Does this make any noises?
Hello?
Hi.
Is it on?
Yes?
I guess it's on.
Hello?
Hi.
Thought maybe we'd get started.
My name Doralynn Pines, and I am
a member of the class of 1969,
and the chair of
Project Continuum.
I'll tell you about what Project
Continuum is in a minute.
And I want to welcome you to
the committee's first event
of the 2016-2017 year.
Project Continuum is one of
Barnard's Alumni Association
committees.
It's mission is
to bring together
alumni who graduated
30 or more years ago.
We used to have a slightly
different description,
but this is much better.
And to promote dialogue
around the diverse, personal,
and professional
issues they face.
That comes right out of
the mission statement.
Who knew that when we scheduled
this event-- and this is really
true-- so many months ago, that
it would take place the day
after the first
presidential debate.
We really had no idea.
Very pleased to introduce
Professor Michael Miller,
a member of the political
science department since 2014.
Professor Miller teaches
courses on American elections
and political behavior,
research methods, public policy,
and state politics.
His research focuses on American
elections, campaign finance,
election administration,
and political behavior.
He's the author and co-author
of two recent books,
including Subsidizing
Democracy--
How Public Funding
Changes Elections
and How it Can
Work in the Future.
And Super Pac!-- explanation
point-- Money, Elections,
and Voters after
Citizens United,
and of numerous articles
and book chapters.
Prior to becoming an
academic, Professor Miller
was a campaign consultant
on federal races,
managing a number of
campaigns for the House
and serving as a senate senior
strategist on a Senate race.
I also want to say
how grateful we
are to Professor
Miller for stepping in
for Professor Richard Pious,
almost at the last minute.
I'd also like to thank
Professor Emerita Flora
Davidson, who made the initial
connection to Professor Pious.
Professor Miller.
Thank you for that.
I'll try to keep the mic on me.
I generally am quite rangy.
I like to say no
podium can contain me,
but I will try to work
with the AV tonight.
I was asked to give
a talk this evening
on a very simple
question reflected
in the title, which of these
people will win this election.
I'm going to do my best
to answer that question
and give you a sense of what
political science can tell us
about it.
In doing so, though, I want to
show you some inside baseball
on how forecasting works.
I think we tend to approach
this process as magic.
It's the people who
do it are wizards,
and I don't understand what's--
I'm going to tell you how I
would call this
race, and I have--
I forgot to give
you this detail,
but I have also called races
for CBS News in Chicago,
and I can tell you
how that works too.
All of my experience--
academic, campaign consultant,
and as an applied statistician,
which I am by training,
will come in tonight.
So in short, I'm going to help
you win Facebook this evening.
I may not make it
to my 45 limit.
I will do my best.
I also want to just
give you a heads
up that I'm going to
show you some ads tonight
and one of them contains fairly
aggressive language with regard
to race.
We're going to be having so
much fun by the end of this
that if I do go over I
hope you won't notice.
I want to begin by
challenging a meme that's
been thrust upon you by the
media about how elections
are conducted.
We're taught to
think about campaigns
as wire-to-wire
affairs-- the horse race.
We talk about candidates, how
they come out of the gate.
Did Trump get out of the gate?
Did Clinton get out of the game?
We talk about how they're doing
in the backstretch season,
the summer doldrums where
no one's paying attention--
that August season,
when only I am watching.
The election.
We talk about whether
they're ahead or behind.
You can turn on literally
any news source today,
and you will see that happening.
Has the debate altered?
Who's ahead or
behind in this race?
Momentum is a concept that the
media talk about all the time,
and this is absolutely,
in our perspective,
most of us in the field
of political science,
we see this as
absolutely the wrong way
to think about an election.
It's built on a
false foundation,
and it is my fiduciary
duty, I think,
to tell you that before I
tell you anything else--
so I need to give you just a
little bit of baseline here.
We've grown quite
comfortable with stories
like this one that appeared
last week-- actually,
yesterdy-- in Real Clear
Politics-- in the run up
to yesterday's debate.
They make sense to us, because
we've been trained by the media
to think about two horses coming
out of the gate neck and neck,
momentum changing.
Who is it going to be?
They make sense to us.
The phrase Game Changer is the
most overused one in politics.
I'll say more about that later.
And it's all part of the fraud.
Media create these horse
race narratives because they
need us to keep watching.
Who's ahead and who's behind,
especially the concept
of momentum or fabrications
created by an institution who's
only interest is the manufacture
of seemingly important
narrative.
We have become a nation
fascinated by polls,
and while out of one
side of our mouth
we extol on social
media, the polls
that support how we want
things to be-- my candidate
is winning, we say.
We suppress the ones
with wrong conclusions.
We ignore them.
We recognize that all polls
contain an element of error,
and at some level they measure
public support or voter
intent for a
politician any moment,
but we rarely stop to think
about what this means.
The assumption
promulgated by those
who need our eyes continuously
glued to the process
is that there is a great
middle-- a squishy middle
of American voters--
and they're there just
waiting to be persuaded.
This is familiar to you.
How will the independents vote?
How did last night affect
the independent voters?
That's the question that
everybody is talking about.
And that's precisely the first
thing that we need to correct.
The claim that we
hear all the time
is that elections are
determined by that one
third of the electorate-
the great middle.
And when political
scientists hear that,
we generally respond like this.
Now, something
completely different.
This is how I want you to
understand independent voters.
Stay with me.
My students by the
end of the semester
come to refer to
independent voters
a Sasquatches because
the evidence for neither
of these creatures is very good.
We are all partisans in America.
Despite what the media is
telling you, about a third
of the electorate in the
left, a third on the right,
and third in the
middle-- 92% of us
have reliable partisan
identifications.
We just lie to
pollsters because we
don't want to feel like
anybody tells us how to vote.
So I call people up
in a poll and I say,
are you a Democrat, an
independent, Republican
or what?
They say, I'm an independent.
I say, great.
How did you vote in the last
six presidential elections?
And they say for
the Republicans.
And so when you
look at behavior,
you can see that we're
all reliably partisan.
We may defect in some elections,
or become demoralized and sit
some elections out,
but there's one thing
you should take from
everything else I'm
going to say tonight is this--
the media's story of two
people trying to persuade
a great waffling middles
is a false construction.
You're being bamboozled.
As exhibit A, I'll say,
find me the people who
voted for Obama last
time who in this election
are going to break for
Trump, besides your uncle.
Every body's got one uncle.
We would need to see millions
of uncles for that narrative
to be correct.
And if the explanation
is in media, and what
I call the punditocracy
are correct,
then we need to go to
another conclusion.
How do you win an election?
And the answer, we think, is
by identifying your partisans
and getting in the polls.
It's as simple as that.
If everyone is partisan,
you need the task
before you is to know
who those people are
and get them out to vote.
It's true today, it's
been true forever.
And we need to think
about elections that way.
If you can accept that there
are many fewer moving parts
in this system, then
you want there to be,
then the media are
trying to convince you
that there are we can go
quite a long way tonight
down the road of looking ahead
at what's going to happen.
So now, I'll give you
a play in three acts.
How do we call an election?
Well political science,
and polling science,
and all these things can merge.
Act One-- The Fundamentals.
The fundamentals is the thing
that political scientists use
to describe the things that we
cannot change and a candidate
cannot change about the race.
It's just the way
the board is set up.
This is the game that
you have to play.
