously avoided picking a Democratic candidate to support. I will not have to decide until Super Tuesday, when Minnesotans caucus to support one or another candidate. I like Hillary Clinton for a number of reasons, including the simple fact that she has considerable experience in the Executive branch, and is a person who can get things done. If I got to pick the president (skipping the election process entirely), I’d probably pick Sanders because I’m all in on the revolution in American policy. Both candidates are actually in close agreement on most of the key issues. Neither came to the game with a strong climate change policy, and that is a strong negative for both of them, but they have gotten on board at least rhetorically. Not good enough, but the best we have. Both are against involving the US in a Middle Eastern quagmire. Both seem to be in favor of election reform, but Bernie is right that he’s the one acting like it already happened while Clinton is not. Yet, we can’t hold that against Hillary any more than we held it against President Obama when he won two elections. The electability argument may have favored Clinton at one point during the current primary race, but that same argument has been effectively made against her, and Sanders’ electability quotient seems to be rising.
Regardless, I strongly oppose the internecine arguing and sniping among supporters of both candidates. I sense that much of the really nasty anti-Clinton/Sanders yammering comes from people who are fairly new to the process and have yet to be disappointed by the outcome of such efforts that tend to harm one’s own chances of being represented in the White House.
Notice how much sniping there was during the debate among the actual candidates. Some, but not much. Also, they pointed out agreements on a number of occasions. All three candidates (and no, I’ve not forgotten O’Malley) made strong points against the Republicans, especially Donald Trump, but there were not enough such jabs.
[Note: Some of the sniping in brought to you by your friendly opposition party. See this.]
Still, I hope that both Clinton and Sanders supporters take a page out of the play books of their own candidates and cut back on the damaging attacks. One of those two candidates is going to get the Democratic nomination, and regardless of which one goes against the Republican, it is essential that individual wins. Supporters of the candidate that looses have to put their big kid pants on, suck it up, and get into the fight full steam ahead to assure that this happens.
I think of it as a recreational boxing match between marines in combat. Have a fair fight, try to win, but after the fight is over, the guy you knocked out is going to have to be in a condition to save your life later. If you kill your opponent, you’ve killed an important ally. This is why I think the most severe intra-party attacks are probably by noobs and youngies. They’ve not seen the loser of a primary jump into the general election context and help their former opponent win. That does, in fact, happen. Notice that Bill Clinton helped Barack Obama win, and Hillary Clinton served in the top cabinet post in President Obama’s administration.
OK, so that’s what I needed to get off my chest. Now, who won the debate?
I scored the candidates using a very subjective informal system during the entire debate. My scoring was based not on how much I personally agreed or disagreed with the candidate’s position. Again, the candidates are actually very close on most positions anyway. Rather, I scored the candidates on how they presented their case. Even there, I did not score on how much their approach resonated with my thinking, but with how I felt their rhetorical approach met the needs of a candidate talking to the American people.
I was looking at the candidates debating like a campaign advisor might look at their candidate, to refine the rhetorical and tactical approach.
Let me give you an example. I took points off Sanders’ discussion of “Medicare for All” in which he said that the middle class would have to pay taxes to get that benefit. He made the point that the overall output of the average middle class family would go down because the increase in taxes would be less than the current cost of expensive medical insurance, mainly by cutting out the insurance companies. I agree with that, but he lost points because he needed to put it another way. Overtly and even proudly claiming a tax increase, no matter how sensible, is not a good campaign strategy. He loses points not for being honest, but for having a policy that guarantees that enough voters can be turned against him on that one issue to throw a close election.
This is not unimportant. There are better ways he could have made the same case. After all, Medicare is not paid for with income tax. Future expanded Medicare does not need to be either. Indeed, as a policy, sinking health care cost into general income tax is a bad idea, possibly, because of Congress. Congress is constitutionally empowered to do whatever they want with that money. A strong Republican Congress during a serious budget crisis could eliminate universal health care way too easily under those conditions. So, he lost a couple of points for not referring to a modest payroll contribution to replace overinflated premiums.
I did the scoring on my facebook page, here. Feel free to jump in and complain!
The outcome of the scoring was that Clinton and Sanders got almost the same score, not different enough to matter. O’Malley got a lower score simply because he talked less, and I did not adjust for that (though I recorded the data in a way that would allow that adjustment).
Meanwhile, what did people think? The only real indicator of the outcome of this debate will be the official scientifically conducted polls that happen over the next few days. I’ve not seen any such polls yet. It takes a few days to do a poll, so a poll dated January 18th or 19th will not necessarily reflect the debate’s influence. I’ve argued in the past that online polls are actually useful, contrary to popular presumption, because of the way things work these days on the Internet. Online polls have tracked very closely with scientifically conducted polls for the Republicans. This may be true as well with the Democrats. Hard to say.
Online polls show a HUGE surge for Bernie Sanders with this debate, with Sanders garnering results in the 80% range in many polls. This is not a small thing. This may be in part because Sanders supporters are crazy poll clickers and will go out of their way to create a buzz (there is material evidence for this). But Clinton supporters should also be clickity clicking, so this effect can account for only a portion of that difference between the candidates.
