2016 President

With the dust settling from one of the most brutal and nasty presidential campaigns in modern American history and with the late vote returns creeping up to a final count, it is time to take stock of the presidential election forecasts offered initially to readers of the Crystal Ball website and then published in the October issue of PS: Political Science and Politics. Despite the surprising electoral vote victory of Donald Trump, the vote count as of one week after the election indicates that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton received 50.5% of the two-party popular vote cast nationwide to Republican President-elect (yes, it is still jolting) Trump’s 49.5%. So how did the forecasts do? From late June to early September in Sabato’s Crystal Ball, eight forecasters or teams of forecasters issued 10 presidential election forecasts of the national two-party popular vote (along with the PollyVote meta-forecast assembled from array of different types of forecasts). Aside from a few minor updates, these were the same forecasts later published in PS (in no case did the difference between the Crystal Ball and PS reported forecast differ by more than two-tenths of a percentage point). Table 1 reports the forecasts from the closest to

There is no doubt that this is a high stakes election. It is not Tweedledum and Tweedledee, as former Alabama Gov. George Wallace famously said of the major parties when he ran as a third-party candidate nearly a half century ago. Almost everyone nowadays agrees that a Donald Trump presidency would take the nation in a vastly different direction than a Hillary Clinton presidency. Yet their political destiny is not totally in their own hands. This is an election where third and fourth parties can shape the outcome. And in an historical sense, that is highly unusual. Third parties, such as Ralph Nader’s Green Party candidacy in 2000, tend to affect presidential elections every decade or two. But not since Ross Perot’s campaigns in the 1990s has the third-party vote reached 10%, nor since 1948 have four parties (two majors plus two minors) won at least 2% of the popular vote. With Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein, both could happen again this year. Polls show Johnson well above the 2% mark and Stein hovering right around it. Meanwhile, a fifth candidate, independent Evan McMullin started too late to be a factor in the nationwide popular vote,

The mist is lifting from the map of the United States and the moment of clarity for the 2016 general election campaign has arrived. Yes, there is still uncertainty about some states in the Electoral College. But nearly all of it comes in states that Mitt Romney won in 2012 or a couple of Barack Obama states that Hillary Clinton doesn’t need to win. With less than three weeks to go, and all of the debates blessedly in the rearview mirror, Clinton is in a commanding position in the contest to become the 45th president. Clinton has taken a significant lead in national polling and is now up by about six to eight points in two-way and four-way presidential matchups in both the HuffPost Pollster and RealClearPolitics averages. Her leads in the key states that would get her to 270 votes are in some instances smaller than that, but she has a healthy advantage in more than enough states to get her to an Electoral College majority, and smaller leads in states that she doesn’t need but Trump does, including big, typically Republican-leaning prizes like Florida and North Carolina. A few Obama states seem more tenuous for Clinton, including Iowa

Donald Trump’s apparent slide in the polls is continuing, and with that more states seem to be coming into play. We already moved heavily Republican Utah to Leans Republican earlier this week, a decision that was backed up by a recent Deseret News poll showing Clinton and Trump tied at 26% apiece, with independent Republican candidate Evan McMullin, a Mormon who has been focusing on the Mormon-majority state, running a close third at 22%. It now appears that Georgia, like Arizona, is also moving back into play. There have been several reports of close polls there and the Clinton campaign might try to make a move for this reliably Republican state. We’re moving it back to Leans Republican, from Likely Republican, matching Arizona’s race rating. Needless to say, a Clinton win in Arizona or Georgia would be evidence of a Clinton rout that matches or exceeds Obama’s seven-point 2008 romp. Map 1: Crystal Ball Electoral College ratings Table 1: Crystal Ball Electoral College ratings changes

Back in mid-September, we noted that there appeared to be at least a limited negative (or inverse) relationship between the amount of attention one presidential nominee was garnering from the public relative to the other nominee and that candidate’s position in the polls. In short, the candidate getting more coverage tended to see a decline in his or her poll numbers. We now have another month’s worth of data to help flesh out this relationship, and I offered a preliminary tweetstorm earlier this week about it. Using Gallup data for the question “Did you read, hear, or see anything about Hillary Clinton/Donald Trump in the last day or two?” and comparative Google Trend data for the search terms “Hillary Clinton” and “Donald Trump” in the United States, it really does appear that the candidate receiving more attention tends to struggle more. This article will look at the correlation between the polls and the Gallup data as well as the correlation between the polls and the Google Trends data. Correlation in statistics measures the degree to which different sets of data show a mutual relationship, calculated with a range measuring from -1 to 1. The closer the correlation (r) is to

Editor’s note: As a part of the development of this article, the Crystal Ball team compiled a database of county winners going back to 1836. Click here to access it. Political types may love the 2016 election, but we recognize that for many, it is a dreary affair. Media saturation and two unpopular candidates can make following it a daily slog. Unquestionably, though, this campaign presents the opportunity to observe some fascinating changes in the American electorate. Donald Trump’s chances seems predicated on popularity with non-college educated whites, which he hopes will push him over the top in a few blue states. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is banking on demographic changes and the erosion of Republican support among more educated conservative voters to compensate for any loss among the working class. This dynamic could manifest itself in breaking some durable streaks of voting for a party on the county level. In the past 100 years there have been nine elections where the winning party won the popular vote by at least 15 percentage points: six such victories for the Republicans (1920, 1924, 1928, 1956, 1972 and 1984) and three for the Democrats (1932, 1936, and 1964). That means the number of