Nate Silver's Blog, page 127

Election Update: Polls Show Pennsylvania Back In Clinton’s Firewall

At FiveThirtyEight, we generally prefer state polls to national polls. So far, though, we haven’t had many of them to work with. If you’re getting dozens of national polls every week, but just a smattering of state-level surveys — and that’s what we’ve been getting — you’re better off inferring what’s going on in the states from the trend in national polls, rather than the other way around.

For example, Hillary Clinton has gone from having roughly a 3 or 4 percentage point lead over Donald Trump in national polls in early July to more like an 8-point lead now. Therefore, we’d expect her to gain perhaps 4 or 5 points in polls of Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio and other swing states if polls were taken in those states now, compared to the previous versions of those polls conducted a month ago.

On Tuesday, we finally got a bunch of state polls to test the theory — three polls each from Quinnipiac University and Marist College. In fact, the new data mostly confirms our hypothesis, although with some caveats. Clinton gained an average of 4 percentage points across the six surveys. The clearest trend toward Clinton is in Pennsylvania, which is now part of her path of least resistance to 270 electoral votes. Here are the new surveys:

STATEPOLLSTERJULY POLLLATEST POLLSWINGPennsylvaniaMaristClinton +8Clinton +9Clinton +1OhioMaristClinton +3Clinton +4Clinton +1IowaMaristTieTie—PennsylvaniaQuinnipiacTrump +6Clinton +9Clinton +15OhioQuinnipiacTrump +1Clinton +2Clinton +3FloridaQuinnipiacTrump +5TieClinton +5AverageTieClinton +4Clinton +4Latest swing state polls mostly show gains for Clinton

Note that these numbers are based on the versions of the polls with third-party candidates included, which is the version FiveThirtyEight’s models use. The head-to-head versions of the Marist and Quinnipiac polls were a bit better for Clinton, perhaps because there are still a fair number of Bernie Sanders supporters who say they’ll vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson or the Green Party’s Jill Stein. In fact, Johnson gained ground in the Marist polls, when third-party candidates typically lose ground after the party conventions.

Overall, these are good but not great numbers for Clinton; as I said, they’re about in line with what you’d expect based on trends in national polls. It’s also not surprising that Clinton improved more in Quinnipiac’s polls than in Marist’s, since Quinnipiac previously had a strongly Republican-leaning “house effect” while Marist had among the more favorable polls for Clinton. Sometimes those house effects diminish as the election draws onward, with polls tending to converge toward one another. Note also that Quinnipiac shifted from surveying registered voters to likely voters, a change that normally helps Republican candidates but that might not this year given Trump’s potential reliance on lower-propensity voters.

The best news for Clinton is in Pennsylvania, where a variety of post-convention surveys, including the two released on Tuesday, show her ahead by around 9 percentage points. Our polls-only model now projects Clinton to win Pennsylvania by 8.5 percentage points, making it just a pinch bluer than the national average. (Polls-only has Clinton winning the national popular vote by 8.0 percentage points.) By contrast, polls-only has Clinton projected to win Ohio, Florida and Iowa by 5 to 6 percentage points, meaning that they lag her national numbers a bit.

Let’s not bury the lead: Clinton is polling really well right now, and if you held an election today, she’d probably win in a landslide, possibly including states such as Georgia and Arizona along with most or all of the traditional swing states.

Still, Clinton doesn’t quite have a firewall of 270 electoral votes. If Trump makes a big comeback, her Electoral College position is decent but not great. Including Pennsylvania, Clinton has 269 electoral votes in states where our polls-only model projects her to win by more than 8 percentage points. This category also includes Wisconsin, Michigan, Colorado and Virginia, states where Clinton can feel fairly confident about her position based on polling and demographics. Note, however, that 269 electoral votes is not enough to win — it’s only enough to tie. Also, the 269 total includes an electoral vote from Maine’s rural 2nd Congressional District (Maine splits its vote by congressional district). Trump led the only poll of the 2nd district, and our model favors Clinton there, but sees a highly competitive race.

So Clinton needs one more state, of any size, in this firewall scenario. Ohio and Florida are candidates, of course, but they’re heavy lifts. Couldn’t Clinton target something a little smaller?

On the basis of demographics, Nevada might seem like a strong Clinton state, but her polling there has been mediocre all year. She also hasn’t polled that well in Iowa, where Marist’s latest poll showed a tied race. New Hampshire, where Clinton had a big lead in the only post-conventions poll, might be the best option, but it can be swingy, meaning that if the election shifted back toward Trump overall, New Hampshire might swing right along with it. North Carolina is a possibility: Clinton’s polling has been no worse there (and no better) than most of the other states I’ve mentioned. North Carolina could really be a tipping-point state this year that makes the difference between winning and losing maps for Clinton, and not just an add-on that helps her run up the score.

So Pennsylvania has helped, and Clinton has a lot of options. But overall, our models have her as being more likely to win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College than the other way around. Of course, neither possibility is all that likely.

Overall, Clinton’s position is strong and may still be improving. Instead of seeing her convention bounce fade, she’s holding onto or even improving her lead over Trump in a variety of national polls. You can find one or two polls showing a rebound toward Trump if you look hard enough, but they’re outweighed by polls showing Clinton gaining, including a few that give her a double-digit national lead.

Our polls-plus model continues to expect a rebound toward Trump, in part because Clinton may still be in the midst of a convention bounce. (It will be another week or two before we can be confident that the convention’s effects have faded.) Still, the polls-plus model gives Clinton a 79 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, her highest figure so far this year. And polls-only, which doesn’t adjust for convention bounces, has Clinton with an 88 percent chance.

For now, those lofty percentages for Clinton are mostly based on her strong standing in national polls — and swing state polls that seem to be consistent with the national data. The volume of state polling typically increases a lot at about this stage of the campaign, however. So before long, those state polls will be driving most of the changes in the outlook.

When Down-Ballot Republicans Should Dump Trump

In this week’s politics chat, we wonder whether more Republicans will start to un-endorse Donald Trump. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Welcome, everyone! Today’s topic: With Donald Trump’s recent slide in the polls, should down-ballot Republicans — candidates for the U.S. Senate, House, etc. — start to think about abandoning Trump? If so, when? (For the record: We decided on this topic yesterday, and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine abandoned Trump in an op-ed today. #prescience)

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): What you all seem to neglect is that this is ALL PART OF TRUMP’S PLAN. Lull your opponent into a false sense of security. Let her lead by 9 percentage points in August. Then after Labor Day? BAM! Turn on your master persuader skills. Result: Landslide.

2/ pre-Labor Day, and bracing against events beyond its control after that. Trump team betting ppl can be persuaded from Labor Day 2 Nov 8

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 9, 2016

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): I think that Susan Collins had the luxury of making a moral stand because she isn’t up for re-election this year. I would be more interested to see something like that from someone like Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who is up for re-election in New Hampshire and actually has something to lose. I’m not sure Ayotte would get Republicans seeing her side of the equation if she abandoned Trump. I was in the convention hall in Cleveland after Ted Cruz shunned a Trump endorsement and people did not seem super happy. “Binary choice” is the buzz-phrase du jour in the GOP right now.

dave (David Wasserman, House editor at the Cook Political Report and FiveThirtyEight contributor): Did anyone else think it was kind of weird Collins penned this in the Post rather than a Maine outlet? Whatever you thought of Paul Ryan’s op-ed, at least he faced his own Wisconsin voters in the Janesville Gazette.

