Nate Silver's Blog, page 105

The Health Care Bill Could Be A Job-Killer For GOP Incumbents

Republicans in the House of Representatives voted today to approve a version of the American Health Care Act, their bill to repeal and replace Obamacare. The biggest effects of the bill will be on the millions of additional Americans who would go without health insurance if a similar bill is passed by the Senate. But it could also endanger the job prospects of the Republican members of Congress who voted for it and make a Democratic takeover of the House substantially more likely in 2018.

The previous version of the AHCA — which died in the House in March before it came to a floor vote — was an exceptionally unpopular bill. Polls in mid-March had opposition outweighing support for the bill by an average of almost 15 percentage points, and the numbers were getting worse; most notoriously in a Quinnipiac poll that showed just 17 percent of Americans supporting the bill and 56 percent opposed.

The various amendments to the AHCA since then — which were mostly made to placate the Freedom Caucus and have pushed the bill further to the right — aren’t likely to make it any more popular. Some of the amendments could even affect people who receive insurance from their employers in addition to those who receive Medicaid or buy insurance on the Obamacare exchanges. Republicans are also playing with political fire to pass such a bill before the Congressional Budget Office has scored the amendments and estimated how many additional people might gain or lose coverage.

In 2010, Democrats who voted for Obamacare paid a huge price in the midterms. Just how big a price? A 2011 study by FiveThirtyEight contributor Seth Masket and another political scientist, Steven Greene, found that Democrats who voted for Obamacare lost 6.6 to 7.6 percentage points of the vote, depending on which model they used. Note, however, that these totals refer to the share of the vote the Democrat lost and not to the margin that the Democrat had against the Republican. Since third-party candidates are rarely major factors in House races, almost every vote the Democrat loses is one the Republican gains. Thus, the effect on the Democrat’s margin against the Republican was roughly twice that — 13 to 15 percentage points. That’s a huge effect; it means that a Democrat who was on track to cruise to re-election by 12 points would lose if they’d voted for Obamacare.

A later study by Masket, Greene and three other researchers found impacts of a similar magnitude, estimating a 5.8 percentage point Obamacare effect on the Democrat’s vote share using one technique, and an 8.5-point effect using another. Again, these are vote shares, not vote margins. (We usually think in terms of margins here at FiveThirtyEight). The margins would be roughly twice as high — in the range of 12- to 17-point penalty for a Democrat who voted for Obamacare.

If Republican members should suffer a similar penalty for voting for the AHCA — somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 points — it could put dozens of GOP-held seats in play. Some 33 Republicans won their seats by 14 percentage points or less in 2016; of those, 27 voted for the AHCA.

Republicans in the next tier or two down could also be vulnerable, however, because the overall political climate is likely to be a lot worse for Republicans than it was in 2016. In 2016, Republicans won the aggregate popular vote for the U.S. House by about 1 percentage point. Democrats currently have a 5- to 6-point lead in polls of the 2018 House vote, however. Moreover, the numbers for the president’s party usually get worse over the course of the midterm cycle as more voters tune into the political process. There could easily be an overall partisan swing of 5 to 10 percentage points against Republicans, therefore. It’s not quite clear how this partisan swing would interact with the AHCA penalty — whether you’d add them together or whether that’s double-counting — but it should be enough to make a lot of Republican incumbents nervous. There are 58 Republicans who won by less than 20 points in 2016 and who voted for the AHCA.

There are some mitigating factors for Republicans, however. Unlike Obamacare, the AHCA is somewhat unlikely to become law, at least in its present form: It faces considerable opposition in the Senate, which would likely pass a more moderate bill if it passed one at all. The Republican process for negotiating the AHCA also hasn’t been as drawn out as the one Democrats had for Obamacare. And President Trump makes a lot of news that could compete with the health care vote for attention. If the bill quietly dies in the Senate this summer, for instance, it’s not clear that a vote taken in May 2017 will be at the top of voters’ minds in November 2018.

Then again, in 2010, Democrats engaged in a lot of wishful thinking around Obamacare, hoping they could avoid the effects from passing a substantially unpopular piece of legislation that affected one-sixth of the U.S. economy. They were wrong; they got their health care bill but not without a big electoral price.

There’s even a chance that Republicans could suffer a bigger penalty than Democrats did. As unpopular as Obamacare was as it was being debated by Congress in 2009 and 2010, the AHCA is more unpopular still.

The Comey Letter Probably Cost Clinton The Election

This is the tenth article in a series that reviews news coverage of the 2016 general election, explores how Donald Trump won and why his chances were underrated by most of the American media.

Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28. The letter, which said the FBI had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into the private email server that Clinton used as secretary of state, upended the news cycle and soon halved Clinton’s lead in the polls, imperiling her position in the Electoral College.

The letter isn’t the only reason that Clinton lost. It does not excuse every decision the Clinton campaign made. Other factors may have played a larger role in her defeat, and it’s up to Democrats to examine those as they choose their strategy for 2018 and 2020.

But the effect of those factors — say, Clinton’s decision to give paid speeches to investment banks, or her messaging on pocket-book issues, or the role that her gender played in the campaign — is hard to measure. The impact of Comey’s letter is comparatively easy to quantify, by contrast. At a maximum, it might have shifted the race by 3 or 4 percentage points toward Donald Trump, swinging Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida to him, perhaps along with North Carolina and Arizona. At a minimum, its impact might have been only a percentage point or so. Still, because Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by less than 1 point, the letter was probably enough to change the outcome of the Electoral College.

And yet, from almost the moment that Trump won the White House, many mainstream journalists have been in denial about the impact of Comey’s letter. The article that led The New York Times’s website the morning after the election did not mention Comey or “FBI” even once — a bizarre development considering the dramatic headlines that the Times had given to the letter while the campaign was underway. Books on the campaign have treated Comey’s letter as an incidental factor, meanwhile. And even though Clinton herself has repeatedly brought up the letter — including in comments she made at an event in New York on Tuesday — many pundits have preferred to change the conversation when the letter comes up, waving it away instead of debating the merits of the case.

The motivation for this seems fairly clear: If Comey’s letter altered the outcome of the election, the media may have some responsibility for the result. The story dominated news coverage for the better part of a week, drowning out other headlines, whether they were negative for Clinton (such as the news about impending Obamacare premium hikes) or problematic for Trump (such as his alleged ties to Russia). And yet, the story didn’t have a punchline: Two days before the election, Comey disclosed that the emails hadn’t turned up anything new.

One can believe that the Comey letter cost Clinton the election without thinking that the media cost her the election — it was an urgent story that any newsroom had to cover. But if the Comey letter had a decisive effect and the story was mishandled by the press — given a disproportionate amount of attention relative to its substantive importance, often with coverage that jumped to conclusions before the facts of the case were clear — the media needs to grapple with how it approached the story. More sober coverage of the story might have yielded a milder voter reaction.

My focus in this series of articles has been on the media’s horse-race coverage rather than its editorial decisions overall, but when it comes to the Comey letter, these things are intertwined. Not only was the letter probably enough to swing the outcome of the horse race, but the reverse is also true: Perceptions of the horse race probably affected the way the story unfolded. Publications may have given hyperbolic coverage to the Comey letter in part because they misanalyzed the Electoral College and wrongly concluded that Clinton was a sure thing. And Comey himself may have released his letter in part because of his overconfidence in Clinton’s chances. It’s a mess — so let’s see what we can do to untangle it.

Clinton was in a danger zone before Comey’s letter

Clinton woke up on the morning of Oct. 28 as the likely — by no means certain — next president. Trump had come off a period of five weeks in which he’d had three erratic debates and numerous women accuse him of sexual assault after the “Access Hollywood” tape became public. Clinton led by approximately 6 percentage points in national polls and by 6 to 7 points in polls of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Her leads in Florida and North Carolina were narrow, and she was only tied with Trump in Ohio and Iowa. But it was a pretty good overall position.

Her standing was not quite as safe as it might have appeared from a surface analysis, however. For one thing, there were still lots of undecided voters, especially in the Midwest. Although Trump had a paltry 37 percent to 38 percent of the vote in polls of Michigan, for instance, Clinton had only 43 percent to 44 percent. That left the door open for Trump to leapfrog her if late developments caused undecideds to break toward him. Furthermore, in the event that the race tightened, Clinton’s vote was inefficiently distributed in the Electoral College, concentrated in coastal states rather than swing states. While she had only an 11 percent chance of losing the popular vote according to FiveThirtyEight’s forecast that morning, her chances of losing the Electoral College were a fair bit higher: 18 percent.

