Google “Trump could win” and you will find out something I told you about two months ago, Trump has a real chance to win the Republican nomination. Nate Silver is still holding out<\/a>. But as I’ll point out below, I think he is reasons are specious<\/p>\n

Why could Trump win? For all the reasons I’ve been saying.<\/p>\n

1. His message resonates with a substantial part of the Republican electorate which is motivated by racial and anti-feminist resentment, and fear of a world that seems untethered, not economic issues. His tough guy act gives his angry, scared followers some faith that he will be leader who will protect them and stand up for them. Trump is making a classic fascist appeal and, given the circumstances of American life today, it is finding some resonance in about a third of the Republican electorate.<\/p>\n

2. His lead in the polls-which he has sustained for far longer than any non-establishment candidate four years ago–makes him look like a winner, too, and that appeals to the same people as well as others. Victories in Iowa and New Hampshire will keep that going.<\/p>\n

3. He’s a brilliant self-promoter who doesn’t shy from a fight or fear saying the dirty little things people think but are too embarrassed to say out loud. The Republicans have defined deviance down to such an extent that he can not only get away with saying those things but benefit from doing so. Bigotry against Mexicans and Muslims as well as sexists remarks about women are features not bugs of the Trump campaign.<\/p>\n

4. He can fund himself. This both enables him to stay in the race as long as he wants and claim to be independent of the corporate elite, which helps his populist message.<\/p>\n

5. The large field keeps him ahead of any other candidate. After March 15 or so, he’ll pick up big bunches of delegates by winning with 30-40% of the vote.<\/p>\n

And there is good reason to think a lot of those candidates will stay in, if only because they and their funders will keep waiting for Trump to collapse. Bush and Rubio will split the establishment vote even if Christie never takes off and gets out soon. They are both have deep pockets. Carson will hold the religious vote and is getting a lot of money from evangelists. Cruz is the biggest threat to Trump but if he stays where he is, he probably helps rather than hurts because some of his supporters don’t want to go quite so anti-establishment as Trump.<\/p>\n

Now Nate Silver seems convinced that Trump has no–or rather a 2%–chance to win.<\/a>\u00a0But if we look at why he thinks that, we will confront the limits of how Silver is thinking about politics right now.<\/p>\n

What Silver is famous for, predicting election results, is the result of his adopting a methodology that makes a great deal of sense to me: drawing together as many polls as he can find and then running simulations based on them. I was trained to in public opinion research by Professor \u00a0William Schneider who always took sampling and methodological variability seriously and insisted that more data is better than less, that looking at a variety of polls done with a variety of methods always makes more sense than relying on one poll, and that paying attention to the margin of error is critical. Silver has systematized Schneider\u2019s approach to give us a very sensible way of \u00a0predicting elections based on polls.<\/p>\n

Where I think Silver goes wrong is when he starts acting like a political scientist and takes theoretical constructs more seriously than he should.<\/p>\n

One reason he thinks Trump can’t win is that he’s bought into the notion, put forward by political sciences Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller, that “the party decides.”<\/a>\u00a0 Everyone who talks about the “invisible primary” of public officials and party activists which supposedly determine presidential nominations is drawing on their work. And there is much to be said for it. Public officials and party activists do play an important role in getting candidates taken seriously by the primary electorate and the press \u00a0and in raising money for them. But if you try to measure what the party is deciding, as Silver and others do, by looking at endorsements by public and party officials, you run into some trouble. For the notion of the party is something of a construct. Who counts as \u201cthe party\u201d after all? Our parties permeable, so that from time to time, a whole new group of activists who were once irrelevant in nominating contest become relevant at later date. That\u2019s what happened to the Republicans in 64 and Democrats in 72. It\u2019s what is happening now as tea party and other extremists begin to play a larger role in the Republican Party and lefty activists do the same in the Democratic Party. So counting endorsements from members of Congress and legislators might not really tell you what \u201cthe party\u201d thinks.<\/p>\n

In addition, when you have a candidate who is very well know, \u00a0a billionaire and a master of earned media, then what the “Party” thinks is a lot less relevant than it is for other candidates. By virtue of his fame, money, and media mastery Trump has, in effect, done the work that the “Party” usually does in the pre-primary stage of the election.<\/p>\n

The other thing that Silver and those who follow him have been saying is that Trump can’t win because he favorability numbers were never high, seem to have peaked and are, at least in some survey, negative with more people not liking him than liking him.<\/a><\/p>\n

Now, to some extent this claim is empirically questionable. Look at the Huffington Post favorability averages,<\/a> which take into account a number of polls and you will see that every Republican candidate except Carson is at a favorability deficit, with more people having an unfavorable than a favorable view. All of them, including Carson, have seen their unfavorable rating rise slightly except for Trump who has seen his relatively high unfavorable rating decline. And all of them except Trump and Carson have seen their favorable rating stay basically flat. Both Trump and Carson saw their favorable ratings go up since June. Trump’s has been flat since the end of August while Carson’s has gone up a bit.<\/p>\n

