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Bi-Weekly Discussion - What Can We Learn From The 2016 Election?

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Brian B.
Bi-Weekly Discussion - What Can We Learn From The 2016 Election?

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We're currently hosting our discussions at Café Walnut, not too far from our summer meeting spot in Washington Square Park. The cafe is near the corner of 7th & Walnut in Olde City. The cafe's entrance is below street level down some stairs, which can be confusing if it's your first time. Our group meets in the large room upstairs.

Since we're using the cafe's space, they ask that each person attending the meetup at least purchase a drink or snack. Please don't bring any food or drinks from outside. If you're hungry enough to eat a meal, they have more substantial fare such as salads, soups & sandwiches which are pretty good and their prices are reasonable.

The cafe is fairly easy to get to if you're using public transit. With SEPTA, take the Market-Frankford Line & get off at the 5th Street Station (corner of 5th & Market), and walk 2 blocks south on 5th and then turn right on Walnut Street and walk 2 blocks west. With PATCO, just get off at the 9th-10th & Locust stop and walk 3 blocks east & 1 block north. For those who are driving, parking in the neighborhood can be tough to find. If you can't find a spot on the street, I'd suggest parking in the Washington Square parking deck at 249 S 6th Street which is just a half block away.

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WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION?

INTRODUCTION:

Oust last meetup addressed the expert consensus in political science and the theories that most political scientists think explain American politics. In this meetup, we'll address how well these theories have held up in the aftermath of the tumultuous 2016 presidential campaign season and the election of Donald Trump.

A good place to start to get a sense of the various things political scientists have taken away from the 2016 election is a pair of blog posts written by the political scientist Andrew Gelman in December of 2016. They were entitled "19 Lessons We Learned from the 2016 Election" and "5 More Things I Learned from the 2016 Election":
http://andrewgelman.com/2016/12/08/19-things-learned-2016-election/
http://andrewgelman.com/2016/12/09/5-things-learned-2016-election/

Gelman teamed up with fellow political scientist Julia Azari to turn these blog posts into a journal article, which was published in the December 2017 edition of Statistics and Public Policy. There were response articles by Jennifer N. Victor, Corrie V. Hunt, Hans Noel, Seth Masket, and Robert Y. Shapiro. See Andrew Gelman's blog for links to these articles:
http://andrewgelman.com/2017/12/22/19-things-learned-2016-election-2/

Briefly, here are the 24 things Gelman claims to have learned from the 2016 election:

  1. The party doesn't decide. Trump seemed to be a long shot in the Republican primary, but primary elections are difficult to predict (multiple candidates, no party cues or major ideological distinctions between them, unequal resources, unique contests, and rapidly-changing circumstances).

  2. That trick of forecasting elections using voter predictions rather than voter intentions? Doesn’t work. The hope was that when you ask people whom they think will win, survey respondents will be informally tallying their social networks, which aggregates some valuable information for forecasting. However, a more likely possibility is that respondents do little more than process what they’d seen in the news media.

  3. Survey nonresponse is a thing. It’s harder and harder to reach a representative sample of voters. The final polls were off by about 2 percentage points, suggesting that, even at the end, Trump supporters were responding at a lower rate than Clinton supporters.

  4. The election outcome was consistent with “the fundamentals" i.e. the strength of the national economy plus several well-known political factors. All these fundamentals-based models have uncertainties on the order of 3 percentage points, so what they really predicted is that the election would not be a landslide.

  5. Polarization is real. Cross-party voting keeps declining, and members of the out-party hold the president in lower esteem. With a polarized electorate, it makes sense for candidates to focus on firing up their base, and this is a key part of the story of the success of the Trump campaign.

  6. Demography is not destiny. Trump still got 28% of the Latino vote. Longer term, it may well be that the Republican party needs to change with the times, but destiny hasn’t happened yet.

  7. Public opinion does not follow elite opinion. In 2016, Trump was opposed vigorously by almost everybody in elite circles, but half the voters still said, "We'll go with this guy anyway."

  8. There is an authoritarian dimension of politics. A significant segment of the electorate, maybe 20%, has always been waiting for its authoritarian champion, and Trump brought them out by breaking political norms with his rhetoric.

