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Does Donald Trump Really Have a 30% Chance of Winning?

by IonaMackinolty Posted on May 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Sam Wang, my go-to presidential forecaster, says Hillary Clinton would have a 99 percent chance of winning if the election were held today. But the election isn’t being held today:

Historically from 1952 to 2012, the likely range of movement in two-candidate margin from this time until Election Day has been 10 percentage points, which is the standard deviation from the 16 past elections. Therefore, even though Clinton currently leads by a median margin of 7 percent (12 national surveys) and would certainly win an election held today, she could still lose the lead, and from a purely poll-based standpoint, is only narrowly favored to be elected President in November (probability: 70%).

It is also the case that Clinton is the only candidate who is poised for a blowout. Her “plus-one-sigma” outcome (current polls plus one standard deviation) is a popular vote win of 58.5%-41.5%. Trump’s plus-one-sigma outcome is a narrower win, 51.5%-48.5%.

In chart form it looks something like this: two bell curves centered 7 points away from each other, each with a standard deviation of 10 points.

The blue span from 48.5 to 51.5 is Trump’s 30 percent chance of winning—though it’s worth noting that Wang says the standard deviation in recent elections has been more like 4 points, which would give Trump virtually no chance of winning. Nonetheless, he also says this: “But considering the upheaval in the Republican Party, a little voice tells me to open my mind to a wider range of possibilities… including a Trump win.”

James Wimberley isn’t convinced. He takes a look at various upsides and downsides of the two candidates (gaffes, oppo dumps, unusual outside events, etc.) and concludes that virtually all of them favor Hillary:

Adding these pseudo-numbers up, I get the total risks to Clinton 39, to Trump 352. Really the only more than marginally possible future events in my categories that he has going for him are ISIS pulling off a big atrocity and economic collapse in China, both at long odds. I don’t claim credibility for my particular numbers, just that overall we have to put a very fat thumb on the probability scales in Clinton’s favour. So her chances to a sensible bettor are more than Wang’s 70%, a lot more.

Comments? I’m pretty astounded that after locking up the nomination Trump has actually gotten more out of control, not more restrained. Everybody sort of assumed that when it came time to widen his appeal beyond the Republican base, he’d be smart enough to dial things back a notch, but he seems to have taken this as some kind of schoolyard challenge. The last couple of weeks he’s been crazier than ever. If this keeps up, I’d be hard put to give him more than a 1 percent chance of winning.

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Does Donald Trump Really Have a 30% Chance of Winning?

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Here’s Another Crazy Thing Texas Republicans Are Voting on Today

by FrederiFad Posted on May 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Texas Republicans are convening today to cast their ballot on a number of matters close to the Lone Star state’s conservative heart. The most notable issue is whether or not to secede from the rest of the United States, as ardent nationalists in the party are hoping to do.

But buried in the long list of standard Republican agenda items includes the following gem, one that’s stereotypically reserved for members of the left wing:

Despite the unusual bipartisan paranoia, Republicans hoping to opt out of the government-backed meters are likely fresh out of luck: In 2014 the same proposal was overwhelmingly rejected by state lawmakers who were not persuaded that the technology was endangering the public.

Anyone in search for another issue with red and blue support should look no further than the aforementioned vote on Texas secession. As our own Josh Harkinson notes, that, too, has cheerleaders from both ends of the political spectrum.

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Here’s Another Crazy Thing Texas Republicans Are Voting on Today

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Three Sentences About the Cocoon

by JoshuaDadson Posted on May 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Sentence #1: Drew Altman on whether people are satisfied or not with their Obamacare coverage:

In the Kaiser survey, which will be published next week, 29% of Republicans in marketplace plans (i.e., Obamacare) say they have benefited from the ACA compared with 75% of Democrats, a 46-point difference.

This is now so common that it makes top-line polling almost useless. How’s the economy doing? It depends on your party. Do you believe in climate change? It depends on your party. In unemployment up or down? It depends on your party. We’re accustomed to opinions about things like abortion depending on party ID, but more and more, views of objective reality depend on party ID too. Why?