Another danger to Clinton was complacency. Several days earlier, the Times had written that she was on the verge of having an “unbreakable lead.” And there was a risk that people looking at statistical forecasts were misreading them and “rounding up” a probable Clinton win to a sure thing. (We’ll take up that topic up at more length in a future article in this series.) But Clinton had actually slipped by a percentage point or so in polls since the final debate on Oct. 19. And the news cycle had become somewhat listless; the most prevalent story that morning was about the trial in the Oregon wildlife refuge standoff. Clinton was in a danger zone: Her lead wasn’t quite large enough to be truly safe, but it was large enough to make people mistakenly think it was.

The Comey letter almost immediately sank Clinton’s polls

News of the Comey letter broke just before 1 p.m. Eastern time on Oct. 28, when Utah. Rep Jason Chaffetz tweeted about it, noting the existence of the letter and stating (incorrectly, it turned out) that the case into Clinton’s private email server had been “reopened.” The story exploded onto the scene; Fox News was treating Chaffetz’s tweet as “breaking news” within 15 minutes, and the FBI story dominated headlines everywhere within roughly an hour. In an element of tabloid flair, it was soon reported that the emails in question were found on a computer owned by Anthony Weiner, the former congressman, as part of an investigation into whether he’d sent sexually explicit messages to teenage girls.

Few news organizations gave the story more velocity than The New York Times. On the morning of Oct. 29, Comey stories stretched across the print edition’s front page, accompanied by a photo showing Clinton and her aide Huma Abedin, Weiner’s estranged wife. Although some of these articles contained detailed reporting, the headlines focused on speculation about the implications for the horse race — “NEW EMAILS JOLT CLINTON CAMPAIGN IN RACE’S LAST DAYS.”

That Comey’s decision to issue the letter had been so unorthodox and that the contents of the letter were so ambiguous helped fuel the story. The Times’s print lead on Oct. 30 was about Clinton’s pushback against Comey, and a story it published two days later explained that Comey had broken with precedent in releasing the letter. It covered all sides of the controversy. But the controversy was an unwelcome one for Clinton, since it involved voters seeing words like “Clinton,” “email,” “FBI” and “investigation” together in headlines. Within a day of the Comey letter, Google searches for “Clinton FBI” had increased 50-fold and searches for “Clinton email” almost tenfold.

Clinton’s standing in the polls fell sharply. She’d led Trump by 5.9 percentage points in FiveThirtyEight’s popular vote projection at 12:01 a.m. on Oct. 28. A week later — after polls had time to fully reflect the letter — her lead had declined to 2.9 percentage points. That is to say, there was a shift of about 3 percentage points against Clinton. And it was an especially pernicious shift for Clinton because (at least according to the FiveThirtyEight model) Clinton was underperforming in swing states as compared to the country overall. In the average swing state, Clinton’s lead declined from 4.5 percentage points at the start of Oct. 28 to just 1.7 percentage points on Nov. 4. If the polls were off even slightly, Trump could be headed to the White House.

Is it possible this was all just a coincidence — that Clinton’s numbers went into decline for reasons other than Comey’s letter? I think there’s a decent case (which we’ll take up in a moment) that some of the decline in Clinton’s numbers reflected reversion to the mean and was bound to happen anyway.

But it’s not credible to claim that the Comey letter had no effect at all. It was the dominant story of the last 10 days of the campaign. According to the news aggregation site Memeorandum, which algorithmically tracks which stories are gaining the most traction in the mainstream media, the Comey letter was the lead story on six out of seven mornings from Oct. 29 to Nov. 4, pausing only for a half-day stretch when Mother Jones and Slate published stories alleging ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

MORNING (9 A.M.)
EVENING (5 P.M.)




Oct. 20
Debate recap
Will Trump accept election results?


21
Trump campaign palace intrigue
DDoS attack


22
Trump hotels to drop Trump name
Trump sexual assault accusations


23
Trump sexual assault accusations
Polls


24
Terry McAuliffe investigation
WikiLeaks/Podesta


25
Breitbart coordination with Democrats
Trump campaign palace intrigue


26
Newt Gingrich vs. Megyn Kelly
Trump’s Hollywood star vandalized


27
Trump campaign palace intrigue
Trump campaign palace intrigue


28
Oregon/Ammon Bundy standoff
Comey letter/Clinton emails


29
Comey letter/Clinton emails
Comey letter/Clinton emails


30
Comey letter/Clinton emails
Comey letter/Clinton emails


31
Comey letter/Clinton emails
Comey letter/Clinton emails


Nov. 1
Trump/Russia ties
Polls


2
Comey letter/Clinton emails
Comey letter/Clinton emails


3
Comey letter/Clinton emails
Comey letter/Clinton emails


4
Comey letter/Clinton emails
Terror threat


5
National Enquirer and Trump
Early voting data


6
Trump Secret Service scare
Trump campaign palace intrigue


7
Polls
Polls


The top stories on Memeorandum.com leading up to the election

It’s rare to see stories linger in headlines for more than two to three days given how quickly the news cycle moves during election campaigns. When one does, some effect on the polls is often expected. And that’s what we saw. The sharpness of the decline — with Clinton losing 3 points in a week — is consistent with a news-driven shift, rather than gradual reversion to the mean.

We also have a lot of other evidence of shifting preferences among voters in the waning days of the campaign. Exit polls showed that undecided and late-deciding voters broke toward Trump, especially in the Midwest. A panel survey conducted by FiveThirtyEight contributor Dan Hopkins and other researchers also found shifts between mid-October and the end of the campaign — an effect that would amount to a swing of about 4 percentage points against Clinton. And we know that previous email-related stories had caused trouble for Clinton in the polls. In July, when Comey said he wouldn’t recommend charges against Clinton but rebuked her handling of classified information, she lost about 2 percentage points in the polls. Periods of intense coverage of her email server had also been associated with polling declines during the Democratic primary.

So while one can debate the magnitude of the effect, there’s a reasonably clear consensus of the evidence that the Comey letter mattered — probably by enough to swing the election. This ought not be one of the more controversial facts about the 2016 campaign; the data is pretty straightforward. Why the media covered the story as it did and how to weigh the Comey letter against the other causes for Clinton’s defeat are the more complicated parts of the story.

The Times thought it was covering President-elect Clinton’s first scandal

Re-read one of those New York Times front-page stories from Oct. 29 — “This Changes Everything’: Donald Trump Exults as Hillary Clinton’s Team Scrambles” — and you’ll be surprised by how strange it is. It begins by describing the Comey letter in dramatic terms, as “the kind of potential turnabout rarely if ever seen at this late stage of a presidential race”:

Everything was looking up for Hillary Clinton. She was riding high in the polls, even seeing an improvement on trustworthiness. She was sitting on $153 million in cash. At 12:37 p.m. Friday, her aides announced that she planned to campaign in Arizona, a state that a Democratic presidential candidate has carried only once since 1948.

Twenty minutes later, October delivered its latest big surprise.

The F.B.I. director’s disclosure to Congress that agents would be reviewing a new trove of emails that appeared pertinent to its investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s private email server — an investigation that had been declared closed — set off a frantic and alarmed scramble inside Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and among her Democratic allies, while Republicans raced to seize the advantage.

In the kind of potential turnabout rarely if ever seen at this late stage of a presidential race, Donald J. Trump exulted in his good fortune.

And yet the same Times article told readers that this rarely-if-ever-seen turnabout wouldn’t cost Clinton the election. She had banked too much of a lead in early voting, the story said, and it came too late in the campaign. Instead, the Comey letter could “cast a cloud over a victorious Mrs. Clinton’s administration-in-waiting”:

With early voting well underway, and Mrs. Clinton already benefiting from Mr. Trump’s weekslong slide in the polls, Democrats’ concerns were tempered — more in the realm of apprehensiveness than panic.

[…]

Mrs. Clinton has an enormous cash advantage — $153 million in the bank for her campaign and joint fund-raising accounts as of last week, compared with $68 million for Mr. Trump’s campaign and joint accounts — which means Mr. Trump has limited means to use the F.B.I. inquiry to damage Mrs. Clinton with television ads.

With more than six million Americans having already voted as of Monday, any efforts by Mr. Trump to claw his way back into contention could come too late. The Clinton campaign says its early voting turnout data points to a Democratic advantage in several swing states, including Florida, Colorado, Arizona and Iowa.

But the specter of an F.B.I. inquiry could cast a cloud over a victorious Mrs. Clinton’s administration-in-waiting. News had hardly spread when exasperated Democrats and donors were ruefully dredging up painful memories of the seemingly constant tug of congressional investigations on Bill Clinton’s White House.

