As of this morning, the PollTracker Average puts Hillary Clinton 3.8 percentage points ahead of Donald Trump. But there are two points that I think will be important to watch as we move through the last eight weeks of the campaign.
1: The two way race versus the four way race. Over the last few weeks, the inclusion of all four candidates (adding Johnson and Stein) has in most cases hurt Clinton more than Trump. Historically, third party candidates tend to fade toward the end. If that proves to be the case as it’s almost always been the case in previous elections, that suggests a small but significant upside potential for Clinton. But of course this election seems different in so many ways I don’t think we can take that for granted. It might not happen. It could simply be that political fragmentation is growing, planting deeper roots.
Here’s a supposition of mine. I ***think*** the rise in numbers of Johnson and Stein over the last month was likely driven in part by the perception that Clinton was running away with it and thus a third party vote was essentially a free vote. If it’s tighter, I think there’s some reason to expect those third party numbers drop. Paradoxically, Clinton seems more likely to draw off votes from Johnson than Stein.
2. Likely voters. It is a general rule of thumb going back decades that likely voter screens produce better numbers for Republicans. This is no great surprise. Republicans are older, more affluent, whiter – all demographics associated with more consistent voting. But that calculus began to change in 2008 and 2012 when a number of factors led to substantially higher voter participation rates for young and minority voters. Yet the recent likely/registered voter spreads have been pretty sizable in favor of Republicans, notwithstanding that Clinton still leads in virtually all of them.
Likely voter screens are not a precise science by any means. In the old days they rested heavily not on what a poll respondent said they would do but what they said they had done in previous elections. That started to change over recent years as pollsters realized that this was missing people who did show up in the Obama coalition. So this is another wildcard. Are we back to an era where Republicans have a baked in turnout advantage? Or will these likely/registered voter spreads tighten as we get toward election? Who knows? But it’s a key thing to watch as we go down to the wire.