But to Clare’s point, I’d be curious what Kelly Ayotte would be saying if her primary weren’t in September. I suspect she’d be singing a different tune. We’ve already shown that down-ballot, where you stand on Trump depends a lot on your vulnerability.

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): I find the breakdowns within states such as Maine interesting. You have two major Republican officials statewide: Gov. Paul LePage and Collins. LePage was one of the first to back Trump. Collins refuses.

clare.malone: Maine is filled with confounding rapscallions! A state of blueberries and political complexity.

natesilver: Maine is weird (I mean that in a nice way since it’s one of my favorite states). You’ve got LePage, Collins and independent Sen. Angus King all representing the state at the same time. And it’s also elected some fairly conventional liberals to the U.S. House and so forth. But its demographics are relatively Trump-friendly, especially in the 2nd congressional district, which is why Trump has spent some time campaigning there.

micah: But to set us up here, someone give us a general overview of the Senate landscape.

harry: The Democrats need a net gain of four Senate seats to win a majority if Clinton wins the presidency, and five if Trump wins. (Remember, the vice president breaks a tie.) Before the latest drop in the polls for Trump, Democrats were probably going to pick up seats in the true-blue states, Illinois and Wisconsin. The question now is whether they can hold onto Nevada (where Sen. Harry Reid is retiring) and then pick up two (or three) more seats from swing states like Florida, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania. They’re also looking to put John McCain on the defensive in Arizona, along with Richard Burr in North Carolina, among other more difficult pickup opportunities. And we have limited polling in Indiana where Evan Bayh is trying to pick up the retiring Dan Coats’s seat.

POLLING MARGINSTATEGOP SENATE CANDIDATETRUMPDIFFERENCEArizona+5+1+4Florida+5-4+9Illinois-1-18+17Missouri+7+4+3Nevada+3-3+6New Hampshire+2-2+4North Carolina+4-1+5Ohio+4-4+8Pennsylvania+2-6+8Wisconsin-8-9+1Average+6.5Trump’s running behind Republican Senate candidates in key states

As of 4:05 PM on August 3

Source: Huffington Post/Pollster.com

clare.malone: What I’m wondering is whether more members of Congress won’t start abandoning Trump if his polling numbers stay low or continue to slide as we reach autumn and the leaves start falling. Collins basically said that Trump’s comments about the Khan family were the last straw for her, but I’ll also note that his numbers have been pretty dismal of late, so I wonder if there wasn’t some thinking that you should attack the gazelle while it’s wounded. (Yes, Trump is the gazelle in this scenario.)

I think we can safely say that if Trump loses, Republicans will do as much as they can to make Americans try to black out the last year of their lives. They will want to disappear Trump from our memories.

micah: Dave, you’re talking to these candidates pretty regularly, right? So far, vulnerable GOP candidates have toed the Trump line — have you heard anything to make you think that’ll change?

dave: In interviewing House candidates, about half of Republicans sound intrigued by the potential for Trump to bring out new voters, and about half acknowledge he’s a big drag and are eager to distance themselves. There’s a bit of internal strife within the GOP consultancy hierarchy at the moment. Some ad-makers are arguing it’s time to openly diss him, and some say it’s too early to throw him under the bus. What’s fascinating is that those tensions are getting really fierce behind the scenes. My sense is that it depends on your district, but that Rep. Mike Coffman, who sits in a Democratic-leaning seat outside Denver, is doing something shrewd: bashing both Trump and Clinton in the same breath. A big overlooked factor is how Gary Johnson/Jill Stein voters will behave down-ballot, and Coffman is making a play for them.

natesilver: So let me describe what I think is the nightmare scenario for GOP members of Congress. It’s not necessarily Trump damaging the party’s brand. I mean, that’s a BIG BIG BIG problem, but that’s a long-term problem. The short-term problem is that the election looks like a landslide, and so your voters don’t show up.

Remember, only about 35 percent of voters have a favorable impression of Trump! There’s another 5-10 percent of the electorate that might show up to vote for him, if only because they’re used to voting ‘R’ or because they think Clinton is worse. But if it looks like a blowout, maybe they don’t bother to vote.

clare.malone: One thing I’m wondering, Dave, to your point that people are intrigued by turning out new people, is whether or not those new people might vote for Trump at the top of the ticket, but then vote against Republicans down-ballot. This is a worry that was expressed to me by a Republican strategist — that these blue-collar historical Democrats that Trump is courting might screw Republicans running for lesser offices.

dave: The right model for 2016 Republicans to avoid a nightmare scenario could be 1996. At a certain point it was clear that Bob Dole would lose, and a number of Republicans began making checks-and-balances arguments. If Trump’s numbers stay where they are, it’s easy to see Republicans making a lot of progress by arguing that they’re necessary to “hold Hillary accountable.”

Dole lost pretty badly in 1996, but Republicans managed to hold their House majority. Democrats only won about half the seats they needed for a majority, and you could see the same thing happen this year. The Senate, however, is a different story.

natesilver: Right. You’d rather it not be a blowout. But if it looks like a blowout, you want to give those Trump-skeptical Republicans a reason to turn out and permission not to vote for Trump. There’s some danger in getting stuck in between, I suppose.

harry: Here’s the potential problem with that 1996 comparison: More voters today choose candidates from the same party at all levels, rather than voting for a Republican for Senate and a Democrat for president, for example. Could 2016 be different than the past three cycles? Sure, but I don’t think it is too surprising that polls in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire are starting to show the Republican incumbents losing as Trump gets trounced.

clare.malone: So if Ayotte were to fully embrace Trump and get Trumpian herself (which I really can’t see her doing, but let’s engage with this thought exercise) would she be doing better, do we think? (For the record, I think it would ring inauthentic coming from her, in particular.)

dave: It’s a fair question. I think the more intriguing question is how newly activated Clinton voters will behave. In my mind there are predominantly two distinct sets of anti-Trump voters: traditional, well-educated Republicans turned off by Trump, and young/Latino/Asian voters who haven’t shown up before. If I were a GOP Senate or House candidate, I’d rather have a lot of the former category in my district than the latter, because the former would be more likely to cross over.

natesilver: I find the party-line voting argument less persuasive than the rest of you do, I think. Trump breaks the mold in so many ways that it isn’t that hard to imagine voters splitting their tickets. But you have to remind them what a vote for a conventional Republican represents. And that isn’t so clear right now. The party doesn’t have much of a coherent message, apart from Trump, and the message they had wasn’t selling very well, which is part of why Trump was able to win the nomination.

harry: For example, I don’t think Rep. Tom Price is going to have a problem in Georgia’s 6th district, in the northern Atlanta suburbs, but I’d expect Trump to greatly underperform there. That’s one of the most highly educated and Republican districts in the country.

dave: I’ll second Nate there. I’d argue that Ayotte would be doing worse if she fully embraced Trump, and better if she fully ditched Trump. What I’m seeing is that the biggest Trump boosters in the most marginal districts are paying a bit of a price. Take, for example, Rep. Darrell Issa in California, who has never had a tough re-election but sits in a coastal San Diego/Orange County district that’s rapidly trending away from the Republican brand. He’s been a reliable Trump surrogate on television, and all of a sudden, he finds himself in a much closer race than he’s had in the past.

clare.malone: It’s interesting to think about regionalism rearing its head, to talk about the various ways that people in New Hampshire, California, and Georgia might react to Trump and their particular members of Congress. It brings to mind some advice that’s in a memo from a Republican strategist that Politico got hold of last week. The thread of advice that rung most loudly throughout the memo was along this line: “You know your voters better than anyone. Make the decision based solely on what your district expects—not what party leaders, consultants or anyone else expects.”

harry: But how much distance can these candidates really get from Trump? I could see Ayotte winning in New Hampshire if Trump loses by 5 percentage points. But can she really win if Trump loses by 10?

natesilver: But maybe you’re confusing correlation and causation, Harry.

