2016 Polling Thread

[playwrite]

Wow, Clinton is killing it -

Trump trounced by Clinton in latest round of polls

Quote:The new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, released Thursday, shows Clinton with a nine-point lead over the New York businessman.
Another survey, from McClatchy-Marist, puts Clinton’s lead at 15 points. That poll was also released Thursday. Clinton led by just three points in the same poll last month.
Still another poll, released Wednesday by Fox News, gave Clinton a 10-point lead.
Trump can take comfort in a key part of the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll: Voters still give him an edge on the economy, with 46% saying he’d do the best on economic matters and 42% favoring Clinton. Yet Clinton is catching up. In June, she faced a 10-point deficit on the same question.

I think we got an economic contraction due out there somewhere, but we're just a little more than 94 days out to the election.
Since the data rolls in about a month behind, the economy has to contract in about 60 days to have any impact on the election.  I think the odds of that are pretty low.  And as noted here, if the economy picks up even a tad, it is going to greatly undermine a major reason for the Trump's candidacy -

Quote:Should Trump be howling about the ‘bad’ economy?

...The election is 95 days away, and it’s pretty easy to reckon roughly what the data are going to look like as America heads off to cote. And it’s maybe not a picture Trump will want to focus voters’ attention on, especially after the much better-than-expected 255,000 July gain in jobs that the Labor Department reported Friday morning.
First, unemployment may well be pushing toward 4.5% by the October jobs report that hits the Friday before the election. It’s 4.9% now, holding steady from last month despite the big job gain. But the gains of the last two month are three times the 85,000 that Moody’s Analytics says are needed to keep unemployment steady.
So, one of two things has to happen if job growth sustains its pace or even comes close: Unemployment will fall sharply, or the GOP will deprived of one of its derpiest arguments — that falling workforce participation since 2007 reflects lingering worker despair that doesn’t show up in consumer confidence stats, car sales or housing sales.


Second, lots of indicators that real people focus on are doing much better than the relatively abstract growth of gross domestic product. Economic models that predict this election are split between the approach of Yale’s Ray Fair, whose model predicts a Trump win because it bases its prediction largely on how many quarters see annualized growth of more than 3.2%, and a newer model from Moody’s that focuses on consumer-friendly metrics like gas prices, housing appreciation and real income growth.


Regular gas costs $2.12 a gallon nationwide, down from $4.06 in 2008. (Bernie Bros won’t admit it, but fracking did that). Worse for a GOP-will-fix-the-economy strategy is that gas prices will fall after Labor Day — they always do, an average of 16 cents a gallon in the last three Octobers, when additives designed to prevent summer air pollution are removed. Gas may not crack $2 everywhere, but it’ll be cheap.
Housing prices have risen about 5% in the last year, and more than a third since 2012, according to the Case-Shiller Index. And real disposable personal income has risen 2.4% in the last year, Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi noted in explaining the ADP numbers Wednesday.

So how unhappy will voters really be about the economy?

Putting the inputs together, Moody’s model says Clinton grabs 326 electoral votes, 56 more than needed to win. Moody’s model got every state right in 2012 and 2008, said Dan White, the economist who runs the model. Fair’s GDP-focused model predicted President Mitt Romney.

Now, let’s talk about the GDP number.

Yes, first-half growth was terrible — just 1% annualized, less than half last year’s pace — but it was terrible in ways that may not translate directly into voter unrest.


Consumer spending actually rose more than 4% in the second quarter — a pace not unlike the good-times late 1980s. The first-half problem was business confidence. Companies are shrinking inventories, and equipment investment dropped at a 3.5% annual pace in the second quarter.


Business’ lack of confidence isn’t about Clinton — it’s about Trump. Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, the 2010 GOP candidate for California governor, said as much in endorsing Clinton this week.


Or you can believe Internet dude billionaire Mark Cuban, who asks, “Is there a bigger jagoff in the world than Donald Trump?” Or Warren Buffett, who says a monkey throwing darts at stock listings delivers better results. Or $40 billion man Mike Bloomberg, who reduced Bill Clinton to did-he-say-that gasping for breath with the bon mot, “Let’s elect a sane, competent person.”


Think those folks will be on the news in October blaming weak investment on Barack Obama rather than Fear of Trump?


Pinning hopes for a Trump resurgence on a third-quarter reprise of slow-to-no growth is also a lot like the mistake that Mitt Romney made in 2012: All year long, he made the argument that Obama couldn’t be re-elected because unemployment was still above 8%. The benefit of the argument was its simplicity: Its downfall was that the jobless rate hit 7.8% a month before the election, an outcome easy to see in January.
The lesson of Romney is, don’t base your political strategy on one number you don’t control. In the likely event that gas is cheap this fall, that real median incomes are basically at Web-bubble peaks and employment is near-full, and even GDP growth comes in about 3%-ish for the quarter (the Atlanta Fed’s influential GDPNow tracking estimate is now 3.7%), a Trump yell-about-the-economy plan will reduce Clinton’s strategists to — yes — howls of laughter.

What's cool about those howls of laughter to come is that the economy will be doing well and we'll all be sighing some relief for dodging the bullet of electing a proto-facist who sucks up to Tsar Putin.  Awesome Fall in the making!