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Any Republican Would Have Won in 2016? It Ain’t Necessarily So.
Don’t bet your house on the roulette pattern — or your country on the election pattern. Correlation is not causation and past performance does not necessarily predict future results. We all know this, yet it is great fun to prognosticate and to chew the fat over past sports and presidential election seasons. Moving beyond such speculation towards serious analysis requires us to turn to the theory and practice of political science.
In Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research, Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba laid out the case for research that is scientific even without large data sets — situations like the small set of presidential elections. Arguing against ad hoc explanations, they laid out the basics of research design: “the research question, the theory, the data, and the use of the data.” (p.13)
A social science theory is a reasoned and precise speculation about the answer to a research question, including a statement about why the proposed answer is correct.
[…] Any intelligent scholar can come up with a “plausible” theory for any set of data after the fact, yet to do so demonstrates nothing about the veracity of the theory. […] Human beings are very good at recognizing patterns but not very good at recognizing nonpatterns. (p.21)
Consider an annual event, which in presidential election years highly correlates with the election outcome.
Discovered by Steve Hirdt of the Elias Sports Bureau, the Redskins Rule that when the Washington Redskins win their last home game during an election year, the incumbent party will retain the White House. If they lose, the challenging party will take the election. (The connection was even cited in 2007 episode of Mad Men.)
Sure, it sounds a little goofy, but here’s the astonishing part about the Redskins Rule: since 1936, it held true for every election year until 2004, when George W. Bush retained the presidency after the Skins lost the last game of the season. The Rule got back on track in 2008, however, when Washington lost its final game and Barack Obama took the White House.
Is this a meaningful pattern? Would you really ask how sporting events significantly influence, let alone determine, the outcome of presidential elections in America? Note that the “theory” applies to precisely one game in one sport. No one who cares about our politics is going to urge political campaign and voting decisions based on the Redskins’ season final home game outcome.
Let’s turn to another possible pattern that is claimed to have predictive power for presidential elections. It has been claimed that “any Republican would have won in 2016.” The basis of this claim is given as follows:
The 22nd Amendment was adopted in 1951, which established a two-term limit on Presidents. The American people have gone one better. They have practically established a two-term limit on the two political parties, a pattern which has persisted in 15 of 17 elections since 1951!
In each election, the question is if the party in power is on their first or second term.
- If the party is in its first term, the American people have historically given that party another four years, with the only exception being in 1980 after Jimmy Carter had been a disaster as President.
- But if the party in power is in its second term, the American people in their wisdom have decided to “throw the bums out”! The only time that any party has gotten a third term was in 1988 when George H.W. Bush was essentially elected to the third term of the greatest president of the Twentieth Century, Ronald Reagan.
Notice that there is no falsifiable theory here. Indeed, the deviations from the perceived pattern are explained by ad hoc claims – “Carter had been a disaster” and “George H.W. Bush was essentially elected to the third term of the greatest president of the Twentieth Century, Ronald Reagan.” We are not invited to consider all presidential elections, just those since the adoption of the 22nd Amendment. There is no explanation for this presumably arbitrary limit.
The 22nd Amendment only formalizes the unwritten constitutional term limit established by President Washington, who would otherwise have been president for life.
Amendment XXII (emphasis added)
Section 1.
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
Section 2.
This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several states within seven years from the date of its submission to the states by the Congress.
No candidate until Franklin Delano Roosevelt dared run for more than two full terms. Indeed, Theodore Roosevelt, who ascended from vice president to the presidency on the death of McKinley, gave way to Taft after being elected president once. Four years later, TR was the first to stretch the unwritten rule by running for a full second term as a third party candidate. A visual inspection of all presidential elections suggests that election results by party are a nonpattern.
But, maybe there is something to the party incumbency idea. There has been a small literature on presidential incumbency, especially by Alan I. Abramowitz, that shows a significant incumbency effect. He uses three variables, under what he calls the “Time for Change forecasting model.”
[The variables are] the incumbent president’s approval rating at midyear (late June or early July) in the Gallup Poll, the growth rate of real GDP in the second quarter of the election year, and whether the incumbent president’s party has held the White House for one term or more than one term. Using these three predictors, it is possible to forecast the incumbent party’s share of the major party vote with a high degree of accuracy in late July, more than three months before Election Day.
