Quote:To anyone not following the ins and outs of the election, the contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton has all the trappings of a close-fought, competitive election. Both candidates dominate the news media; both have held massive rallies and events; both are on the airwaves with ads on television and radio; and both are maneuvering on the ground in an effort to reach broad and diverse constituencies. Turn to CNN or MSNBC, and you’ll see breathless coverage of each development in the race, reinforcing the sense that this a tight contest between two formidable campaigns—one horse hitting the quarter pole half a length ahead of the other.

But of course it’s nothing like that. Hillary Clinton isn’t just leading—she’s dominant. And her odds of winning get stronger each day she holds that dominant position.

Take the polling averages, which aggregate public polls to provide a comprehensive view of the race, with various weights and adjustments for methodology. As of Wednesday, Clinton leads in the Talking Points Memo average by a margin of 3.3 percentage points; according to the Real Clear Politics method for averaging polls, she leads by a margin of 6 points. And in the Huffington Post’s average of national public polls, she leads by 7 points. A 3-point margin is within the realm of a typical, close contest. But in modern presidential elections—where parties vie for votes in a hyperpolarized electorate—6 or 7 points is something close to a landslide, comparable to Barack Obama’s win over John McCain in the 2008 race.

More critical than the size of the lead is its place on the calendar. Polls are at their least predictive in the first half of an election year, before the national conventions. It’s a volatile time, as candidates compete in primaries and parties struggle for a semblance of unity. The conventions act as a reset button, a way to restore that unity and present the parties and their nominees to the public at large. And it’s after the conventions that polls become far more predictive, as the volatility of the primary season dies down and pollsters begin to screen for likely voters.

“Although the convention season is the time for multiple bounces in the polls, one party ends up with an advantage when the dust clears,” write political scientists Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien in their book The Timeline of Presidential Elections. “This gain is a net convention bump rather than a bounce.” The polls we see after the conventions, in other words, tend to reflect a genuine change in the state of the race. And that change is durable. In their analysis of presidential polling, going back to 1952, the candidate leading at this stage of the race always won the popular vote. The margin might differ, but the outcome was on target. It’s why the various polling models from FiveThirtyEight, the New York Times, and the Princeton Election Consortium all give Clinton a high likelihood of winning in November, from 85 percent in the FiveThirtyEight “nowcast,” to 89 percent in the Times calculator, to 96 percent in the Princeton measure of the race.

In other words, Clinton’s odds of losing this election amount to the general chance of an unimaginable black-swan event that transforms the political landscape. If you think there’s a 10-percent chance that the American economy collapses before November, then that is roughly the chance that Donald Trump wins this election.

What we have is a horse running by itself, unperturbed but for the faint possibility of a comet hitting the track.

On top of all of this is the fact that one side is running a campaign, and the other side isn’t. Hillary Clinton is raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ads (saturating swing states in television spots aimed at disqualifying Trump), organizing, and “get out the vote” efforts. She has hundreds more employees than Trump and far more offices in far more states, including traditionally Republican territory like Georgia and Utah. Trump has none of this: no infrastructure to find and mobilize supporters, an anemic budget for advertising, and little staff to manage volunteers. He is so thinly staffed that for a moment it seemed plausible that Trump’s main organizer in a key Colorado county was a 12-year-old boy.

For Trump, a stronger organization would not be enough to overcome his deficit. But it would minimize the size of the loss. That he’s so outmatched on the ground bodes poorly for how he’ll perform when the voting starts. Unlike Clinton, he won’t “bank” early votes and absentee votes from supporters who could cast them, freeing resources for more marginal voters. He won’t have people to mobilize the least enthusiastic Republicans and bring them to the polls. And he won’t have resources to counter Democratic efforts to demoralize Republican voters through advertising and targeted appeals. At the same time, he’s wasting the resources he has by spending them in deep-red states like Mississippi and deep-blue ones like New York.

If states like Arizona, Georgia, Missouri, and South Carolina are on the edge—thanks to overwhelming nonwhite support for Clinton, third-party candidates, and profound ambivalence for Trump among Republicans—then his weakness and her strength increase the chances those states flip away from the Republican Party.