Other things being equal, Ayotte’s more likely to win if Trump loses by 5 — or wins New Hampshire, certainly — than if he loses by 15. Trump’s performance is largely out of her control, however. Holding the Trump vote constant, she can potentially increase the amount of ticket-splitting by distancing herself from Trump.

harry: Oh sure. But if your offensive line sucks, having Otto Graham as your quarterback probably isn’t enough.

dave: If Ayotte went full Susan Collins, wouldn’t more New Hampshire voters view her as approvingly as Maine voters view Collins? Collins got 61 percent of the vote in 2008 as President Obama was clobbering John McCain in her state. It’s Ayotte’s weird obfuscation on Trump that makes her sound like the Alison Lundergan Grimes of 2016.

harry: Sure, Dave, but Collins has been cultivating an image in Maine for a number of years. Ayotte is only a first-term incumbent running against a fairly popular governor. Plus, Maine has shown a tendency to buck presidential vote patterns, while New Hampshire has been far more lineup with it the past few cycles anyway.

natesilver: With Collins, it’s also about what sort of future she imagines for the Republican Party. If it becomes the Party of Trump — well, maybe she becomes an independent or a Democrat before long, no? She’s about as far away from Trump as you can imagine, really.

harry: Collins is the only old-school liberal Republican left in the Senate.

clare.malone: Won’t those famed (though possibly mythically overstated) New Hampshire independents be an unpredictable factor for Ayotte?

micah: That’s what I don’t get. Is the bloc of voters who favor Trump but don’t usually vote Republican that big?

natesilver: No, not at all. But the opposite is true. There’s a big block of voters who normally vote Republican but have cold feet about Trump.

micah: So that’s an argument for a candidate to jump ship. (As long as Trump is losing by 7 or 8 or 9 percentage points.)

clare.malone: Should we dial Ayotte into this chat?

micah: I would love to see the Ayotte campaign’s strategy memos and polling. Maybe they’ve done a poll asking New Hampshire voters whether they’d be more or less likely to back Ayotte if she endorsed Trump.

clare.malone: (Leak to us, New Hampshire!!!)

harry: I think the things you need to balance here are 1. How likely is not backing Trump going to hurt you in a primary; 2. How likely is not backing Trump going to help you in a general election; 3. Your own feelings on Trump.

There’s a mathematical model here that I’m sure someone will be sending to my inbox after this is published.

natesilver: Someone should probably raise the point that politicians who have crossed Trump haven’t necessarily fared very well, though. Look at what has happened to Cruz’s numbers after the RNC, for instance.

harry: Sure, though Cruz’s Republican base in Texas looks a lot different than Collins’s in Maine.

micah: How much sway does party leadership have in all this? Does it matter that Paul Ryan has been so wishy-washy? And is it possible, if Trump’s struggles continue, that we’d see some type of more official break with Trump? Led by Ryan and McConnell?

natesilver: Republican “party leadership” is becoming sort of an oxymoron, like that old Will Rogers line about not being a member of any organized political party since he was a Democrat.

dave: I suspect you’ll see more Republicans distancing themselves from Trump who haven’t before, and the media will treat it as a trend or a reaction to new Trump controversies. In fact, they already have (see Richard Hanna, Charlie Dent, and Scott Rigell). But in reality, it will be because primaries have passed or members are retiring. It all comes down to timing and political incentives.

harry: If the party leadership was so powerful then Trump probably wouldn’t be the nominee.

clare.malone: I kinda think the Paul Ryan wishy-washiness is ultimately a smart strategy for the terrible position he was put in this year. He’s taken every chance to say Trump has done something stupid when he’s done something stupid, but other than that, Ryan is trying to keep out of the news. He’s like the guy in the pool who’s sorta not kicking and just drafting off the faster swimmer in front of him, hoping the coach won’t notice, to use a tortured Olympics-themed metaphor.

natesilver: Obviously it would be a big deal if Ryan or McConnell or Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus explicitly encouraged their candidates to distance themselves from Trump. But in the meantime, it seems like everyone is sort of left to their own devices. What’ll probably happen is that 1. eventually, one or two high-profile Senate candidates will abandon Trump and 2. everyone else will (over)interpret how the polling shifts once that happens and either follow suit or not, depending on how they read the data.

micah: Dave’s point about the primaries is really important, I think. And a reminder that 99.9 percent of whether these candidates back Trump or distance themselves from Trump may come down to political expediency — it seems like principle has very little to do with it.

dave: The closer up you are to members of the GOP congressional leadership, the more striking their timidity and lack of control over the party is. I had a conversation with a senior House Republican last week who told me that Trump “acts like a seven-year-old” and “makes me want to leave politics altogether.” But that member was a Trump delegate and has never publicly rebuked Trump. If he did, he’d probably lose his leadership position in the conference.

clare.malone: Basically, the shorter version of this chat is: politicians are cynical.

harry: We already had Sen. Mark Kirk in Illinois abandon Trump. He’ll probably still lose. I wonder if McCain would do it after his primary.

dave: Could we talk geography for a second? There’s an important distinction between the House and Senate that we haven’t touched on. The places where Clinton is likeliest to outperform past Democrats are areas that are valuable to Senate Democrats but not necessarily beneficial to House Dems. For example, lots of Puerto Ricans are moving from the island to the Orlando area, and that could be enormously helpful to Clinton and Democrats’ chances of beating Marco Rubio for the Senate seat there. But most of these new voters are settling south of Orlando, in Florida’s 9th District, which Democrats already hold.

micah: So Dave, you still think, despite Trump going from being down 5-6 percentage points in June/early July to down 7-8 now, that the House isn’t really in play?

dave: I’m still most comfortable in the 10-20 seat range for Democratic gains in the House. They’d need 30 seats to win the majority.

natesilver: DAVE, ARE WE GOING TO HAVE TO BUILD A FREAKIN’ HOUSE MODEL?

harry: “House” was a weird show, but predicting the House can be fun. The polling is more sparse and building a strong fundamentals-based model is important.

clare.malone: lol, we have different definitions of fun, Harry.

natesilver: The House model might wind up looking like the Olympic Village in Rio, given how fast we’d have to put it together.

clare.malone: Boom. I like how all the Sochi jokes translate to Rio.

micah: Before we wrap, any educated guesses on which Republicans are most likely to follow Collins? (Maybe once all the primaries are over?)

clare.malone: I mean … McCain? Presuming he wins his primary challenge — Trump has taken all kinds of personal pot-shots against the guy.

dave: My dark horse for a Clinton endorsement IF IT WERE REALLY CLOSE is George W. Bush. But I’m not sure it will come to that, and I’m also not sure who it would hurt/help.

natesilver: I suppose I’m interested in Gov. John Kasich in Ohio, if only because he’s a pretty popular guy there and it’s hard to imagine Trump winning the Electoral College without Ohio.

