Amerikaanse verkiezingen 2016 #46 Super Tuesday part II

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Op dinsdag 15 maart 2016 16:15 schreef Re het volgende:
hey ik dacht in POL toch een wat schonere discussie te kunnen houden...

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Can Bernie Sanders Pull Off An Upset In Ohio?
Demographics favor Clinton in Tuesday’s Midwestern primaries, but only narrowly.

Bernie Sanders’s win in Michigan last week was a massive upset relative to the pre-election polls of the state’s voters, which had shown Hillary Clinton ahead by an average of 21 percentage points. In fact, Sanders may have pulled off the biggest upset in the history of primary polling, eclipsing the previous record from 1984, when Gary Hart beat Walter Mondale in New Hampshire despite having trailed him by 17 percentage points.

When you consider Michigan’s demographics, however, the result wasn’t all that shocking. Michigan Democrats are fairly liberal and the state has a lot of college students — both factors that help Sanders. We aren’t just making this up as we go along; last month, we published state-by-state targets for the Clinton-Sanders race based on a few simple demographic variables in each state: specifically, its racial composition, how liberal or conservative it was, and how rural it was. Those targets had Sanders ahead of Clinton by 4 percentage points in Michigan.

Does that mean we called the upset in Michigan weeks ahead of time? No, we weren’t quite that good or lucky. The targets were based on a hypothetical race in which Clinton and Sanders were each winning about half the vote and half the delegates nationally. Since Clinton is ahead of Sanders nationally, she still would have been favored in our model (although not by the blowout margin that polls suggested).

Either way, the big gap between polls and demographics makes us nervous, especially because three more Midwestern states are voting today, including Ohio, where Clinton leads Sanders by about 11 percentage points in the polls. Historically, a margin like that would be quite safe: hence our polling model’s conclusion that Clinton is a 97 percent favorite. But after what just happened in Michigan? I’d love to drop a few bucks on Sanders if a bookmaker offered 30-to-1 odds against him, as our polling model does.

Fortunately, even if the polls haven’t been great, the conditions are potentially favorable for making demographic forecasts of the Democratic race. In 2008, under similar circumstances, I made demographic-based predictions of the Democratic race — see here for my North Carolina prediction, for example — which often outperformed the polls.

Those predictions in 2008 were based on regression analysis. They took advantage of the fact that Democrats report their vote by congressional district, which makes the sample more robust; by the time North Carolina voted eight years ago, for instance, hundreds of diverse congressional districts had already weighed in. So we’re overdue to apply the same technique this year.

In contrast to the demographic benchmarks we set in February, which were based on polling data, these are based on actual votes so far, aggregated across congressional districts. We can then compare these votes against demographic and attitudinal variables in each congressional district. For a more technical description of the analysis, see the footnotes. But basically, we’re just looking for sensible variables that have done a good job of explaining the split in the vote between Clinton and Sanders so far. The ones we included in the model are as follows:
-The share of African-Americans is the best predictor of the Democratic vote to date, with Clinton performing significantly better in congressional districts with more black voters.
-Clinton also performs slightly better in districts with more Hispanic voters, although the magnitude of the effect is considerably smaller than that for black voters.
-Sanders performs better in districts that express liberal attitudes on social policy.
-Sanders performs better in districts with major colleges, as measured by the number of people employed in postsecondary education in each district.
As other researchers have found, Clinton performs better in the South, even after controlling for other factors.
-Sanders performs better in districts where more voters are in labor-union households.
-Clinton performs better in districts where voters are more in favor of gun control.
-Sanders performs better in caucuses relative to primaries, other factors held equal.

This regression analysis models the vote by congressional district reasonably well. We can aggregate the congressional district projections to come up with state forecasts. Here’s what they would have said about the states to have voted so far:

<zie bron voor tabel met data>

Our demographic “retrodiction” for Michigan still has Clinton winning, but only barely — by 3 percentage points, compared with the actual 2-point win for Sanders. Especially under the Democrats’ proportional allocation method, that’s a pretty minor difference. The model’s retrodictions in Vermont and Arkansas are also pretty far off, as you can see, but that makes sense given potential home-state effects for Sanders and Clinton in those states.

Other results are a bit harder to explain. How did Clinton (barely) win the Iowa caucuses when she got crushed in other Midwest caucus states, like Kansas and Minnesota? How did Sanders lose Massachusetts after winning New Hampshire by so much? How did Sanders win Oklahoma by 10 percentage points?

I have my theories — Clinton’s ground game may have saved her in Iowa, for instance — but my goal isn’t to explain away every last bit of variance (in which case I’d be guilty of overfitting my model). Instead, it’s to have reasonably sensible demographic-based projections that pass the smell test when applied to future states. Here are those forecasts, starting with the five states that will vote on Tuesday:

<zie bron voor tabel met data>

The numbers in Ohio jump out, since they suggest — in contrast to the polls — a very close race between Sanders and Clinton. After accounting for the uncertainty in the forecasts, the demographic model gives Sanders a 42 percent chance of winning Ohio, much better than the 3 percent chance that our “polls-only” forecast gives to him.