Sentence #2: Ezra Klein on why Facebook is likely to become more biased, not less:

Before the web…it was possible to cocoon yourself inside an echo chamber, but you really had to work at it. Then came cable news…. Constructing an echo chamber became easier….But now we have personalized search results, handcrafted Twitter feeds, and a Facebook algorithm based on likes. Now you can end up in an echo chamber without even knowing it.

Aha. The cocoon. This is why the objective state of the world depends so much on party ID. If you watch Fox News and read the Drudge Report, you get exposed to more than just different spins compared to people who listen to NPR and read Mother Jones. You get exposed to an entirely different set of stories. Conservatives and liberals these days are increasingly exercised by issues that their opposites barely even know exist.

Sentence #3: Todd VanDerWerff on the ultimate hollowness of the latest George Clooney vehicle, Money Monster:

Hollywood used to excel at telling stories of people who lived and worked in the lower classes….Whether it was The Grapes of Wrath or Raging Bull, filmmakers used to treat the concerns and hopes of the working class as worthy of consideration. That happens less and less now.

The cocoon again! Back in the day, plenty of screenwriters and film directors came from working-class backgrounds. Today they all have degrees from the USC film school and live in Silver Lake. They get their news from Variety and the LA Times, not drive-time radio and People. In this cocoon, the working class is something to make money from via transparently condescending TV shows, not real people with real problems.

Years ago, I used to think that everyone who did the kind of thing I do—blather about public policy from the perch of an upper-middle-class existence—should read the National Enquirer weekly to get a better sense of what kinds of news shaped the views of ordinary people. I don’t think the Enquirer fills that bill anymore, but what does? The media-verse is so fragmented these days that I’m not sure there’s any single outlet you can count on anymore. Suggestions?

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Three Sentences About the Cocoon

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Corrupt IRS Spells Doom For Donald Trump Later This Year

by JulietaBeardsle Posted on May 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Should Donald Trump release his tax returns? Sure. So why won’t he? There are probably a few embarrassing things tucked away in there, but I doubt this is the real reason. The real reason is that they’d show Trump isn’t worth $10 billion. Or $5 billion. Or, who knows, maybe not even $1 billion. His ego just couldn’t stand having that made public.

Still, he did promise to release them. And Quin Hillyer has an…exotic reason why he should keep that promise:

Republicans, especially delegates, have every right not just to ask for, but to demand, the release of the returns before the convention. With a crew of Lois Lerners running the IRS, those returns surely will leak right after the nomination is made formal.

That’s right. The IRS is such a beehive of Democratic Party corruption that Hillary Clinton will have no trouble getting one of her moles to hand over the entire Trump record. Hell, she’s probably done it already and is just waiting for the right time to start dribbling out explosive revelations. It’s just the kind of things she’d do. Amirite or amirite?

Between left and right, I feel like I’m almost entirely enveloped by bizarre paranoia these days. Can we all just settle down and return to planet Earth for a while?

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Corrupt IRS Spells Doom For Donald Trump Later This Year

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Here’s the Latest From the Bullshitter-in-Chief

by DellBartels Posted on May 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump knows exactly how to appeal to the women’s vote:

“Have you ever read what Hillary Clinton did to the women that Bill Clinton had affairs with? And they’re going after me with women?” he added, incredulously, without citing any specific examples or sources.

Oh goody. I guess in a few days we’ll be treated to a barrage of thumbsuckers relitigating the titillating tales of Kathleen Willey, Gennifer Flowers, and Paula Jones. Christ. But the BinC didn’t stop there:

Trump also took sharp aim at Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren….In front of a crowd of thousands on Friday night, Trump unveiled a new nickname for the Massachusetts senator: “Goofus.”

Clinton’s “got this goofy friend Elizabeth Warren, she’s on a Twitter rant, she’s a goofus,” he said. “This woman, she’s a basketcase. By the way, she’s done nothing in the United States. She’s done nothing.”