Election Update: Trump’s Slump Deepens In The Polls

There’s no longer any doubt that the party conventions have shifted the presidential election substantially toward Hillary Clinton. She received a larger bounce from her convention than Donald Trump got from his, but Trump has continued to poll so poorly in state and national surveys over the past two days that his problems may be getting worse.

The recent Fox News, Marist College and NBC News/Wall Street Journal national polls show Trump trailing Clinton by 9 to 14 percentage points, margins that would make for the largest general election blowout since 1984 if they held. Clinton’s numbers in those polls are on the high end of what we’ve seen lately — Marist, for instance, has generally had a Clinton-leaning house effect in its polls this year. By contrast, a series of polls released earlier in the week generally put Clinton’s advantage at 5 to 8 percentage points.

The new polls are noteworthy, however, because they postdate the earlier surveys — Marist’s poll was conducted Monday through Wednesday, for instance. That opens up the possibility that the spiral of negative stories for Trump, such as his criticism of the family of a Muslim-American soldier killed in action and his renewed feud with GOP leadership, are deepening his problems above and beyond Clinton’s convention bounce. Not only have Clinton’s numbers risen since the Democratic National Convention, but Trump’s numbers have fallen back into the mid- to high 30s in polls that include third-party candidates. And Trump’s favorability ratings, following modest improvement after his convention, are now about as bad as they’ve ever been.

Meanwhile, polls of Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire — three swing states with demographics that, in theory, could be friendly to Trump — showed Clinton with leads of 9 percentage points, 11 points and 15 points, respectively. Those are big leads for Clinton, but they shouldn’t be all that surprising: The margins look a lot like the ones by which Barack Obama defeated John McCain in those states in 2008, an election he won by 7.3 percentage points overall. According to our now-cast, Clinton would defeat Trump by a similar margin nationally, 7.9 percentage points, in a hypothetical election held today. Compared with that new, higher baseline for Clinton, a Suffolk poll showing her “only” 4 points ahead of Trump in Florida, which would have looked like an excellent result for her a week ago, is middling.

Overall, the now-cast estimates that Clinton’s electoral vote total, in an election held today, would be similar to the 365 electoral votes that Obama won in 2008. Although she’d be unlikely to carry Indiana, which Obama surprisingly won in 2008, she could make up for it by winning Arizona or Georgia, states that the now-cast has as tossups. Utah might even be competitive in an election held today — and the now-cast thinks that Texas would produce a closer finish than Pennsylvania.

But the real election is still just more than 94 days away. And our forward-looking models, which project the Nov. 8 result instead of evaluating what the polls look like now, are more conservative.

Our polls-plus forecast projects Clinton to win by about 4 percentage points on Nov. 8, meaning a margin more like Obama in 2012 than Obama in 2008. And given the wide uncertainty in forecasting an election three months out, it has Trump with a 26 percent chance of winning. Clinton has nothing to complain about — her 74 percent chance is her highest mark in the polls-plus forecast all year. But the model tweaks her numbers downward for two reasons.

First, it adjusts for potential convention bounces. Although the bounce following the second convention is historically not as misleading as the one following the first convention,1 Clinton’s numbers may still be elevated by a couple of percentage points from the convention afterglow.

Second, polls-plus combines the polls with a “fundamentals” forecast based on an economic index, and the economy is average, suggesting that the election ought to be close. Obviously, there’s a big assumption embedded in there — that Trump is a normal candidate who can take advantage of macroeconomic conditions in the same way that (for instance) John Kasich or Marco Rubio might. Still, American presidential elections have tended to tighten down the stretch run more often than not.

Our polls-only forecast also discounts the recent polls to some degree, projecting Clinton to win by 6 percentage points on Nov. 8 and giving her an 80 percent chance of winning the Electoral College. Polls-only doesn’t use the economic index, nor does it lower Clinton’s numbers because of a potential convention bounce. But it does weight polls taken during the conventions less. Furthermore, it’s deliberately a bit sluggish to update its forecasts because presidential polls are mildly mean-reverting, meaning that gains in the polls are more likely to reverse themselves than to continue unabated.

A model can be too stubborn to update its forecast. Clinton, after blowing a 7-point lead in July, is now in the midst of one of the bigger convention bounces in recent years. This election has produced large swings by historical standards, and the odds ought to have shifted back and forth, in the same way they would if an NFL team forfeited a two-touchdown lead before halftime and then regained it in the third quarter. But you shouldn’t rush to judgment based on two days of polling (admittedly excellent though they were for Clinton) when there are still about 94 days to go. A poll showing Clinton with a 9-point lead three weeks from now would be more meaningful than three more such polls taken tomorrow.

Is Donald Trump Blowing It?

In this week’s politics chat, we talk about what’s happened in the 2016 campaign since the end of the Democratic National Convention on Thursday. It’s been a wild few days. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): All right, everyone, we’re back in New York after two weeks covering the conventions and here’s our question for today: Is Donald Trump blowing it? He got a middling bounce out of the Republican National Convention, and since then has seemed intent on creating problems for himself. Most notably, he’s spent days criticizing the Muslim parents of an American soldier, who was killed in Iraq, after they spoke at the Democratic convention.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Can we lay the numbers out here? He got a 3-4 percentage point bounce, which is fairly normal for recent conventions, right? And we think Clinton might get a bigger bounce?

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Clinton has gotten a bigger bounce. That’s safe to conclude at this point.

And I sort of don’t buy the argument that a 3-4 point bounce was impressive for Trump, especially given what we’ve seen from Clinton. There was a lot of low-hanging fruit this year, in terms of undecided and third-party voters. Doesn’t take that much to sweep them into the GOP camp. But he really didn’t reach out at all beyond his base, which is maybe 40 percent of the population. He went from 37 to 40 percent. Woo-hoo.