What the heck is going on here? Why was the Times giving Comey’s letter such blockbuster coverage and at the same time going out of its way to insist that it wouldn’t affect the outcome?

The evidence is consistent with the theory that the Times covered the Comey letter as it did because it saw Clinton as the almost-certain next president — and Trump as a historical footnote. By treating the letter as a huge deal, it could get a head start on covering the next administration and its imbroglios. It could also “prove” to its critics that it could provide tough coverage of Democrats, thereby countering accusations of liberal bias (a longstanding hang-up at the Times). So what if it wasn’t clear from the letter whether Clinton had done anything wrong? The Times could use the same weasel-worded language that it often does in such situations, speaking of the Comey letter as having “cast a cloud” over Clinton.

In a sense, the Times may have made a version of the same mistake that Comey reportedly did, according to the very detailed recounting of the FBI director’s decision that the Times published last month. The newspaper’s editors and reporters thought Clinton had the election in the bag. And they didn’t consider how their own actions might influence the outcome and invalidate their assessment. That influence was substantial in Comey’s case and marginal for the Times, as one of many media outlets covering the story. But the media’s choices as a whole potentially mattered, and the tone of campaign coverage shifted substantially just as voters were going to the polls.

“Little Comey” vs. “Big Comey”

One can make a case that the race would have tightened even if Comey had not issued his letter. Clinton had already lost a percentage point or so off her lead in the week before the Comey letter; if she continued at that rate of decline, she’d be down to a 4- to 5-point lead by Election Day. And although polls don’t always tighten down the stretch run — Barack Obama’s lead expanded at the end of the 2008 and 2012 campaigns — they sometimes move more in line with economic conditions and other “fundamental” factors. As of Oct. 28, the polls-plus version of FiveThirtyEight’s forecast, which accounts for these factors, expected Clinton to lose a point or so off her lead before Election Day.

Another complicating factor is that Clinton had a slight rebound in the polls over the final 36 hours of the campaign, with her lead improving from 2.9 percentage points on Nov. 6 to 3.6 points in our final forecast on the morning of Nov. 8 (Election Day). It’s not entirely clear what this uptick represented — it may have reflected pollster herding as outlier polls magically changed their tune. But it also could have meant that the Comey effect was fading as the news cycle moved on to other stories.

So you could postulate that the Comey letter had only about a 1-point impact. Perhaps Clinton’s lead would have been whittled down to around 4.5 points anyway by Election Day because of mean-reversion. And she led in the final polls by about 3.5 points. Yes, she also underperformed her final polls on Election Day, but that could reflect pollster error or undecideds breaking against her for other reasons, this case would say — there was no particular reason to attribute it to Comey.

Nonetheless, Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by less than 1 percentage point, and those states were enough to cost her the election. She lost Florida by just slightly more than 1 point. If the Comey letter had a net impact of only a point or so, we’d have been in recount territory in several of these states — but Clinton would probably have come out ahead. I call this the “Little Comey” case — sure, the Comey letter mattered, but only because the election was so close.

ADJUSTED VOTE MARGIN




CLINTON VOTE MARGIN
SMALL COMEY EFFECT*
BIG COMEY EFFECT*
CLINTON’S ELECTORAL VOTES HAD SHE WON




Michigan
-0.2
+0.8
+3.8
248


Pennsylvania
-0.7
+0.3
+3.3
268


Wisconsin
-0.8
+0.2
+3.2
278


Florida
-1.2
-0.2
+2.8
307


Nebraska’s 2nd C.D.
-2.1
-1.1
+1.9
308


Arizona
-3.5
-2.5
+0.5
319


North Carolina
-3.7
-2.7
+0.3
334


Georgia
-5.1
-4.1
-1.1
350


Ohio
-8.1
-7.1
-4.1
368


Texas
-9.0
-8.0
-5.0
406


Iowa
-9.4
-8.4
-5.4
412


Even a small Comey effect could have cost Clinton the 270 electoral votes she needed to win

*Adjusting for a small Comey effect adds 1 percentage point to Clinton’s vote margin. A big effect adds 4. Hypothetical scenario starts with the 232 electoral votes Clinton actually won, ignoring faithless electors.

Or one could argue for a larger impact from the Comey letter. This is the “Big Comey” case. There was nothing inevitable about the race tightening, it would say, given that the news cycle had been unpredictable and that Trump had a tendency to dig deeper holes for himself while down in the polls.

Representatives of the Clinton campaign made two additional “Big Comey” claims in comments at the Harvard Institute of Politics conference after the election.

First, they said the letter’s impact was larger in Midwestern swing states such as Wisconsin because there were large numbers of undecided voters there, especially among white voters without college degrees. And the Clinton campaign claimed that the second Comey letter — which he issued late in the afternoon on Nov. 6 and which announced that the emails on Weiner’s laptop hadn’t turned up anything new — hurt Clinton because it put “FBI,” “Clinton” and “email” back in the headlines. This is hard to test because the second Comey letter came so late in the campaign that there wasn’t time for polls to pick up its effects.

But it’s plausible that Clinton’s underperformance versus the polls on Election Day had something to do with Comey — either lingering effects from his original letter or new effects from his second letter. The “Big Comey” case might attribute a 4-point impact to him nationally — accounting for the swing between Clinton’s 6-point lead on the morning of Oct. 28 and her 2-point popular vote margin on Election Day — and slightly more than that in the swing states.

My personal views are more toward the “Little Comey” side of the spectrum, since I think there would have been a fair amount of mean-reversion even without Comey. That’s because Clinton and Trump had alternated better and worse months in the polls in a way that tracked with the news cycle. Clinton had been in a strong position in the polls in June, August and — until the Comey letter — in October, while Trump had drawn close to her in May, July and September (and therefore might have been “due” for an uptick in November). This pattern may have reflected some sort of complicated feedback loop in media coverage. After some initial stimulus — say, a strong debate — there was a frenzy of favorable coverage for a candidate and negative coverage for her opponent, with news events framed against a backdrop of rising or falling polls. Then after a few weeks, the reporting on the story exhausted itself, the polls stabilized and the press was eager to look for a reversal of momentum. Comey’s letter came at a time when the campaign press may have been itching for a change in the narrative after several tough weeks for Trump. If not for the Comey letter, perhaps some other story would have blown up in Clinton’s face. Still, this theory is speculative, and those other stories might not have had the kryptonite-like effect that email-related stories had on Clinton’s numbers.

Let’s play the blame game

The Comey letter wasn’t necessarily the most important factor in Clinton’s defeat, although it’s probably the one we can be most certain about. To explain the distinction, consider Clinton’s decision to run a highly negative campaign that focused on branding Trump as an unacceptable choice. One can imagine this being a huge, election-losing mistake: Trump’s negatives didn’t need any reinforcing, whereas Clinton should have used her resources to improve her own image. But one could also argue that Clinton’s strategy worked, up to a point: Trump was exceptionally unpopular and needed a lot of things to break his way to win the election despite that. The range of possible impacts from this strategic choice is wide; perhaps it cost Clinton several percentage points, or perhaps it helped her instead. The range from the Comey letter is narrower, by contrast, and easier to measure. It was a discrete event that came late in the campaign and had a direct effect on the polls.

The standard way to dismiss the letter’s impact is to say that Clinton should never have let the race get that close to begin with. But the race wasn’t that close before the Comey letter; Clinton had led by about 6 percentage points and was poised to win with a map like this one, including states such as North Carolina and Arizona (but not Ohio or Iowa). My guess is that the same pundits who pilloried Clinton’s campaign after the Comey letter would have considered it an impressive showing and spoken highly of her tactics.

Thus, you have to assess the letter’s impact to do an honest accounting of the Clinton campaign. If you’re in the “Big Comey” camp and think Clinton would have won by 5 or 6 percentage points without the letter, it’s hard to fault Clinton all that much. Even given all of Trump’s deficiencies as a candidate, that’s a big margin for an election in which the “fundamentals” pointed toward a fairly close race. “Little Comey” believers have more room to assign blame to Clinton’s campaign, in addition to Comey (and the media’s coverage of him).

But campaign postmortems almost always involve a lot of results-oriented cherry-picking. It’s easy to single out things that Clinton did poorly — her handling of the email scandal, her inability to drive a positive message and her poor Electoral College tactics would have to rank highly among them (although those Electoral College choices probably didn’t swing the election). There are also some things the campaign did well, however. For instance, Clinton got a huge bounce after her convention, and she won all three debates according to polls of debate-watchers. She also made a fairly smart VP pick in Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine. These aren’t minor things; in normal presidential campaigns, preparing for the debates, staging the conventions and picking a solid running mate are about as high-stakes as decisions get. Clinton did poorly in the unscripted portions of the campaign, however, and the campaign went off script in the final 10 days.