The most basic problem with the model is that even if it worked across all elections, it predicts the political equivalent of Super Bowl yards gained. The game is determined by points scored and the election is determined by Electoral College votes. With the extreme tilt of several Democrat states, models dependent on national level data may be going the way of surveys dependent on land lines.
Beyond not estimating the thing that actually determines presidential election victories, Abramowitz’s model is critically dependent on Gallup Poll data, limiting how many elections can be tested. This creates vulnerability to changing conditions not measured in this elegantly parsimonious model. Indeed, the model treats third party votes as a wash between the two major parties, when that has changed from election to election. He was so concerned about his model in 2012, that he added an extra explanatory variable, POLARIZATION, and then ran new estimates on elections back to 1996.
In October 2016, Abramowitz was trying to explain, in advance, anticipated national popular vote under-perfomance by Donald Trump. He even offered excuses about violated assumptions that do not appear in his earlier work. Yet, he did not include his POLARIZATION variable! He offered all the conventional wisdom and missed both candidates’ campaign decisions in swing states. He thought swing states were important to mention in 2012, but did not take that as a prompt to reconsider his model.
So, there is a theory that fits the data, if you limit cases to 1948 and following, and if you assume that major party popular vote percentages, based as just those votes cast for the two major party candidates, accurately predict Electoral College victory – which the theory’s author does not claim. What other research might help?
The American people do not choose presidents, the American voter does, through the state-by-state aggregating mechanism of the Electoral College. As it happens, academics have carefully studied voting behavior, using scientific polling data, since at least the 1960 publication of The American Voter. It is a very quantitative field supported for decades by the American National Election Studies (ANES). The ANES mission:
[To] inform explanations of election outcomes by providing data that support rich hypothesis testing, maximize methodological excellence, measure many variables, and promote comparisons across people, contexts, and time. The ANES serves this mission by providing researchers with a view of the political world through the eyes of ordinary citizens.
Here is the searchable PDF list of American Election Survey questions. Note that there are 24 questions about congressional incumbency, but only one that can be interpreted as presidential incumbency in the last election, not two elections back. Indeed, the only reference in 2016 to 2008 is in questions about how the economy has done over time. To understand why, see David R. Mayhew’s 2006 article “Incumbency Advantage in U.S. Presidential Elections: The Historical Record” (PDF), showing lack of statistical significance.
So, there is a theory that fits selected data for elections starting in 1948. A prominent scholar suggested over a decade ago that presidential incumbency should be included in voter behavior models and survey instruments. As of the last election, the ANES has not added questions that would get at incumbent presidential party effects. When the scholar with the strongest presidential incumbency model has made adjustments, and offering qualifications to his predictions, over the last two presidential cycles, perhaps you should not bet your country on an incumbency effect.
Published in Elections
This is very well written.
Except the misspelling in the title.
Presidential elections are cultural and not natural phenomena, as such they are difficult to predict with statistics. Cultural phenomena are difficult to predict – and therefore control – because the underlying rules are not static. The results of one experiment can change the results of subsequent experiments. The particles in the experiment have a mind of their own, and may decide to change their behavior on a whim or even out of spite. This is why the central planners are always doomed to fail.
Thanks. Fixed it, after re-titling on the fly. Original title was the first sentence, but it was an obvious buzz kill.
So what did you think of the substance of this post?
Researchers need not throw their hands in the air; voter behavior and the basis of attitudes is fairly stable. But, getting from individual vote to election outcome is indeed complex.
It’s a fantastic piece, thorough and convincing.
Damning with faint praise?
No, it was well written, and strongly researched. The issue is if there was a culture change after the 22nd Amendment was adopted. I say there was, but Clifford disagrees. Both are reasonable positions.
Part of the joy of Ricochet is the ability to disagree without being disagreeable. And from time to time, I reverse my position on issues. (Cf. when I said that Trump was the most Authoritarian President in American History, and after reviewing the assertions of my fellow Ricochetti, I said that Trump was the most Authoritarian President in American History.
Gary saw and read my piece with the original blah title. He messaged me to urge jazzing up the title to attract more readers.
I actually do not claim that there is or is not a culture change, an addition to the “unwritten constitution.” Rather, I find a lack of strong support for such a conclusion. In part the problem is lack of appropriate data. Absent a lead pipe cinch model, I’m risk adverse on elections. Hence my opening sentence.