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): I mean, “blowing it” implies he really was ahead to begin with.

micah: Even if he wasn’t winning, Harry, is he blowing any chance he had?

harry: We know that Clinton’s lead in FiveThirtyEight’s now-cast is nearly as high as it’s ever been. (Note: that’s what the now-cast is good for. It tells you where things are right now.) Ergo, Clinton had a successful convention, which is what voters said, according to Gallup.

micah: But I’m more interested in what’s happened post-convention. It feels like Trump’s incendiary comments about the Khan family have stuck in a way that other Trump controversies didn’t. And today, President Obama went further then he has before (maybe further than any recent incumbent president) in calling Trump unfit for the presidency, and urging Republican leaders to abandon him.

harry: The Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel controversy stuck, too, but Khan isn’t a federal judge — he can keep the story alive for days and weeks. I’d also argue that there is an increased urgency from folks like Obama because the polls showed Trump closing.

micah: I guess this is my point: If Trump’s best hope is to make this election as normal as possible — because the fundamentals point to a close race and Clinton is so unpopular — he has really moved in the opposite direction in the past week.

natesilver: Be careful, though. Clinton’s gotten a pretty big lead because of the conventions. I’ve already seen a couple of people (mis)attribute it to the Khan stuff. We don’t really know anything about that yet, polls-wise. We’ll have to see if Clinton’s lead continues to grow after the convention.

harry: I get some people’s inclination to think Trump is a sort of master campaigner, given the primary, Micah, but in the general election the opposite seems to be true.

natesilver: Right, and that’s why the conventions were important. Clinton ran a conventional convention. Trump ran an unconventional convention. The conventional convention seemed to win out.

clare.malone: I think now that the conventions are past, the big event that had so much build-up, I wonder if Trump isn’t feeling a bit adrift? I.e., maybe the reason he’s responding so much to the controversies of the moment is because he was slightly disappointed by his polling bounce from the big event he had been looking forward to, and now he heads into the abyss of the true general election.

micah: He had told us the GOP convention would be an amazing show… and then afterward was saying, “Oh, I just showed up to speak.” Which does suggest he was disappointed with how it went.

natesilver: What if he’s in an abyss, mentally? He’s been keeping up this act for more than a year now. It’s exhausting (and nobody would accuse Trump of being lazy). What he tried before in the primaries isn’t working, and maybe he sort of knows it deep down, but he doesn’t quite have the willpower to change.

clare.malone: As a side note, I am so excited for the Olympics to be added into the current soup of culture, as, I would imagine, are the American people. Micah keeps on saying this in meetings, but August is a relative political lull in some ways. Trump might be trying to figure out how to deal with this doldrums.

harry: Trump reads the polls. He has to know most of them show him down. (Side note: I don’t care for the Olympics.)

micah: I hate the Olympics.

clare.malone: Wait. Really?

harry: Really.

clare.malone: I have never heard anyone say that. I’m not being hyperbolic here.

You don’t even like one event?

harry: I watch baseball and football. Those are not Olympic events.

natesilver: The Olympics is sports, packaged for non-sports fans, which is slightly offensive if you’re a sports fan.

harry: THANK YOU.

clare.malone: UGH. You guys are such elitists.

natesilver: I just want to resist the interpretation that any of this is coming from a rational part of Trump’s brain, whether as part of some brilliant 12-dimensional chess strategy, or even a strategy at all really. Maybe that’s a reasonable prior for a lot of politicians, but I’m not sure about Trump.

clare.malone: I mean, it may be coming from his emotional side, but so do most campaign decisions, it would seem.

micah: Let me back up for a second: Why do you all think his comments about Khan have stuck in a way maybe only the Curiel comments did?

natesilver: I don’t think that, necessarily. I think we’ll need to see proof of that in the polls, and frankly we may never get it because all of this is going to be mashed into the convention bounce. But it does seem that when Trump is cruel to private citizens, that tends to get him in trouble. As opposed to being mean to politicians.

micah: Yeah, I’m just talking news cycle and the culture of the campaign, not polls.

harry: As I wrote on our last live blog of the Democratic convention, I thought Khan’s speech was powerful, in part, because he was talking about his son, and not about anti-Muslim bigotry in the abstract. I also think that’s why Trump’s attacks on Judge Curiel were so widely rebuked. Trump has made many racially and religiously insensitive comments, but these were tied to someone specific — people viewed as a patriotic American.

micah: Yeah, that seems like the key differences, he’s attacking someone specific and they’re not a politician.

clare.malone: Right, and also, Republicans and Americans generally don’t take kindly to people speaking ill of the families of dead soldiers. Not a great look ever. I’ll point out here that George W. Bush faced a pretty consistent critic of the war in Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a dead U.S. soldier. Bush handled his comments when it came to that with a whole lot more tact than Trump has.

micah: Right … so Nate, how would you advise people to try to disentangle the effects in the polls of the Khan controversy (if there are any) from the convention bounces?

natesilver: We need to wait another week or so. Usually, the convention bounce peaks just a couple of days after the convention. But if a candidate really steps in it — as Romney did with 47 percent at a similar time last year — that bounce may keep growing.

Still, the timing in the news cycle is also a reason to be suspicious that it matters all that much, in the end, in terms of the polls. Meaning, Clinton had a good convention. She moved way up in the polls. News coverage of Trump was almost certainly going to be negative because of that, at least for a week or two. Trump’s problems are being attributed to the Khan stuff, when if there wasn’t that, there would be something else it was attached to.

micah: Not to harp, but I think you’re missing something. The Khan comments were so widely condemned, including by Republicans, that — whether they register in the polls or not — they seem like a mile-marker in the campaign to me.

natesilver: Look, I think there’s a world in which this is the start of a downward spiral, and Clinton wins the election by 13 points or something. That sort of outcome is on the table, just as Trump winning is still on the table.

But I feel like we’ve had a really big Politics 101 moment that’s sort of gotten lost. Which is that maybe the campaigns matter after all, and people do certain sorts of things at the convention because it works, and Trump isn’t doing that, and he’s in a big hole.

clare.malone: I tend to agree with Micah that this might be turning into a campaign milestone, if only because Trump may be feeding the beast. Someone on Twitter this week suggested that this Breitbart article looks a bit like an oppo research dump on the Khans by the Trump campaign: “Until now, it looked like the Khans were just Gold Star parents who the big bad Donald Trump attacked. It turns out, however, in addition to being Gold Star parents, the Khans are financially and legally tied deeply to the industry of Muslim migration–and to the government of Saudi Arabia and to the Clintons themselves.”

micah: Just to add to the craziness: Trump is unskewing the polls now.

harry: Not only is Trump unskewing the polls, he’s suggested that he might try to unskew the election. That is, he has said it may be rigged, which may be the most dangerous thing he has said to date.

natesilver: Yeah, that’s the sort of thing that Republican leaders ought to be denouncing. Even for selfish reasons, they should be denouncing it. Talk about a way to further undermine trust in the establishment.

micah: So that’s the thing. It feels to me like we may be reaching an inflection point.

harry: But it has felt like we reached those before, but they never came. Rather than try to guess that we’re at an inflection point, I feel quite comfortable in allowing the next few weeks to take place and see where we are at.

micah: That’s so prudent of you, Harry.

natesilver: In FiveThirtyEight model terms, this is sort of the debate between polls-only and polls-plus. Once the models get a few more days to settle in, polls-only will probably show Clinton in a better position than polls-plus, since polls-plus will revert to the mean more. It will assume the race is more likely to tighten than for Clinton’s lead to continue to widen, in other words. Polls-only won’t make any assumptions about that, conversely.

micah: And the now-cast will light its hair on fire.

natesilver: To me, the most important development of the past few days isn’t Khan, but Democrats doubling down on the notion that Trump is unfit for office. As you mentioned, Micah, President Obama just said that, in exactly those terms, earlier this afternoon. Very unusual for a sitting president to do that.