Well, nothing except for all the stuff that conservatives apparently hate her for. Like being the godmother of the CFPB, which is great for most of us but loathed by banks—and therefore also loathed by Trump and the entire Republican Party. And despite being in the minority party and therefore having zero power, she’s been a pretty effective advocate for reining in Wall Street during her 39 months as a senator. Effective enough to piss off Donald Trump, anyway.

Next up: Trump claims that Chelsea Clinton knew all about Benghazi. Huma Abedin is disgusting for sticking with her husband. Beyoncé wouldn’t have any fans if she were a man. Shonda Rimes is an affirmative-action hire who has ruined ABC’s Thursday-night TV lineup. Malia Obama is going to Harvard on the taxpayer’s dime. Kim Kardashian is a total slut. Laura Bush is a loser. Amal Clooney defends terrorists. Gloria Steinem sure hasn’t aged well. Natalie Portman was terrible in Star Wars.

Keep it up, Donald. You’re doing great so far.

UPDATE: This should help him out with the little ladies:

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Here’s the Latest From the Bullshitter-in-Chief

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John Kasich Drops Out of Presidential Race

by DianTrivett Posted on May 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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John Kasich announced Wednesday evening that he was dropping out of the presidential race, leaving Donald Trump as the sole Republican contender and almost-certain nominee. Kasich’s announcement comes less than 24 hours after Trump’s sweeping Indiana primary victory sent shock waves through the political world and prompted Ted Cruz to abandon the race. Following Cruz’s announcement, GOP chairman Reince Priebus called Trump the presumptive nominee on Twitter and encouraged Republicans to rally behind the real estate mogul.

Unlike Cruz, Kasich never had much of a shot at becoming the GOP’s nominee. On the campaign trail, he touted positions—expanding Medicaid, supporting a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants, and more—that seemed removed from the typical attitudes of the GOP electorate. The Ohio governor won only one state primary: his own. But with Cruz out of the race, Kasich represented the GOP’s last, long-shot hope for somehow stopping Trump from winning the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination.

Shortly after Cruz dropped out Tuesday night, Kasich’s campaign assured voters he would be staying in the game. “It’s up to us to stop Trump and unify our party in time to defeat Hillary Clinton,” Kasich’s campaign manager, Ben Hansen, wrote in an email to supporters.

But Wednesday evening, during a speech in Columbus, Ohio, Kasich changed course. He opened by thanking his family, his wife, and his campaign staff and volunteers. He recounted some of the interactions with voters he had on the campaign trail: “The people of our country changed me with the stories of their lives,” Kasich said. He ended on a somber note: “As I suspend my campaign today, I have renewed faith, deeper faith, that the Lord will show me the way forward and fulfill the purpose of my life.”

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John Kasich Drops Out of Presidential Race

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The Super-Rich Tech Elite Is Just Fine With Big Government

by SwenDaneit Posted on May 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Gregory Ferenstein, in the course of arguing that super-rich donors are about equally split between Democrats and Republicans (although the Republicans donate more in absolute dollars), points out that the super rich in Silicon Valley are almost exclusively Democrats. Why?

I think the more likely explanation is that the nation’s new industrial titans are pro-government.

Google, Facebook, and most Internet titans are fueled by government projects: the Internet began in a defense department lab, public universities educate a skilled workforce and environmental policies benefit high tech green industries. The CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, is a fan of Obamacare, which helps his entrepreneurial drivers keep their health insurance as they transition between jobs.

In other words, the Democratic party is good for emerging industries and billionaires recognize it. Donald Trump is a candidate known to go after major figures in tech; a trend that may further the Democrats friendship with new industrial titans.

Perhaps more importantly, I’ve argued that the modern emerging workforce of Silicon Valley, urbanized professionals, and “gig economy” laborers all represent an entirely new political demographic redefining the Democratic party to be more about education, research and entrepreneurship, and less about regulations and labor unions.

There’s something to this, but I suspect culture has a lot more to do with it. Most of these folks have spent their lives marinating in social liberalism, and being situated in the Bay Area just adds to that. So they start out with a visceral loathing of conservative social policies that pushes them in the direction of the Democratic Party. From there, tribalism does most of the additional work: once you’ve chosen a team, you tend to adopt all of the team’s views.

