Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Good News and Bad News in Gary Johnson’s Polls
Click to expand.
Gary Johnson’s campaign for President has lately had a mix of bad and good news in the polls — more on that in a moment — but the poll on the front page of yesterday’s Washington Post definitely is one he will be talking about. Using SurveyMonkey online methodology, the survey measured voter opinion in each of the 50 states over the past month. And it finds the Libertarian candidate to be a serious factor in the race.
The headline finding for Johnson is that he reaches 15 percent of the vote or better in 15 states, and 10 percent or better in 42 states, that is, all but eight. The states where he makes the strongest showing are his own New Mexico (25 percent); Utah (23 percent); Alaska, Idaho, and South Dakota (19 percent); Kansas (17 percent); Colorado, Iowa, North Dakota, and Washington (16 percent); and Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, Rhode Island, and Wyoming (15 percent).
At the other end, the eight states that lag most in enthusiasm for the mountain-climbing two-term governor are Louisiana and Maryland at 9 percent; Alabama, New Jersey, and New York at 8 percent; Hawaii and Kentucky at 7 percent; and Mississippi at a mere 4 percent.
It’s hard to dismiss this as statistical noise associated with the imperfections of measuring opinions in small states (where Johnson tends to do best) because both his stronger states and weaker states form coherent geographical clusters. If you were playing Game of the States, you could hop a continuous path on the map through all but two of his best states: Alaska, Idaho, Utah, New Mexico (a corner crossing, but the Milton Bradley rules say that’s okay), then up to Iowa and around Minnesota and the Dakotas to Wyoming. You’d still need to make it over to Maine and Rhode Island, two New England states known for their love of quirkiness, to finish collecting your biggest Johnson fans. The areas of the country not yet enthusiastic about Gary likewise form recognizable clusters: one in Louisiana-Mississippi-Alabama, the other New York-New Jersey-Maryland, plus Kentucky.
According to the new poll, Gary Johnson is not far from overtaking Donald Trump for second place in his home state of New Mexico, while in at least five states he’s within 10 points of pushing Hillary Clinton into third place: Utah (where he trails her by only 4 percent); Idaho and Wyoming (6 percent); and North and South Dakota (10 percent).
In this fluid and surprising election year, with new revelations coming daily and unexpected endorsements likely, anything could happen — including a Johnson move into first place in states like Utah and New Mexico. Yet the Commission on Presidential Debates — its rules and behavior shaped over the years by loyalists of the two major parties — could exclude him based on its calculation of whether he has reached an average of 15 percent before each debate in five CPD-designated major polls.
For better or worse, Johnson’s performance in national polls keeps scattering widely — in six national polls to come out within the past few days he’s scored 12 percent in NBC/SM and IBD, 11 percent in GWU, 9 percent in Fox, and only 7 percent in CNN and Rasmussen. While the new WaPo/SM is consistent with the higher end of that range, the polls preferred by the debate commission — unfortunately for Johnson — tend to be the ones where he underperforms.
There is, of course, no single best way to design and weight a poll. Outcomes for Johnson may vary greatly depending on the sampling of independent voters (who contribute much of his strength) and technology used (Johnson’s support skews dramatically young, which means his supporters are more likely to lack landlines and engage online).
Like it or not, the debate commission’s methods are going to be coming under intense scrutiny. Former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, Johnson’s running mate, makes a good point here: “They [the debate commission] have a duty to be non-partisan rather than bipartisan.” That same distinction comes up in legislative redistricting, where bipartisan line drawing can sometimes reach a very different result (“You can protect your guys if we can protect ours”) than a nonpartisan process would have done.
A truly nonpartisan commission would need to set some thresholds and standards for debate admission: you don’t need to be a Republican or Democratic partisan to see the problem with letting 12 small-party candidates jostle with Clinton and Trump for camera time. But is there much doubt that if the debate commission truly followed a non-partisan rather than bipartisan course, Johnson (and perhaps also Green Party nominee Jill Stein) would right now be in a position to practice their zingers for the debate stage?
Published in General
How do you figure?