It may well turn out that this debate is part of the transition I documented and described here, which is parallel to a transition that happened in the Clinton-Obama race.
If Sanders did in fact win this debate by such a large margin, then this will have to be reflected in the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary. Sanders will have to win the Iowa Caucus by a decisive amount (close to 10 points?) and he will have to win New Hampshire by a landslide (he is effective “favorite son” there), in order for us to say that he won this debate at the level indicated by online polls.
Then, we are faced with the rest of the primary process. The electability issue will not go away for Sanders unless he beats or matches Clinton in the South, or at least, does fairly well. If Clinton creams Sanders in South Carolina, that is bad news for Sanders. Some Sanders supporters have indicated that Sanders won’t win the South anyway, and that may be true, but if he totally loses every southern state including Florida and Texas in the General, than we may end up President Trump-Cruz, and you can kiss the Supreme Court and doing anything about climate change good buy for many decades.
The fact that Sanders seemed to do well in this particular debate, held by the Congressional Black Caucus, might be important here. Clinton has the advantage with “minority” voters, for her family-related policy, her long term links to relevant issues, and the fact that she was married to the first Black president. Sanders is an old white Jewish guy from an all white state. African American vs. Jewish American relations are cold, on average. But Sanders kicked a lot of that to the curb with his social justice stands during this debate, and in general during his campaign. African Americans traditionally have had important friends in New England liberals, and in Jewish American intellectuals and their famous “New York Ideals” (sensu Cruz). The recent move to disassociate traditional allies by #BlackLivesMatters activists may or may not permeate to southern Democratic Party voters.
Personally, I wish Minnesota was not voting on Super Tuesday along with Georgia, Arkansas, Texas, Tennessee, and Virginia. I’d rather have a bit more time with the Fish Finder before I have to cut bait, if you get my drift.
I’m going to make this simple. The primary season has not started yet. It starts in a few weeks. Everything we are doing now is pre-Primary. Not one person has put pen to checkmark in a voting booth.
Once that process starts, everything changes. Suddenly there is more polling in downstream states. Starting before the first primaries, but then ramping up as we head towards states that matter (and no, Iowa and New Hampshire don’t matter despite what you may have been told). Same with campaigning. We’ve seen a few debates, there’s been a lot of speeches, but you ain’t seen nothing yet. And other things (fund raising, more endorsements, etc.)
I thought I’d start out a discussion on the historic context by producing the simple graphic above. This is the course of polling (from Real Clear Politics) for the Clinton-Obama race in 2008 up to about now in the process, along side the Clinton-Sanders race this year. The graphic is rough, I just threw it together, but it kind of speaks for itself.
But in case the meaning is not clear, it means this: The primary season has not started yet. It starts in a few weeks.
I made a new graphic to underscore the meaning of the graphic above. Here, I took the 2008 primary season and the 2016 primary season RCP polling data for the two main candidates and ROUGHLY scaled them together. That moment when everything changes for 2008 is about now, or about the beginning of the actual primaries. Will that be what happens this year?
The current polling as shown on the Huffpo Pollster, using only “likely voters” and “non partisan polls” shows that Trump and Carson are neck and neck and have been close for a week. Most of the other candidates are so low it is impossible to imagine any of them rising to a level of significance. On the other hand, there are still so many clowns in the clown car that it is hard to say. If eight or nine of the candidates dropped out over the next few weeks, it is possible that someone will rise up.
On the other hand, there is a thing about how the Republicans pick their candidate that may have a significant effect and cause neither Carson nor Trump to get the nomination. It works like this. There are many states (and/or Congressional Districts, which matters more in some states) where there aren’t that many Tea Bagger Republicans, but still a good number of delegates. States like New York could be sending a very large number of delegates who would never consider a Trump or a Carson, while states like Alabama might send a small number of delegates who are strongly in favor of the fringe candidates (like Trump and Carson, fringe in the sense of their, well, you know what I mean.) So, we’ll see. Frankly, we might not know what is going to happen in the GOP race until Super Tuesday or later.
In the Democratic Race, looking again only at likely voters and non-partisan pols, Clinton has been ahead of Sanders all along and her relative position has risen slightly. Hillary Clinton currently has a commanding and steadily growing lead over Sanders.
The Gop poll is shown above, the Democratic poll shown below.
Lincoln Chafee, Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, Bernie Sanders, and Jim Webb faced off in the Facebook-CNN sponsored debate. Who won?
The individual who “won” is the individual whose poll numbers went up the most, and we don’t know that yet. But there are other ways to win, and other ways to talk about winning.
Winners
Barack Obama I am pleased to note that the candidates running for the Democratic nomination were not running away from the President. That proved to be a bad strategy for House and Senate Democrats during the last election, and we are not seeing it today. One of the questions asked during the debate was, “How would your presidency not be a third Obama term?” The ideal answer might have been, “Oh, it will be a third Obama term in many ways,” or even “My first term will be a second version of Obama’s second term.” No one said that, but some implied it, and it was clear that no candidate was trying to distance themselves from Obama. Within Democratic party politics, that is meaningful, and it was an endorsement of President Obama.