If I were advising a future candidate on what to learn from 2016, I’d tell him or her to mostly forget about the Comey letter and focus on the factors that were within the control of Clinton and Trump. That’s not my purpose here. Instead, it’s to get at the truth — to figure out the real story of the election. The real story is that the Comey letter had a fairly large and measurable impact, probably enough to cost Clinton the election. It wasn’t the only thing that mattered, and it might not have been the most important. But the media is still largely in denial about how much of an effect it had.

What Will Democrats Demand Of Their 2020 Nominee?

In this week’s politics chat, we take stock of how the Democratic Party has changed since President Trump won the White House. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): What do Democrats want? There’s been a ton of attention on the Trump administration revolving around his first 100 days, but we’ve also learned a bit about what the Democratic Party will look like in the Trump era. Ron Brownstein at The Atlantic did a nice job of summarizing the issue:

Though Trump’s agenda has unified Democrats in near-term opposition, clear fault lines have quickly emerged about the party’s long-term strategy to regain power. On one side are those — largely affiliated with Senator Bernie Sanders — arguing for a biting message of economic populism, which is intended largely to recapture working-class white voters that stampeded to Trump in 2016. On the other are party strategists who want Democrats to offer a more centrist economic message, aimed primarily at reassuring white-collar suburbanites drawn to the party mostly around cultural issues.

So, which wing is ascendant? And how has that changed in the last few years and since Trump was elected?

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): I think what we’re really asking here is: Did 2016 actually change the Democratic universe? Are the prerequisites the same?

micah: Yeah, that’s better. Are there new litmus tests? Or, what are the litmus tests?

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): I read a piece asking if the Democratic candidate in 2020 needed to be in favor of single payer. That may be a good clarifying question.

micah: What do people think?

perry: Bernie Sanders is for that, of course. I saw Cory Booker asked about that recently and he gave a somewhat meandering answer. (His office told Vox that “Medicare for all is one of those ideas that must be considered.”

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): If I had to guess, I’d think the 2020 nominee might support some type of supercharged public option. Not quite Medicare for all, but Medicare for anyone who wants it.

clare.malone: I’m with Nate on the public option.

micah: Side note: Does Booker really have a chance? With populist and anti-establishment winds blowing strong in the Democratic Party, isn’t Booker an odd fit for 2020?

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): He has as much of a shot as Donald Trump had of winning the Republican nomination at this point.

Politics Podcast: 99 Trial Balloons

 











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The Trump administration has made a habit of floating new policies in the press only to back away from them within days or even hours. Administration officials said President Trump would sign an executive order withdrawing the U.S. from NAFTA, and then Trump said that wouldn’t happen anytime soon. The White House suggested that it would tie Obamacare funding to funding for a border wall. That didn’t happen either. The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast debates how to cover the president’s statements given this unpredictability.

Also, FiveThirtyEight’s Ben Casselman joins the podcast to make sense of Trump’s one-page tax plan and the meager GDP growth estimates from the first quarter of 2017. Lastly, a new report suggests that automatic voter registration in Oregon was more effective at increasing youth turnout than expected.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Monday evenings, with occasional special episodes throughout the week. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Buy, Sell, Hold: What Comes After Trump’s First 100 Days?

In this week’s politics chat, we play one of our favorite games: buy/sell/hold. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Welcome, everyone, to a special almost-100-days-of-President-Trump edition of our weekly politics chat. To celebrate the occasion, we’re going to play a game of buy/sell/hold with PredictIt prop bets (plus some I made up). I checked the prices of a bunch of propositions at noon Eastern on Tuesday, and we’re translating those prices into probabilities. (I know that’s not exactly right, but it’s close enough.)

In case you forgot how to play buy/sell/hold:

Buy means “I think the chances of this happening are higher than indicated”;
Sell means “I think they’re lower”;
and hold means “I’m a total coward and am unwilling to take a stand.”

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Is “Trump 100 Days Week” the equivalent of the ugly person version of fashion week? I think it might be — the politics universe is having a group aneurysm.

micah: That seems about right.

OK, let’s start with the most immediate one …

Buy, sell or hold: There will be a government shutdown on May 1 (Monday). 10 percent

(Again, these probabilities are as of noon Tuesday — they may have changed.)

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): Sell.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Buy, I suppose.

clare.malone: Buy.

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): I say hold.

natesilver: Holdin’ Harry

micah: Wow … didn’t take long for Harry to wimp out.

harry: It’s not like I’ve been bitten in these games before.

natesilver: I think I bought Carly Fiorina stock at one point during the GOP presidential primary.

harry: The truth is I don’t know what the chances are. I know they are low. But as we’ve learned, things at the tail ends of the probability distribution often have a higher chance of happening than we think.

clare.malone: I think the chances are low, but higher than 10 percent given the volatility of American politics in 2017.

natesilver: And the disorganization of the White House.

micah: OK, Harry, that’s the only “who knows? … as we’ve learned” you’re allowed this chat.

harry: OH, COME ON!

micah: OK, Perry, you’re the outlier. Explain yourself!

perry: Well, 1. I think the administration and Congress will make great effort to avoid a shutdown, and 2. I think the shutdown could come after May 1.

micah: So, Perry, they would pass a short-term fix by this weekend then screw it up later?

perry: Yeah, I’m not wedded to this one. But there is some talk of a short-term fix, moving the deadline a bit.

natesilver: I guess I just think — they haven’t passed a budget yet, the deadline is April 28, and there are about a million ways they could screw it up.

Like, if “Fox & Friends” or CNN makes fun of Trump for caving on the border wall, maybe he’ll change his mind?

micah: Next!

Buy, sell or hold: Trump will sign a bill without majority GOP support in 2017. 13 percent

harry: Is this House and Senate? Or just House?

micah: The House. Whatever … you get the idea.

perry: Buy.

natesilver: Buy. Cha-ching.

clare.malone: Buy.

harry: I’m going to say buy. Partially because I think it’ll happen and partially because I’m herding.

clare.malone: Honest man.

micah: So Clare, are you buying because you think this will happen at least once, or are you buying because you think Trump will pivot to the center in a sustained way?

clare.malone: I’m buying because I think the problems Republicans ran into on health care were a good foreshadowing of the problems Trump could have going forward (conservatives dig in heels, Trump digs in heels against them, etc.). And also, if the more moderate forces at the White House win out (aka Jared Kushner over Steve Bannon), it would seem that Trump would be more likely to trend moderate.

perry: The Freedom Caucus might balk at a debt ceiling increase, causing other Republicans to do the same in the House. Then Democrats in the House have to vote to get it through, and maybe they get something in return. I’m not saying it will happen, but it could. I’m skeptical Trump will make a broader, sustained move to the center.

harry: The big question I have is whether Democrats will actually throw Trump a bone. There’s a fairly decent shot of it happening on a budget item?

natesilver: Of course, there are a few barriers here. House Speaker Paul Ryan is going to be reluctant to let such legislation come to the floor. But 13 percent? That’s CHEAP. I’m going to build a new Trump Hotel there, in fact.

micah: Where? This isn’t Monopoly.

harry: Baltic Avenue cheap.

natesilver: On Reading Railroad.

harry: I still cannot believe they got rid of the thimble, but, please, let’s continue.

micah: Did you all buy the railroads?

I bet I can guess:

Nate: yes.
Clare: no.
Harry: Never played Monopoly.
Perry: yes.

clare.malone: Accurate. I’m the only no!!! I’m noting this, Micah.

natesilver: The railroads are a great investment in Monopoly. Whereas the utilities are terrible.

micah: 2 for 2.

perry: I don’t recall, since this is a political chat.

micah: I’m counting that as a win. 3 for 3. (Harry is refusing to answer.)

OK …

Trump will be president at the end of 2017. 84 percent

natesilver: Buy.

perry: Buy.

harry: Buy.

clare.malone: Buy.

You know what …

SELL!

micah: YES!

clare.malone: Variety is the spice of life.

He’s old! We know not the hour nor the day …

Impeachment would take waaaay too long to finish in 2017, though.

micah: This just seems like liberal wishful thinking?

clare.malone: Yes, for SURE.

perry: That is an interesting notion. Age, not impeachment/removal/scandal/resignation, which I agree is very unlikely this year.

micah: So it’s health or he just walks away?

harry: If you’re betting on it happening this year, then it’s age. But the man has so many doctors around him — I just don’t see it happening.

clare.malone: Trump and Hillary Clinton were among the oldest presidential candidates we’ve had.