Yeah, in case you didn’t notice, James was pointing out that the inevitable consequence of this standard is a growth in the number of candidates who make the effort to get such ballot access. He was asking if it is really all that enlightening to have a half dozen people on stage for example, four of whom have no chance of winning?
Getting ballot access for 270 electoral votes isn’t actually all that hard. Many small parties don’t bother because it offers them nothing tangible. Getting on the debate stage is something tangible, and makes the entire affair a debacle.
The more people on stage, the less they actually talk. It becomes easier for each to know nothing but a rote couple of sentences about a given issue and regurgitate them on stage.
Rewatch the libertarian debate from the convention. Each member repeating short sound bytes ad nauseam. Nothing of substance was ever actually debated.
Well, I’d say that nothing of substance gets debated in the CPD debates.
The problem with excluding other candidates from the general debates should be obvious: the choices get worse and worse. This year’s garbage candidates are the worst yet.
There is genuine back and forth between both candidates. Knowledge must extend beyond the superficial in order to not come off as a buffoon.
The choices usually don’t get worse and worse. It fluctuates. Johnson is a horrible politician, and Stein a complete joke. Adding those two clowns to the stage does not improve the choices, it merely clutters the stage with people who can’t win.
You consider that “genuine”?
As to your comments wrt Johnson and Stein, I’m not saying it would be a complete panacea. It’s a process. Opening up the debates would allow more competition. Competition benefits the consumer.
The current duopoly guarantees a mediocre product. As evidenced by this year’s choices.
You deny that there are often 2 to 3 rebuttals on any given topic?
Most of the free world has more than two parties, and their results are not better in this regard.
From where I sit, the choices have consistently deteriorated for the last 30 years. I can’t think of single candidate that was better than his predecessor. The closest was probably Romney after McCain.
I think the debates should include the top 3 candidates at a minimum. This would provide an incentive for third parties to get more serious and less fringe. FWIW pretty soon, it will be the Republican Party vying for that third slot, so adopting that policy now could serve to lengthen their political life.
I’d deny that anything in the CPD “debates” is anything that could be called genuine public discourse.
Come on now. I get that have a vested interest in wanting Johnson off the stage for some reason, but you must have a REALLY low threshold for what qualifies as a “debate” if you actually believe this.
Whether 10 candidates on stage or 2, these things boil down to the available candidates just going back and forth reciting talking points. By this point, I’d be content if we just did away with them all together if they’re not going to offer anything of substance.
I have witnessed the alternative many times, and there is no doubt that what occurs during the presidential debates are an order of magnitude more useful than what happens in debates with numerous candidates on stage.
All you get are sound byte answers from the latter. The former at least requires enough knowledge to go back and forth several times. There is a significant difference between the two scenarios.
I would also advise you against assuming bad motives from other members in disagreements.
There are 3 debates scheduled, why not compromise?
3rd party candidates get a chance to state their case in the first debate, but unless they get traction they get weeded out of the later debates.
I wish the GOP primary debate had followed a similar format, and whittled it down to the top 2-4 by the final debates.
Neither major candidate shows up to this one. No one watches in turn, leaving it as useless as Johnson and Stein getting together on their own in order to have a debate.
Joe,
There is no perfect solution. However, I too have favored the narrowing approach. It would give everyone a chance while still applying pressure to focus the process on making the necessary decision. At the moment, with all eyes focused on Trump pulling even with Hillary in the polls, I am surprised that more is not made of the possibility of the Johnson candidacy having a large enough effect to throw the election. Especially with Johnson’s 7-9% not being evenly distributed it could work a great deal of mischief in the electoral college. If Johnson’s effect in heavily blue states is negligible but large in what would be red states this could damage Trump’s electoral vote performance.
Make no mistake, I am not a Michael Barone. However, I am surprised by the lack of analysis about this possibility. If Johnson is magically no threat to either candidate I’d like to see the numbers that prove this unlikely case.