I have a hunch that the Time For Change model is the best you are ever going to get. The factors are simple and the logic is clear. Where it falls down is an inability to capture the Electoral College and events occurring during the campaign. Such as Clinton’s email scandal.
If I were betting on the results of an election, I’d go with the model. But I would also be aware that I’m playing the odds so not bet the ranch on the outcome.
Dan McLaughlin did an extensive analysis of this in NRO a while back. Bottom line, it’s pretty clear that nearly any Republican would have won the election, and probably would have out performed Trump. What some Trump supporters can’t seem to understand is that the way in which Trump beat Hillary isn’t the only way to beat Hillary. Any of the main GOP candidates would have won, they just would have won differently than Trump, and we’d be in a stronger position now.
Counterfactuals are impossible to prove, but I think Hillary’s crash and burn is the most likely outcome regardless of the GOP candidate.
The great political philosopher Anton Chigurh would counter “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
Twenty professional politicians backed by billions from backers, conventional analysis, and consultancy best practices sought the presidency in 2016.
There were success two-term governors of large states. There were young dynamic senators.
There was a pathetic modern version of Lurleen Wallace supported by the cast of Hamilton.
The winner: a rude, crude billionaire playboy from New York and the Playboy Mansion supported by evangelicals and Scott Baio.
No rule for that.
Trump poleaxed Rubio in his home state primary. Rubio won one county and 27% of the vote. Can you imagine a different Rubio with Trump or Jeb!/Murphy not in the race? Sure.
Can you honestly see Cruz (the post-Wisconsin Cruz), Bush, Jindal, Perry, Kasich, or Carly beating Clinton? If so, I have some tickets to Scott Baio’s one man show on Broadway to sell you!
“Please clap…” Jeb! Bush
Clifford:
Thanks for this.
It is rare to read an article like this, one that points out
I’m keen on the topic because precisely the same patterns of pseudo-scientific argument are the rule in current mainstream economics, a discipline which has prostituted itself to the propaganda needs of ambitious socialist politicians and activists.
And because Richochet is to such a large degree an echo chamber for those economics myths, with never a whimper of complaint from the defenders of science when our local economics “experts” (and we in the general audience) argue for or against various professional quantitative forecasts of “the economy”–of as-reported economic aggregates–as if they were comparing various competing scientific statements, rather than competing piles of pure intellectual rubbish.
These are an exceptional series of articles, but not entirely convincing because (once again) they are very reliant on past historical trends and rather short (relatively speaking) on an actual analysis of the 2016 election. McLaughlin makes a noble effort to get there by analyzing the performance of Republican congressional candidates in ’16 vis a vis Trump, but that’s still “apples and oranges” (Are we surprised Rob Portman ran ahead of Trump in Ohio?) and ultimately not terribly satisfying. The bottom line is that presidential elections are about one-on-one (mostly) matchups, and what happened in, say 1984, only tells us so much about that.
I don’t think that’s the exclusive basis for that claim.
There is evidence to suggest that a large number of voters were turned off by a race between Trump and Clinton. Although Trump rather decisively flipped certain components of the former “Obama coalition” in key states, it’s possible that another Republican wouldn’t have had to, because they would have been able to attract a non trivial number of voters who declined to vote for Trump or Clinton that could have changed the outcome.
Then again, there is the argument that the other Republicans couldn’t actually achieve this, because they would have only attracted voters in solidly Republican states, winning the popular vote but losing the electoral college. Therefore, Only Trump Could Win.
Either way, this is a good takedown of the “we switch parties just because the Constitution implcitly tells people to” lame argument.
I hate it when this happens. Clifford raises valid points.
I changed the title of my post in the Member Feed from “Any Republican would have won in 2016” to “Almost any Republican would have won in 2016.”
I’d vote for Wilson, with Obama 2nd (the videographer, the IRS scandal), Trump 3rd, maybe Lincoln in there somewhere along with FDR. Wilson jailed Debs, which was pretty ugly.
The effort was commendable but the intellectual strain was obvious. McLaughlin is one of the smarter analysts of politics and baseball (his post-mortems on my Mets are painfully brilliant). Yet, sometimes all those smarts in service of a very marginal thesis demonstrate the smarts more than the thesis.
Take a look at the stunning success of the GOP Senate elections in 1980.
Does it follow that any Republican — Howard Baker, John Anderson, Phil Crane, George Bush — could have beaten Carter?
