The rough outline of the 2016 general election is set: barring unforeseen events, Republican candidate Donald Trump will face Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton this November. Even as Clinton wraps up her party’s nomination, however, media figures and other commentators have launched a barrage of disingenuous concern trolling in her direction. Typical points raised include “If Hillary Clinton isn’t a weak candidate, why does she continue to lose state contests?” “Carter was ahead of Reagan and people treated Reagan like a joke, but he won a crushing victory in the general!” and “This year is just different! Trump’s reshaping the electorate with his outsider appeal!” These “concerns" are raised over and over, presumably to heighten the horse race drama and reinforce "narratives" such as Clinton's alleged lack of enthusiasm and Donald Trump's alleged appeal to "real Americans." The problem is, it’s all bunk. Let’s unpack the misinformation here.
1. Losing states late in the primary is a sign of weakness as a candidate.
No. This meme is seemingly related to the notion of “momentum;” that is, the idea that enthusiasm and excitement builds for a candidate across a series of wins. This point of view holds that Clinton’s scattered losses deep into the primary are signs of flagging enthusiasm and an inability to “close the deal.” But it’s completely wrong. Demographics, not “momentum” or any other fuzzy concept, have been the best predictor of state victories this cycle. As in 2008, factors such as race and age have explained variances in the Democratic candidates’ vote share. Indeed, Senator Barack Obama lost Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, and South Dakota, states where he was demographically weak, late in a much closer primary race before going on to win the general election with a greater percentage of the popular vote since LBJ in 1964. There is no quantifiable enthusiasm gap or “inability to close the deal,” just demographic variance between states.
2. Carter and Reagan
Although this one also made an appearance in 2012, it is back with a vengeance this year due to some people seeing parallels between Reagan and Trump. The meme goes that Carter was comfortably ahead of Reagan, but a late debate victory by the latter drove undecided voters into his column for a landslide win. The problem is that this narrative literally ignores the polling facts. In 1980, Ronald Reagan took a polling lead in the spring and never gave it up. In contrast, Hillary Clinton has consistently led Trump in polling aggregates with no evidence of the long downward slide Carter experienced throughout the spring. This was around the point at which Reagan took his lead over Carter, but Clinton’s lead on Trump has expanded over the same period.
3. Watch out! The pundits were wrong about Trump in the primaries, too!
This meme indicates a wrong lesson learned from the primaries. The story of the GOP primaries was pundits writing Trump off despite ample polling data showing him dominating the race. The polling was correct. Now, the same commentators are advising that we ignore polling because pundits were wrong about Trump before, because they ignored polling. Despite a few misses, polling and demographic modeling have been extremely useful for predicting winners this cycle. The predictions of Trump’s demise were made by people who ignored data. That isn’t an argument for continuing to ignore data.
4. Trump ‘s outsider appeal will reshape the electorate
Given his catastrophically bad numbers with key demographics, including African Americans, Latinx voters, and women, Trump’s path to the White House has always been dependent on producing historic margins and turnout among white men. The problem for Trump is that there is no solid proof that he is having this transformative effect on the electorate. In fact, there is at least some evidence that Trump is underperforming with white voters in addition to other demographics. This is not evidence of a game changing candidate. It is evidence of a remarkably weak candidate.
None of this is to say we should rest on our laurels. We need to be working hard and running like the Democrats are ten points behind in order to ensure that Donald Trump is not, by some miracle, elected President of the Untied States. But we should also reject disingenuous, dishonest, and factually incorrect concern trolling about Hillary Clinton.