Horse race stuff

Théodore Géricicault, The Wild Horse Race at Rome, ca. 1817, via Wikiart.

I've been looking at extremely interesting ideas (warning: when I say "extremely interesting" I may really mean "in agreement with my naive expectations that nobody else agrees with or has corroborated", just the way most people do) about the US electorate being developed by a political scientist called Rachel Bitecofer at the Judy Ford Wason Center, Christopher Newport University, in Newport News, Virginia, making election predictions on the hypothesis that the behavior of "independents" isn't especially important, and the effects of what she calls "negative partisanship" are (it's not that simple: it considers a lot of factors, in two separate tiers, and regression analysis).

Which led her to predict last November's Democratic gain of 42 House seats (she said 43) in July 2018, when mainstream forecasters were unsure whether Democrats would win the 23 seats they needed to take the majority, which was a pretty remarkable feat, and is leading her now to predict a very solid Electoral College victory for the Democrats in 2020, without knowing who the candidates are. You'll have to check out the paper to get the details, because that's what I'm running this post to get you to do.

I was especially taken by Bitecofer's analysis of what happened in the 2016 election, because it not only puts to rest the zombie story of the "white working class" as decisive factor but also gives the first precise estimate I've seen (schematic, not numerical) of the influence of the Russian active measures:

Ask anyone, and they will describe Trump’s 2016 Midwestern triumph as a product of white, working class voters swinging away from the Democrats based on the appeal of Trump’s economic populist messaging. Some will point to survey data of disaffected Obama-to-Trump voters and even Sanders-to-Trump voters as evidence that this populist appeal was the decisive factor. And this is sort of true. In Ohio, Trump managed the rare feat of cracking 50%. Elsewhere, that explanation runs into empirical problems when one digs into the data. Start with the numerical fact that Trump “won” Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan with 47.22%, 48.18%, and 47.5% of the vote, respectively, after five times the normal number in those states cast their ballots for an option other than Trump or Clinton. This, combined with the depressed turnout of African Americans (targeted with suppression materials by the Russians) and left-leaning Independents turned off by Clinton (targeted with defection materials by the Russians) allowed Trump to pull off an improbable victory, one that will be hard to replicate in today’s less nitpicky atmosphere. Yet, the media (and the voting public) has turned Trump’s 2016 win into a mythic legend of invincibility. 

The other thing I wanted to call attention to was what she thinks about choosing the 2020 Democratic candidate, expressing the particular (but in Bitecofer's view not really serious) danger of choosing Sanders or, still more, Biden:

Does the Democrats' nominee matter? Sure, to an extent. If the ticket has a woman, a person of color or a Latino, or a female who is also a person of color, Democratic Party turnout will surge more in really important places. If the nominee is Biden he’d be well-advised to consider Democratic voter turnout his number one consideration when drawing his running mate to avoid the critical mistake made by Hillary Clinton in 2016. This is true for any of the white male candidates. If the nominee hails from the progressive wing of the party, it will provoke massive handwringing both within the party and the media that if not controlled could become self-reinforcing. But the Democrats are not complacent like they were in 2016 and I doubt there is any amount of polling or favorable forecasts that will make them so. That fear will play a crucial role in their 2020 victory. We will not see a divided Democratic Party in 2020.