You may not always like
how the pieces are set up,
but it's the game
that you have to play.
And what does that mean in
the context of an election?
There are economic
fundamentals, and we
think these are very important.
There are also
political fundamentals.
But Bill Clinton
when he ran in 1992
articulated very
well what the notion
of what fundamentals are
in determining an election.
It's the economy, stupid.
We need to be talking about it.
That's what people care about.
He recognized that.
If we notice some things,
we can predict elections
fairly accurately.
If we know pieces
of information,
for instance, about the
economy and its trends-- how
the economy is moving
versus where it is,
it's much more important.
If we know
presidential approval--
how popular is the incumbent?
And if we know how long that
party has held the White
House-- I'll blow
your mind right now--
I can predict an election in
April of the election year
with 85% certainty.
Most voters decide that
early in the election cycle.
Why?
Because we're all partisan.
Because very few
of us cross over.
If you search your feelings,
as Darth Vader used to say,
you'll know it's true.
They don't change their minds
as the events of the campaign
unfold.
Basically, no one changed
their mind last night.
Go to Facebook and you can see
that playing out right now.
It's flowing through
me in the air.
So if we have this
information, we
can do a pretty
good job predicting
the outcome of elections.
Here's exhibit A on that point.
What you're seeing is a plot.
Every year that you see is
the outcome of the election.
The horizontal axis shows
you the incumbent party's
percentage of the
major party vote,
and that's graphed
against the change
in the gross domestic
product of the United States
for the first six
months of the election.
That's when people are really
forming their preferences.
Am I better off today
than I was four years ago?
And if the economy
is growing more,
people will respond
in the affirmative.
You can see on this plot
that as growth goes up,
so, too, does the fortune
of the incumbent party.
And we want growth
right around-- usually
to be on the safe
side, we actually
bounce this up and say we
want a peak to be about 2%
before we start feeling
good about the fortunes
of the incumbent party.
We do that because you'll see
that very few elections are
actually on that
prediction line.
In fact, there's quite
a few that are below.
So this would be examples
of the incumbent party
underperforming.
And so where are
we in this race?
We're right here.
Growth in the first
six months of 2016
is 1.8 points, which would
portend well, it seems,
for the Democrats.
Would put Hillary Clinton
at about 52.5% of the vote.
But again, I'll remind you, if
you're Hillary fan, before you
start celebrating on the
basis of this information,
I'll remind you that there
is quite a lot of bounce
in these numbers.
So we have to look at
more than one thing.
So let's look at
presidential approval.
I've made this graph a
little more palatable for you
by giving you quadrants
in the green lines.
In the top right, you can see
a lot of incumbent parties
that won elections in years
when their sitting president was
popular.
So when the sitting president
has a high approval rating,
his party-- I'll say
"his" because they've all
been through far-- his
party has done well.
Not in the converse is true.
And you don't see
any points here.
So this is a pretty tight
line, with pretty decent
predictive power if we just
break it in the quadrants.
And where is Barack Obama's
aggregated approval rating
today, you might ask.
See how that green
line just turns red?
It's at almost exactly 50%.
Now, this implies a
very close election.
I will give you good
news and bad news.
The good news is
Obama's approval rating
is trending upwards as we speak.
Every month he's doing
a little bit better.
That would suggest that there
will be some poll for Hillary
Clinton as you go on.
The bad news, if you're
a Hillary supporter,
is that this effect is heavily
moderated by the length of time
that the incumbent
party has held office.
So, with the Democrats
now defending
the office for two
consecutive cycles,
that should actually serve
as a brake on this effect.
And so what we're
really seeing here
is that the basic
economic fundamentals
imply a toss up race.
Basically a coin toss.
We need to remember
there have been
two terms of
Democratic presidency,
and with that in
mind, I would actually
say the economic fundamentals
in a generic Democrat
versus a generic
Republican, the Republicans
should be expected to
win in this election.
There are other factors
that matter, though.
Certain other
economic indicators,
like unemployment income
growth, though they're usually
correlated with GDP,
it's why we use that.
And so I would say that
the fundamentals here
give a slight edge to Trump.
And in most other election
years-- most other election
years, I would be fairly
confident to start
making predictions
using this information.
I did it in 2012
and the students
thought I was like
mystical, right.
Here's how political
scientists actually do this.
This is an economic
fundamentals prediction model
by a scholar named Abramowitz.
And he uses economic and
political fundamentals
into his model as predictors.
You can see that the president's
approval goes in here, the GDP
growth, and whether or not
it's the first term in office
for the incumbent party.
Now, I know all this is
Greek with no context,
so we highlighted
the predictors.
You can see that since 1988,
this model has correctly
predicted the winner of
the election every time.
Does anyone want to see
what it predicts this year?
Allan's predicting
a Trump victory
with a probability
of 66% confidence.
However, he's been pretty
forthright that he thinks
this year might be the
wrong prediction for reasons
that I'm going to
tell you shortly.
But he does believe he
can prove he can predict--
within a margin of error--
a Clinton vote share a 48.6%
using only these data.
Does not matter-- in
words, the argument
from many political scientists--
not thing else matters.
Candidate attributes
day to day events
of the campaign,
the ground game,
nothing else matters--
most of the time-- in fact
85% of the time, and in
his case 100% of the time--
we've been able to call a race
using only these fundamentals
information.
We have seen other examples
of political scientists using
fundamental models
to make headlines.
This is a different
model by Helmut Norpoth,
and he's out at Stony Brook.
And his model weighs heavily
the political fundamentals.
Much less focus on the
economy in his model.
He has also
successfully predicted
the results of the last
five presidential elections
with his model, and he is also
forecasting a victory for Trump
with confidence of 87%.
Norpoth's model relies
on the pendulum effect.
He believes that
voters oscillate
between preferences
between Democrats
and Republicans running things.
It's a thermostatic effect is
the best way to understand it.
And as I said, the last
five elections right.
And so people look
at these models
and they reach-- students
especially will say OK,
so I can conclude, then, that
the campaign itself actually
has no bearing on the
outcome of the race.
And that is not quite right.
And, in fact, this time I
think it's really wrong.
So I'm not arguing at
all that the fundamentals
in this election are
determinative, and could
be used on their
own for prediction.
These-- either or-- is
it the fundamentals.
Is it the campaign?
These kinds of comparisons
are not helpful right now.
We need to understand
what we have
to work with in the
selection campaigns
exist within the political
economic environment.
They point people
to the fundamentals.
That's what campaigns do.
So, how do people know
that growth is shrinking
or are going up?
It's because the campaign
is telling them that.
That's thing one.
So if the fundamentals
matter, I would argue that.
It's because we have candidates
telling them the information
that they need to know.
They allow the conversation to
be shaped via agenda setting
and framing.
The candidates are telling us
what they think is important.
And there's good reason to
believe that in this election
the fundamentals alone will
not make a good prediction.
Norpoth-- the last
prediction I showed you--
he's riding that
into the ground.
He is going all the
way with his model.
But as I said,
Abramowitz believes
that his model is wrong.
And these are the
only two-- this
is crucial now-- of
nine prediction models
that political scientists
use, the two I've
showed you are the only two that
are predicting a Trump victory.
To understand why that is, we
need to look at the candidates
and how they're conducting
their campaign because
very crucially when you look
at these models reported
in the media, they're always
dealing with generic Democrats
and generic Republicans.