He’s not gonna walk away in 2017. That would be a loser move, no?

micah: It would.

harry: Trump’s not a loser. He’s told us as much.

natesilver: Without looking up actuarial tables, the risk of age-related death or incapacity is not that high in any given eight-month period, even if you’re 70 years old and have a super stressful job. So we’d probably be talking about resignation, yeah.

harry: It’s low, Nate. See Clare’s piece that she just linked to, or here’s a direct link.

perry: This betting line I assume is getting at “Will Trump be pushed out by a scandal, particularly around Russia?” And I think no way in 2017. It still could happen. But I feel like it might require either a transcript of a phone call between him and Putin or Democrats winning the House. These investigations in Congress are going slow. And the investigation by the FBI still must go through Trump’s Department of Justice.

harry: It takes time for scandals to develop.

natesilver: For Trump to be forced out in some way, Republicans also have to decide that they’re better off throwing Trump under the bus and cutting their losses. And I don’t think we’ve seen many signs of that yet. A few around the margins. But not enough for this to develop into impeachment within eight months.

harry: If his approval drops into the mid 30s permanently, then it might be worth it. Hanging in the low 40s? Forget it.

micah: Speaking of …

The prop bet on Trump’s job approval rating on PredictIt is narrow and boring, so I’m going to make one up. We’ll do an over/under.

Over/under: Trump’s approval rating at the end of 2017 will be 47 percent. (It’s 41.4 percent now.)

natesilver: Under.

clare.malone: Under.

harry: Under.

perry: That is a pretty safe under.

harry: Trump might say over.

natesilver: He’d say over publicly but then leak under to Maggie Haberman or Robert Costa.

perry: If I said 39 percent, what would you say? Over/under?

harry: That’s a good one. I’d say over.

natesilver: I’d hold at 39. Suppose I’d go over if forced to pick.

clare.malone: Yeah, ditto. Over.

perry: Micah?

micah: Under.

perry: Wow.

natesilver: Ordinarily a president’s approval rating declines throughout his first year, and Trump is already at 41 percent. But he’s so low so early that the precedents might not apply.

micah: I just think it’s easier for things to go wrong than to go right — for any president in modern times. And he’s already pretty close to 39 percent.

OK, next up: Paul Ryan will be speaker of the House on June 30. 94 percent

perry: Buy.

harry: Hold.

clare.malone: Sell.

natesilver: Sell.

clare.malone: 94 is quite a confident percentage.

harry: Yes, it is.

perry: Yeah, 94 is really high. But there is no one ready to take that job. He just got it. And everyone knows it sucks.

natesilver: What if he quits?

clare.malone: What if some scenario came about where a Freedom Caucus member could finagle it? Yeah, or if he quits. I just think 94 is suuuper high.

harry: I’m holding because of the reasons Perry outlines.

natesilver: Holdin’ Harry.

micah: But I think Clare and Nate are right that this is more about him quitting than being overthrown.

On the other hand, what if Trump needs a big scapegoat on something?

harry: He could just fire Press Secretary Sean Spicer or something.

perry: I could have seen Ryan being pushed out right after health care. But he survived that, which was a huge, huge fail.

natesilver: But Ryan massively screwed up on health care. He wasn’t just the fall guy. It was a disaster from start to finish. And it was at least partly his fault. So that leads me to think he’s more prone to screwing up again.

clare.malone: I don’t think it would have looked good for them to push him out then.

micah: I was a bit surprised Trump didn’t go after him more.

harry: I mean, who else is going to be the speaker? That’s the problem. There’s no one better. No one who wants the job, anyway.

clare.malone: Oh, come on, let’s not oversell the “no one wants it” argument. The House is filled with power-hungry and ambitious people.

micah: Yeah, I’m with Clare. I’d be speaker.

harry: Hold it a second … are you better than Paul Ryan, Micah?

perry: To take Harry’s side here, we are not in a place where there is a great amount of palace intrigue about replacing Ryan. I think ambitious members who could be speaker probably know this is not the best time to make a play for the job. In contrast, I’d imagine lots of people are gunning to replace Reince Priebus as Trump’s chief of staff and Stephen Bannon as his chief strategist.

micah: That’s a good segue …

Sean Spicer will be press secretary on Dec. 31. 56 percent

Buy (you think the chances are greater), sell (lower) or hold (that’s about right)?

clare.malone: Buy.

natesilver: Sell.

perry: Hold.

micah: That’s the name of the game!

Harry?

harry: I’m going to buy. Usually we get a little more mileage out of press secretaries.

clare.malone: Make Nate explain himself.

micah: Nate, explain yourself.

natesilver: I mean, the tenure of press secretaries has been pretty short in the modern age. It was only two weeks ago that Spicer sparked an outcry with a Hitler comparison. And he has a sort of impossible job for an intemperate boss.

Plus, I get a slightly good price (I’m taking the under at 56 percent, not 50 percent). It seems like the buys are the ones who have to justify themselves!

micah: What if it were: Bannon will still be in the Trump administration on Dec. 31? 56 percent

Buy, sell or hold?

natesilver: In what capacity?

micah: Any capacity.

perry: Buy.

harry: As White House chef.

natesilver: Buy on him being in the White House in some capacity, but sell on him remaining in his current role at 56 percent.

harry: There’s a better shot Bannon is out than Spicer.

clare.malone: Eh, I dunno. I think Bannon has a better shot of staying in. They don’t want him on the outside pissing in.

harry: I think you’re all crazy!

clare.malone: Maybe you demote him.

harry: He’s already been demoted.

natesilver: Yeah, Bannon is potentially quite dangerous to have on the outside.

perry: And Bannon has a constituency outside of the White House. Firing him is complicated and might be covered like Trump is abandoning his more populist campaign rhetoric. I don’t know if that’s true, but it will be covered that way. And Trump cares about coverage.

micah: How about: Priebus will still be chief of staff on Dec. 31? 56 percent

perry: Sell.

micah: Ooooh.

natesilver: Buy, I guess?

micah: Bad move. Chiefs of staff can turn over pretty quickly.

natesilver: But is he really empowered like a traditional chief of staff? Does he have enough power to be worth firing?

harry: I’m a hold or sell.

micah: Holdin’ Harry.

clare.malone: I think it’s likely he’s out by beginning of 2018.

natesilver: Holden Caulfield Enten.

perry: The simplest move for Trump — if he’s in real trouble — would be to dump his chief and suggest everything that has gone wrong this year is a big management failure. He brings in some CEO type to replace Priebus. And he can keep Kushner and Bannon.

harry: FWIW, I got a “C” on the “Catcher in the Rye” test. Thanks, Ms. Altschuler!

micah: I’d rank them, in order of most likely to leave/quit/be fired to least: 1. Spicer, 2. Priebus, 3. Bannon.

OK, two more quick ones!

Buy, sell or hold: The individual health insurance mandate will be repealed by the end of 2017. 37 percent

perry: Sell.

harry: Selling like a fake purse in Herald Square.

clare.malone: I guess sell …

natesilver: Selling like a cronut when the tour bus pulls up.

micah: That’s terrible.

perry: I would sell that at 20 percent too. It is hard to drop the mandate outside of a full Obamacare repeal. And we saw how that went.

micah: So you are all skeptical about this because you think the overall chances of health care reform happening — repeal and replace Obamacare — are low?

clare.malone: Yes.

natesilver: The chances for comprehensive health care reform are quite low, whereas there’s some chance they could do some token-ish stuff, including repealing the mandate. But it’s still a sell at 37 percent, for me. It was such a flaming disaster last time around, and there’s no credible path forward so far.

micah: OK, the penultimate prop bet:

There will be an individual tax cut by the end of 2017. 56 percent

Buy (you think the chances are greater), sell (lower) or hold (that’s about right)?

clare.malone: Buy.

perry: Sell.

natesilver: Sell.

harry: I say … buy.

perry: This was the hardest one.

micah: I’m surprised you’re selling, Perry and Nate. Republicans control everything. Isn’t some type of tax cut a pretty good bet?

natesilver: You’d think the same would have been true with health care.

perry: I see tax cuts for individuals getting trapped in a more controversial corporate tax cut proposal that either 1. passes early next year, after lots of wrangling, or 2. doesn’t pass at all.

clare.malone: I guess I bet they pass this year … they gotta get something done, right?

harry: I don’t see this being similar to health care. For one thing, everyone in the GOP agrees on tax cuts.

micah: The price for corporate tax cuts on PredictIt, by the way, was 69 percent. A bit better than an individual cut.

natesilver: Yeah, I might put the chances of some type of tax cut bill at 56 percent, but I suppose it’s possible they’d cut the corporate tax and not the individual tax — the corporate tax is the only detail that’s leaked so far.

perry: The buy people have moved me here. But I will stick with sell.

harry: I’d probably hold at 67 percent on both. But predicting legislation is hard. Predicting anything is hard. Save for snow in Syracuse in December.

micah: And finally, to close us out …

Over/under: 20 percent of people who have visited this article are still reading this chat.

harry: Over. I believe in you, dear reader. Don’t let me down.

natesilver: Sell.

micah: Nate is having a hard time with the difference between over/under and buy/sell/hold.

natesilver: Under.

perry: We have data on this, right? Do people finish the chats?

natesilver: I wouldn’t trust the past data because this chat is unusually long and bad.

