Things to Watch For (and Not to)!

***Just a quick reminder: I will once again be live-blogging the election returns this evening, but this time around I won't be able to start until roughly 9:00pm because of a teaching commitment.***

 Well, it's official. No, not that. Rather, I've officially given up trying to think about anything else today, regardless of relative personal importance. It's true what the pros say about election day: There isn't really all that much to do except sit around, gossip, fret, and wait. Mercifully that wait is once again almost over. In the meantime, thanks to all who've gotten back on the Cinema Democratica bandwagon: yesterday was our biggest single page-view day, ever -- surpassing even the 2008 live blog -- and I doubt any of this would be nearly as much fun without you all. And none of us, apparently, can stand the suspense.

And so as we all await the results of this at-once-wacky-and-yet-maddeningly-stable election, I thought I would take a few moments of excess nervous energy to share some thoughts about what sorts of tea leaves might make the best reading material before the final calls are in. To my thinking, the "pre-available information," if you will, falls into four categories: red herrings, stubborn and quick-to-fall states, partial precinct data, and demographics. Let's have a quick look at all four, with a word or two about how seriously to take each one. 

Red Herrings
Every election cycle the major polling firms all conduct exit polls, and every year the exit polls turn out to be completely useless. There's a simple reason for this, which is that there's no way to adjust exit polling data to reflect the larger voting cohort: Whomever happens to be emerging from the polling place at a given time, and is willing to be interviewed about it, finds his or her way into the data, regardless of whether he or she proportionally reflects the true mood of the state in question. This is called self-selection bias, and it's an instant deal-breaker as to the reliability of the data in question.

Suppose for example that a college -- even one which shall remain nameless -- decides to abandon the time-perfected practice of conducting student opinion surveys in class, on paper, preferring instead to allow students to elect to participate in the opinion-survey practice entirely on their own. Two things will naturally follow: First, those students who have the strongest opinions about the professor or the class will of course be unscientifically over-represented in the results. Second, since the poll itself is anonymous, there will be no way to weight the results in such a way as to better reflect the opinion of those students' non-responding counterparts.

The most famous example of this problem in electoral politics was election day of 2004, in the afternoon of which staffers for John Kerry confidently predicted that he would win -- basing their confidence entirely on the results of exit polling. More generally the problem seems to be (in part) that patterns of voter turnout over the course of the day are non-randomly distributed across party affiliations, and there just isn't time for the polling firms in question to carry out the sorts of labor-intensive adjustments necessary to correct for this phenomenon before getting scooped. Point being, readers would be well advised to take any news about exit polling with about a 250-pound block of salt.

This year a new source of potential information mischief has waded into the murk, in the form of a series of geek-based efforts to pre-project the outcomes of entire states in full view of the public. Cooler heads will refrain from even clicking through, but it's an open question whether the political commentariat can resist the temptation to meta-cover these scientifically dubious efforts, and the fear on the part of many is that any crack in the mainstream media's traditional embargo on this sort of thing could tip the result somewhere. It would be a fool's errand to ask readers not to patronize the geek-off, but don't let the media stories about it (if any) concern you too much either way, because the reporters in question won't know that they're talking about people who don't know what they're talking about.

Stubborn / Quick-Call States
It's utterly shameless self-promotion to say this, but I consider it no small feather in my cap to have correctly anticipated that Indiana's stubborn refusal to be called in 2008 would set the tone for that historic night for Barack Obama and the Democrats. (And entirely by the way, is it just me or does that moment seem like it happened a hell of a lot less than eight years ago?)

This year the two states to watch are New Hampshire and South Carolina. Both of them close relatively early -- South Carolina at 7:00pm and New Hampshire finishes its staggered closing times at 8:00 --  and any combination other than an immediate call for S.C. and a stubborn lack of resolution to New Hampshire is almost certainly the end of the road for The Orange One. I predict exactly the opposite: that, despite the two weeks' worth of solid media narrative about how tight New Hampshire has become, Secretary Clinton will be called the winner at the first possible second, while South Carolina will be this year's Indiana, just hanging there, and hanging there, and hanging there.

Barack Obama eventually won Indiana in 2008, but it was far from necessary and almost certainly won't happen again. The real point is that an surprise un-called state alters the media coverage disproportionately -- precisely because it's such a surprise. I'm sticking my neck out on this one more than usual, but I honestly think that the combination of a sneaky-high percentage of Hispanics in the Palmetto State, together with Mr. Trump's less than flattering words for George W. Bush, will bring the matter at least to within the margin of error, and set much of the tone of the night for the major anchors.

Partial Precincts
I am not popular company with my closest friends when questions of expertise are at issue: it's a blind spot of mine, owing its origins to a childhood in which no one could correctly pronounce my (very, very easy to pronounce) last name, and which was solidified when I chose economics as my field -- an area of human intellect in which every single drunk asshole at the bar has a self-awarded honorary Ph.D. Point being, I don't do well when I know something, and it's right, and other people won't just take my word for it. The most successful people in the world have all sorts of coping mechanisms for this, and I am forty-seven years old and not about to learn any of them.