And if we have learned
one thing in this election
is Trump is not a
generic Republican.
And so let's turn to this
notion of campaign effects.
By campaign effects we mean--
we political scientists--
we mean the impact that the day
to day efforts of a campaign
have on the election
outcome-- the thing that you
think about all the time.
You're conditioned to believe
that this is all that matters.
The media want you
to believe that this
is all that matters so
that every day you tune
in to the reporter that
says, I'm standing here
outside the Trump rally,
and something really awesome
just happened, and it's
going to be a game changer.
That's understandable
that we believe that,
because that we
hear that so much.
And all of the money, and all of
the ads, and all of the events,
and the goings on, we
think it has matter, right?
Political scientists are
significantly more bearish
on this question than
the general public.
We think the campaigns
probably matter a lot less
than most people think.
Some folks think they
don't matter at all--
some political scientists.
But they do matter.
I believe they matter in some
conditions, some of the time.
Crucially for this
election campaign effects
are most important
when the fundamentals
predict a close outcome.
And they're doing that--
we've already seen.
And that's precisely
what we're dealing with.
So, now I want to turn
to a campaign effects
as I see them
relating to this race,
and I'm going to
begin with an example,
then a case, first the example.
Picture this-- the years 1984.
Ronald Reagan's first
term, and the country
is enduring the deepest
recession since World War II.
Nobody was old enough yet
to remember this, right?
One fun fact-- my
earliest memory of my life
is the 1984
presidential election
when my mom let me stay
up late because there
was something about it
that just enthralled me.
I shared that with you.
One year earlier,
the unemployment rate
had been as big has 10%.
It had climbed there on Reagan's
watch, and the people noticed.
In March of 1983,
half the country
said their personal
financial situation had
grown worse during the preceding
year, and in that same year,
Reagan's approval
rating sank to 35%.
We forget that today.
It's not a good
fundamentals board.
Double digit unemployment,
35% presidential approval.
And headed into the 1984
race against the former Vice
President, Ronald
Reagan was in trouble.
Right on cue,
though, the economy
began showing signs
of life in early 1984.
And the key job of Reagan's
re-election campaign
then became to get that
information out to the public,
This is an example of a campaign
communicating the fundamentals
to the voting public.
And he began doing
that with what I think
is the greatest political
ad of all time, which
I'm going to show you now.
The ad is called
"Morning in America."
Some of you will remember it.
It's morning again in America.
Today more men and women will
go to work than ever before
in our country's history,
with interest rates about half
the record highs of 1980.
Nearly 2000 families today
will buy new homes, more than
at any time past four years.
This afternoon, 6500 young
men and women will be married.
And with inflation
of less than half
of what it was just
four years ago,
we can move forward with
confidence to the future.
It's morning again in America.
And under the leadership
of President Reagan,
our country's prouder,
and stronger, and better.
Why would we ever want to
return to where we were
less than four short years ago?
The reason why I give the
inflection of the word "and"
is that's the crucial
moment of the ad.
This ad is really effective
at steering public attention
to the fundamentals, and then
subsequently, telling you who
gets credit for the changes
in the fundamentals.
Despite the rosy rhetoricc--
this morning again, here's
all the great things
that happened,
and Ronald Reagan is the
person who brought it to you.
And despite that,
unemployment in 1984
was still north of 7%, which
isn't good by any measure,
but it was headed in
the right direction.
Reagan's ad plays
on this sentiment
that, hey, things
are getting better.
In other words, these ads
can be effective insofar
as they allow candidates to
harness the fundamentals,
framing their positions
against the backdrop what's
happening in the economy.
Ads are certainly
intended to inform voters
about elections--
their background,
their policy positions.
Ads may not mobilize
on their own.
They may not get
people out to vote,
but they can help voters form
preferences about candidates,
and they can shape how
salient the election seems.
In other words, the
primary function of the ads
is to inform voters about
candidates vis-a-vis
the fundamentals.
Does this work?
That depends what we mean.
Ads do appear to be reasonably
effective at persuasion,
but the effects are ephemeral.
Most studies find that they
wear off in as little as one
to two days.
Or at most, two weeks.
The best campaigns
are, therefore,
packaged around a
theme or brand that
draws a distinction
between the candidates--
and this is crucial--
that is sustained.
And that last bit
is really important.
And now I'm going to give
you a case to think about.
The 1964 presidential election
has obvious parallels to today.
The Republican Party
fielded a nominee
that had fractured support
among its own base, who
is accused of taking
positions outside of the norm
of the Republican Party, and
was labeled as many people
as too extreme.
Lyndon Johnson seized
on this to exploit
his opponent, Barry Goldwater's,
weaknesses in a sustained,
and unrelenting ad campaign.
Now I showed you a single ad
and said, this is a great ad.
I think it's great ad.
The 1964 presidential election
marked the best ad campaign
we have ever seen, because
it's wrapped up in a message.
And you got a little
bit of that last night.
The stakes are too high
for you to stay home.
And so I'm going to show you
three of Lyndon Johnson's ads
to demonstrate
how effective this
can be if it does not let up.
Back in July, in San
Francisco, the Republicans
held a convention.
Remember him?
He was there.
Governor Rockefeller.
Before the convention, he said,
Barry Goldwater's positions
can, and I quote, "spell
disaster for the party
and for the country."
Or him, Governor Scranton.
The day before the convention,
he called Goldwaterism a,
quote, "crazy quilt collection
of absurd and dangerous
positions."
Or this man, Governor Romney.
In June, he said
Goldwater's nomination would
lead to the quote,
"suicidal destruction
of the Republican Party."
So even if you're a Republican
with serious doubts about Barry
Goldwater, you're
in good company.
Vote for President
Johnson on November 3rd.
The stakes are too high
for you to stay home.
That's ad number one.
Here comes ad number two.
This is the one I warned
you about at the outset.
We represent the majority
of the people in Alabama
who hate niggerism,
Catholicism, and Judaism,
and all the isms of
the whole world, so
said Robert Creel of the
Alabama Ku Klux Klan.
He also said, "I
like Barry Goldwater.
He needs our help."
That ad cuts off, but
as originally intended.
Vote for Johnson
on November 3rd.
The stakes are too high
for you to stay home.
Here's the third ad.
I'm having technical difficulty.
There we go.
Now it wants to show us an ad.
So I'll talk over the ad.
Many of you know
the frame from this.
And it's Daisy Girl, the most
famous attack ad of all time.
Aired only one time, because
it was seen as too risky to air
again.
One, two, three, four,
five, seven, six, six,
eight, nine, nine.
10, nine, eight, seven, six,
five, four, three, two, one,
zero.
[EXPLOSION]
These are the stakes.
To make a world in which all
of god's children can live,
or to go into the dark.
We must either love each
other, or we must die.
Vote for President
Johnson on November 3rd.
The stakes are too high
for you to stay home.
When I show that ad to
students today, many of them
don't get it.
Those of us who lived
through-- I mean, they get it,
but they don't feel it.
Those of us who lived
through the Cold War-- and I
grew up in Minot,
North Dakota, which
was the second target on
the Soviet nuclear list.
I was still doing fall-out
drills in 1988 in school.
And so you know
what that ad means.
In totality, Johnson's
ad is wrapped
around the political
fundamentals of the race.
The stakes are too high
for you to stay home.
