How the Democrats Can Lose the Presidential Election in 2016 (Bill Clinton, economic, program)

[bobtn]

Longer term, by a good stretch, than Ga. Ga took several hours to call in 2012, and as Bureaucat brought up, a good leading indicator of trends is how hard to call is a once easy state. I do think though SC is next in line after Ga, and sadly for the GOP, no state is trending the other way.

[Smash255]

Originally Posted by bobtn

Longer term, by a good stretch, than Ga. Ga took several hours to call in 2012, and as Bureaucat brought up, a good leading indicator of trends is how hard to call is a once easy state. I do think though SC is next in line after Ga, and sadly for the GOP, no state is trending the other way.

I really don't think you can put Georgia and South Carolina in the same category. In Georgia, you can see some of the same trends occuring that was building in Virginia and North Carolina a decade prior. The growth and trends in metro Atlanta are similar to some of the same trends in NOVA, metro Richmond, the Research Triangle and Charlotte. However, the outer edges of the Atlanta metro are growing and uber Republican (such as Forsyth County). That reduces the trend somewhat, and makes it at a slower pace than the trend in VA & NC, but a trend is clear. How much it will continue, remains to be seen, though I do think it is possible Georgia could move more towards swing status in the not too distant future.

South Carolina on the other hand, doesn't have the same factors that Georgia currently has, or NC & VA have had. It has grown, but it isn't as much of the metro area boom which has driven the trends in NC & VA.

[Bureaucat]

Originally Posted by Guamanians

I think you're underestimating how conservative Virginia really is. Keep this in mind.... (D) senator Jim Webb resigned due to his party's extremism. The other senator, Mark Warner joined Rubio in the gang of 6 (or 8?) because that was the ONLY way to get anything done. Warner barely won re-election in 2014. Keep in mind that former (R) Governor Mcdonnell was already under investigation for his shady activities. This had to hurt the GOP brand, but yet Warner almost lost. Former (D) gov T. caine tried to raise taxes and there was a strong public backlash -- so much so that he (Caine) reversed course w/i a month or so of implementing anything long term. And, do you think the black vote will be there for the dems like it was for Obama? Remember, most of VA is highly conservative, and has a strong military presence. This was offset by an enthusiastic black vote in 2008 and 2012.

Only time will tell, but there are number of statistical trends to support the view that Virginia is rapidly becoming a Blue State.

Back in 1970, Virginia was the "Ole Virginny" of the days of the Byrd political machine. Sixty one percent of population lived in rural and small town Virginia and the state as a whole was very conservative. Less than 1 in 5 Virginians were minority and the vast majority were blacks who were denied the right to vote through the '50s and early '60s so the electorate was overwhelmingly white. As of the 2010 census, about 3 out of every 4 Virginians are now classified as urban, with over 70% of then living in NOVA, the Richmond Metro and Tidewater Virginia. The black population (19%) hasn't increased tremendously, but Hispanics (8%) and Asians (6%) have increased to the point where now fully 1 in 3 Virginians is a member of a minority group.

Virginia still has a large veteran population (12%) and large numbers of religious conservatives, but those groups and not increasing as a percentage of the population. The traditionally Republican area of Southwest Virginia is older than the rest of the state and losing population. The most Republican areas of the state are either declining or static, while the Democratic areas are exploding. Between 2000 and 2010, about 55% of the total growth of the state of Virginia occurred in Northern Virginia. If you exclude NOVA from the 2012 election, Mitt Romney won the balance of Virginia by 52-48% and by about 94,000. In NOVA, Obama won about 61% of the vote and amassed a margin of nearly a quarter of a million votes, which turned his deficit in the rest of the state to a margin of 149,000 votes or 3.9%, mirroring his national margin.

One of the strongest indicators of whether a state falls on the Red or Blue side of the political spectrum is the percentage of individuals in the state with advanced degrees. Of the 18 Blue Wall states that have voted for the Democrats since 1992, 16 fall in the upper half of states in this measure. In his book, "The Emerging Democratic Manority", Ruy Teixteira noted that if you looked at the states that were trending Democratic, it was often where you had a combination of either rising minority population, or concentrations of highly educated people drawn to employment in emerging industries, often based around leading research universities. Virginia ranks 4th nationally in the percentage of persons with advanced degrees, only behind solid blue Massachusetts, Maryland and Connecticut, and just ahead of New York and Vermont.

Andrew Gelman of Columbia University and Gary King of Harvard are two of the most respected statisticians/political scientists in the country. They developed a statistical model and a computer program for use in predicting statistical probabilities of elections. The program includes data from past elections, along with changes in the electorate projected due to demographic change. Probabilities of various scenarios are then examined using thousands of computer simulations. Their program was used by Ben Highton of Cal-Davis to examine the probabilities of which way 14 states that were even remotely contestable were likely to fall in 2012 and 2016. In the 2012 projections, these were the states listed as most likely to be carried by the Republicans in a 50/50 national election scenario, meaning results based solely on the tendencies of that particular state:

1: North Carolina
2. Florida
3. Ohio

These states represented the low hanging fruit if you will. Carry all of the safe Republican states and these three swing states and the GOP has 253 EV with 17 more needed. Odds for all three of these states to go R in a 50/50 election was more than 50%.

4. Virginia- odds for carrying Virginia in 2012 were rated at 50%, meaning a 50/50 chance in a 50/50 year. Carry all 4 states and you're at 266 EV.
5. Colorado- take Colorado's 9 EV in conjunction with the above 4 states and the GOP has 275 EV and has elected a President. These 5 states along with Nevada were carried by Dubya in his narrow wins in both 2000 (271 EV) and 2004 (286 EV).