  9. Swings are national. If you plot vote swings by county, or by state, you see much more uniformity in the swing in recent years than in previous decades. There’s been lots of talk of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and these three states did make the difference in the electoral college, but similar swings happened all over the country.

  10. The ground game was overrated. Some ground game is necessary, but it’s hard to get people to turn out and vote, if they weren’t already planning to.

  11. News is siloed. Saturation of social media by fake news, along with a decline of the traditional TV networks and continuing distrust of the press, appears to have been a factor in polarizing Americans.

  12. The election wasn’t decided by "shark attacks" or other irrelevant stimuli. The 2016 election was rather about big stories - endless scandals & gaffes for Trump and the Comey letter for Clinton - that didn’t matter much or canceled each other out.

  13. Overconfident pundits get attention. Academics are overcautious in our predictions; in contrast, the media (traditional news media and modern social media) reward boldness and are forgiving of failure. [In his journal article, Gelman also points out that election forecasting would be clearer if it were expressed as estimated vote share with a margin of error rather than speculative win probabilities. Much confusion could have been avoided during the campaign had Clinton’s share in the polls simply been reported as 52% of the two-party vote, plus or minus 2 percentage points.]

  14. Red state blue state is over. [Note: Gelman's point is unclear, but I interpret him to mean that the long era of the Republicans as the "party of the rich" and the Democrats as the "party of the working class" is finally over. In the early to mid 20th century, the parties mostly split along class lines that also aligned with the relative wealth of the states, i.e. the North was wealthy & industrialized while the South was poor & agrarian. By the late 20th century, this pattern had shifted so that in poorer inland "red states", the wealthy & middle class were more likely to vote Republican, but in rich coastal "blue states", income had a very low correlation with vote preference and Democrats did well with the wealthy & middle class there. However, Gelman points out that the 2016 election displayed minimal income-voting gradients, suggesting that political differences between red & blue states are now explained less by differences in individuals’ incomes than by broader cultural forces. In his journal article, he connects this with the growing urban-rural divide within states, i.e. red & blue counties.]

  15. Third parties are still treading water. 2016 seems to have confirmed conventional wisdom. Both major parties were highly unpopular, but all the minor parties combined got only 5.6% of the vote

  16. A working-class pundit is something to be. Michael Moore may have been prescient with his article written a month before the election entitled “5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win,” specifically pointing to the Rust Belt, angry white men, voter turnout, and other factors that everybody else was writing about after the election was over. [Note: Gelman doesn't mention his feud with Thomas Frank here over whether the GOP seduce working class whites into voting against their own self-interest. Jonathan Haidt has suggested this dispute could be resolved by defining the "white working class" as those without a college degree - i.e. blue collar whites - rather than poor whites.]

  17. Beware of stories that explain too much. The Republicans did well in 2016 and now control the presidency, both houses of Congress, most of the governorships, and soon the Supreme Court. But when it comes to opinions and votes, we’re a 50/50 nation. So we have to be wary of explanations of Trump’s tactical victory that explain too much.

  18. Goldman Sachs rules the world. Goldman Sachs candidate Hillary Clinton managed to lose the electoral vote, but Goldman Sachs Senator Chuck Schumer may now be the most powerful Democrat in Washington, while former Goldman Sachs executive Steve Bannon will be deciding strategy inside the White House, so the major banks appear to still have conservable influence.

  19. The Electoral College was a ticking time bomb. Gelman notes that since the number of electoral votes that low-population states have gives them an outsized influence over deciding who becomes president, it was probably inevitable that the Electoral College would lead (yet again) to a presidential candidate winning even when they lost the popular vote.

  20. RE: Fundamentals & the non-presidential elections - Straight ticket voting soared in this election in the Senate races, though not the governor’s races, which supports explanations based on fundamentals & polarization rather than candidate-specific stories.

  21. RE: The Latino vote - Exit polls that showed Trump winning 28% of the Latino vote may be deceptive. Trump winning based on the white vote is consistent with research that shows the electorate being whiter than observers had thought based on exit polls.