We're going to push that
theme across many different
fundamental messages,
but that is the message
that I want voters to take
if I'm Lyndon Johnson.
And the lesson from that is that
the most effective ad campaigns
are unrelenting.
We complain about it, right?
Every time I turn on the
TV, I see political ads.
The reason for that is because
they need to be that way.
And that is informative
with respect
to how campaign effects
might shape outcomes
in this election.
If Clinton can sustain a
campaign like Johnson's, she
can gain a crucial preference
advantage, I think.
Now Trump's media strategy has
been anything but sustained.
Yesterday he promised to
spend $114 million on ads,
but he doesn't have that much
money in the bank right now.
So he's relying on
being able to raise it.
And we've never seen such a
spotty media presence ever.
The story here
reminds us that he
has stopped spending money
for the last two weeks
in the battleground states
in the run up to the debate.
That's unprecedented.
He just went completely dark,
and if we believe everything
we think we know,
this should suggest
that he has stalled any
gains that he has made early
in the election
cycle when it comes
to shaping voter preferences.
That really opens a huge
opportunity for Clinton
to reap campaign
effects at a level
that maybe we haven't
observed before.
Particularly, considering
another forensic area
that I'm going to show you
right now, which is money.
This is spending data and fund
raising data as of last week.
And we see here
that Clinton up top
has been able to raise
considerably more than Trump,
which bodes well for her ability
to continue outspending him
down the stretch, if
this trend continues.
And that's an easy
thing to conclude.
She's raising more money,
so she's going to win.
It's easy to conclude.
And if you believe that
ads are what matters,
we're about done here.
I can start taking
questions, but I
need to push back on some more
of that conventional wisdom.
The supposition that the
candidate who raises the most
money will win is false.
That is not a thing
that we actually observe
in presidential campaigns.
I would remind you
that Mitt Romney
outraised Barack Obama in 2012.
I could show you any
number of other examples
of this happening.
We argue about the extent
to which money does matter,
but I always tell students this
is like an old physics vector
problem.
This candidate is
spending money,
and this candidate
is spending money,
and if they both
spend the same money,
then the net effect is zero.
It's only when one candidate
completely overwhelms the other
that money starts to matter.
That's actually
happening this time.
We haven't observed
that happening
in a modern
presidential election
since we started keeping
track forensically of money.
So the one thing
I know is you're
going to lose if you can't
raise any money, but that said,
it's simplistic to
make these conclusions
based on fund raising alone.
Campaign finance reports
can tell us a lot, though,
and it's really useful to really
drill down and look at them.
My students in my
summer class this year--
they were very giddy
when I told them
that the top line item in
Trump's expenditure report
was hats.
That's a true story.
That said, Trump out-raised
Clinton on the last month
12 million to $8.4
million in contributions
from small donors.
And if we buy into the momentum
narrative, that's telling.
Or it could point to his efforts
that the thing that is really
going to win this election--
voter mobilization.
And so I need to speak to that.
For all the ads, all the yard
signs, all hats, signage,
the slick websites,
and direct mail--
political science
has consistently
found that the best way to win
votes is to burn shoe leather.
It's true in 1840, it's true
in 1880, it's true in 2016.
You want to persuade
somebody to vote for you,
you go and knock on
their door and you
have a conversation with them.
This is, ladies and
gentlemen, the most
replicated and well-established
finding in my entire field.
That high quality personal
face to face interaction
is what wins elections.
And by high quality, we mean
you connect with the person
in an individual way.
There are ways to do
this on the phone,
but the most
effective way we have
found in experiment
after experiment
is to do it face to face.
So candidates who are willing
to invest in that, even
though it's not a sexy
line item, and the media
is now going to report
on the ground game
as much as talking about
your big, slick new ad
that you have.
It's really what wins.
The best way to think of this
is that the ads that you see,
and the ads that are talked
about, that's your air war.
But campaigns, just
like war-- real war--
are won by the efforts
conducted on the ground.
And forensically,
we can get a sense
of how the ground
game is unfolding
by looking at the
expenditure report
and that's what you're
now seeing a graphic of.
I draw your attention
to the orange column,
which is payroll,
because if you're
going to have people going door
to door, you have to pay them.
And we can see here--
here's Donald Trump.
The size the dot reflects
the amount of money.
He's spending almost
nothing on payroll.
Here's Hillary Clinton.
Now we can look
also at the amount
of money being spent in
other areas-- events, that's
interesting.
Travel because he
uses his own plane,
he spends a lot more money.
But for me, payroll
is really telling
because it suggests
that Trump is not
investing in field at all.
We know anecdotally
that this is true.
He said as much
in his interviews
that he's content to let the
Republican Party do his voter
mobilization on his behalf.
But we can do even
better than looking
at the people he's paying.
We can count the number of
offices that he's opened.
If we do that, we can get more
evidence for what's going on.
If campaigns are
won by mobilization,
and if mobilization is
best achieved by the face
to face interaction then the
start is hugely informative
I'll boil this down
for you in every state
where it matters
every battleground
state in this election,
Clinton is outgunning
Trump in the ground game.
You can see the trends
reflected in blue for Clinton
and red for Trump.
With the possible
exception of Wisconsin
we see very little in
infrastructure investment
opening that county office.
This has been hard for us to
get an empirical handle on,
but we think that
opening a county office
boosts turnout in that
county by anywhere from 1.5
to three percentage points.
If you are highly effective
at identifying and mobilizing
your voters, this
is how you win.
And this will not be
reflected in a poll.
Bare that in mind as
you consume that stuff.
Nobody's talking about
this because it's
just easier to draw over the
headline that says, Poll colon.
Clinton leads-- so just
never, ever click on a link
that starts that way.
I will never read a
story about one poll, OK?
So I think that this is
possibly determinative.
If the election is
really that close,
this alone could affect
how the campaign unfolds
in the battleground states.
And so in this election,
this kind of thing
might affect the result.
But campaigns certainly
don't matter in the way
that the media want you
to believe-- that there
is that great middle.
I'm just reminding
you now, there
is no wishy-washy-- there's no
person going home and reading
the newspaper and thinking,
which one of these people
should I vote for?
The best way to understand
how the fundamentals interact
with a campaign is this picture.
Now you may well--
in this picture, we
have a rugby pitch
here, and the white team
going this way, that's
Clinton in this election.
She's fighting an uphill battle
because the economy is not
amenable to her.
Democrats have held power--
growth isn't where she'd
like it to be, but if you
come in with a good game plan,
you can compensate
for your disadvantage
here in the slope of the
pitch, and that's really
how campaign effects
interact with
those economic fundamentals to
produce an election outcome.
So the answer is
both things matter.
And so why you came here
is you want me to apply
Act 1 and Act 2 to Act 3.
So let's wade into
this election and I'll
start telling you the things
that you want to know.
First things first, we need
to calm down as a country.
We need to approach these
problems analytically,
we can rely on our
gut a little bit,
but we really need to
keep our head on a swivel
and not act like it's
the first time we've ever
been through an
election in our lives.
There are no game
changers-- none.
What you're seeing here
are the predicted chances
of winning throughout
the 2012 election.
You can see blue line
top, that's Obama.
We never doubted it,
political scientists.
Plenty of people in
the general public did.
You can see a couple
of events here
that shifted the
race a little bit.
This is 47% video.
This is the first debate.