Beyond that, yes, I imagine that tech zillionaires are more than normally aware of how much they rely on government: for basic research, for standards setting, for regulation that protects them from getting crushed by old-school dinosaurs, and so forth. And let’s be honest: most of the really rich ones have their wealth tied up almost entirely in capital gains, which doesn’t get taxed much anyway. So endorsing candidates who happen to favor higher tax rates on ordinary income (which they probably won’t get anyway) doesn’t really cost them much.

For most folks in Silicon Valley, even the super rich, there’s very little personal cost to supporting Democrats. Combine that with an almost instinctive revulsion at both troglodyte Republican policies and the Fox News base of the party, and there just aren’t going to be many Republican supporters in this crowd.

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The Super-Rich Tech Elite Is Just Fine With Big Government

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This Is Why Hillary Clinton Can’t Tell Bernie Sanders to Drop Out

by LinEagarwvz Posted on May 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton’s lead in delegates over rival Bernie Sanders is now almost insurmountable as they move toward the conclusion of the Democratic presidential primary contest. But Clinton has not called on him to drop out of the race, for one simple reason: the example her own campaign set in 2008.

Eight years ago this month, Clinton was trailing hopelessly behind then-Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. On May 1, 2008, Clinton loaned her bankrupt campaign $1 million (following at least $10 million in earlier loans). Before the end of that week, pundits were calling the contest for Obama, whose May 6 win in the North Carolina primary, by 14 points, had made his delegate lead essentially insurmountable. “We now know who the Democratic nominee will be,” Tim Russert said on MSNBC after the results came in. Less than a week later, Obama surpassed Clinton in the super-delegate count, signaling that the party establishment was shifting behind the presumptive nominee.

But Clinton was determined to fight until the last votes had been cast. She would go on to win contests in West Virginia, Kentucky, and South Dakota before the primary ended on June 3, even though there was no way for her to make up her deficit in the delegate count.

Along the way, the Clinton campaign put forward every conceivable argument to justify staying in the race. It used wins in states like Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Kentucky to claim that Obama was losing support among white working-class voters and that she would be the stronger general election candidate. On May 5, it began to argue about the delegate math, making the case that the number of delegates needed to clinch the nomination was actually 2,209, not 2,025, the figure that had been cited up until then—and that if neither campaign reached that new number, Clinton was prepared for a floor fight at the party’s convention. On May 23, Clinton justified her continued White House bid by noting that in 1968, Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June, after winning the California primary. And lurking in the background in these final weeks was the rumor that Republican operatives had gotten hold of a tape of Michelle Obama disparaging “whitey.”

Eight years later, Clinton knows she cannot turn around and tell Sanders it’s time to leave the race, even though her current lead over Sanders, at about 300 delegates, is larger than the nearly 160-delegate lead Obama had over her after the North Carolina primary in 2008. The Sanders campaign had $17 million on hand as of the latest public filings at the end of March, giving it far more fighting power than the broke Clinton effort had at the same point in 2008.

So the Clinton team has been careful not to say Sanders should drop out. After her victory in New York, Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, told reporters that the campaign expected Clinton to be the nominee but that Sanders had a right to continue to fight. Instead of focusing on Clinton’s refusal to bow out in 2008, her campaign is talking up her unequivocal support of Obama after the primary was over—suggesting that that is the example Sanders should follow. In late May 2008, she said she and Obama “do see eye-to-eye when it comes to uniting our party to elect a Democratic president in the fall.” And when she announced her withdrawal from the race on June 7, she forcefully threw her support behind Obama and urged her fans to do the same.

“I think she set a gold standard for how people who don’t end up with the nomination, who lose in that effort, should come together and help the party,” Palmieri said on the night of the New York primary last month.

What Clinton isn’t mentioning is that before she tried to unify the party, she was questioning Obama’s appeal to white voters, hoping that a bombshell video would surface and help take down her rival, and entertaining a convention floor fight. Despite her team’s claims of magnanimity, at this point eight years ago, Clinton was five weeks and a few attacks shy of giving into the inevitable and uniting the party.