How this is relevant in the present context, is that every four years I find myself saying the same thing about the partial-precinct reports that scroll across the bottom of the news channels: as an overall barometer of how the two campaigns are doing statewide, they are utterly, sumptuously, radiantly useless. Yes, precinct reports come in at random, in terms of their distribution across a given state, but that's just the thing: The voters themselves are *not* evenly distributed across that same state. The most notorious case of this leading to some distortions in the public's perception of how things are going was in 2000, when the last precincts to report in Florida were (as they always are) from the deep-blue enclaves of Palm Beach, Broward and Dade Counties. And if you've seen Fahrenheit 9/11, then you don't need me to tell you how this fact was manipulated by Karl Rove to create the appearance that Mr. Bush had won the state before he had.

This being said, partial precincts can shed useful light on the state of a state -- provided that they are viewed against the voter splits in previous elections. If, in Duvall County Florida, for example, Hillary Clinton is running well ahead of where Barack Obama ran in that same part of the state in 2008 or 2012, then -- then -- we know something. Not based on the raw numbers from there, which will almost certainly show Trump with a lead.

Demographics
We're already seeing big indications that the Hispanic portion of this year's vote was badly under-anticipated in the demographic modeling of the major polling firms. Hispanics (and by the way, women too), are turning out in larger numbers than anyone expected, and if this trend continues it will spell a very bad night for the GOP. So as you follow the news -- including here -- pay special attention to any apparent surprises vis-a-vis the makeup of the electorate (if the non-affiliated electorate in Florida continue to include an outsized proportion of Hispanic voters, for example).    

Well, that's it. At this point, all of us have done what we could, and all that's left is to wait, and enjoy the live-blog. Thanks again for following these pages, and if you haven't done so already -- for God's sake, *VOTE*!

Dave O'Gorman
Associate Professor of Economics
Santa Fe College
Gainesville, Florida


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The States to Watch are Not the Ones You Might Think

First, a bit of light housekeeping: As in 2008 and 2012, I will once again be live-blogging the election returns as they come in tomorrow evening -- with a big caveat: I have a teaching obligation that doesn't permit me to begin until roughly nine o'clock on the east coast. But I promise to be here as soon as possible, and to get caught up as quickly as I can.

Second, with all the kerfuffle about whether the race is tightening, or stabilizing, or tightening only in the battlegrounds, or not, I thought it might be an idea to point out that little has changed about the structural underpinnings of this election: Donald Trump didn't really have a plausible path to 270 electoral votes in late September, and he doesn't really have a plausible path to 270 electoral votes, now.

To emphasize this point, I want to take a moment to imagine a scenario in which, late tomorrow night, we all find ourselves unable to call any of Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, *or* New Hampshire. (These are the states that have consistently been listed as the most likely tipping points for the 2016 contest, in some combination.) I know this scenario would require an odd set of circumstances, but just play along while I spring the punch-line on you:

As long as Secretary Clinton holds Michigan and Pennsylvania, and consolidates her leads in Virginia, Colorado, and Nevada, nothing else actually matters.

...And nothing else actually does.

As far as I can tell, Clinton stands on 274 absolutely solid electoral votes. That is, before any of the supposedly decisive states are even factored into the equation.

Nevada, as it happens, and the positively gob-smacking performance of the Harry Reid machine in securing such a prohibitive early-voting lead for Team Blue, will be the story of things tomorrow night. If it even gets that far, which it may well not, since I think Clinton is going to win in Florida before the polls in Nevada have even closed.

I'm a homer, so I also think Clinton's vaunted ground game is going to make the difference in Ohio (late indications are that her position is improving there), as well as in North Carolina (where the GOTV effort is only being helped by the presence of a polarizing race for US Senate *and* the Governor's Mansion. I also think she'll hold in New Hampshire, as her non-response bias problem with recent polls there fades into the dusty archives of history alongside Director Comey's Fifteen Minutes of Fame. As other commentators have noted elsewhere, a quick blue call for New Hampshire after polls close there will spell a seriously long night in a certain gilded Manhattan penthouse. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, will hang on in two out of Iowa, Arizona, and Georgia, but not the third one -- though at this hour I'll admit that I have no idea which.

Your final map, early Wednesday morning, would thus look (something) like this:

Whether I've got the exact states right is (semi-obviously) beside the point of this column, and also of this election: Barring something genuinely unforeseen in any of Pennsylvania, Virginia, Colorado, or Michigan -- and assuming Jon Ralston isn't wrong about Nevada in a way he's never been wrong before about anything in his life -- we will all wake up two mornings from now to the first female President-elect in our nation's history. Eventually to succeed the first black President in our nation's history, next January.

And in this white man's opinion, it will be about, freaking, time. 