And fun fact, last
night's debate
was scored as the third
most lopsided victory
in American history in
a debate for Clinton.
The most lopsided victory was
the first presidential debate
of 2012 where Obama seemed
to-- he took like Nyquill
or something before the race.
And so the fundamentals are
probably more important,
most of the time, but
maybe not this time.
And that said, even
this time we can fairly
safely say that there
will be no game changers.
There's not going to be
anything that-- oh well,
if not for that one thing
that happened, you know,
Donald Trump would have
won, or vice versa,
unless something major
and unforeseen like
a terrorist attack or some kind
of economic-- that would really
change the dynamics.
And so we're waiting to
see what effects, if any,
the debate may have
for public opinion.
We already have the evidence
for a fairly stable trends
in this race, but you want
to talk about the debate?
I'll talk about the debate.
On the bottom-- so where
do we go besides polls?
I'll talk about polls,
but where else do we go?
On the bottom, we have
prices from predicted,
which is essentially an
online futures market.
The price for a
share of Clinton--
you can buy a share in
Clinton, if you want.
You're effectively betting on
whether she will win the race.
And so if the election
ends and she wins,
you get $1 on every
share you bought.
So if you buy a share for $0.64,
you're going to profit 35.
So the best way to
interpret those figures
is the betting markets
predicted probability
of a Clinton victory.
On the left-- and so people
are betting real money here.
And so when people do that, they
tend to make informed guesses.
And these markets these markets
generally outperform polls
historically, especially over
the long term of an election.
The price at left--
right here-- that was
Clinton's share last Friday.
I went ahead and grabbed that so
I'd have a baseline to compare.
So that's before the debate.
This is Clinton's
price this morning.
So we see here
the betting market
has given her a four point
bump in probability of winning.
At top, we have the trend
in predictive probability
of victory for
the two candidates
from another firm
called Predict Wise.
The data come from an academic
named David Rothchild,
and his a model factors
these kinds of guesses,
plus delta from
social media sites,
like Facebook likes,
and Twitter mentions,
as well as some polls.
And these data tell
a different story
than the one you're seeing
in the media about Trump's
momentum in the weeks
leading up to the polls.
Clinton's probability
has never really changed
in this prediction market.
It's always been
higher than his.
It's a lesson for
me-- it's clear
we can look at the
fundamentals and predict
that Trump is going
to win, or we can look
at different pictures that
factor in other things
and we could reach very
different conclusions
in a forecast, depending
on the stream of data
that we're looking at.
I just added this
slide to my deck
about 10 minutes before
I walked into this room.
I already told you that
the hot poll last night
immediately following
the debate showed
a Clinton victory perceived
by a representative slice
of the public at 35 points.
Couple of things you need to
bare in mind when you look
at hot polls following debates.
They are generally
not representative,
and neither was CNN's.
I looked at the cross tabs
and it skews Democratic,
so we should take a few
points off of their result.
Nonetheless Nate Silver
over at FiveThirtyEight
was kind enough to put this
figure out this afternoon,
which correlates the
perceived result in polls
like CNN's with
the subsequent bump
that a candidate gets in
the polls after a debate.
Now, her 35-point bump would put
her somewhere right about here.
So Silver is
suggesting that she's
going to come out of this
debate with a 2.5 percentage
point increase in her
polling approval nationally.
And so should we use
fundamentals like these ones?
Should we use the
prediction markets?
Well, I think the truth is
usually in between two polls,
and it is worth noting
that five of the six
methods of prediction that
have been published so far
predict a Clinton victory.
It's only the economic
fundamental models that do not.
The truth is probably
somewhere in here.
And these data are current as of
today, not reflecting the poll.
All right, let's talk about
polls, though, and talk
about how polls can
be sensibly used
to think through an election.
Now you know this
gentleman is if you
follow political news at all.
This is Nate Silver, former
baseball statistician,
current election prognosticator.
The strength of his method is
that he uses polling averages
over a period of time instead of
obsessing over the latest one.
And it factors how the
election is actually conducted,
which is state by state.
The national polls
make nice headlines,
but at the end of the
day, I really only
need returns from the
battleground states
to forecast the election.
And if you're nerdy like me,
you can say things like this,
I don't focus on
battleground states.
I have battleground counties.
There are 10 counties
in the United States
that will determine the
outcome of this election,
in my professional opinion,
because this race is
coming down to this map.
So I'm going to go
back to my slides,
and we can start talking
about how that might occur.
Silver's method is
important because it really
forces us to think
about the dynamics
of the electoral college.
These national polls--
they don't tell us anything
because they're going to
mix people from New Jersey
in with people from
Colorado and Iowa.
And so when it comes
to fundamentals, to me,
if I'm going to do
an election forecast,
this is the penultimate one-- a
recognition of the battleground
dynamics of the map.
And so let's-- you
want to game one out?
Let's look at an
elections scenario.
Now I want to tell
you about Trump's path
to victory, so that
you can know where
this race is going to land.
Here, if you want to do this
at home on your own time,
it's 270towin is the website.
I do this a lot just at home.
My choices here will
reflect my prediction
for this race, given data
as of this morning, i.e.
my data do not account
for any polling
surges that Clinton may get.
So I'm going to go ahead and
give all of Mitt Romney's
states to Donald Trump, and
some of Obama states to Hillary
Clinton.
Now, remember-- I should
put this up here--
you need 270 electoral
votes to win,
and the race will
come down-- and this
should shock no one
who pays attention--
to probably these states here.
Now Nevada is trending
for Donald Trump.
I'm going to give it to Hillary
Clinton for two reasons.
One, Nevada-- never believe
a poll from Nevada--
it's the hardest state
in the country to poll.
The population is transient,
and nobody can get
their likely voter model right.
What I do know is that voter
registration among Hispanics
in Nevada is surging,
and I also know how
they're probably going to vote.
For that reason, I'm giving
that state to Hillary Clinton.
For the same reason, I
will give her Colorado.
Her lead is such that I think
she has a very high probability
of winning in Virginia.
If I give Clinton Virginia,
I have to give Iowa to Trump.
Now remember, 270 is the
number we're looking for.
Does this look familiar?
This election will be decided
in Pennsylvania, in my opinion.
Now Ohio is tough.
Ohio is tough, and you
got to just stay with me.
It it's very, very close.
Clinton has a lot
more offices there.
She's spending a lot
more money there,
and everything I think I know
should suggest that in a month,
I could paint that state blue,
but I can't do it tonight.
The data don't support
that conclusion.
And so Pennsylvania,
walking into this room,
is too close to call.
So I have the election at
259 to 259 with Pennsylvania
determining its outcome.
But it could also be Ohio.
So now I want to introduce
you to these two states.
This is Ohio.
Hello, Ohio.
These are the places.
Now, I give you this so that you
can have fun on election night,
regardless of what happens.
You can think oh, I'm going
to go and look at Lake County.
That's how I do elections.
So when I forecast
national elections,
I always set up what
I call barometers.
I've also referred to them in
the past as tsunami warning,
because if there's
a wave coming,
the bell will ring
in these counties.
So if you want to have a
very sophisticated take
on this election,
I think that you
should memorize this counties.
Lake County, Ohio, very
well could determine
the outcome of this race.
It went to Romney
last time narrowly,
but it seems like it's always
the closest county in Ohio.
It's right up here.
It's a suburb of
Cleveland County.