  22. RE: Siloed news - The best evidence doesn't support the idea of siloed news, and even if there were evidence of selective exposure/polarized media consumption habits, that wouldn’t prove an effect on attitudes, voting behavior, etc. There's also evidence to suggest that social media actually reduces mass political polarization.

  23. RE: "Shark attacks" - Achen and Bartels’s larger point that that many voters are massively uninformed about politics, policy & governing is relevant even if it’s not true that voters are easily swung by irrelevant stimuli.

  24. RE: The Clinton campaign’s “ground game” - A Clinton staffer reported that their campaign's ground game in the Midwest was focused on recruiting volunteers from people already friendly to Clinton, not on trying to persuade swing/undecided voters or mobilize the party's base until a week out from the election.

Clearly, we can't review all of these points, but I've picked 4 of them that have been heavily discussed in the media for the last year. We'll do our best to explore their different facets. Hopefully, when we combine the political science concepts from our last discussion with the topics I've selected this time, most of our participants will walk away with a decent grasp of the current consensus in political science.

Note: To review the topics we covered last time, click the link below:
https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/xvbrznyxdbxb/

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DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO PREPARE FOR OUR DISCUSSION:

The videos & articles you see linked below are intended to give you a basic overview of some of the major theories that political scientists have about the 2016 election. As usual, I certainly don't expect you to read all the articles & watch all the videos prior to attending our discussion. The easiest way to prepare for our discussion is to just watch the numbered videos linked under each section - the videos come to about 33 minutes total. The articles marked with asterisks are just there to supply additional details. You can browse and look at whichever ones you want, but don't worry - we'll cover the stuff you missed in our discussion.

In terms of the discussion format, my general idea is that we'll address the topics in the order presented here. I figure we'll spend about 30 minutes on each section.

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I. "THE PARTY DECIDES" THEORY, THE "LANE THEORY" OF PRIMARIES & "EARNED MEDIA":

  • WAS TRUMP MERELY A FLUKE, OR DID HE DISPROVE "THE PARTY DECIDES" THEORY, SINCE HE DIDN'T WIN THE "INVISIBLE PRIMARY" OF GOP PARTY ENDORSEMENTS BUT STILL WON THE PRIMARIES & GOT THE NOMINATION?
  • HOW MUCH OF TRUMP'S PRIMARY WINS WERE THE RESULT OF HAVING AN UNCONTESTED "POPULIST LANE" WHILE THE "ESTABLISHMENT LANE" & "RELIGIOUS CONSERVATIVE LANE" WERE CROWDED?
  • HOW MUCH OF TRUMP'S PRIMARY SUCCESS CAN BE ATTRIBUTED TO STARTING WITH HIGH NAME RECOGNITION & TURNING LOTS OF NEGATIVE MEDIA COVERAGE INTO $2-3B WORTH OF FREE PUBLICITY?
  • WHEN THE PARTY NO LONGER DECIDES, DOES IT MEAN THE PARTY IS IN DECLINE OR MERELY IN TRANSITION?

1a) Vox, "Primary voters don't really look like America" (video - 2:52 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fwht08ceJOg

1b) Matt Dickinson & Bert Johnson, "Does the Party Still Decide?" (video - 5:42 min.)
http://www.middlebury.edu/newsroom/archive/2016-news/node/506497

II. THE MEDIAN VOTER THEOREM & POLARIZATION:

  • DID TRUMP'S FAILURE TO "PIVOT" FOR THE GENERAL ELECTION & MODERATE HIS CAMPAIGN RHETORIC DISPROVE THE "MEDIAN VOTER THEOREM", OR MERELY THAT MODERATION IS UNNECESSARY WHEN POLITICAL POLARIZATION HOLLOWS OUT THE IDEOLOGICAL CENTER?
  • DID TRUMP'S POPULIST ECONOMIC VIEWS REPRESENT A MODERATION OF THE GOP ECONOMIC PLATFORM THAT PROVES THE "MEDIAN VOTER THEOREM" HELD UP AFTER ALL?
  • IF THE CENTER IS GONE, DO THE DEMOCRATS HAVE A BETTER CHANCE OF WINNING WITH A LEFT-WING POPULIST THAN A CENTER-LEFT CANDIDATE IN 2020?
  • WHAT'S RESPONSIBLE FOR OUR POLITICAL POLARIZATION - GERRYMANDERING? GEOGRAPHIC SORTING? INCOME INEQUALITY? OR ARE THE PARTIES MORE POLARIZED THAN THE ELECTORATE?

