Should the 2016 Election Have Been Not Close Enough to Steal?

Nate Silver’s multi-part series about the 2016 elections is all worth reading, and I’ll be writing about several of the posts. To amplify what I’ve said before, this point about the structural context of the 2016 elections is important:

An alternative to the “blue wall” and the “emerging Democratic majority” was to look at the underlying, macro-level conditions of the race, or what we sometimes refer to as the “fundamentals.” Political scientists and other empiricists disagree on exactly how to do this, and the precision of these methods can be overestimated. But there’s broad agreement on a couple of propositions:

• First, there are few if any permanent majorities. A newly elected party (for instance, Barack Obama’s Democrats before the 2012 election) often wins a second presidential term. Beyond that, it’s not much of an advantage to be the incumbent party, and it may be at a slight disadvantage when a party tries to win more than two terms in a row.
• Second, the economy matters a lot to voters, and a better economy helps the incumbent party, other factors held equal.

By this rubric, the 2008 and 2012 elections were likely to be strong years for Democrats. In 2008, Obama was facing John McCain after Republicans had held the White House for two terms and overseen a financial collapse. In 2012, Obama was a first-term incumbent running for re-election and the economy was just good enough to get him over the finish line.

But Clinton faced more headwinds in 2016, trying to win a third consecutive term for her party amid a mediocre economy. Against a “generic” Republican such as John Kasich or Marco Rubio, she might have been in a toss-up race or even a slight underdog, in fact. So she was counting on good economic news — or for Trump to underperform a “generic” Republican because of his unique flaws as a candidate¹.

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Instead, 2016 was generally treated as Clinton’s race to lose when that conclusion didn’t necessarily follow from the empirical research on presidential campaigns. A better perspective was that Clinton was leading in the polls despite somewhat challenging conditions for Democrats, no doubt in part because of Trump’s flaws as a candidate. However, that made her vulnerable if the candidate-quality gap closed — whether because of her own problems as a candidate or because Trump’s performance improved — in which case partisanship would kick in and she’d be headed for a barnburner of a finish.

Incidentally, Clinton slightly outperformed the “fundamentals” according to most of the political science models, which usually forecast the popular vote rather than the Electoral College. For instance, the economic index included in FiveThirtyEight’s “polls-plus” model implied that Trump would win the popular vote by about 1 percentage point. Instead, Clinton won it by roughly 2 percentage points. That’s not a huge difference, but it’s something to consider before assuming that Clinton must have been an exceptionally flawed candidate.

Trump was pretty clearly a weak candidate, although this weakness was largely mitigated by the United States not having a democratic system for picking the president. Whether it was Clinton or Sanders or Biden or whoever, the Democratic candidate was also going to be facing much more difficult structural conditions than Obama did in either election, and analyses that fail to take this into account are not going to be useful. It’s very possible that another Democratic candidate could have beaten him, but the idea that the election should have been not close enough to steal is pretty clearly wrong.

And another upshot is that the usual lazy punditry about how DEMOCRATS ARE DOOMED is about as useful as similar claims made when Republicans were beaten much more badly at the federal level and almost as badly at the state level in 2008. Many of the structural factors that have been hurting Democrats are about to help them. And in 2020, the state of the economy and Trump’s popularity will be much more important factors in determining the outcome of the election than the tactics of the Democratic candidate.