It's suburban, it skews
older on its demographics,
and its white,
but its population
is fairly well educated.
As I said, Romney
won this narrowly.
If Clinton wins it
this time, I think
she will win not only
Ohio, but the election.
So if you look at Lake County,
Ohio-- I could be wrong,
I usually am, but it will at
least make the night more fun.
Similarly in Stark County, right
here, which is home to Akron,
it will be interesting to see
whether Trump's new voters show
up.
This is a blue
collar county where
Obama squeaked by in 2012, but
where I expect Trump's message
to possibly resonate.
So here, yes, we're
looking at how Trump does,
and if he does well, we're
also looking at turnout.
We have not been able to detect
a surge of new registrants
in many of the places that
Trump is expected to do well.
Don't believe these
headlines that
say Republican
registration is surging.
When we actually drill
into the numbers,
we see that there's no
new voters coming in here.
These are people who are
registered Democrats and voting
Republican anyway.
So suspend that.
But if Clinton wins
Stark County, which
is a place where I don't
think she should win,
given the demographics,
I think we
have to start questioning
whether Trump's plan of peeling
away white working class
voters-- Democrats--
is going to work.
If she wins a Lake and
Stark, she will win Ohio.
There are 800,000 or so
voters in Hamilton County,
home to Cincinnati.
Obama rolled up big
numbers here in 2012,
but this time I think
it will be more swingy.
Clinton must win
Hamilton County.
Must win.
If she can get to
52.5% of the vote
here-- I'm giving
you these numbers--
Ohio looks safer for her.
She did win the primary
there against Sanders
in a county with a heavy
population of nonwhite voters.
Finally, Clinton must get people
out in Franklin and Cuyahoga
counties.
Franklin is Columbus,
Cuyahoga is Cleveland.
If we see vote totals
in excess of 425,000,
in Cuyahoga and 330,000
for Clinton in Franklin,
that bodes well for her.
But as I think, as Lake goes,
so goes Ohio in this race.
If you see a lot of counties
going to Trump on election
night in Pennsylvania, it's OK
if you're a Clinton supporter.
That's normal.
And if you're a Trump supporter,
too soon to celebrate.
Clinton needs to run up
the numbers in Philadelphia
in the suburbs, in
Pittsburgh, and in Erie.
And I think it's likely that
Clinton will win only nine
counties in the state
of Pennsylvania,
and you can see how many
there are on the map.
So it's the margin where she
wins that will be important.
If she gets 560,000
votes in Philadelphia--
that's the number to watch
for-- then that's a good sign.
Allegheny County, that's
home to Pittsburgh.
And like most large
cities, Clinton
expects to do well
there, but there are also
a ton of Republicans
in this county--
more than any
county in the state.
Largely concentrated
in the suburbs.
Obama won this county with
57% of the vote in 2012.
If Clinton dips below
55%, I'm thinking she's
in trouble in Pennsylvania.
Again, this really comes down
to a mobilization effort.
There are more than twice as
many Democrats as Republicans
here.
So it's a matter of
getting them out to vote.
Registration trends
have been even
between the parties
in Allegheny County,
and this county is absolutely
crucial for the campaign
on both sides.
But if Lake County,
Ohio, is where
that magic is going to happen,
Bucks County, Pennsylvania,
is where Pennsylvania will turn.
Bucks is a swingy
suburban county
with more than half
million people.
Obama won it narrowly last
time, but by a lot less
than he did in 2008.
There are a lot of white
working class voters in Bucks,
as well as a lot of traditional
mainstream Republicans.
If Trump wins, it
may signal that he's
caught on with at least
one of these groups, which
will make me lean
forward when returns
come in from the great
middle of Pennsylvania.
Now having worked races
across the country,
there's a great axiom
among political consultants
that Pennsylvania is interesting
because you have Philadelphia
here, and Pittsburgh here,
and in the middle is Kentucky.
All of these counties will vote
Republican in this election.
Democrats have always
banked on Luzerne.
Luzerne is as a
county I'm watching.
It's coal country, it's
not getting any younger.
Obama won with 52%
last time, but I
expect Trump to at least
flip that, possibly run up
more numbers.
If he goes above
58% here, he may
be riding a mid state wave that
could win him Pennsylvania.
Republicans have registered
8,500 more voters
than Democrats in
Luzerne County this time.
And so I don't know what color
to color Pennsylvania tonight.
We have to keep watching about
how this election plays out.
But I will give you these
points as takeaways.
To be a better citizen.
What's going to
determine this election?
The fundamentals
or the campaigns?
I think, clearly,
the answer is both.
What polling should I look at?
Well, I think it may actually be
too early to look at any of it
this time.
Close in battleground polling.
When I say close in, I
mean within two weeks
of the election we'll start
leaning forward and believing
the numbers that we see.
I will continue to look at
the campaign finance reports
and office locations to
try to get this right.
And the other
thing that you need
to know is every poll
you've ever seen is wrong.
Statistics is
different than math
in that we try to
arrive at the least
a wrong answer,
not the right one.
A generic Republican should be
the favorite in this election,
but I do expect campaigns
to trump fundamentals
in this race for the
first time in a while.
And we all need to
accept in this election
that sometimes the fundamentals
will swamp everything else.
It does it 85% of the time.
Sometimes the best
candidate doesn't
win because the fundamentals
just made for that field--
the slope of that pitch--
so steep that nothing could
have affected the outcome.
And so I'm going leave us with
kind of a meme to understand
how elections work.
Now we know the
Serenity Prayer, right?
And it can be useful
for us at trying times.
If you are a political candidate
taking everything that I have
told you here tonight about the
awful lot of things that you
cannot change, and your
ability to run against
the fundamentals, we could
alter this and create a serenity
prayer for the
candidates themselves.
Grant me the serenity to
accept economic and political
realities, courage
to spend wisely,
and wisdom to know when
to keep my mouth shut.
That's what you want
if you're a candidate.
And for the rest of us,
the prayer is simple.
Who will win?
I don't know.
I'm sorry if I went long.
[INAUDIBLE]
You've stated as a premise
that there is no middle.
That it's not like
there's a tug of war
and there's a middle
ground which people
are trying to capture,
but doesn't the fact
that election shift
between Republicans
and Democratic
winners belie that?
I mean, surely the reason that
people shift to Republicans,
or the reason that
people go for Democrats,
is that they're not
necessarily absolutely wedded
to what they think.
The Reagan Democrats,
supposedly,
and that kind of thing.
And so isn't there
really a battle of ideas
here that is significant?
The notion of the
Reagan Democrat
is part of what we
call a realignment that
began in 1964 with Lyndon
Johnson's Civil Rights Act,
where the South really left
to the Democratic coalition.
Now, I like to give students
an awful lot of-- I push back
against conventional
wisdom, and one
of the things that
I tell them is it's
a great myth that we
have a two party system.
We actually have a
three party system
where we have a very small
party that caucuses and creates
a majority coalition government
with one of the other larger
parties.
And you can think of the
Dixiecrats in that way.
They used to attach
themselves to the Democrats,
and then beginning in 1964
they attached themselves
to the Republicans, but
that has a long tail.
And it took a long
time for voters--
it's still happening
today-- for voters
to update their
registrations, to activate
that new blinking identity.
And so it was a process
that needed to work through.
We know today that in
Congress the parties
are farther apart than they
have been quite some time.