2a) Diana Thomas, "Why Do Politicians All Sound the Same?" (video - 2:23 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P34SUDahiA0

2b) Ezra Klein, "Why Donald Trump can't become 'moderate'" (video - 5:15 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypOwLUMUHw0

2c) Nolan McCarty, "Did Gerrymandering Help Trump?" (video - 1:34 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoFEAyHWShA

III. POLLS, FUNDAMENTALS & ELECTION FORECASTING:

  • WHY DID SO MANY POLLSTERS GIVE TRUMP A LOW CHANCE OF WINNING EVEN THE DAY BEFORE THE ELECTION? WAS A TRUMP WIN INCONSISTENT WITH "THE FUNDAMENTALS" , OR WAS THE PROBLEM SOMETHING ELSE - LIKE POLLING METHODS?
  • HOW MUCH OF THE PUBLIC'S CONFUSION WAS DUE TO PRESENTATION STYLES - I.E. PROBABILITY OF VICTORY VS EXPECTED VOTE SHARE WITH MARGIN OF ERROR? HOW MUCH WAS DUE TO A FAILURE TO UPDATE - I.E. PEOPLE WERE STILL THINKING OF TRUMP'S LONG ODDS TO WIN THE GOP PRIMARY WHEN THEY WERE INFERRING HIS CHANCES OF WINNING THE GENERAL ELECTION?
  • WHAT FACTORS MIGHT'VE MADE PUNDITS OVERCONFIDENT IN A CLINTON WIN: WISHFUL THINKING? AN ELITE FILTER BUBBLE? MEDIA INCENTIVES THAT REWARD BOLDNESS? DEMORALIZE TRUMP SUPPORTERS BY TELLING THEM HE HAS NO CHANCE?
  • DOES A SINGLE FAILURE IN ELECTION FORECASTING REPRESENT A BROADER INDICTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE?

3a) Claudia Deane, Courtney Kennedy, Andrew Mercer, Kylie McGeeney @ Pew Research, "Why 2016 election polls missed their mark" (video - 4:32 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfBAPn7-hDg

3b) David Doherty, "Did Political Science Survive the 2016 Presidential Election?" (video - 42:57 min, start at 22:11 & watch til 28:20)
https://youtu.be/dAsPF2SmZnk?t=1331

IV. THE BACKLASH THEORY: IDENTITY POLITICS & RACIAL RESENTMENT:

  • IS MARK LILLA RIGHT THAT TRUMP'S ELECTION WAS A BACKLASH AGAINST LIBERAL IDENTITY POLITICS, OR IS THAT MERELY A CASE OF THE "PUNDIT'S FALLACY"?
  • IF WE ACCEPT HANS NOEL'S POINT THAT "NON-PARTISANSHIP" AND THE "GENERAL PUBLIC INTEREST" ARE LARGELY FICTITIOUS, DOES THAT MEAN JACOB LEVY IS RIGHT THAT SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS BASED ON IDENTITY (E.G. BLACK LIVES MATTER) CAN BE BENEFICIAL?
  • WERE VAN JONES & TA-NEHISI COATES RIGHT THAT TRUMP'S ELECTION WAS A "WHITE-LASH" OF RACISM BROUGHT ON BY DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE & OBAMA'S PRESIDENCY, OR ARE THEY MISTAKING CONSERVATIVES' RESENTMENT OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS AND "JUST WORLD BELIEF" FOR RACISM?
  • SHOULD DEMOCRATS MODERATE THEIR EMPHASIS ON IDENTITY POLITICS IN ORDER TO RECAPTURE THE MEDIAN VOTER, OR WILL A MORE RADICAL PLATFORM ENERGIZE THEIR BASE?

4a) Ta-Nehisi Coates, "‘It’s Impossible to Imagine Trump Without the Force of Whiteness" (video - 2:08 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyiH3YcvRH0

4b) Mark Lilla, "Politics Isn't About Identity, It's About Winning" (video - 2:43 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhrpiVccU2g

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