2016 Senate

  Dear Readers: Our new book on 2016’s remarkable election, Trumped, is now available. Trumped features some of the nation’s sharpest political reporters and analysts breaking down an election that truly broke all the rules. The following is taken from Chapter 10 of the book, authored by Ariel Edwards-Levy and Natalie Jackson of Huffington Post, and Janie Velencia, formerly of Huffington Post. The authors write about political polling in the 2016 cycle and the challenges facing the industry. In this excerpt, they argue that the issue and approval polls that we see on an almost daily basis are still good barometers of public opinion. Crystal Ball subscribers can get a special discount on Trumped: The 2016 Election That Broke All the Rules from publisher Rowman and Littlefield. Use code 4S17SBTOCB at checkout to get the paperback at 30% off the retail price at Rowman’s website. — The Editors   The debate over what factors caused pollsters to err in 2016 is likely to continue for some time, as is the argument as to what extent the miss represents either a critical failure for the industry or simply a demonstration of overcertainty by pundits and forecasters. But regardless of the magnitude

Speaking at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama, then a candidate for the U.S. Senate, famously declared that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.” Obama then went on to decry political pundits who “like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states.” The implication of Obama’s speech was that the perception of geographic sorting of the country into reliably Democratic and Republican areas was not based in fact, but was instead a false narrative imposed by the media. Obama’s rhetoric of unity and homogeneity across party lines notwithstanding, there is substantial evidence that cultural and lifestyle preferences are strongly related to political tastes. Political scientists have demonstrated that political ideology and party identification are predictive of choices in areas as varied as mate selection, media consumption, cleanliness, office décor, music tastes, and housing decisions. If such relationships between political and lifestyle preferences are strong enough, and individuals are sufficiently willing and able to “vote with their feet” and move to areas that are a better match for their tastes, the implication is clear: We should expect to see the emergence over time of a geographically divided

The Crystal Ball is coming out a day early this week because we wanted to invite our readers to watch the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ 18th annual American Democracy Conference, which is going on today from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the Ronald Reagan Building & International Trade Center in Washington D.C. Registration is full but members of the media interested in covering the conference are welcome to attend, and we will be streaming the conference live throughout the day at https://livestream.com/tavco/ADC2016. Our featured speakers are Kellyanne Conway, who managed Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign, at 9 a.m., and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) at 12:30 p.m. Additionally, Center for Politics Director Larry J. Sabato will interview Khizr Khan, the Gold Star father who spoke at the Democratic National Convention, at 1:30 p.m. There will also be three panels discussing various aspects of the 2016 campaign. Here’s the full program:   9:00 a.m. Welcoming Remarks by Larry J. Sabato, Director, UVA Center for Politics   9:05 a.m. Keynote Speaker: Kellyanne Conway, campaign manager for President-elect Donald J. Trump’s campaign   9:45 a.m. – 11 a.m. Panel I – Politics and the Fourth Estate Moderator: Geoffrey Skelley, Associate Editor

Editor’s Note: The Crystal Ball is taking the week off for Thanksgiving next week, but we’ll be back with another edition on Thursday, Dec. 1. Now that we’ve had a week to digest the results of the 2016 election, here are some observations about what happened and what the results might tell us about the future: 1. Electoral map tilts to the GOP In close elections, the Electoral College will probably continue to tilt to the GOP. Twice in 16 years, we’ve had a “misfire,” where the popular vote went to one major-party candidate while the other candidate secured a majority of the electoral vote. This is because Democrats secure large, sometimes enormous, majorities in mega-states such as California, New York, and Illinois, while Republicans have just Texas, where Donald Trump’s margin of victory was nearly 450,000 votes fewer than Mitt Romney’s. (You should never join “just” with Texas, but we trust you’ll see what we mean.) Other sizable states, such as Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia, are closely divided and add only small pluralities to the candidate that wins them. While the cumulative popular vote means nothing under the Constitution, it is not a good thing for a president

Well, what can we say — we blew it. We thought the signs pointed to Hillary Clinton winning the White House. We thought that even if she lost Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio, her Midwestern “firewall” of states that not only had voted for Barack Obama twice, but hadn’t voted for a Republican since the 1980s, would hold for her. It didn’t — Trump blew a hole in what we dubbed “Fortress Obama.” Remarkably, this all happened while Clinton was winning Virginia by a larger margin than Obama did in 2012 and almost certainly winning the national popular vote. Every two years, we put out an update after the election asking, “How did we do?” Well, let’s see: President Do we really have to get into it? OK, fine. We wrongly insisted for months that Clinton was always leading the race and never put her below 270 electoral votes. As of this writing, Trump won 279 electoral votes to Clinton’s 228, according to NBC News projections. We missed the following Leans Democratic states: Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. We had Wisconsin as Likely Democratic, yet Trump also carried it. Two other Leans Democratic states — Michigan (where Trump leads) and

After a nearly two-year campaign — kicked off in December 2014 by Jeb Bush (remember him?) — we’ve come to it at last. Election Day is less than 24 hours away. And we know why you’re here: You just want the picks. So let’s cut to the chase. Table 1 shows our final selections for the Electoral College, Senate, House, and the governorships. Table 1: Crystal Ball 2016 election projections Let’s start with the presidency: THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE Map 1: Crystal Ball Electoral College projection Despite some wobbles along the way, we’ve favored Hillary Clinton as the 45th president of the United States ever since we did our first handicapping of the Clinton vs. Donald Trump matchup back in late March. The edge we had for her back then has eroded a little bit at the end — we had her as high as 352 electoral votes, and in the final tally we have her down to 322, with 216 for Trump. If this is how it turns out, Trump will fare 10 electoral votes better than Mitt Romney, and Clinton will do 10 electoral votes worse than Barack Obama in 2012 — 11 or 12 if rogue Washington electors

Another week has passed in the presidential race and it appears that Donald Trump is not making up much if any ground on Hillary Clinton. Last month, we coined the term “Fortress Obama” to describe an outer and inner ring of defenses Clinton had against Trump as she sought to recreate Barack Obama’s Electoral College majority. The outer ring consisted of states like Florida, Iowa, Nevada, and Ohio — states that Obama won twice but that are vulnerable to Trump — as well as North Carolina, which Obama carried only in 2008. These are states that Trump needs but that Clinton could probably do without. Then there’s the inner ring, states like Colorado, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, none of which Clinton can afford to lose if Trump were to completely knock down the outer ring. At this point, Clinton is no worse than 50-50 to carry each of the outer ring states — even states like Iowa and Ohio, where polls have been very close or even show a Trump edge — and she seems secure in all of the inner ring states. This is why Clinton is such a heavy favorite to win the presidency, and our