The news isn’t as good for Sanders in Missouri. There, the demographic model concludes that polls showing the race to be essentially tied are slightly too generous to Sanders; it forecasts Clinton to win by 9 percentage points.

In Illinois, the polls have been all over the place, with recent surveys showing everything from a 42-point lead for Clinton to a 2-point lead for Sanders. Our weighted polling average has Clinton up by 7 points there, and the demographic model is largely in agreement, forecasting a 9-point win for Clinton.

Finally, both polls and demographics imply that Clinton is likely to win by blowout margins in North Carolina and Florida. If Sanders were to win or come close in one of those states, it would be an even bigger upset than Michigan and would suggest that something fundamental had changed in the Democratic race.

For clarity: These are forecasts based on the results so far, as opposed to benchmarks of what might happen in a hypothetical 50-50 race between Clinton and Sanders. If the candidates hit their forecasts on the nose in every state, Clinton would wind up winning by about 10 percentage points nationally. Thus, Sanders needs to substantially beat and not just tie these numbers to have a shot at the nomination. If you like, you can turn them into benchmarks by adding a net of 10 percentage points to Sanders. For instance, while the forecast in Connecticut is Clinton +3, the benchmark would be Sanders +7.

Since Sanders has lost ground to Clinton in the states to have voted so far, however, even that would not suffice for him to win the nomination; he’d have to beat these forecasts by something like 15 percentage points instead. It would be pretty shocking — but then again, Sanders has proven he can win when the odds are against him.

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RALEIGH, NC—In what many political observers are calling a new low in an election season that has already seen its share of negative campaigning, a scathing anti–Ted Cruz attack ad airing this week reportedly shows nothing more than a still photograph of the Texas senator’s face for 30 seconds, unaccompanied by any text, voiceover, or music.

The pointed TV spot—which continues on in complete silence and does not pan across or zoom in on the candidate’s face, but merely holds steady on the image for half a minute before fading to black—is said to be running in several states with upcoming primaries and is paid for by a super PAC opposed to Cruz’s presidential bid.

“This is an extremely vicious jab at Ted Cruz, and one that succeeds in painting the candidate in a most unfavorable light,” said Douglas Reisenthaler, a senior analyst with Public Policy Polling, who described the ad as by far the most unrelenting and hostile attack to air since the 2016 election cycle began. “Inevitably, some voters will be turned off by the maliciousness of showing an unretouched headshot of Ted Cruz on television screens across America, but it has nonetheless proved very effective in turning public opinion against his candidacy.”

He added, “Everywhere this ad has aired, Cruz’s numbers have gone into complete free-fall.”

The Cruz campaign has been vocal in its criticism of what it describes as an underhanded smear tactic, with spokeswoman Alice Stewart saying the televised photo not only crosses the line, but is also difficult to watch. While admitting some amount of mudslinging is to be expected in a competitive race at the national level, she called airing a static image of Cruz’s bare countenance without interruption for the full duration of an ad “sick” and “truly repulsive.”

A representative from the organization responsible for the commercial, Believe in Liberty PAC, defended its actions, noting that while attack ads often digitally alter photographs to make a candidate appear more unflattering or even menacing, the picture it used of the 45-year-old presidential hopeful was completely undoctored and thus did not misrepresent or mislead in any way. Regardless, many viewers told reporters they found the anti-Cruz commercial inexcusable.

“It’s absolutely revolting, and I can’t believe they would run something like that on television,” said Dorothy Chalmers, a Dillsboro, NC mother who saw the ad with her three small children. “I immediately turned it off, of course, but I had to talk with my kids about what we had just seen. It was so nasty and unpleasant, my youngest one started to cry. Is this the kind of low-blow campaigning we can expect to endure through November?”

“After watching the ad, though, I definitely won’t be voting for Ted Cruz,” she continued. “How could you after seeing that?”

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Op dinsdag 15 maart 2016 19:30 schreef fixatoman het volgende:

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Is dat van de Amerikaanse De Speld?

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Op dinsdag 15 maart 2016 19:53 schreef L3gend het volgende:
Net gestemd met mijn vriendin, was minder druk dan verwacht. Er waren paar jongeren voor ons die vergaten te registreren en boos wegliepen.

Op de weg terug, hoorde ik op de radio dat in Ohio in democratische strongholds, de opkomst bij de republikeinen erg hoog is en dat er democraten op Kasich stemmen om Trump tegen te houden

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Op dinsdag 15 maart 2016 20:00 schreef fixatoman het volgende:

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Dat vermoeden heb ik ook ja. Die lopen ook minder risico natuurlijk.

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Op dinsdag 15 maart 2016 20:04 schreef L3gend het volgende:
Zomertijd is afgelopen weekend ingegaan, dus uitslagen komen voor jullie eerder aan dan normaal.

7.30pm ET North Carolina, Ohio
8pm ET Florida (7pm muv Panhandle), Missouri en Illinois