We know that most of this came
from an apparent rightward
shift among
Republicans, and we also
know that that was fueled
by conservative Democrats
leaving the Democratic Party and
joining the Republican Party.
So it may have been true for
the last 30 years before 2008
there was no voters
in the middle.
But I think most
political scientists
would argue that voters have
quite efficiently sorted
themselves into
the correct party.
In other words, if
you're a liberal today
you're probably a Democrat and
that hasn't always been true
and so these shifts
that we've seen
are dependent on two things.
One, people updating
these identities, and two,
sometimes voters in
one party are just not
fired up for whatever reason.
They sense that the headwinds
are against them, or whatever.
And so I think we can definitely
defend that model by conceiving
of people as weak partisans
who maybe you switch over
and vote for somebody
of the other party.
Thank you very much.
That was really a
wonderful explanation
of many of the factors that
we need to think about.
And in some ways, was
reassuring, and in some ways
not.
One quick question, before
I get to my real question--
the economic fundamentals,
where was 2000,
and which way did it go?
Because I couldn't tell if they
were predicting the Republicans
or the Democrats.
We're talking about
the GDP model?
This one right here?
The first two models.
So, 2000 is here.
It lays off an error
of about 2.5 points.
Because when you have the
popular vote go one way,
and the election given
to somebody else--
Right.
Right.
There was a lot
going on in 2000.
OK, [INAUDIBLE] about that.
But here's my real
question-- I think
that one of the most important
things that you emphasized
was the ground
game, and turn out.
And we know that turnout
is going to be critical.
To what extent should
we be concerned
that turnout will be
affected by voter suppression
activities, which
have been quite
extensive for this election.
That's my first question.
My second question is, will
we see a gender gap in voting,
as we have seen in
recent elections?
Voter suppression.
We have to be careful
how we define that.
There's a couple
ways to define it.
I'll give you an
administrative definition.
And one way to understand
modern suppression
is-- you have to remember that
the Voting Rights Act has been
suspended by Shelby in
the Supreme Court, which
if you read that opinion,
Justice Roberts says racism
used to be a problem,
it's no longer a problem.
The South is free to make
its own election laws,
and release them without
federal intervention to do that.
Subsequently, we get a rash of
fairly oppressive election laws
coming from-- guess
where?-- the South.
We have seen pretty
serious changes to felon--
can felons vote?
In Southern states, we have
seen new voter ID laws.
You can, I think,
defensively characterize
this as a partisan motivated
suppression maneuver.
Will it work?
There is evidence
that voter ID laws
do depress turnout among
African-American and Hispanics
to the tune of about
two percentage points
where they exist.
Where should we be concerned
about this, though?
I hate to be very
strategic about it.
It's a completely
larger and awful issue,
but if we're talking
about it in terms
of how it affects
the election, well
places like Virginia
and Pennsylvania.
Although the courts have
begun to intervene in voter
ID in a way that I didn't
expect very recently.
Other forms of suppression?
Well, Trump has suggested that
poll monitors be sent out.
We know is this is consistent
with things we saw in Jim Crow.
And we know that it suppressed
African-American votes
in those areas.
I think that's something
to watch and think about.
The flip side of the coin,
by the way, is voter fraud.
These voter ID laws are
often justified to prevent
voter fraud, and
the kind of fraud
that they would prevent-- voter
impersonation fraud-- it's not
going to win an election.
It's very costly.
If you get caught it's a felony.
And you would have to
impersonate thousands of people
in order to do this.
And there are legal scholars
who keep track of people who've
been prosecuted
impersonating voters,
and there have been more than a
billion votes cast since 2000,
and we are aware
of, last I checked,
24 cases voter impersonation
fraud in the United States.
Second question is about gender.
There is pretty strong
evidence in political science
for the existence of what
we call an affinity effect.
The theory is that
women pull women.
Women as candidates pull
women voters to them.
This generally only flows
to Democratic women.
And the theory is that it's
easier for a Republican woman
because they're more liberal.
They're closer to the middle
of the political spectrum,
because women, in general,
are more liberal than men.
So they have a smaller
distance to travel.
So when Democratic
women run, they
have been successful in
congressional elections,
at least, in attracting votes
from people who would not
have voted for them
if they were not women
to the tune of, again,
about two points.
But all these two point
effects can start adding up.
Will there be an affinity
effect this time?
Well you couldn't ask for
better ground for two better
candidates to get an affinity
effect than the candidates
that we have.
Go ahead.
[INAUDIBLE] How
[INAUDIBLE] effect
this election, specifically
in the counties--
the swing counties.
And the second part of the
question is, at the debate
last night, I thought Donald
Trump was going backwards
and forwards in a
word salad, but he
seemed to have this theme of
us against them, good vs. evil
that, I think, people
can really grasp onto,
whereas Hillary is just
more nuanced and more
difficult to understand.
So is that going to
play into the election?
The first question is,
how third party candidates
will affect the race.
Difficult to know.
There will be a protest
vote from both parties.
There are plenty
of Republicans who
won't vote for Donald Trump.
Where do they put their
vote is the question.
Now strategically,
if I'm a strategist,
I love those people if I'm
a Democratic strategist,
because if they go and
vote for Gary Johnson,
that's as good as a
vote for Hillary Clinton
because Trump is not
getting a vote that he
would have otherwise gotten.
So taking away a vote for
my opponent is just as good.
The risk for the Democrats
is that there are disaffected
Democrats who for
whatever reason
will not vote for
Hillary Clinton
and will do the same thing.
And those are the people that
she should be concerned about.
I don't know what the
answer to that is,
and I don't know
where it comes from.
Part of it, I think, is
because she's a woman.
I think there's overt,
or subconscious, gender
stereotypes, and the
positions that she
take have provoked a reaction
that we haven't seen.
I tell the students to
really think about their vote
carefully in this race.
There seems to be
a cultural moment
that we're in that we have
begun to demand inspiration.
And we say to
ourselves, well I'm not
going to vote for you
because you haven't moved me
to tears during this race.
And I don't know
where that comes from,
but it's a dangerous way to
conceive of your vote, I think.
I think voting is
a five-second deal.
You go in and you say, that one.
Hopefully you've informed
yourself to make that choice,
but I don't have good data to
answer your question about who
it hurts or who it helps.
I would suspect,
based on what I know,
that it will hurt Trump
more, but not in the places
where, if you're a Democrat,
you would need him to be hurt.
I think the white collar
working class voters,
they're going to break
for him, not Johnson.
It's the mainstream Republicans
that will go to Johnson,
so I would expect the depressed
vote because of Johnson
in the suburbs.
And the second
question was the--
How Trump sticks to
this good versus evil.
Us versus them, yeah.
So you need to
remember that Trump
is campaigning as a populist.
Now Trump's political ideology
is best characterized, I think,
as a neo-fascist.
I'm putting him into an
actual category, just based
on the positions
that he's taken.
It wasn't a joke.
He's running as a populist, and
he's making a populist appeal,
and he's doing this
right out of the playbook
of other populist
candidates that we've seen.
Now Bernie Sanders had
a populist flavor, too,
but he actually was running
a very well informed policy
campaign, and that
was the exception.
Populists always point at
something to be against.
That's the name of the game.
It's us versus them, and
that's what you're seeing.
Trump's position just happens
to be-- I mean you follow along
race racial and class
lines, and those
are chords that resonate
with every American, which
makes it easy for us to spot.