micah: That was really striking. Is there precedent for a sitting president to so explicitly disqualify the opposing party’s nominee?

natesilver: Maybe they think they’ve found Trump’s Achilles heel. Because it’s very hard to respond to comments like that except by appearing composed and presidential. And that’s very hard for Trump to do, to say the least.

harry: That’s why I’d argue that perhaps the most interesting speech of the convention was Michael Bloomberg’s. He basically said Trump was unfit for office — it was essentially the speech’s only argument against Trump. It mostly wasn’t about policy.

clare.malone: Yeah. I keep on thinking about the ways I responded to childhood taunts by siblings as a way to analyze this election. Hard not to get your Irish up when you’re backed into a corner vis-à-vis your ethical competency, as is happening to Trump right now — and yeah, Bloomberg saying he got all his money from his daddy. That’s got to smart.

natesilver: Right, and in general, the Democrats moved rhetorically to the center at their convention, even though the platform was actually pretty far left. So to some extent, they’re trying to have their cake and eat it too.

clare.malone: Mmm, cake. (This chat is inconveniently scheduled over the lunch hour.)

harry: Yeah, I’m hungry.

natesilver: And the editor of this chat ordered lunch for himself, without asking if any other participants wanted food. Just FYI.

micah: Another FYI: the food is delicious.

clare.malone: Yeah, what gives, Micah? Shrimp fried rice?

harry: Anyway, I’d argue that this election isn’t being fought on the liberal-conservative dimension as much as a second dimension. I don’t know exactly how to define it, but it’s on this second dimension that Trump is getting raked over the coals.

clare.malone: The dimension is: concern for democracy.

natesilver: Values vs. nihilism?

micah: Alright let me press the “something really is changing” case a little more, if only to stress-test it. Qualitatively, the Khan comments and the response to them seemed to me to have more weight than other controversies (and I don’t buy the argument that because something didn’t hurt him in the primary, or even earlier in the general, that this won’t).

Moreover, as FiveThirtyEight contributor David Wasserman pointed out, we’re moving out of the period when down-ballot Republicans are competing in primaries and most worried about the base. So I think you’ll likely to see more Republicans coming out explicitly for Clinton, rather than just against Trump, and I think it could all build on itself.

natesilver: I guess the point I’m struggling to make is that Clinton’s large-ish convention bounce is a pretty big deal, and people are sort of treating it as another garden-variety event and moving on to the next thing.

micah: Well, we have certainly covered it.

harry: Covered? We doused ourselves in it.

natesilver: I know. But I’m used to people freaking out over 1- or 2-point shifts in the polls. This year, we’ve seen some 5- or 7-point shifts, and people’s reactions are about the same.

micah: But Clinton’s bounce to me is part of it — I just think we may look back and say, “The normal political rules didn’t seem to apply during the GOP primary, but they applied during the general.”

clare.malone: I don’t think she got the bounces because of the Khans. OBAMA. Obama coming out there and basically taking shots at Trump I think added a lot.

harry: I think every little thing adds up. And we cannot disentangle what exactly is going on.

micah: Obama got a bounce too.

clare.malone: Right. So basically we should all check back in two weeks. And watch some OLYMPICS.

micah: Except, dear reader, make sure you check this site every day between now and then.

natesilver: Every HOUR.

clare.malone: NOW-CAST.

harry: DO IT!

clare.malone: But don’t tweet at me about it. That really stressed me out this weekend. I don’t know how the model is built, people. That’s all up in Nate’s mind-palace.

harry: Which looks like Trump’s apartment, fyi.

natesilver: The now-cast is a powerful drug.

Election Update: Is Clinton’s Lead A Bounce Or A New Equilibrium?

Hillary Clinton continues to poll strongly in surveys conducted after the Democratic National Convention, which show her having received a convention bounce and gaining a meaningful lead over Donald Trump. The polls are coming in quickly enough that it’s somewhat futile to tick them off one by one, but here are some highs and lows as of 10 a.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday:

Clinton’s smallest lead in any fully post-DNC national survey is 5 percentage points.1 She achieved that 5 percentage point lead in several polls, such as this one from Public Policy Polling.Her largest lead is 15 points, in a poll from RABA Research. That poll is something of an outlier, though, with most polls showing Clinton’s lead in the 5- to 8-point range.Clinton’s largest bounce in any national poll, as measured in comparison to another survey by the same pollster conducted with a full set of interviews after the Republican National Convention, is 13 percentage points. That comes from a CNN survey, which showed her turning a 5-point deficit into an 8-point lead.And her smallest bounce in any such survey is from YouGov, which had her lead growing from 2 percentage points to 5 points, a 3-point bounce.

There are some hints that Clinton’s post-convention lead over Trump will eventually settle in at about 7 percentage points, give or take a couple points. The biggest tip-off is that both the national polls and the state polls we’ve seen so far look similar to the ones we were seeing in June, when Clinton maintained a lead over Trump of about 7 points after wrapping up the Democratic nomination. Since Clinton and Trump were roughly tied after the GOP convention, a 7-point lead for Clinton would mean she’d gotten about a 7-point bounce, double the size of Trump’s.

FiveThirtyEight’s forecast models aren’t used to seeing a lot of 7-point overnight shifts, which rarely occur outside the conventions. (In recent elections, they’ve also rarely occurred during the conventions, with most convention bounces looking more like the modest one Trump got.) So the models may still need another day or two to catch up.

Our hyperaggressive now-cast, which describes the results of a hypothetical election held today, will be the quickest to adapt: It already shows Clinton with a 5.6 percentage point lead over Trump. Be wary of getting too attached to the now-cast, however. It is useful in situations like these, where you want a quick read on how a news event has affected the polls, but it can also jump around a lot on the basis of statistical noise or short-term aberrations in the polls.

The polls-plus model is also relatively well-equipped to handle the new data. Clinton probably has some further room to grow in this forecast, but because it adjusts for potential convention bounces — adjusting post-RNC polls upward for Clinton, and post-DNC polls downward — the shifts won’t be as dramatic. Furthermore, the polls-plus model discounts the polls by blending them with a “fundamentals” forecast, which suggests the race should be close because of economic conditions. This leads to a fairly stable forecast: Clinton’s chances of winning the election have never been lower than 59 percent, or higher than 73 percent, according to polls-plus. As of 10 a.m. Tuesday, they were 69 percent, up from about 60 percent before the DNC began.

Lastly, there’s our polls-only forecast, which shows Clinton with a 66 percent chance of winning. Usually, the polls-only model is a nice compromise, making fewer assumptions than polls-plus but being less hyperactive than the now-cast. But during the conventions, it’s the most stubborn of the bunch, being reluctant to reverse itself after having shown a clear trend to Trump throughout July. Clinton’s lead over Trump in polls-only will probably continue to grow over the next several days, provided she continues to get polls showing a bounce.