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This Is Why Hillary Clinton Can’t Tell Bernie Sanders to Drop Out

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Democrats Have a Class Gap. Republicans Have a Generation Gap.

by KianBittner Posted on April 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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What are the big fault lines within the Democratic and Republican parties? According to a recent Pew report, Democrats have a class gap: Democratic elites are far more liberal than less educated members of the party. But there’s not much of a generation gap: old and young voters are pretty similar ideologically.

Among Republicans, it’s just the opposite. They have a huge generation gap, with older voters skewing much more conservative than younger voters. But there’s no class gap: their elites are in pretty close sync with the party base. The raw data is here, and the chart below shows the magnitude of the difference:

This is interesting, since the most talked-about aspect of the Democratic primary was the astonishingly strong preference of young voters for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. But why did they prefer Bernie? The obvious answer is that they’re more liberal than older Democrats and therefore preferred his more radical vision—but the Pew data says that’s not the case.

So what is the answer? The age gap could still explain a bit of it, since young Democrats are a little more liberal than older Democrats. And the class gap could also explain a bit of it, since Bernie voters tend to be both young and well educated. But even put together, this doesn’t seem like enough.

Obviously there was something about Bernie that generated huge enthusiasm among younger voters. But if it wasn’t ideology, what was it?

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Democrats Have a Class Gap. Republicans Have a Generation Gap.

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It Was Chinese Tea That Spawned the Tea Party

by ClaudeErdmann Posted on April 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Today brings a new academic entry in the angry voter sweepstakes. A quartet of high-powered economists took a look at congressional districts and divided them up by how much they were exposed to trade with China. Some districts showed lots of job losses due to trade while others showed very little. How did voters react?

Districts with lots of job losses were somewhat more likely to vote out incumbents, but not by a lot. Nor were they more likely to switch parties. However, they were likely to become more extreme, electing very conservative Republicans and very liberal Democrats:

The point estimates suggest that about three quarters of the movement away from the political center induced by trade is the result of increasing conservativeness among elected legislators, while one quarter is due to increasing liberalness.

….Districts subject to larger increases in import competition from China are substantially less likely to elect a moderate legislator….Comparing more and less trade-exposed districts, the more-exposed district would become 18.5 percentage points less likely to have a centrist in power between 2002 and 2010. To put this magnitude in context, over the 2002 to 2010 time period, the fraction of “moderates” in the House declines to 37.1% from a baseline of 56.8%.

The authors believe that import competition from China following their accession to the WTO has played a big role in the polarization of American politics:

China bashing is now a popular pastime as much among liberal Democrats as among Tea Party Republicans. Our contribution in this paper is to show that this political showmanship is indicative of deeper truths. Growing import competition from China has contributed to the disappearance of moderate legislators in Congress, a shift in congressional voting toward ideological extremes, and net gains in the number of conservative Republican representatives, including those affiliated with the Tea Party movement.

Why did this benefit conservatives more than liberals? At a guess, it’s because they were better able to tap into voter anger. Both sides could make similar economic arguments, but conservatives could add a healthy dose of nationalism to the mix, something that liberals are a lot less comfortable with. That made their attacks on China more resonant.

Ironically, voters on both sides were basically getting scammed. Big talk aside, neither conservatives nor liberals did much to reduce trade with China. In fact, it’s not clear there was much they could have done. Short of abandoning the WTO and starting a trade war, there really weren’t a lot of options on the table. The net result, then, was lots of windy rhetoric and a more polarized Congress, and eventually the Donald Trump campaign. But Trump, like all the rest of the China bashers, has nothing more than windy rhetoric too.

At this point, the game is almost fully played out anyway. China’s impact on American jobs is a done deal, with little more to come as China itself moves to a less manufacturing-oriented economy and finds itself in competition with countries like Vietnam and Indonesia. But if the authors of this paper are right, the American political scene will continue to pay a price for decades to come.

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It Was Chinese Tea That Spawned the Tea Party

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