Now look at the tipping order the program is forecasting for 2016:

The top 3 doesn't change. North Carolina, Florida and Ohio are still rated as the most likely Republican in a 50/50 year, although the percentages for a GOP win are marginally lower. But at this point, the tipping order changes. State #4 in statistical probability of a GOP win in 2016 is Colorado. It's not that the odds in Colorado are getting better. It actually declines from 37% to 25%, but becomes the 4th most likely because the odds in Virginia change so drastically. State #5 in the statistical pecking order is, not Virginia, but Pennsylvania, where the statistical odds for a GOP win edge up from 19% to 20%. State # 6 in the pecking order is not Virginia, but New Hampshire at a robust 13%.

Nevada and Virginia, 2 of the 6 states that Dubya used for those massive wins of 271 electoral votes in 2000 and 286 in 2004, are rated by the model as having a 7% chance of voting for a Republican in 2016. The data suggests that a Republican in 2016 is nearly 4 times as likely to carry Colorado and nearly 3 times as likely to carry Pennysylvania than he is to carry Nevada or Virginia.

There was an article after the 2012 election, I think in National Journal or Salon, that criticized the Romney campaign's decision to dump large amounts of advertising dollars into the Las Vegas and Virginia markets, while not putting a lot of resources in Pennsylvania. The way the writer put it was something like "the GOP needs to learn that Virginia isn't that attracted to him anymore and that he should ask Pennsylvania for a date."

I take the computer program results with a grain of salt. It rates the R chances in Iowa and Wisconsin as virtually nil, and I'm not sure I agree with that, but I do think it does identify the likely tipping order of states and the rate of change in states like Virginia.

As I said at the start of this post, only time will tell for sure.

[bobtn]

Bureaucat, Just when I think you cannot post in any more informative way than before, you do.

Amazing! Thanks, knowledge is power.

[dsjj251]

Originally Posted by Guamanians

I think you're underestimating how conservative Virginia really is. Keep this in mind.... (D) senator Jim Webb resigned due to his party's extremism. The other senator, Mark Warner joined Rubio in the gang of 6 (or 8?) because that was the ONLY way to get anything done. Warner barely won re-election in 2014. Keep in mind that former (R) Governor Mcdonnell was already under investigation for his shady activities. This had to hurt the GOP brand, but yet Warner almost lost. Former (D) gov T. caine tried to raise taxes and there was a strong public backlash -- so much so that he (Caine) reversed course w/i a month or so of implementing anything long term. And, do you think the black vote will be there for the dems like it was for Obama? Remember, most of VA is highly conservative, and has a strong military presence. This was offset by an enthusiastic black vote in 2008 and 2012.

Jim Webb did not resign, he chose not to run for re election. The reasoning of why he did that is your opinion and nothing based on facts.

Jim Webb was able to beat George Allen in Virginia in 2006 with out Barack Obama at the top of the ticket as did Senator Warner 2 months ago, so it obvious that Barack Obama doesnt need to be at the top of the ticket for a Democrat to win in Virginia.

[bobtn]

Bureaucat "Nevada and Virginia, 2 of the 6 states that Dubya used for those massive wins of 271 electoral votes in 2000 and 286 in 2004, are rated by the model as having a 7% chance of voting for a Republican in 2016."

Incredible! I knew Va was in Team Red free fall, as I am ultra familiar with NOVA, but 7%.wow..

[Dole-McCain Republican]

Bureaucrat, thank you for your insightful post, but I too take those computer program results with a grain of salt. NC, FL, & OH--in that order--are obviously the easiest swing states for Republicans. But after that, I think that the next ripest target is IA, given its demographics and the fact that it seems less liberal than the remaining swing states. I am honestly not sure if WI or VA is the best bet after that: WI is the least secure state in the blue wall and has favorable demographics to the GOP (though it still has a very long tradition of liberalism), while the GOP still does better in presidential elections in VA than in WI (despite the fact that VA is trending Democratic, I believe that trend has slowed down since 2012).

The GOP should seriously consider PA, but I do feel discouraged about that state since Bush lost it twice despite spending massive resources there. The huge black population in Philadelphia makes it such a challenge for Republicans, and it is such an expensive state in which to compete. I honestly think that both WI and VA are easier than PA. Regarding CO, I couldn't disagree more: the GOP really should avoid that state at all costs. The only reason why they narrowly won a Senate seat was because Gardner ran a great campaign while Udall ran a terrible one. At the same time, an unpopular Democratic governor won re-election by a wider margin than by which Gardner won.

[bobtn]

I was unaware the high % in Va's 3 biggest metros-that may make it more urban than NY. Unreal.

Pa presents a 2nd GOP problem: HC was far more popular in the less blue parts of Pa than Obama, and would likely severely cut GOP margins there, no matter who the opponent is.

PS, Dole-McCain Republican, The Dems have been doing better largely because of Pa urbanization; Philly isn't growing pop as much as neighboring burbs are, burbs that are largely blue, but not covered by the media IMO the way they should have been. As is the case in much of the USA, conservative parts of Pa are stagnant in population, most likely due to feeble economic conditions and being older populations overall.

[Bureaucat]

Originally Posted by bobtn

I was unaware the high % in Va's 3 biggest metros-that may make it more urban than NY. Unreal.

Bob, if you want to see how the odds shake out for all of the contestable states, Google the article in the Monkey Cage blog by Ben Highton in the May 7, 2014 edition of the Washington Post.

[bobtn]

Thanks, Bureaucat!