Dave O'Gorman
Associate Professor of Economics
Santa Fe College
Gainesville, Florida
 
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Cinema Democratica Exclusive: Conversation With Ohio

With the early-voting data out of Florida and Nevada so encouraging for Team Blue, your faithful correspondent turned his sights to trying to get a better handle on what's happening in Ohio. As luck would have it, a seasoned political reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Andrew J Tobias, was gracious enough to take time from his impossibly hectic schedule to talk with CinemaDemocratica on the record about where things stand in the Buckeye state, and to bandy some possible theories as to why. Links for following Mr. Tobias on social media are provided at the conclusion of this column.

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Sorry, Donald (and Nate): Any Polling Error Will Favor Clinton

For much of this last Sunday before election day, I grappled with the challenge of how to write -- and then stagger -- two separate blog columns. (#whitepeopleproblems.) The first of these two hypothetical columns was supposed to be a summary of where things stand with respect to early voting; the second one was supposed to be a friend-of-the-court brief regarding the geek war between the editors of the Huffington Post, and Nate Silver. And it's no small testimony to the sloppy file structures inside my head that it took until late this afternoon for me to realize that these had actually been the same column, all along.

Unless you've been vacationing on Neptune, you probably know by now that most of the leading polling firms have shown a marked tightening of the electoral horse race between Trump and Clinton -- presumably in response to the October cudgel delivered to Trump campaign HQ on a silver platter by the Director of the FBI. Timed to inflict maximum political damage, Director Comey's letter to Congress about his re-opening of the Clinton/email investigation was released at the precise moment that early voting began in many of the most crucial battleground states.

The effect has been to dramatically alter both the complexion and the media narrative of the race: from one in which Clinton was as inevitable as any Presidential candidate since Nixon's reelection bid in '72, to one in which literally anything could happen and probably would. But a funny thing happened along the way to Comey's role in upending the fate of the world: In terms of the actual dynamics of the race, there seems to have been much less impact than the polling data might otherwise suggest. The polls are, with apologies to Mitt Romney's supporters from 2012, genuinely and provably missing the drift of this thing, this time -- and Secretary Clinton is the direct and ubiquitous beneficiary of their collective mistake. This is an unusually long column even by my standards, so I hope you'll bear with me.

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Don't Kid Yourself; Hillary Clinton is in Trouble (But Still Leads)

If you've been anything more than a one-time-casual reader of these pages, you're almost certainly a progressive who -- grudgingly or otherwise -- supports Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in this year's Presidential Election. And like me you're probably troubled on more than one level by the FBI's October bombshell, and you're probably worried about the possibility that the bombshell could actually explode the election and deliver a most improbable victory to Donald Trump. Well, the point of today's column is that you'd be absolutely right: This is no time to shrug these latest twists off -- but neither is it time to panic. Yet.


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The Most Effective Campaign Commercial of All Time

For whatever reason the internet loves hyperbole -- particularly of the sort that ignores all but the last eighteen months in the sweep of human history. I had this pointed out to me in 2002 by a smart colleague at my workplace, recounting the tale of a student of his who had just uploaded an essay entitled "The Twenty Greatest Blu-Ray Movies of All Time," and who then refused to see the irony of same when my colleague patiently tried to point it out to him. We all do this, now: Things change so much faster than they used to that we forget how recent the distant-seeming stuff really is.

So forgive me while I chew some precious bandwidth to make the argument that Hillary Clinton's latest one-minute spot, "Captain Khan," is very probably -- and will very probably be remembered for a long time as -- the single most devastatingly effective political advertisement, ever.

But first do yourself the honor of watching it again, because it's worth it.

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Republicans are (Probably) in Bigger Trouble Than They Think

Election polling is, as ever, a good news / bad news proposition. The good news about following polling data in an election season is that there is always a great mass of data and there are always a great many stone-cold pros crunching that data and writing articles about it, as well as Nate Silver. But this volume of data and expert analysis happens also to be the bad news -- because the more stone-cold pros there are, the more likely their predictions are to diverge in meaningful ways. And never is this more true than when it comes to predicting so-called "wave elections," in which the mood of the electorate turns so decisively against one or the other of the two political parties that even the best models under-count the damage.

Worse, this kind of mistake is what statisticians refer to as a "systematic error": one in which the divergence between prediction and outcome only manifests in one tail of the probability distribution. For recent examples of this phenomenon, the United States has experienced "wave" elections in three consecutive midterms -- 2006, 2010, and 2014 -- and in all three of them the most trusted and professional pollsters and poll analysts, and Nate Silver, have all missed the victorious party's margin to the low side. But then this much is nearly tautological: Having failed to diagnose a wave, it would be impossible to then over-estimate its size, since missing a congressional margin to the high side would itself constitute the correct prediction of a wave.

So the bigger, more vexing question, then, is why pollsters and poll-analysts so often miss waves altogether -- and whether those explanations could proffer any guidance in predicting the outcome of this year's electoral horse race. Personally I believe that the explanations for un-diagnosed waves are mostly straightforward, and that they do, in fact, offer real promise that the Democrats could be positioned to do much better down-ballot than the punditry is currently predicting. Let's look at the factors that might substantiate this possibility.


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