Tag: data

THE STATE OF THE RACE FOR PRESIDENT

by Ken Grossberger, PhD

The ridiculous level of dishonesty in election campaigns and the media is a major issue in politics today. The desperate attempt to win at any cost has left too many voters in this cycle with the familiar feeling of having to pick between the better of two difficult options. The polls show this and even something as data-driven as polls become the subject of manipulation by die-hards on either side. The data should be objectively observed and reported, but such is not the case.

What we are left with is the bogus poll patrol, and both sides are guilty. Political polls are public opinion surveys that gauge sentiment at the time they are taken. The better polling organizations use sophisticated methods to construct questionnaires, collect data, analyze the data and provide the results with a reasonable margin of error. If we look at many of these polls over a period of time, we can deduce trends to indicate whether a candidate has a lead outside the margin of error, or not. Polls, therefore, are not necessarily predictive but can give us a sense as to where a particular election is heading. Hopelessly biased media “journalists” only look at the data that shows their candidate in the lead or catching up, the other candidate badly failing, and then make impossible-to-support flat predictions in declarative language. Nowhere to be found is any nuanced discussion of margins of error or the methodological difficulties inherent in collecting meaningful data from verbal questionnaires by cell phones.

But back on the campaign trail the Democrats went for the quick fix, the easy route (leveraging Biden out, deciding Kamala is in). But they are not going to solve the Biden problem with a Biden clone. Newly anointed Kamala Harris (so much for “democracy is on the ballot”) is now trying to verbally distance herself from the Biden-Harris border disaster. And Trump is back to his old self, neither chagrined nor informed by the favorable reactions to his mellower convention speech, nor the assassination attempt. Just days ago he called VP Harris “a bum.”  How does this help?

Both sides will have an abundance of money, surrogates and talking points. But most of these assets will be bulls-eyed at the other candidate and it will get even uglier if that’s possible. We will be told, umpteen times, that a vote for the opposition is an existential threat, and that our candidate is the savior and the only choice to save the planet. Their candidate? Fuhgeddaboudit. Facts do not matter as each campaign will have legions of realty re-constructors that will design a never-ending air attack designed to destroy the opposition and woo the undecideds. Still, in the end, a more rational electorate will decide which presidential candidate will inherit the most complex job in the world, campaign silliness notwithstanding. This show will go on the for the next few months, with the focus sharpening in the fall, reaching a fever pitch in late October. Let’s hope that somewhere in the circus there may be some actual substantive policy discussion where we can get a glimpse as to what the winning candidate might actually do.

PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION ANALOGIES – THIRD PARTIES AND FORMER PRESIDENTS

By Ken Grossberger, PhD

There is much discussion about how the 2024 US Presidential elections will play out, and media types have pushed several comparisons to prior elections, seemingly in an attempt to predict the future from the elections of the past.  Analogies are usually not perfect, but there are a few that might be instructive. Three-way presidential races, where there are viable third party candidates or independents, and races between current and former presidents, upset the balance between the two major parties and lessen the predictability of the outcomes. The “third” candidate becomes a mediating variable that is hard to analyze.  A brief review of the history of such elections sheds light on such unpredictable contests.

  • The election of 1860 was a 4-way contest between Abraham Lincoln and 3 Democrats at a time that the country was seriously polarized due to sectional differences arising from the slavery issue and the states’ rights argument. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois (against whom Lincoln ran in 1858 for the Illinois Senate seat) represented the northern Democrats, John C. Breckenridge (incumbent Vice President of the United States) drew support from the southern states, and John Bell of the newly formed Constitutional Union party gained electoral votes from the border state region. Lincoln won almost all the electoral votes in the north, the three Democrats split the rest, and Lincoln won the presidency.
  • In 1892 former President Grover Cleveland, Democrat, came back to challenge incumbent Republican President Benjamin Harrison (who beat Cleveland in 1888).  In this return contest Cleveland won back the presidency, the only person in US history to have 2 unconnected terms in the White House. The third party candidate in the race, James B. Weaver, representing the Populist Party, won almost 9% of the vote and carried a few western states, which may have hurt Harrison.
  • The 1912 election was the race of the 3 presidents, one past, one current and one future. Former President Theodore Roosevelt ran against his old protégé William Howard Taft and won 27% of the vote. President Taft, the incumbent Republican, ran third with only 23% of the vote and only 8 electoral votes. Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs won about 6% of the vote. Roosevelt and Taft split the Republican vote, and New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat, won the election with only 41% of the popular vote but an electoral landslide.
  • The presidential election of 1948 was famous for the biggest media faux pas in American history when the Chicago Tribune prematurely published a headline that stated: “Dewey Defeats Truman”. Incumbent President Harry S. Truman beat New York Governor and former prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey by a fairly comfortable margin in the electoral college. Truman was not that popular and the third party candidate, Dixiecrat South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond denied Truman a sizable portion of the southern Democrat vote. After attempts to get him to drop out of the race the Democratic Convention nominated Truman, who went on to win by waging a strong campaign.
  • There was a similar outcome in the 1968 presidential race but this time the Democrat split gave the election to the Republican former Vice President Richard M. Nixon. Democrat Gov. George Wallace of Alabama ran on the American Independent ticket and won 5 southern states, denying Democrat and incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey the electoral votes of those states and a significant portion of the popular vote.
  • In 1992 independent Ross Perot, a Texas billionaire, won 19% of the vote, most of it from incumbent Vice President Republican George H.W. Bush, giving the election to Democrat Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton. Perot scored one of the highest third party totals in US history. Ironically Bush had a national approval rate of 81% following the 1991 Gulf War, only to see his popularity dwindle to only 37 percent of the vote in the election.

The election of 2024 may be a mix of these scenarios. There is a viable third party candidate I Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, who is drawing about 10% in many polls, but not enough to be in contention for any electoral votes in the swing states. He appears to be taking more votes from Biden than Trump as we see a shift of a few points in the 5-way polling (including 2 other third party candidates), as opposed to the head-to-head data showing Trump with about a 2 point lead over Biden.

The post June 27 debate polls show a slippage in Biden’s support, most notably in the swing states, where Trump now leads outside the margin of error in 8 of 14 critical states.  Worse for Biden is that New Hampshire, Minnesota and Virginia, which have voted Democrat in recent elections, are now within the margin of error. There will be more to come with the polls following the assassination attempt on Trump.

Predicting the future from the past is always a lesson in objectivity and thought, and this election is no different.