Politics Podcast: Trump’s First 100 Days

 











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As President Trump approaches his 100th day in office, the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast takes stock of his legislative priorities: a looming budget deadline, promised tax cuts, and rumblings about a revived health care bill. The team also gauges the appeal of populism after the first round of France’s presidential election. Finally, FiveThirtyEight’s Maggie Koerth-Baker joins the podcast to talk about the goals of the Earth Day protests that took place this past weekend.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Monday evenings, with occasional special episodes throughout the week. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Marine Le Pen Is In A Much Deeper Hole Than Trump Ever Was

Emmanuel Macron, a centrist candidate, and Marine Le Pen, of the far-right-wing National Front, will advance to a runoff in the French presidential election after finishing in the top two positions in a first-round vote on Sunday. Macron is an overwhelming favorite to win the runoff on May 7. But we’re likely to hear two weeks of punditry that draws misleading comparisons between Le Pen, President Trump and Brexit — and that exaggerates Le Pen’s chances as a result.

Although vote counts are still being finalized, the first-round result should be a good one for pollsters, which correctly had Macron and Le Pen in the top two positions. In fact, the pre-election polls — which had shown Macron at 24 percent, Le Pen at 22 percent, the center-right François Fillon at 20 percent and the far-left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon at 19 percent — should come within a percentage point or two of the final result for each of the top four candidates.

The same polls show Macron in a dominant position in the runoff. He leads Le Pen by 26 percentage points in polls testing the two-way matchup, according to data compiled by G. Elliott Morris of The Crosstab.

And yet, observers of the race seem cautious about Macron’s chances. Betting markets give Le Pen a 13 percent chance — about 1 in 7. Ian Bremmer, a political scientist who runs The Eurasia Group, has given Le Pen a 40 percent chance, meanwhile. (Bremmer’s estimate wasn’t based on any sort of statistical model; he argues that the polls don’t reflect major elements of French politics.) And esteemed publications such as The Guardian are questioning whether the polls can be trusted at all, despite their accuracy on Sunday:

Polls suggest Le Pen can't win against Macron in a second round of the French election. But polls, eh? ¯_(ツ)_/¯ https://t.co/bjuhbYPDop pic.twitter.com/wm3FhcLNyl

— The Guardian (@guardian) April 23, 2017

By contrast, polling-based models give Le Pen very little chance. Morris’s model, at The Crosstab, gives Le Pen a 3 percent chance of winning the runoff. And a model designed by The Economist puts Le Pen’s chances at less than 1 percent.

I worry about overconfident models — for a variety of reasons, statistical models can underestimate tail risks if they’re not designed carefully. In the U.S. election, models varied wildly in their estimates of Trump chances, from 29 percent in the FiveThirtyEight “polls-only” model to less than 1 percent according to the Princeton Electoral Consortium. A lot of those differences had to do with how these models analyzed the Electoral College, a complication that models predicting the French election don’t have to contend with. Still, I’m more comfortable with slightly more conservative estimates such as Morris’s than with The Economist’s.

But in my view, the conventional wisdom espoused by analysts such as Bremmer is more likely to be way more out to lunch. Before the U.S. election, Trump trailed Hillary Clinton by only about 2 percentage points in the average swing state. In the Brexit vote, the “Remain” campaign’s lead was at least as narrow: about 2 points according to a simple average of polls, or just 0.5 percentage points according to a more complex averaging method. So while Trump’s victory and Brexit were historic events in world history, they were utterly routine occurrences from a polling standpoint; 2- or 3-point polling errors are extremely common.

But while there were plenty of precedents for a polling error large enough to elect Trump, there aren’t all that many examples of a 26-point polling error, which is what Le Pen would need. Pundits and other political observers often have poor intuition when it comes to translating polls into probabilities, leading them to treat narrow, fragile leads the same as double-digit ones. Ironically, the same type of sloppy thinking that led people to underestimate the chances for the Trump and Brexit victories may lead them to overestimate Le Pen’s odds.

Of course, there are still two weeks to go until the runoff and it’s possible that Le Pen could narrow her deficit. But by the same token, Macron could expand his lead in the final weeks. Fillon, whose voters agree with Le Pen on some issues, has already endorsed Macron. So did Socialist candidate Benoît Hamon. And Le Pen faded down the stretch run of the first-round campaign, having regularly polled in the mid-to-high 20s in February and March before seeing her numbers decline to about 22 percent in the final polls and in the actual vote.

Some of the bullishness about Le Pen’s chances reflects the idea that there’s a lot of hidden support for Le Pen, perhaps among voters who say they are undecided. This is a version of the “shy Trump voter” theory of the American election, which says that people are afraid to tell pollsters that they support “politically incorrect” candidates. In the abstract, this theory could make some sense; pollsters have long worried about the effects of social desirability bias. A voter who held contemptuous views toward a racial minority group might not want to express those views in a phone call with a stranger conducting a poll, for instance.

However, there’s no evidence that candidates such as Le Pen systematically outperform their polls. Across dozens of European elections since 2012, in fact, nationalist and right-wing parties have been as likely to underperform their polls as to overperform them.

I’ve built a database that covers the performance of right-wing parties and candidates, such as Le Pen and the National Front, in European elections since 2012. (More specifically, the parties are those identified by the New York Times as being “right-wing”; they “range across a wide policy spectrum, from populist and nationalist to far-right neofascist.”) I found 47 elections during this period in which one of these parties competed and voters were regularly polled about it before the election. Some of these elections featured multiple right-wing parties or candidates, so there are a total of 66 data points.

On average, the right-wing parties were predicted to win 13.5 percent of the vote in polls conducted at the end of the campaign. And they wound up with an average of … 13.5 percent of the vote. Polls have been just as likely to overestimate nationalists as to underestimate them, in other words.