Until fairly recently,
it seemed to me
that Florida was trending for
Clinton, and then it changed.
I'm wondering if you could
comment on what happened?
I don't know.
It's been something that
I've been looking at,
and I don't know.
But what I suspect is two
things could be happening.
One thing that
could be happening
is that Trump has somehow
begun really shoring up
support in the northern
part of the state.
That's where his
base will really be.
Another thing that
could be happening,
is that the polls are getting
the likely voter model wrong.
And so when we see
45% of Americans
are going to support
Trump, that's
really the most important thing
when you're looking at a poll.
I want to know what's your
likely voter algorithm.
And nobody will ever tell you
except The New York Times.
They sit on these
algorithms like-- well,
they're proprietary.
And it could be just
as simple as that.
The pollsters are overestimating
the propensity of voters
in the northern part of
the state to turn out,
but I don't know.
I don't know why.
I don't have any other answer.
A number of weeks ago,
for the first time
I heard the news media
talk about hacking
with all these electronic
voting machines.
That seemed like a real
concern, because it
could happen in large scale.
Can you explain how
that would happen
and what the likelihood is?
Let me tell you why you
should be very afraid.
This is my wheel house.
These are problems that I've
been thinking about since 2000
when I was an undergraduate.
When you go to buy gas,
unless you live in New Jersey,
you pull up to the
pump and you get out
put it in, and swipe the
card, and the gas pump
gives you a receipt.
When you go to vote on an
electric machine, you walk in,
you pull the curtain, and you
genuflect before democracy,
push the buttons, and
away flies your vote.
And you trust that that
vote was correctly recorded.
Now, last time I voted in New
Jersey, which is where I live.
I did it on one of these
machines, and I walk out,
I go to the poll worker and
I say, can I get a receipt?
Her response is really
telling about how
election administrators across
this country view this problem.
She said, what could you
possibly want that for?
Now, you should be terrified
about the possibility
for shenanigans resulting from
electronic voting machines.
And if you don't believe me,
Google a United States Senate
primary that occurred in 2010.
A candidate named Alvin
Greene, who spent no money,
had no campaign, beat
a well-established city
councilman in South Carolina.
He'd been a judge.
He'd been out there
running every day.
And beat him by 110,000 votes.
I was asked to do statistical
analysis of this outcome,
and I will go to
my grave convinced
that whoever set up the
algorithm to tabulate votes,
flipped the candidates.
That's what my
analysis suggested.
Now can I prove it?
Well, the way that I did it is
I took the paper ballots that
came in an absentee, and
I correlated the patterns
across the state at
the precinct level,
and I found it was almost
perfect reverse correlation.
And all it takes is
one problem like that.
The greatest enemy to our
democracy is not fraud,
it's incompetence.
Now we need to really think
as citizens about the best way
to do this, because
we very often
have county clerks who know
nothing about elections
before they're elected.
Constantly we're bombarded
with these stories about ballot
design, and vote counting,
and it gets worse.
There was a computer scientist,
I believe at Princeton,
several years ago who an extra
credit assignment to his class.
Gave them a voting machine,
asked them to hack it.
He said whoever can do this in
the smallest number of steps
will get extra
credit or something.
They did it with a paper
clip and a piece of gum
in 11 seconds.
They were able to
reverse the vote totals.
It gets worse.
If you start thinking about how
these systems are networked,
and the ability for
any entry point,
there have been people who have
been able to show that you can
just pop the lid off
of these machines
and upload a virus that infects,
it spreads across the network,
and it is untraceable.
You should demand this.
It if we demand nothing else,
this should cross party lines.
This is urgent, in my opinion.
Because imagine the
constitutional crisis
we will face when, and it
is when, our voting systems
are compromised in this way.
The best way of voting
is still on paper.
Minnesota still
does it this way.
Minnesota has the highest
marks for election validity
in the United States.
So this literally
keeps me up at night.
So I'm glad you
asked the question.
I have a question about
the underlying fundamentals
that you started
talking about with us.
We could probably all agree
on the number of years
an incumbent has been in office,
and the percent change in GDP
is a fact that presumably
we could all agree on.
But it seems like increasingly
even things like basic facts
are being called into question,
or they're not affecting
the country in the same ways.
So I'm thinking, well, maybe
that gets into the campaign
aspect of your talk, which is,
I guess, spinning the facts,
or lying about them, but how
does that affect the underlying
fundamentals when
you can't even-- when
a percentage of the
voting population
won't even agree on the
basic underlying facts.
John Adams said, facts
are stubborn things.
They are becoming
increasingly less stubborn.
This is one of the
symptoms-- or the phenomenon
that we talked about
earlier-- this notion
of party sorting,
where now we have
very clear tribes of voters.
We have the Democrats, and
we have the Republicans.
There's a lot of
things fueling this.
You can-- if you're a
conservative voter in America--
you can wake up, read
the Wall Street Journal,
turn on Fox News, drive
listening to Rush Limbaugh,
come home watch prime
time Fox News, go to bed.
Never encounter a
countervailing argument.
And you can do the same
thing if you're a liberal.
And this is
increasingly-- what we
are all if, we search
our feelings-- what
we're all self-selecting into.
And so it becomes
very hard to craft
a good critical argument, one.
To have anything resembling
a conversation instead
of a fight, two.
But the most interesting
answer is really
that facts are not
facts, because there's
a principle in psychology called
motivated reasoning that's
entered the way that we have
begun to understand how facts
are actually employed in
the mind of the voter.
I do work in this area.
And so the way that this works
is if you're a Democrat, say,
and the example that I always
use in class because it's
near and dear to me as a native
North Dakotan is the Keystone
XL pipeline.
Now, if you're a
Democrat, you're
pre-wired to think--
well, someone has told me
that there's environmental
degradation happening
with this pipeline, so I'm going
to be against this pipeline.
And so when you
hear a news story
about the pipeline, what
happens in your brain?
There could be two facts.
And the first fact will say
the oil coming from the Bakken
where they're taking
this out, is thicker.
it burns worse, it's more
emissions, it's just bad.
You will take that, you
will put it in your brain,
and you will use
it at the barbecue.
And you might get
another thing, though,
that says this is going to have
a economic benefit in the form
of new jobs,
maintenance, and whatever
that will benefit the local
economies by $2 billion.
That fact, because
you're already
predisposed or motivated to not
like this, it hits your brain
and bounces off.
You never retain it.
You never attain it.
This is the way--
I am aware of this.
I know that this is a thing.
My brain works the same way.
If we are motivated to a
predisposed end already,
we are actually incapable
of absorbing facts.
And so when we look at the way
that candidates in our politics
are beginning to be waged,
I can see it reflected
in the two tribes of voter.
And it does not bode well
for a good two-way rhetoric.
I think if we've lost one
thing in this country,
it's the ability to have that
conversation with the person
that we disagree.
And my challenge to you
would be to continue
having the conversation.
Don't give up.
I think it's really important
to continue the conversation.
You can continue it
with me on Twitter.
I'm very active there.
But you should not shy away.
You shouldn't delete people
from the social media
just because they're posting
things you find objectionable.
Try to have the conversation
before you delete them.
And if they're jerks,
then at least you know.
But I think we still have a
lot to learn from each other,
and we should go out of
our ways to recognize that.
That is the only way
to solve that problem.
