2016 President

“There is no city in the United States in which I get a warmer welcome and fewer votes than Columbus, Ohio.” – John F. Kennedy For the first time since Ohio rejected Kennedy in favor of Richard M. Nixon in 1960, it seems quite possible that the Buckeye State will find itself on the losing side of a presidential election this year. CNN’s Jeff Zeleny sent a scare into Ohio Democrats eight days ago when he noted that Hillary Clinton had not been in Ohio since Labor Day and that the state was “slipping down on the priority list” for the Clinton campaign. On Thursday, the New York Times’ Jonathan Martin reported from the state and suggested that the state’s bellwether status might be fading away. News broke that same day that Clinton would be coming back to Ohio Monday — perhaps that was the plan all along, or perhaps the Clinton campaign felt it had to dispatch the nominee to the Buckeye State in response to creeping rumors that the campaign was pessimistic about carrying the state. This would not be the first time that a Democratic campaign cut bait on Ohio. In 2000, Al Gore pulled out of

Editor’s Note: This article is partially an update of a piece we published in 2012 discussing the impact of presidential debates. To slightly modify Ronald Reagan’s famous rejoinder to Jimmy Carter in their single debate in 1980 (“There you go again”), here we go again — into the debate season. There has been at least one televised presidential debate every four years for four decades now. The streak began in 1976. Every four years, the debates seem very important. Whether they are or not is open to, ahem, debate. Mitt Romney experienced an apparent surge in support after the first debate in 2012. He got a number of positive polls after his strong performance (and President’s Obama’s widely-panned showing). However, as we’ve mentioned before, it seems likely that Romney just re-energized his supporters while Obama’s backers became less enthusiastic, and that created what seemed like movement in the polls when there actually wasn’t much. It’s possible that Hillary Clinton’s poor polls over the past few weeks are representative of a similar phenomenon, and that she can use the debate to give her backers a needed jolt. Or perhaps we’re dealing with an unprecedented phenomenon here and Donald Trump can use

There are a lot of ways to tell you’re getting old, and one is the realization that you have watched every presidential general election debate in U.S. history. The saving grace is that the history is short, with TV debates only beginning in 1960. And truth be told, I was just eight years old when Kennedy faced Nixon, and my parents told me I fell asleep during all four debates. But I’ve studied the tapes since and interviewed some of the key individuals involved in those precedent-setting encounters. The dates were similar in 1960 to the ones chosen for 2016: Of course, all the early debates were presidential. The vice presidential candidates were barely mentioned in the exchanges, and Lyndon Johnson and Henry Cabot Lodge certainly didn’t have their own forum. This innovation was added in 1976 — after two more vice presidents, LBJ and Gerald Ford, had succeeded to the presidency, underlining the secondary office’s importance. Almost certainly, the 2016 debates will have a huge audience, just as in 1960. Remarkably, the total estimated audiences for Kennedy and Nixon ranged from 66.4 million in the first debate to 60.4 million at the last one. In November 1960, 68.8 million

Dear Readers: Over the past couple of months, we’ve been running a series on election forecasting models. James E. Campbell, who has been compiling these forecasts for us, offers some concluding thoughts on the series below. — The Editors Modern presidential election campaigns generate a massive amount of news. This has never been more true than for this year’s campaign, an especially intense open-seat election campaign conducted with the parties near parity, with both an electorate and party system highly polarized, and with a pair of highly controversial and generally not-well-thought-of contenders. Every twist and turn, real and imagined, is reported and exhaustingly scrutinized. Even dedicated political junkies may feel overwhelmed by the hourly onslaught of election information as the political world churns. The truth is that the vast amount of information pouring out of campaigns and developed by campaign watchers is of little or no consequence to the election’s outcome. It is noise — distracting and sometimes interesting noise, but nonetheless noise. In this din of information, the important aspects of the elections are often lost or overshadowed. This is where election forecasting models can help refocus attention on what matters, what the election may truly hinge on, what

Every presidential election is different, but nobody’s going to tell us that this one isn’t notably different from any other in the modern period. It’s not just that the two major-party candidates are so disliked and unpopular with much of the public. While Donald Trump’s numbers are no better and sometimes worse, Hillary Clinton’s unfavorables are about as bad as we’ve ever seen for a frontrunner, with about three in five voters saying she’s not honest and trustworthy, a product of the stories about the Clinton Foundation, her private emails, and decades-long controversies involving Clinton and her husband, the former president. Trump got some of the best polls he has enjoyed of the entire cycle on Wednesday, taking leads in the must-win (for him) states of Florida and Ohio. Clinton is struggling with concerns about her health, and her status as the frontrunner in this race is eroding. Perhaps she can pull herself out of her tailspin, and the upcoming debate on Sept. 26 should be a big moment. If she continues to sink, the electoral map we have long tilted in her favor will be getting a lot redder. Nonetheless, the defining difference in this election is not Clinton

New Hampshire may just have four electoral votes, but it’s important. If you doubt it, just ask any Granite State citizens, and they’ll tell you about their first-in-the-nation primary. Even that quartet of electoral votes can matter; in 2000, if Al Gore had just won them (and without Ralph Nader on the ballot, he probably would have), Gore would have been president even without Florida. He didn’t and he wasn’t. Since 2000, we’ve watched New Hampshire become more reliable for the Democrats in presidential years. Neighbor John Kerry of Massachusetts won 50.2% in 2004, and Barack Obama easily carried the Granite State in 2008 (54.1%) and 2012 (52.0%). And now, Hillary Clinton is doing so well that her polling lead in the state is about seven-to-eight points, depending on the average, and now we’re ready to shift New Hampshire from Leans Democratic to Likely Democratic. We waited a while, despite favorable polls for Clinton, because it once seemed reasonable to imagine Trump making a play for the land of Live Free or Die. The state is very white (as of 2014, it had the fourth-smallest nonwhite population share), and the Crystal Ball team hypothesized in 2015 that lily-white Obama states

Dear readers: We’re pleased this week to continue our series on the political science forecasts of the presidential election with a piece from Crystal Ball Senior Columnist Alan Abramowitz on his Time for Change model. Interestingly, the model shows Donald Trump as a small favorite in the presidential election. As you’ll read, Abramowitz throws some cold water on his own model by noting Trump’s challenges, but Abramowitz’s model is one more indication that a generic Republican very well could have been the favorite in 2016 — and that if Trump comes back to win the election, it might be because certain “fundamentals” (like the state of the economy and the president’s approval rating, which Abramowitz’s model stresses) indicated that the country was ready for a change. The rest of this week’s very full Crystal Ball shows our Electoral College map moving a little bit more in favor of Hillary Clinton and also looks at the state of play in the House. Finally, we examine the increasingly frequent comparisons between 2016 and 1964, and explain why the phenomena of Donald Trump and Barry Goldwater are very different. — The Editors The Time for Change forecasting model has correctly predicted the winner