DATE
COUNTRY
ELECTION
RIGHT-WING PARTY
POLL AVG.
ACTUAL




5/25/14
Hungary
EU parliament
Fidesz
58.7%
51.5%


5/22/16
Austria
Presidential
Freedom Party
51.8
49.7


12/4/16
Austria
Presidential
Freedom Party
50.7
46.2


4/6/14
Hungary
Parliamentary
Fidesz-KDNP
47.8
44.9


10/25/15
Poland
Parliamentary
Law and Justice
36.2
37.6


5/22/14
U.K.
EU parliament
UKIP
29.0
26.6


12/13/15
France
Regional
National Front
28.7
27.1


10/18/15
Switzerland
Federal
Swiss People’s Party
28.3
29.4


5/25/14
Poland
EU parliament
Law and Justice
27.7
31.8


4/24/16
Austria
Presidential
Freedom Party
26.4
35.1


5/25/14
Austria
EU parliament
Freedom Party
24.3
19.7


5/25/14
France
EU parliament
National Front
23.3
24.9


4/23/17
France
Presidential
National Front
22.3
21.7*


5/25/14
Belgium
Federal
New Flemish Alliance
20.2
20.3


9/29/13
Austria
Legislative
Freedom Party
20.1
20.5


4/6/14
Hungary
Parliamentary
Jobbik
19.3
20.2


5/25/14
Belgium
EU parliament
New Flemish Alliance
18.7
16.8


6/18/15
Denmark
General
Danish People’s Party
17.8
21.1


5/25/14
Finland
EU parliament
Finns Party
17.0
12.9


4/19/15
Finland
Parliamentary
Finns Party
16.5
17.7


5/25/14
Hungary
EU parliament
Jobbik
15.9
14.7


4/22/12
France
Presidential
National Front
15.8
17.9


5/22/14
Netherlands
EU parliament
Party for Freedom
15.0
13.3


6/17/12
France
Legislative
National Front
14.9
13.6


3/15/17
Netherlands
General
Party for Freedom
14.6
13.1


11/6/16
Bulgaria
Presidential
IMRO
14.5
15.0


5/7/15
U.K.
General
UKIP
13.0
12.9


9/12/12
Netherlands
General
Party for Freedom
12.3
10.1


9/14/14
Sweden
General
Sweden Democrats
10.6
12.9


4/9/17
Finland
Municipal
Finns Party
10.2
8.8


3/26/17
Bulgaria
Parliamentary
United Patriots
10.2
9.1


5/6/12
Greece
Legislative
Ind. Greeks
9.6
10.6


5/25/14
Greece
EU parliament
Golden Dawn
9.3
9.4


3/5/16
Slovakia
Parliamentary
Slovak National Party
9.1
8.6


5/12/13
Bulgaria
Parliamentary
Attack
7.9
7.3


1/22/12
Finland
Presidential
True Finns
7.4
9.4


9/20/15
Greece
Legislative
Golden Dawn
7.2
7.0


5/25/14
Belgium
EU parliament
Vlaams Belang
7.2
4.3


6/17/12
Greece
Legislative
Ind. Greeks
7.1
7.5


5/25/14
Belgium
Federal
Vlaams Belang
6.8
3.7


5/25/14
Germany
EU parliament
AfD
6.7
7.1


9/29/13
Austria
Legislative
Team Stronach
6.7
5.7


1/25/15
Greece
Legislative
Golden Dawn
6.2
6.3


5/25/14
Italy
EU parliament
Lega Nord
5.4
6.2


10/26/13
Czech Rep.
Legislative
Dawn
5.4
6.9


5/6/12
Greece
Legislative
Golden Dawn
5.4
7.0


6/17/12
Greece
Legislative
Golden Dawn
5.1
6.9


10/5/14
Bulgaria
Parliamentary
IMRO/NFSB
4.9
7.3


3/10/12
Slovakia
Parliamentary
Slovak National Party
4.5
4.6


5/25/14
Bulgaria
EU parliament
Attack
4.1
3.0


5/25/14
Czech Rep.
EU parliament
Dawn
4.0
3.1


5/25/14
Greece
EU parliament
Ind. Greeks
4.0
3.5


9/22/13
Germany
Federal
AfD
4.0
4.7


2/25/13
Italy
General
Lega Nord
3.9
4.1


1/25/15
Greece
Legislative
Ind. Greeks
3.8
4.8


5/25/14
Italy
EU parliament
National Alliance
3.8
3.7


5/6/12
Greece
Legislative
LA.O.S.
3.6
2.9


10/5/14
Bulgaria
Parliamentary
Attack
3.4
4.5


9/20/15
Greece
Legislative
Ind. Greeks
2.9
3.7


9/29/13
Austria
Legislative
BZÖ
2.9
3.5


11/2/14
Romania
Presidential
Greater Romania Party
2.4
3.7


2/25/13
Italy
General
National Alliance
2.1
2.0


3/5/16
Slovakia
Parliamentary
People’s Party
2.0
8.0


12/9/12
Romania
Parliamentary
Greater Romania Party
2.0
1.5


3/10/12
Slovakia
Parliamentary
People’s Party
1.5
0.9


5/25/14
Austria
EU parliament
BZÖ
1.4
0.5


6/17/12
Greece
Legislative
LA.O.S.
1.3
1.6



Average


13.5
13.5


European right-wing parties don’t really outperform their polls

For European elections with “right-wing” parties since 2012. Le Pen’s vote total reflects a preliminary estimate from Ipsos.

Sources: New York Times, Wikipedia, europarl.europa.eu

The same has been true in France, where the National Front has variously underperformed and outperformed its polls. In five elections since 2012, the National Front has averaged 21 percent in polls and finished with 21 percent of the vote.

In European elections since Trump’s win, in fact, the trend has been for nationalist candidates to perform disappointingly. Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom faded badly down the stretch run in the Dutch general election and then underperformed its polls on election day last month. Meanwhile, Austria’s Norbert Hofer, of the Freedom Party of Austria, considerably underperformed his polls in a presidential re-vote last December. Trump isn’t popular in Europe, and his victory may have done candidates who emulate his rhetoric no favors.

There’s still some uncertainty about the outcome, however. Although the polls haven’t systematically underestimated nationalist and right-wing parties, they also haven’t been all that accurate in pinning down their support, having come in both high and low in different elections. In cases since 2012 where the right-wing party polled at 25 percent or more, the polls missed the party’s actual support by an average of 3.6 percent of the vote. That translates to a true margin of error (or 95 percent confidence interval) of about plus or minus 9 percentage points. And because any vote that Le Pen gets is one that Macron won’t get, the margin of error for the gap between Le Pen and Macron is twice as large, or about 18 percentage points.

An 18-point margin of error is huge! But it still isn’t enough when you’re 26 points behind, as Le Pen is against Macron. If Le Pen if can significantly narrow her deficit with Macron over the next two weeks, Macron’s supporters will have reason to worry. If she still trails by something like 26 points on election day, however, a Le Pen victory would be essentially unprecedented. She could beat her polls by as much as Trump and Brexit combined and still lose to Macron by almost 20 points.

Trump Probably Won’t Defy Midterm Gravity

The midterms will probably be rough for Donald Trump and Republicans next year.

Here’s the main reason we know that: They’re almost always rough on the president’s party. It’s one of the most consistent regularities in American politics. Usually it’s a question of whether the damage is pretty bad, really bad or catastrophic.

Here’s the other thing we know and which cases like the Georgia special election on Tuesday — and the one in Kansas last week — serve to demonstrate: Trump can’t defy gravity. These were bad results for Republicans. They’re consistent with what you’d expect from a public that would like to elect some Democrats to counterbalance an unpopular president and the Republicans’ hold on both branches of Congress.

You can debate exactly how bad these elections were for Republicans, of course. Each special election is subject to its own circumstances. But the narrative that “Democrats don’t have any wins yet” is dumb. Kansas’s 4th Congressional District, where Democrat James Thompson lost to Republican Ron Estes by just under 7 percentage points, is as red as Alabama. A Democrat coming close there is the sort of thing you’d see only in a really bad or perhaps even catastrophic midterm for the GOP.

The Georgia case is more ambiguous. Democrat Jon Ossoff — after winning a 48 percent plurality of the vote in the all-parties primary on Tuesday — is roughly even money to win the runoff against Republican Karen Handel. But the district has changed a lot, having gone from extremely red in 2012 to competitive in 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump by less than 2 percentage points there. I’m on the side that says the result on Tuesday is more consistent with a pretty bad outcome for Republicans in 2018, rather than a really bad one, although that might change depending on how the runoff goes.

What do I mean by pretty bad, really bad and catastrophic? Roughly, something like this:

I’d consider a pretty bad outcome for Republicans to be one in which they lost one to two dozen House seats next year, leaving them with only a narrow majority — or perhaps a razor-thin Democratic majority if Democrats played their cards just right and won a lot of the closest House races. Because the Senate map is so favorable for Republicans, the GOP might gain a seat or so on net there, but most of the vulnerable red-state Democratic incumbents would survive intact.
I’d consider a really bad outcome for Republicans to be one in which they lost 30 to 40 House seats along with control of the chamber. Republicans would hold the Senate but lose one or two seats.
I’d consider a catastrophic outcome for Republicans to be a 2010-style wave election in which they lost 50 or more House seats, Democrats either won the Senate or came really close, and Democrats won a large majority of purple-state gubernatorial races.