Most impressive result of the 2016 election is the invincible ignorance of much of the consultant and pundit class, especially the conservative class.
We all prefer to focus on Trump versus Hillary. I certainly do. Focussing on Trump versus Rubio/Cruz/Paul/Walker/Perry/Jindal/Kasich/Bush is just too painful still.
I don’t think engaging in Game Theory/Mister Magoo/”Anyone would have beat Hillary” rationalizations is intellectual or culturally honest. Of course, I still do when I need to.
That verifies my revised premise that Trump was the most authoritarian Republican President in history. Several people argued that Clinton was up there also.
Who are the players whose jerseys you are wearing? I think that you are Viking fans.
I guess it depends on how ones define “authoritarian”. In terms of personality, Nixon has him beat. In terms of order running over people’s freedoms? Has to be Lincoln.
Don’t we judge an authoritarian by actions, and actions that are outside the scope of one’s authority? The first travel ban was ill conceived, but I’m not finding anything else. Talk is cheap and does not an authoritarian make.
Authoritarians are typically very involved in details. Such as who uses the White House tennis courts when. I think Trump has more in common with Bill Blazejowski. He’s an idea man. The bigger the better. Details are what staffs do. Feed mayonnaise to the tuna fish. Call Star Kist. Pass laws to make America great again. Call Congress.
You missed one other aspect of Billy Blaze that is rather Trumpian.
Interesting how the interaction in comment sections always swerves off OP when President Donald Trump comes into the picture. Nothing in either my OP, or the post to which I wrote in response, depends upon the personality or governing style of incumbents, incumbent party candidates, or challengers. But we have managed to confirm my opening paragraph claim that “it is great fun to prognosticate and to chew the fat over past sports and presidential election seasons.”
Were it not so, Ricochet would have little membership and traffic. That no one has rolled in with alternative rigorous quantitative or quantitative models reinforces my impression that the field of presidential election studies is still quite thin, perhaps for reasons of too few cases and too many explanatory variables.
If you’re looking at the forest you’re gonna run smack dab into a tree. There are so many specifics and contingencies for any given candidate that it’s impossible to say that anyone would have beat Hillary. Take Rubio, the arguably strongest GOP candidate, for example.
Rubio would have won Florida, but his fusionist, neocon, young and Hispanic shtick would have pissed in the Cheerios of working class whites in the blue wall states and probably Ohio. Maybe he still would have won, because she was such a bad candidate. But how do you know Rubio stands up to the Clinton attack machine? He couldn’t take the heat from Christie. Plus, does Hillary stay out of the blue wall states against Rubio? Not a chance. Did he have any affairs? If he had become the nominee, we would have found out if he did. Would that have doomed him? Probably.
Would anyone have beaten Hillary? Definitely maybe.
If there are truly “so many specifics and contingencies for any given candidate” across election cycles, then catagories like “blue wall states” are meaningless.
It might be possible to apply the Time for Change model to the real election process by getting mid year state level polls to ask the presidential approval question. Run the equation for each state and weight results by Electoral College votes to get an estimate of electors or of likelihood of victory (probability of winning 270 or more). State level polls are smaller, so cost a certain amount of confidence in the results, but might be subsidized for one or two key polling iterations to get larger samples.
They are worse than meaningless to the party that banks on them, because they lead to complacency.
Mid-year is too early. All the interesting stuff happens in October.
Also, I would do larger polls that draw from multiple states that usually vote together; ‘blue wall’ was a misnomer, but that doesn’t mean that Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania don’t correlate highly. Why not poll them together? The larger sample size would probably be more reliable than smaller state-level polls.
Multi-state samples are meaningless for estimating electoral votes. Hence the idea of beefing up one or two iterations of state level polls with national level research funding for increased costs. The variables in the model are insensitive to the things attracting our attention in October. Indeed, the claim is that the cake is largely baked by early summer and that campaigns can only improve on the margins. If things are very close, it may be the race is truly up for grabs through a series of state level victories on very slim margins.
You point out complacency. That is an obvious danger, cutting both ways, if a model got a reputation for reliable predictions. It could be self-fulfilling or self-defeating.
Chuck Lumley: As we sit here and idly chat, there are woman, female human beings, rolling around in strange beds with strange men, and we are making money from that.
Bill Blazejowski: Is this a great country, or what?