The Predictive Power of (Very) Early Presidential Primary Polling Part II - 2000 Republican Primary

Elizabeth Dole polled a closer 2nd place to George W. Bush in 2000 Republican Primary polling than John McCain ever did.

This is a continuation of a piece I wrote last week that examines the last 40 years of Republican and Democratic presidential primaries in an attempt to understand the predictive value of polls taken two to three years before the start of actual primary contests.

Just before the 2012 race, Nate Silver looked at whether polls taken ONE year before the Iowa Caucuses presaged the eventual nominee, and found that yes, in many instances, they do. This series will look back even further, before the ink dries on your just-cast presidential ballot, to see if polls did as well further out from the primary race. Not surprisingly, the answer is no.

As discussed yesterday, very early primary polling had predictive value as to the final result in just three of the fifteen Republican and/or Democratic primaries examined dating back to 1976 (the 2000 Democratic and 1988 & 1996 Republican presidential primaries). But excluding those three contests, very early primary polling has been unhelpful in identifying eventual nominees.

One of the best examples of early primary polling's failure at political forecasting is the 2000 Republican contest. Contrary to how it may seem, the massive lead that eventual winner George W. Bush commanded for most of the primary season did not exist in 1997, the first year of Clinton's second term, before any layperson had heard the name Monica Lewinsky, and before Bush had been overwhelmingly re-elected to the Texas Governorship.

That was thanks to a very popular African American General, Colin Powell. Powell surprised observers early in the '96 cycle with impressive, hypothetical head-to-head performances against President Clinton (even leading him by double digit margins on multiple occasions.) So you can understand why, following a disappointing presidential loss, 35% of Republican primary voters were willing to support him as their candidate for President in 2000.

As you can see, Powell's early strength in 2000 primary polling was briefer than in the '96 cycle. By mid-1998, after repeated assertions he would not be running for President "or anything" in 2000, pollsters got the hint and dropped Powell from their surveys. But he led in five out of the six polls in which his name was included (and was a close second to Bush in the one he did not). The final survey to include Powell as a candidate for President put him ahead of George Bush 25-16%, with Elizabeth Dole, Jack Kemp, and Dan Quayle trailing at 8%, 7%, and 7% respectively.*

So Powell exited the race on a high note.

With the exception of 1997, the 2000 GOP primary process closely mirrored the three I discussed yesterday - Bush positively dominated polls throughout 1998, 1999, & 2000. Senator John McCain, despite the media excitement he created following his New Hampshire win, never seriously threatened Bush from a national polling perspective. In a Gallup survey taken prior to the February 1st NH primary, McCain managed just 15% in a national poll of Republicans, vs. Bush's 65%. After the NH primary, the lead was a considerably smaller, but still daunting 56-34%. That Gallup finding also represented John McCain's national peak, as it was downhill from then until his official exit on March 10, 2000.

Out of 131 total 2000 GOP Primary surveys taken, Bush led in all but five. But traveling back in time to 1997, no one could have foreseen that based off polling alone.

Fun facts: Outside of Colin Powell, former Secretary of Labor, N.C. Senator, and would-be First Lady Elizabeth Dole was Bush's strongest polling foe in 2000 primary surveys (even more so than John McCain), trailing him by as little as 9 points in a February 1999 Fox News Poll of Republicans.




*Harris Poll, Jul, 1998. Retrieved Nov-12-2013 from the iPOLL Databank, The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut. http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu.libproxy.uncg.edu/data_access/ipoll/ipoll.html
**Harris Poll, Oct, 1997. Retrieved Nov-12-2013 from the iPOLL Databank, The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut. http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu.libproxy.uncg.edu/data_access/ipoll/ipoll.html

Fun With Nate Silver's New Interactive Map: Democrats' many paths to 270 in 2016

President George W. Bush held Democrat John Kerry to just 53% of the Latino vote in 2004. But even if Republicans replicate Bush's performance in 2016, they'd have to maintain their 2012 margins with white voters to win.