Of course, if we’re at the point where South Carolina—one of the most conservative states in the union—is vulnerable to a Democratic campaign, then the election is already too far gone for the Republican Party. And there’s little chance that Democrats will lose their lead to complacency. If there’s a bandwagon effect in politics, it’s for winners. In presidential elections, at least, voters seem to want to cast a ballot for the winner. It’s the losing “side” that stays home.
There is no horse race here. Clinton is far enough ahead, at a late enough stage in the election, that what we have is a horse running by itself, unperturbed but for the faint possibility of a comet hitting the track. Place your bets accordingly.

(08-24-2016, 11:31 PM)naf140230 Wrote: I found this article I think shoudl be interesting. Here is the URL: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/08/there_is_no_clinton_trump_horse_race.html

Here is the article:

Quote:To anyone not following the ins and outs of the election, the contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton has all the trappings of a close-fought, competitive election. Both candidates dominate the news media; both have held massive rallies and events; both are on the airwaves with ads on television and radio; and both are maneuvering on the ground in an effort to reach broad and diverse constituencies. Turn to CNN or MSNBC, and you’ll see breathless coverage of each development in the race, reinforcing the sense that this a tight contest between two formidable campaigns—one horse hitting the quarter pole half a length ahead of the other.

But of course it’s nothing like that. Hillary Clinton isn’t just leading—she’s dominant. And her odds of winning get stronger each day she holds that dominant position... (Snip)

(08-25-2016, 12:15 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(08-24-2016, 11:31 PM)naf140230 Wrote: I found this article I think shoudl be interesting. Here is the URL: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/08/there_is_no_clinton_trump_horse_race.html

Here is the article:

Quote:To anyone not following the ins and outs of the election, the contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton has all the trappings of a close-fought, competitive election. Both candidates dominate the news media; both have held massive rallies and events; both are on the airwaves with ads on television and radio; and both are maneuvering on the ground in an effort to reach broad and diverse constituencies. Turn to CNN or MSNBC, and you’ll see breathless coverage of each development in the race, reinforcing the sense that this a tight contest between two formidable campaigns—one horse hitting the quarter pole half a length ahead of the other.

But of course it’s nothing like that. Hillary Clinton isn’t just leading—she’s dominant. And her odds of winning get stronger each day she holds that dominant position...  (Snip)

This slant on things is hardly unique to Slate.  I've seen similar articles elsewhere.  Basically, the polls settle down several weeks after the conventions, becoming highly predictive.

We should likely hold the election anyway.  

(08-26-2016, 07:45 AM)Anthony Wrote: Trump will lose - unless he stops worrying about Gary Johnson and goes turbo-populist in the debates, stressing on how his agenda will put more money into the pockets of the very people most likely to spend it, with the flint-and-steel effect of raising their wages (via the labor shortages sure to be created by cutting off immigration) and cutting their taxes (to zero in millions of individual cases).  By contrast, Hillary favors wage-undercutting "free" trade and continued floodtide immigration, and her ties to Wall Street and its infamous banks, e.g., Goldman Sachs, are well documented.  Plus Hillary voted for that awful bankruptcy "reform" bill in 2005, which has sent tens of thousands of people to prison, including some even for life under "three strikes" laws.

A "respectable" loss does nothing for Trump: As William F. Buckley pointed out in a 1989 column, Michael Dukakis might have gotten 45 per cent of the vote, but George H.W. Bush got 100 per cent of the Presidency (in the 1988 election).

(08-26-2016, 07:45 AM)Anthony 58 Wrote: Trump will lose - unless he stops worrying about Gary Johnson and goes turbo-populist in the debates, stressing on how his agenda will put more money into the pockets of the very people most likely to spend it, with the flint-and-steel effect of raising their wages (via the labor shortages sure to be created by cutting off immigration) and cutting their taxes (to zero in millions of individual cases).  By contrast, Hillary favors wage-undercutting "free" trade and continued floodtide immigration, and her ties to Wall Street and its infamous banks, e.g., Goldman Sachs, are well documented.  Plus Hillary voted for that awful bankruptcy "reform" bill in 2005, which has sent tens of thousands of people to prison, including some even for life under "three strikes" laws.