Related:

It’s About 100 Days Till Election Day

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After two weeks on the road covering the conventions, the podcast crew is back in the New York studio. And with the primaries officially in our rear-view mirror, we thought this would be a good opportunity to look at how the FiveThirtyEight forecast models have moved since we launched them and answer listener questions about recent ups and downs. We also try to figure out why some of Donald Trump’s incendiary remarks tend to stick in the news cycle and others don’t. His criticisms of Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a Muslim-American soldier killed in Iraq, for example, have dominated the news since he made them.

You can stream or download the full episode above. You can also find us by searching “fivethirtyeight” in your favorite podcast app, or subscribe using the RSS feed. Check out all our other shows.

If you’re a fan of the elections podcast, leave us a rating and review on iTunes, which helps other people discover the show. Have a comment, want to suggest something for “good polling vs. bad polling” or want to ask a question? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Election Update: Clinton’s Bounce Appears Bigger Than Trump’s

UPDATE (Aug. 1, 6:11 p.m.): Hillary Clinton’s post-convention lead over Donald Trump has continued to grow as more polls have come in, according to our models. Check our forecasts for the latest numbers.

Initial polls conducted after the Democratic National Convention suggest that Hillary Clinton has received a convention bounce. In fact, it appears likely that Clinton’s bounce will exceed Donald Trump’s, which measured at 3 to 4 percentage points. Thus, Clinton will potentially exit the conventions in a stronger position than she entered them, perhaps also making up for some of the ground she lost to Trump earlier in July. This is good news for Clinton, but we’ll need to wait a few weeks to see if she can sustain her bounce before we can conclude that the race has been fundamentally changed.

Before we continue, a quick note or two about terminology. When we refer to a candidate’s “bounce,” we mean the net gain in her standing in the polls, including changes to her opponent’s vote share. For example, if the previous XYZ News poll had it Clinton 42 percent, Trump 40 percent, and their new poll has it Clinton 44, Trump 39, we’d call that a 3-point bounce for Clinton, since Clinton gained 2 percentage points and Trump lost 1 point.1

Also, when evaluating the gains a candidate has made, it’s important to note when the previous poll was conducted. Based on our models, Clinton led by 6 to 7 percentage points throughout most of June, but her lead dissipated to around 3 percentage points by mid- to late July, just before the conventions. Then, after the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Trump pulled into an approximate tie with Clinton. It’s those post-RNC polls that make for the best comparison when describing Clinton’s bounce.

So far, however, the post-convention polls have been strong enough for Clinton that there isn’t a lot of need to worry about semantics. They suggest that she possibly holds a lead over Trump in the mid- to high single digits, instead of being tied with him. Here are the fully post-convention polls we’ve seen so far:

A CBS News poll has Clinton ahead by 5 percentage points, in the version of the poll that includes third-party candidates (which is the version FiveThirtyEight uses). Trump led Clinton by 1 point in a CBS News poll conducted just after the RNC, so that would count as a 6-point bounce for Clinton.A Morning Consult poll also showed Clinton up by 5 percentage points, representing a 9-point swing toward her from a poll they conducted last week after the RNC.A RABA Research national poll, conducted on Friday after the convention, has Clinton with a 15-point lead. RABA Research’s national poll has been something of a pro-Clinton outlier. Still, the trend in the poll is favorable for Clinton. She’d led Trump by 5 percentage points in RABA Research’s poll just after the RNC, meaning that she got a 10-point bounce.Finally, a Public Policy Polling survey has Clinton up by 5 percentage points. Because PPP did not conduct a post-RNC poll, we can’t directly measure Clinton’s bounce. But their previous national poll, in late June, showed Clinton up by 4 percentage points. Therefore, their data tends to confirm our notion that the conventions may have reset the race to approximately where it was in June, which was a strong month of polling for Clinton.

There are also a couple of national tracking polls that contain some post-convention data, and they aren’t as strong for Clinton so far. The USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times tracking poll, which has generally shown favorable results for Trump, still shows Trump ahead by 4 percentage points, although Clinton has recovered slightly from a 7-point deficit a few days ago. Note, however, that the USC poll uses a week-long field period, so only about half of its interviews came after the DNC.2

Meanwhile, the Ipsos/Reuters tracking poll last released data on Friday, covering interviews from Monday through Friday — so most of the poll was conducted during the DNC rather than after it. The short version is that their head-to-head poll (without third-party candidates) shows a bounce back to Clinton, while their version with third-party candidates (the version FiveThirtyEight uses) does not. But Ipsos’s data is a bit of a mess right now because they changed their methodology to remove “neither” as an option in their head-to-head poll. Although the wording on the third-party poll was not changed, it was indirectly impacted by the shift.3 We’re continuing to include the poll in our model, but it’s probably not worth a lot of mental energy to unpack the various editions of it.

Speaking of our models, they’ve begun to show a rebound for Clinton, although it will take more data before any convention bounce is fully priced into them. Clinton’s clearest gains are in our now-cast, which estimates what would happen in an election held today. She’s now a 64 percent favorite in the now-cast, up from having a 45 percent chance when Trump briefly surpassed her in the now-cast last week.

Our forecasts for Nov. 8 haven’t changed as much yet. Clinton is a 62 percent favorite according to our polls-plus forecast, which adjusts the polls for potential convention bounces. That should be a familiar figure, since Clinton has been between 60 and 63 percent in the polls-plus forecast every day since July 17. Finally, our polls-only forecast is the most stubborn of the bunch, showing Clinton as only a 53 percent favorite. Let me try to walk you through the “thinking” of each model:

Polls-only: I tell you what, this thing has been trending to Trump for weeks. The guy was down 7 percentage points in June, and now he’s just about tied it up. What’s that? You’re telling me that some of that was a convention bounce? Sorry, bud — you didn’t program any assumptions about a convention bounce into me. So I wouldn’t know anything about that. The Trump train was rolling down the tracks. You expect me to turn around on a dime based on a few good polls for Clinton? If she’s really gained that much, I’m gonna have to see more proof. I know you think I’m as stubborn as an old Cray-2 , but one of these days, I’ll save your behind from getting too far out in front of itself.

Now-cast: I’m so excited about these polls! Last week I thought TRUMP WAS WINNING! Now I think CLINTON’S WINNING! Maybe Clinton’s winning by A LOT! But even for me, four polls isn’t that much data. A few more good polls for Clinton and I’m going to get REALLY EXCITED!

Polls-plus: I’m not sure what you’re all so worked up about. That convention bounce for Mr. Trump? I predicted it ahead of time. I’ve been the very picture of composure, really, barely moving at all over the past two weeks. I must say, though, that I disagree with my friend, Mr. Polls-only. According to my calculations, Mr. Trump’s momentum stopped a couple of weeks ago. I don’t think he should get a lot of credit for that middling convention bounce of his. So I’m happy enough to believe that the next shift in the race will be toward Mrs. Clinton. But be careful, friend. Mrs. Clinton may be in the midst of a convention bounce of her own. Let’s wait for a couple of weeks for things to settle in.