In the 2012 election, Democrats captured a historical 72% of the Hispanic vote, leading many pundits to speculate that Republicans could have a difficult time capturing the White House in 2016...or perhaps, ever again.

In light of the emerging debate surrounding the effect of immigration reform on Presidential election results, FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver released an awesome interactive map yesterday that allows users to tamper with various demographic and voting distrubition scenarios to produce certain election results WELL into the future (2048, to be exact). And based on what I've seen from the map, it's pretty difficult to create a plausible scenario where the GOP would win in 2016, much less 2048.

Off the bat, I'll note what Nate Silver pointed out in his article yesterday: "Population growth and changes in voting patterns will have much larger effects than how unauthorized immigrants are treated."

In other words, playing around with the percentage of immigrants that could hypothetically become citizens as a result of immigration reform, as well as the percentage of immigrants that could wind up actually voting, effects the results VERY, very little. I'm talking fractions of a point (which kind of blows a hole in Politico's heavily debunked analysis from last week that immigration reform could create an electoral bonanza for Democrats.)

As a result, I let most of Nate Silver's assumptions remain (which were all derived from a 2012 election baseline), tampering only with white, black, and Hispanic demographic vote distribution.

SCENARIO #1:
The first scenario below shows the GOP winning the 2016 presidential election by a narrow 286-252 electoral college votes, and an even narrower 49.6 - 48.6% popular vote win. But getting to this result requires some pretty optimistic assumptions for the GOP. The Democrats share of the white vote would have to drop from 39% to 37%, their share of the black vote would have to drop from 95% to 90%, and their share of the hispanic vote would have to drop from 72% to 67%:



Regarding the black vote: Democrats attracted between 83-90% support from African Americans in presidential elections from 1984-2004. But the election of one of their own in 2008 boosted those numbers to their now near-unanimous 95%. With another non-African-American Democrat running for President, it's possible to see the African American vote returning to pre-2008 levels of 90% or less for Democrats in 2016.

Nate Silver on Hillary Clinton in 2016

Nate Silver is up with a post on why Hillary Clinton would be formidable in 2016, and it's not because her favorability ratings are exceptionally high:

But if Mrs. Clinton runs for president in 2016, one thing is almost certain: she won’t be as popular as she is right now. Recent polls show that about 65 percent of Americans take a favorable view of Mrs. Clinton, while only about 30 percent have a negative one. Those are remarkably high numbers for a politician in an era when many public officials are distrusted or disliked.

But part of the reason for Mrs. Clinton’s high numbers is that, as secretary of state, she has remained largely above the partisan fray that characterizes elections and fights over domestic policy.

The coolest thing  about the Silver article is the chart that compiles information on Hillary's favorable/unfavorable rating since 1992:

PPP promotes findings of Republican fringe; glosses over poor job approval for Obama

Public Policy Polling is out with their first post - election take on the American pulse, testing everything from President Obama's job approval rating, to feelings on various political celebrities such as Nate Silver and General David Petraeus. In case you were wondering, Nate Silver's favorability rating is 12% favorable, 10% unfavorable, while 77% are unsure of either who he is or how they feel about him). In a post titled: "Republicans not handling election results well", PPP blogger Tom Jensen fails to make mention of President Obama's abysmally low 37/59% job approval rating with Independents. Not to mention the President's rating with ALL voter's is an unimpressive 50/47%. In fact, it is historically poor when compared to past presidential job approval ratings.

Take, for example, PPP's measure of how Barack Obama was doing at a similar point after his first election (albeit, a little later) in North Carolina: by a 66/25% margin, North Carolinians approved of President elect Obama's transition into office . Granted, the survey questions are different, but they both measured a level of satisfaction/dissatisfaction with Barack Obama shortly after winning a general election. Not only that, but Independent voters gave him a 65/24% approval rating in the days just before his 2009 inauguration, a very far cry from his post-2012 election rating of 37/59%.