It may seem bold to lay out a menu of options like this. But if you look at the history of midterms, it isn’t. Take a look, for instance, at how the aggregate popular vote for the U.S. House has behaved in midterm elections dating back to 1922:

PRESIDENTIAL PARTY’S MARGIN IN HOUSE POPULAR VOTE


YEAR
PRESIDENT
2 YEARS EARLIER
MIDTERM
SWING




2014
Obama
+5.7
-1.2
-6.9


2010
Obama
+6.8
-10.6
-17.4


2006
W. Bush
+2.6
-8.0
-10.6


2002
W. Bush
+0.5
+4.8
+4.3


1998
Clinton
+0.0
-1.1
-1.1


1994
Clinton
+5.0
-7.1
-12.1


1990
H.W. Bush
-7.7
-7.8
-0.1


1986
Reagan
-5.1
-9.9
-4.8


1982
Reagan
-2.6
-11.8
-9.2


1978
Carter
+13.6
+8.9
-4.7


1974
Ford
-5.6
-16.8
-11.2


1970
Nixon
-1.7
-8.7
-7.0


1966
Johnson
+14.7
+2.7
-12.0


1962
Kennedy
+10.0
+5.3
-4.7


1958
Eisenhower
-2.5
-12.4
-9.9


1954
Eisenhower
-0.5
-5.5
-5.0


1950
Truman
+7.2
+0.7
-6.5


1946
Truman
+4.7
-8.5
-13.2


1942
Roosevelt
+5.8
-3.8
-9.6


1938
Roosevelt
+16.2
+1.6
-14.6


1934
Roosevelt
+13.1
+11.7
-1.4


1930
Hoover
+14.1
+8.0
-6.1


1926
Coolidge
+15.1
+16.3
+1.2


1922
Harding
+23.2
+7.0
-16.2



Average
+5.5
-1.9
-7.5



Midterms almost always swing against the president’s party

Sources: Statistical ABSTRACT OF THE UNITED STATES, DAVID WASSERMAN, WIKIPEDIA

On average, there was a 7.5-percentage-point swing against the president’s party at the midterms relative to the election two years earlier. Few presidents have been immune from this. And presidents who came into office with a big wave — as Barack Obama did in 2008 — saw their party suffer massive losses as the electorate reverted to the mean. But presidents who had a limited mandate to begin with, such as Jimmy Carter in 1978, also suffered. The president’s party gained ground only in 1926 and 2002.

I’ve framed these losses in terms of votes lost rather than seats lost because converting from one to the other is tricky. That there are fewer and fewer swing districts is an undoubtedly big help to Republicans. On average since 1922, the 7.5-point popular vote swing against the president’s party has translated into a loss of 29 seats in the House, but Democrats probably wouldn’t get quite so favorable an exchange rate. And there are other factors that go into the calculation, such as how strong the incumbency advantage is and how broadly the opposition party contests the map. It’s the sort of thing that you’d probably want a model to help figure out, and we don’t have a model yet.

What we do have, however, is an increasing amount of evidence that Trump is facing real and sustained resistance from the public. This evidence comes not only from the special election results so far, but also from his poor approval ratings, his difficulty in passing key pieces of legislation such as health care reform, and from Republicans’ problems in recruiting top-tier candidates for next year’s races.

And none of it should really be surprising. Trump was elected only narrowly — losing the popular vote to Clinton — and he hasn’t made much effort to reach out beyond his base. Some of his supporters were reluctant to begin with.

Being president is a tough job. Like many of his predecessors, Trump may get better at it as he goes along. But most of those predecessors suffered a substantial setback at the midterms first.

Politics Podcast: Elections In Georgia, France And The U.K. — Live From New York

 











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The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast team discussed the special election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District in real time on Tuesday night, as results rolled in during a live show at the Comedy Cellar in New York. The crew also talked through the upcoming elections in the United Kingdom and France, played a round of political trivia and answered questions from the audience. The final results from Georgia were not in by the end of the show, but FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten has the latest on that outcome.

Tonight's FiveThirtyEight politics live podcast show at the Comedy Cellar Village Underground was full of laughter. pic.twitter.com/SvAlPPjGCm

— Vanessa Diaz (@_Vanessa_Diaz) April 19, 2017

It's possible that I captured peak nerdiness in this snap @ForecasterEnten Great show! @FiveThirtyEight pic.twitter.com/c9adSSCARr

— Katie Roberts (@KTMarie_NYC) April 19, 2017

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Monday evenings, with occasional special episodes throughout the week. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

The U.K. Snap Election Is Riskier Than It Seems

Conservatives are way ahead of Labour in polls of the United Kingdom — which may have been behind Prime Minister Theresa May’s decision to declare a “snap” general election for June 8 in the hopes of increasing her party’s majority in Parliament.

But May’s move isn’t risk free. In fact, if the final polls come within a couple of percentage points of the actual vote on June 8, it will be something of an upset. Polls in the U.K. have a history of inaccurate performance, with average errors that more than double the ones in American presidential elections.

American journalists considered it a huge failure for the polls last year when Donald Trump won the White House. But polls in U.S. general elections have mostly been pretty good. Final polling averages in the U.S. have missed the presidential popular vote by only 2 percentage points, on average, since 1968. And contrary to the conventional wisdom, Trump’s performance wasn’t an exception. He beat his national polls by only 1 to 2 percentage points in losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. He beat his polls in the average swing state by just 2 to 3 points in winning the Electoral College. Far from having committed an extraordinary error, the polls had correctly pointed toward a competitive race in the Electoral College, although the pundits had mostly ignored this data.

If you don’t appreciate how good we’ve had it in the U.S., take a look across the Atlantic. In the table below, I’ve collected data on how accurate U.K. polls have been in general elections dating back to 1979, along with last year’s Brexit referendum and Scotland’s 2014 independence referendum (which only Scottish residents voted on). The chart shows the polling average at two intervals: first, 50 days out from the election — which is about how far we are from the snap election now — and second, in the final week before the election. Then, it compares the polling averages to the actual result.

AVG. POLLS 50 DAYS OUT
AVG. POLLS WEEK BEFORE
ACTUAL


YEAR
VOTE
LEADER
MARGIN
ERROR
LEADER
MARGIN
ERROR
WINNER
MARGIN




2016
Brexit
Remain
+3.7
7.5
Remain
+2.4
6.2
Leave
+3.8


2015
Parliament
Lab.
+0.1
6.7
Con.
+1.0
5.6
Con.
+6.6


2014
Scotland
No
+9.0
1.6
No
+3.3
7.3
No
+10.6


2010
Parliament
Con.
+6.3
0.8
Con.
+7.7
0.6
Con.
+7.1


2005
Parliament
Lab.
+7.0
4.2
Lab.
+8.8
6.0
Lab.
+2.8


2001
Parliament
Lab.
+20.6
11.6
Lab.
+15.0
6.0
Lab.
+9.0


1997
Parliament
Lab.
+24.1
11.6
Lab.
+18.1
5.6
Lab.
+12.5


1992
Parliament
Con.
+0.1
7.4
Lab.
+2.0
9.5
Con.
+7.5


1987
Parliament
Con.
+11.4
0.0
Con.
+9.3
2.1
Con.
+11.4


1983
Parliament
Con.
+7.3
7.5
Con.
+18.7
3.9
Con.
+14.8


1979
Parliament
Con.
+13.8
6.8
Con.
+5.2
1.8
Con.
+7.0


Avg.



6.0


5.0




U.K. polls have been highly error-prone

Sources: UK Polling REPORT, WIKIPEDIA

On average, U.K. polls this far out have missed the final margin by 6 percentage points. And they don’t get all that much more accurate as you go along — the final polling average has missed the result by 5 points. The experience in Brexit last year — when the polls missed the final margin by 4 points according to the Huffington Post polling average or 6 points according to the method I described above — wasn’t a big outlier by U.K. standards. The same goes for the previous U.K. general election in 2015, when they underestimated Conservatives by around 6 points. Polls in 2010 were quite good in diagnosing the Conservative-Labour margin, although they considerably overestimated Liberal Democrats’ performance.

May’s Conservatives do have a massive lead, with recent polls showing them 9 to 21 points ahead of Labour and their unpopular leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Also, while the polls in the U.K. haven’t been very accurate, they’ve tended to underestimate Conservatives rather than Labour in the past. (See also: the Shy Tory Factor.)

But if polls are missing election outcomes by 5 or 6 points on average, that means the margin of error (or 95 percent confidence interval) is very large indeed. Specifically, a 6-point average error in forecasting the final margin translates to a true margin of error of plus or minus 13 to 15 percentage points, depending on how you calculate it.

Exactly how sure Conservatives are of retaining a majority of seats in Parliament is a more complicated question than who will take the most votes. This stuff is tricky to model — as we’ve learned the hard way — because the results are greatly dependent on where the vote is distributed and how third parties perform. The Scottish National Party is likely to continue to control the vast majority of the 59 seats from Scotland, which gives Conservatives less margin for error in the event the election tightens. Bookmakers give 20-to-1 odds against a Labour majority, but only 5-to-1 odds against a hung Parliament — about the same odds that many of them offered on “Leave” winning the Brexit vote last year.

So while May’s Tories are undoubtedly in a good position, this move isn’t totally without risk. Public opinion in the U.K. can change in a hurry, and pollsters have long had trouble nailing it down.