Regards,
Jim
I think Cruz is morally bad and dishonest, that some of his policies were poor, and that he didn’t seem terribly interested in pursuing the conservative goals he outlined. Other than his tax plan, I didn’t attack his ideal policies much; they were mostly broadly in line with his values. I didn’t suggest he was ignorant, lazy, an addict, or adulterous.
With Johnson, while it still irritates me that the media suggest that he’s honest, it’s those qualities and the leftism that animate me most. As I used to say of the Trump/ Cruz race, Trump seems like the better human being, but Cruz would be a better President. Johnson seems inferior to Trump on both grounds, but the comparison to Cruz still seems to hold. Johnson seems upset when he says things that hurt people; I wish he wouldn’t take, eg. Gun friendly positions with gun crowds and control positions with everyone else, but the desire to please everyone seems more humane than sadism.
Which is to say that I object to both more viscerally than I do to Clinton or Trump, but the nature of that objection is different. I’ve always said that Cruz would be a better President than they would be, but would never have suggested that of Johnson.
For what it’s worth, no one is stopping this from happening. It’s just that the LP aren’t particularly interested in talking to the Constitution Party or the Greens. Johnson endlessly says that he’s “the” third party (using the singular first person). His message gets undermined by the existence of multitudes.
I would love to have an undercard debate, though.
What do you feel were the first and second most useful sources for the views and attitudes of the candidates in 2008, 2004, and 2000? I feel like America learned a lot from the debates in each.
How so? Are you saying you do want Johnson on the stage? Your other posts above suggested the opposite.
What did you mean by “vested interest”? If you meant “preference”, then I think that Frank misread you.
At any rate, I’m in a bit of an ornery mood today and coming in with the rhetorical bull horns on. I apologize to the extent that misinterpreted your motivation in any way. I don’t find the 10 person debates all that appealing either, but don’t see how adding a third person would be all that disruptive to what is ultimately just a glorified recession of talking points.
To all,
Polls: Trump and Clinton deadlocked in Florida, Ohio
This is what I’m talking about. Trump has pulled even or even a 1% lead in the overall national polls. He’s pulled even in two major battleground states. However, Clinton still has her choke hold on the electoral college. Of course, if Trump were to pull out to a more commanding lead then it would be academic. If it stays close, problems arising from Johnson’s 3rd party vote could easily swing it.
I don’t believe the extreme negative projections against Trump because of the intense volatility already demonstrated this year. I can’t understand why so much verbiage is wasted invoking the 2012 results and not a paragraph by qualified pollsters deeply analyzing Johnson’s voters. By historical American standards, 7-9% is a huge 3rd party vote. A highly imbalanced huge 3rd party vote is an electoral college iceberg waiting to wreck your voyage.
I’d like to see some numbers.
Regards,
Jim
Well for starters, the current RCP average for a 2-way race has Clinton up 2.8, while the 4-way polls have Clinton up 2.1. So it seems the net effect of including both Johnson and Stein is fairly minor, 0.7%, and well within the margin of error.
Of course you’d have to break it down state-by-state to do a more thorough analysis.
Joe,
Running averages are not the best indicator of what will happen in a volatile race on election day. The more important point is that the influence of the Johnson campaign is far from uniform across states. This could effect the electoral college totals in a much more dangerous way. This is exactly what I mean about not taking the analysis of Johnson’s voters seriously. A 3rd party vote of this size has all kinds of potentials for mischieve. It should be closely analyzed at this point with regular projections made. Otherwise, surprise on election day and Johnson swings 20 electoral votes from one side to the other and so goes the election. I’m not saying it will happen but I am surprised that nobody seems interested in proving that it won’t.
Regards,
Jim
Including both Johnson and Stein results in relatively little impact; in other words, the partisan impact of Stein (almost 100% pro Trump) is slightly greater than the partisan impact of Johnson (2/3 pro-Clinton, 1/3 pro-Trump, for about 1/3 of his vote share, i.e. Somewhat less than Stein’s impact).
That is a very different statement to a suggestion that either is not likely to be decisive. Although having a good pitcher on each team may not impact the ultimate result, it would be an eccentric analyst or coach who overlooked pitching as an issue because it affected both sides.