The Democratic Party I believe that there are people out there who were either Republicans or who were Independents who watched the GOP debates and then watched the Democratic debate and became Democrats. If you need to know why, you didn’t watch the debates.
Climate Change I am also please to note that climate change was a key issue in the debate, even if CNN did not try very hard to make it so. Many of the candidates mentioned climate change without prompting, and when climate change was brought up it was addressed. Most of the candidates had the “right” answer — that climate change is real, and important.
Martin O’Malley O’Malley is a climate hawk, and also, has a strong position on gun regulation. But, he is relatively unkown. Most democrats and progressives seemed to think he did well in the debate and he made a good impression. He is not likely to move out of the single digit zone, but he has become a factor. Many commenters are suggesting that he advanced into the possible VP slot because of this debate.
Bernie Sanders and Millions of Americans Sanders articulated his central position and did not falter or screw up in any way. Sanders supporters are able to say he won hands down, Sanders opponents can not say he did poorly. But something else happened here. Sanders made a point to a national audience that he has been making all along, which is very important. Like many idealist candidates before him, he has positions that can’t turn into reality because of strong opposition by the Republicans and because of Citizens United. Sanders’ answer to that is to agree, these positions will go nowhere. Unless… Unless millions of people show up outside the windows of the elected officials in Washington to scream at them. He’s right. Having that sociopolitical tactic acknowledged and part of his campaign would make Sanders the best candidate and an effective president if a) he wins and b) the millions of people actually show up. That prospect is now on the table.
Hillary Clinton Many commenters have noted that Hillary Clinton won the debate because she was the best debater. An example of her skill came when her ability to make good decisions was questioned vis-a-vis her vote on Iraq. Her answer was, essentially, that President Obama trusted her with the Secretary of State job, so what the heck? That and several other comebacks served her well. Clinton is a traditional fire and brimstone Democrat. Given a podium for ten minutes she can capture the crowd and bring everyone to a teary-eyed state of Progressive Frenzy with great skill. In the debating context, this is hard to do because the train just starts to leave the station when you get cut off. But on those few occasions when Clinton had the time, she got the train out of the station. Did you notice that? (In contrast, Sanders is a chunker. He has these great, fiery, hard as brick chunks of rhetoric he can slam into any conversation in less than 19 seconds. He showed that ability many times last night.)
Losers
International trade deals Sanders made the point that there have been no good international trade deals. Clinton, who was in on the early negotiations of the Trans Pacific Partnership threw the TPP under the bus. No one came to the rescue of international trade deals. It will be interesting to see if the Gops make this a point in the election. Their knee-jerk reaction will be to do so, but it will hurt them because nobody likes sending jobs and money overseas, and Romney has inoculated the voting populous in this area already.
Lincoln Chaffee Chaffee just did not come off well. Also, he was the only candidate repeatedly questioning everyone else’s ethics with the passive aggressive comment that HE was the one with ethics. Then he fell into the tiger trap by admitting that his 1999 Senate vote to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which he now sees as having been a bad vote, was made because he had no idea what he was voting for and had some personal problems and stuff. In all fairness, that was a conference vote, which is routinely near 100% even if more were opposed to the original bill, and he never had a chance to debate or vote against the bill earlier on. This is the Senator Problem, where the rules of the Senate are such that most experienced Senators can be singled out as having voted against something they are for, or for something they are against, unfairly. So, it may be unfair to write off Chaffee because of that one gaff. But it was more than just a gaff. It was more like digging a tiger pit for the other candidates then flinging oneself into the hole.
Guns Not every candidate was saying the same things about guns, but here’s the thing. The biggest differences between candidates were exposed in the light of very few issues, and gun regulation was one of those issues. But, it seems that at least within the context of the Democratic Party, the candidates are being judged on how anti-gun they are. Guns lose.
Benghazi and Email Scandals Benghazi was already hanging from the end of a taut rope, but still got beat up during the debate, along with Sanders’ remark that the Republicans need to take Hillary Clinton’s emails and shove them where the sun don’t shine. OK, he didn’t say that exactly, but that is what he, and everyone else, was thinking.
Wall Street Obviously.
So, who really won the debate?
Sanders or Clinton won the debate. The commenters I’ve read seem about evenly divided between the two candidates. However, on line polls are wildly supportive of Sanders over Clinton. Perhaps this means we have to say Sanders won the debate. I personally felt better about both of them after the debate, but it is hard to say if I felt more better about one or another.
Regarding the online polls, I’ve placed a bunch of screen grabs HERE so you can see how that looks. And, this brings up another interesting point.
Notice that I’ve avoided mentioning Jim web in the winners vs. losers sections. Personally, I thought he came off as a whinging wonk, not a potential president. Also, he’s wrong on several issues. Most commenters seem to feel the same. But if you look at those on line polls, oddly, Webb has surprisingly high marks in some of them. Overall, if we look only at the on line polls, Webb came in a solid third, even though most commenters are writing him off. Why?
), notes that the effectiveness of a campaign is partly tied to the effectiveness of that campaign’s story.