A "respectable" loss does nothing for Trump: As William F. Buckley pointed out in a 1989 column, Michael Dukakis might have gotten 45 per cent of the vote, but George H.W. Bush got 100 per cent of the Presidency (in the 1988 election).

(08-26-2016, 01:20 PM)Odin Wrote: Trump lost the election the instant he shat on the Khan family.

(08-26-2016, 01:27 PM)playwrite Wrote:

(08-26-2016, 01:20 PM)Odin Wrote: Trump lost the election the instant he shat on the Khan family.

I back it up to this WWF-like moment -





- both his high-water mark and the moment of an entire nation together asking "WTF?"

Been downward trending ever sense.

(08-26-2016, 03:32 PM)Anthony 58 Wrote: Yeah I'd say that cutting off immigration has worked out great for Japan - where any unemployment rate above 4% is indicative of a "lost decade."

Quote:And Trump would cut the top tax rate from 39.6% to 33%. Big deal. Gary Johnson would cut their taxes to basically nothing: If a super-richie makes $50 million in a year and spends $50,000 of it, you do the math under the Fair Tax - and its "pre-bate" is a red herring if ever there was one: The soon as the usual moral judgmentalists point out that it would give Skid Row bums and druggies free money to indulge their pathologies, the pre-bate is toast, and then the poor pay the full 30%.

Quote:Only 47% of them pay taxes already? You mean that a single taxpayer with no dependents who makes $10 an hour is part of the top 47%? Really?

Quote:And if you're thinking ahead to a future Presidential run, maybe it's a good idea to join those 15 votes against that bankruptcy bill?

(08-26-2016, 11:46 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: To "cut off immigration" you'd have to cut off legal immigration. Trump just wants to get all the illegals and "put them through the process" at which point they could immigrate. He doesn't even want to do that with all the illegals. And he praises Obama and Bush for controlling immigration, and pledges to continue doing that "perhaps with a lot more energy." How's that for a well-defined plan! No, not only does immigration create jobs, there's no immigration to cut off now!

And I don't get your constant references to cutting taxes for workers. Only 47% of them pay taxes already; didn't you hear Mitt Romney? Trumpie can't cut taxes for low income working people lower than they already are.

Yes, Hillary wants the USA to do its part to help the millions of refugees fleeing the tyranny about which we have done too little too late. But don't count on Trump to be any tougher on trade than Hillary. Hillary is often against free trade, while Trumpie uses and benefits from it.

Trump like all the worst politicians tries to soften his policies so he can be all things to all people. Everybody loves me, he says. And he truly wants everyone to love him. That's why he says that he won't get his tax policies adopted, which make huge cuts for the wealthy and send the deficit into orbit. He'll have to negotiate, he says, so the cuts won't happen. Really? If the people are so stupid to elect Trump president, you can be sure they will be stupid enough to put the Republicans back in control of congress too, and then some. You can bet those Republicans will give him every tax cut for the rich that he wants. Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric will be well taken care of.

Quote:Hillary's better-than-nothing is much better than Trump's better-than-nothing.

(08-28-2016, 12:42 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: It may be that, Classic, but Republican voters are still a diminishing demographic, and their party is on the way out, because it promotes ideas that are the most outdated of any ideas ever promoted since the 1860s by any substantial group of the population.

(08-28-2016, 04:45 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(08-28-2016, 12:42 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: It may be that, Classic, but Republican voters are still a diminishing demographic, and their party is on the way out, because it promotes ideas that are the most outdated of any ideas ever promoted since the 1860s by any substantial group of the population.

What makes you think that they are diminishing? I'd hope that you aren't foolish enough to believe that minority voters are incapable of changing their views, their minds, their values and their primary interests over time. I'd hope that you would able to give them more credit for their ability to advance themselves without the need for blue sympathy, government support and hand outs. Hell, I'm giving them more credit for that than you appear to be giving them.