So it’s not at all clear that there is any evidence that shows that Trump’s favorability ratings indicate that he has any serious problems in his race for the nomination, except that he, like all the other candidates besides Carson, has a net negative rating.<\/p>\n

But do those favorability ratings actually give us any good evidence about the primary at all? I have my doubts.<\/p>\n

While \u201cthe party\u201d is something of a construct, at least attempts to measure what the party thinks looks at people doing real things. The notion of \u201ccandidate favorability,\u201d however, is entirely a construct. It doesn\u2019t measure something that exists prior to survey that establishes it. People have all sorts of attitudes and beliefs about candidates and in many cases they are implicit and vague. We don\u2019t ask ourselves whether we are favorable or unfavorable to Trump or Rubio. We have vague feelings about them that arise (or not) depending on what we may have heard at one point or another. And most of the time we don\u2019t think about them at all.<\/p>\n

So favorability is constructed by the question that measures it. What influences the answers to that question? Well, one thing clearly whether you know anything about a candidate, Am I favorable or unfavorable toward John Kasich? Who the fuck knows? \u00a0I don\u2019t know much about him and never think about him in those terms, as opposed thinking about what I\u2019ve heard he has done with regard to this or that. But people have lots of views about Trump for obvious reasons.<\/p>\n

Another thing that influences how you decided whether you are favorable or not to a candidate is the context in which you\u2019ve heard about someone that stuck in your mind. Even with Trump, my views are kind of wifty. He kind of gives me the creeps so yes, I guess I\u2019m unfavorable to him. But it really depends upon the context in which I\u2019m thinking about him. So if I\u2019m reminded today that he\u2019s pushing ! on his brother\u2019s responsibility for 9\/11, I\u2019m going to have a little different view than if I\u2019m reminded that he is bigoted against Mexicans and most other people<\/p>\n

A third factor is who you are going to vote for. Most of us spend a lot more time thinking about which candidate we might support and which not, then we think about whether we are favorable to them or not. Especially towards the end of an election, there is an extremely high correlation between vote choice and favorability ratings. Which way does the causal arrow run? I\u2019m always inclined to think that something real\u2014an action we take out in the world\u2014is more likely to cause something constructed by a political scientist, than they other way around. Lots of things go into who we vote for\u2014issues, the times, how we see candidates\u2014and it\u2019s not clear to me that we always know why we decide to vote for one candidate or another. Much of the time our explicit reasons are as much rationalizations for our choice than what motivates the choice. So I suspect we are are likely to be favorable towards the candidates we vote for because we are voting for them.<\/p>\n

Except when we don\u2019t. There are other candidates for whom we have favorable feelings even though, or precisely because, we are highly unlikely to vote for them. Bernie Sanders has a higher net favorability rating than Hillary Clinton. But that\u2019s probably in part because those who know about him are the ones who back him And it may also be that \u00a0there are many folks who admire him in many ways, especially for his honest and consistent support for class-based left-wing ideas. But many of those people won\u2019t vote for him because they don\u2019t think someone like him can win or they disagree with him, while admiring his consistency and honesty.<\/p>\n

Whether we are favorable to someone or not also depends upon who else is running. If one candidate is my first choice, I\u2019ll be more favorable to him than if he were my second choice. I I think one candidate is a good guy but has no chance to win, I\u2019ll be more favorable to him. Favorability ratings are holistic not atomistic properties, in others words.<\/p>\n

Given all this, to take favorability ratings as a key to who is going to be nominated strikes me as silly. The favorable \/ unfavorable questions don’t measure some deep-seated idea or sentiment that is relatively unchangeable and that stands underneath our vote. It’s just a response to a question that can be taken in all sorts of ways and that is most likely as or more variable than our decision to vote for one candidate or another.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s silly for another reason: who is nominated depends to a very great extent on the field. McGovern in 72 won not by winning a majority of Democratic votes but because Muskie and Humphrey split the establishment vote. I\u2019m sure that if there were favorability ratings back then, McGovern\u2019s would have been quite low\u00a0by April after he started becoming known, unfairly, as the candidate for Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion. Similarly, Trump\u2019s unfavorability ratings among Republicans could be 40% and yet he would still win nomination.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not saying he\u2019s going to, but he has a good shot. And Silver\u2019s arguments to the contrary rest far more on bad methodology than on good reasons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google “Trump could win” and you will find out something I told you about two months ago, Trump has a real chance to win the Republican nomination. Nate Silver is still holding out. But as I’ll point out below, I think he is reasons are specious Why could Trump win? For all the reasons I’ve been saying. 1. His message resonates with a substantial part of the Republican electorate which is motivated by racial and anti-feminist resentment, and fear of a world that seems untethered, not economic issues. His tough guy act gives his angry, scared followers some faith that he will be leader who will protect them and stand up for them. Trump is making a classic fascist appeal and, given the circumstances of American life today, it is finding some resonance in about a third of the Republican electorate. 2. His lead in the polls-which he has sustained\u2026 Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[153,15,54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elections","category-politics","category-us"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p35YuU-1Q7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7075"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8261,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7075\/revisions\/8261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}