Personally, I think polls-plus makes the most persuasive case for itself and is telling the story that best fits the evidence we have in hand. We know that the polls can be pretty wild around the party conventions. We also know that, by a few weeks after the conventions, they do a very good job of picking the eventual winner:

But we don’t have a lot of evidence about what happens when the parties hold back-to-back conventions, because it’s a relatively new development. Polls just after the 2008 conventions significantly inflated the standing of John McCain and Sarah Palin, who held their convention last. And post-convention polls in 2012 also mildly exaggerated the standing of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, when Democrats held their convention second. While our now-cast may show a relatively sudden shift toward Clinton, our other models will be more cautious, moving a couple of percentage points at a time toward Clinton if she continues to poll well over the next few weeks.POLLING AVERAGEYEARHEADING INTO CONVENTIONS30 DAYS AFTER CONVENTIONSACTUAL RESULT1972Nixon +16.0Nixon +29.7Nixon +23.21976Carter +13.0Carter +4.0Carter +2.01980Reagan +6.0Reagan +2.6Reagan +9.71984Reagan +14.3Reagan +16.8Reagan +18.21988Dukakis +6.7Bush +3.0Bush +7.71992Bush +1.0Clinton +11.7Clinton +5.61996Clinton +16.8Clinton +16.0Clinton +8.52000Bush +4.3Gore +2.0Gore +0.52004Kerry +2.7Bush +1.8Bush +2.52008Obama +3.8Obama +3.1Obama +7.32012Obama +2.3Obama +1.9Obama +3.9

Late-Night Democratic Convention Podcast: Clinton Kicks Off The General Election

Check out all our dispatches from the Democratic convention here.

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Our elections podcast crew gathered late Thursday night to wrap up the Democratic National Convention — and our convention coverage overall. Nate Silver, Clare Malone, Farai Chideya, Harry Enten and Jody Avirgan talked about which voters Hillary Clinton was targeting in her speech and what to expect from the polls in the coming weeks.

The team getting ready to record the @fivethirtyeight politics podcast! pic.twitter.com/TV0hkaj9r1

— Christine Laskowski (@Laskowski_C) July 29, 2016

You can stream or download the full episode above. You can also find us by searching “fivethirtyeight” in your favorite podcast app, or subscribe using the RSS feed. Check out all our other shows.

If you’re a fan of the elections podcast, leave us a rating and review on iTunes, which helps other people discover the show. Have a comment, want to suggest something for “good polling vs. bad polling” or want to ask a question? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

VIDEO: The key moments of the Democratic convention

Where The Election Goes From Here

PHILADELPHIA — In contrast to Republicans, whose convention had a random-seeming parade of speakers each night, Democrats mostly hit their marks and stuck to the traditional convention script. Each day of the Democratic convention had an overarching strategic goal. Monday was about uniting the party. Tuesday was about telling Hillary Clinton’s life story (and, by extension, improving her dismal favorability ratings). Wednesday was about articulating forceful contrasts for swing voters and reminding them of the consequences of a potential President Trump. Thursday, with a lot of flag-waving and representation from the military, along with Clinton’s own remarks, was about establishing her credentials as Commander-in-Chief.

Off-stage, the proceedings weren’t always as smooth. A group of Bernie Sanders delegates — led by the rowdy California delegation — attempted a series of tactics to disrupt the proceedings, booing various speakers, Clinton among them, and staging a walkout after Clinton was officially nominated by roll call on Tuesday night. These delegates represented a minority of the 1,865 Sanders delegates on the floor in Philadelphia — perhaps 250 Sanders delegates participated in the walkout — although they proved that a small, determined minority can draw a lot of attention to itself. On the flip side, the energetic and boisterous crowd at Wells Fargo Center helped the Democrats’ best moments to pack more emotional punch, such as during the remarks given by President Obama and Michelle Obama, and by Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim-American soldier killed in action.

In short, the Democrats appeared to have a conventionally effective convention, and perhaps a very effective convention (which is not to say they had a perfect one). Conventions usually produce polling bounces. In the 1980s and 1990s, these bounces often stretched into the double-digits, but they’ve been more modest in recent election cycles, averaging about 4 percentage points. Donald Trump’s bounce, as measured by the FiveThirtyEight now-cast, was roughly in line with the recent trend, about 3 to 4 percentage points.

Could Clinton get a 10-point bounce? Or no bounce at all? Sure — we don’t know enough about convention bounces to rule out either possibility. It’s not even clear whether convention bounces have to do with the efficacy of the conventions or the underlying conditions of the race (or some combination). Bounces seem to be larger in years when there are more undecided and third-party voters. They seem to be larger in years when the polls are more volatile heading into the conventions. Both those factors might portend larger bounces this year, since there are a lot of undecideds and the polls have been fairly volatile. On the other hand, bounces have gotten smaller over time, and perceptions of Clinton and Trump are relatively hard-wired as compared with those of typical presidential candidates.

Another way to think about conventions is that they help to reset the race to equilibrium. In 1988, for example, George H.W. Bush headed into the conventions trailing Michael Dukakis despite conditions that seemed relatively favorable for Bush: The outgoing Republican president, Ronald Reagan, was fairly popular, and the American economy was in good shape. The conventions produced a big swing in the polls toward Bush, and he never looked back.

What’s tricky about 2016 is that we don’t have a strong sense of what that equilibrium looks like. “Fundamentals” models like the ones that predicted Bush would beat Dukakis suggest that this election ought to be close, since the economy and President Obama’s approval ratings are about average. But those fundamentals-based models don’t have all that good a track record, and they potentially have trouble accounting for the effects of an unusual candidate like Trump.

We can look to the polls instead, but the news cycle has constantly been in motion, and therefore the polls have been in motion as well. Trump gained on Clinton after wrapping up the Republican nomination in May. Clinton rebounded to take a clear lead once the Democratic campaign officially ended in June. The polls held relatively steady for a few weeks, but Clinton’s numbers began to decline again after FBI Director James B. Comey’s repudiation of her use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state. There have also been a lot of tragic and chaotic events over the past month, such as the Dallas shootings of police officers and the terrorist attack in Nice, France, which potentially play into Trump’s narrative about a world spinning out of control. And now Trump seems to have gotten a modest convention bounce.1

The assumption embedded in our polls-plus model, which adjusts for convention bounces and which held steady through the Republican convention, with Clinton having about a 60 percent chance of winning, is that she’ll exit the conventions in about the same position that she entered them. That would mean she’d hold a lead of about 3 percentage points by a few weeks from today, although, it might be higher in the interim. That would leave her as a favorite, although a long way from a sure thing.

But just perhaps, this convention will reveal the true colors of this race, when other events have failed to do so. If Clinton vaults to an 9-percentage-point lead, or if she doesn’t get a bounce at all, that will be the clearest sign to date of where the race is headed.

Democrats Make The Optimist’s Case For America

We’ll be reporting from Philadelphia all week and live-blogging each night. Check out all our dispatches from the Democratic convention here.

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After Wednesday night’s rallying speeches from President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, the elections podcast crew talked about the role Obama will play in the Clinton campaign, and previewed the final night of the convention.

You can stream or download the full episode above. You can also find us by searching “fivethirtyeight” in your favorite podcast app, or subscribe using the RSS feed. Check out all our other shows.

If you’re a fan of the elections podcast, leave us a rating and review on iTunes, which helps other people discover the show. Have a comment, want to suggest something for “good polling vs. bad polling” or want to ask a question? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.