Why Hillary Clinton Is Probably Going to Win the 2016 Election - New York Magazine

Hillary Clinton, probably your 45th president. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Unless the economy goes into a recession over the next year and a half, Hillary Clinton is probably going to win the presidential election. The United States has polarized into stable voting blocs, and the Democratic bloc is a bit larger and growing at a faster rate.

Of course, not everybody who follows politics professionally believes this. Many pundits feel the Democrats’ advantage in presidential elections has disappeared, or never existed. “The 2016 campaign is starting on level ground,” argues David Brooks, echoing a similar analysis by John Judis. But the evidence for this is quite slim, and a closer look suggests instead that something serious would have to change in order to prevent a Clinton victory. Here are the basic reasons why Clinton should be considered a presumptive favorite:

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1. The Emerging Democratic Majority is real. The major disagreement over whether there is an “Emerging Democratic Majority” — the thesis that argues that Democrats have built a presidential majority that could only be defeated under unfavorable conditions — centers on an interpretive disagreement over the 2014 elections. Proponents of this theory dismiss the midterm elections as a problem of districting and turnout; Democrats have trouble rousing their disproportionately young, poor supporters to the polls in a non-presidential year, and the tilted House and Senate map further compounded the GOP advantage.

Skeptics of the theory instead believe that the 2014 midterms were, as Judis put it, “not an isolated event but rather the latest manifestation of a resurgent Republican coalition.” Voters, they argue, are moving toward the Republican Party, and may continue to do so even during the next presidential election.

It has been difficult to mediate between the two theories, since the outcome at the polls supports the theory of both the proponents and the skeptics of the Emerging Democratic Majority theory equally well.

A Pew survey released this week gives us the best answer. Pew is the gold standard of political polling, using massive surveys, with high numbers of respondents and very low margins of error. Pew’s survey shows pretty clearly that there was not a major change in public opinion from the time of Obama’s reelection through the 2014 midterms:

Of course, Pew is not surveying actual voters. It’s surveying all adults. But that is the point. What changed between 2012 and 2014 was not public opinion, but who showed up to vote.

2. No, youngsters are not turning Republican. The Emerging Democratic Majority thesis places a lot of weight on cohort replacement: Republicans fare best with the oldest voters, and Democrats with the youngest, so every new election cycle incrementally tilts the electoral playing field toward the Democrats.

Skeptics have pushed back by claiming that the youngest voters — the ones entering their voting years since 2008 — are turning back toward the Republican Party. Their main evidence has been pollings of millennial voters by the Harvard Institute of Politics. Conservatives have given these results a great deal of attention — it suggests that the youngest voters, disillusioned by the Obama administration, have abandoned the liberal tendencies of their older brothers and sisters. But Harvard’s polling has not held up well; it predicted millennial voters would support a Republican Congress in 2014, which turned out to be extremely inaccurate.

Pew’s more recent survey combs through the data and throws more cold water on the “younger millennials” thesis. As Nate Cohn notices, younger millennials lean Democratic at nearly the same rate as older ones:

(Cohn does note that younger nonwhite millennials seem less Democratic than older nonwhite millennials, but young whites are far more Democratic than older ones, making the trade somewhat of a wash.)

3. Clinton isn’t that unpopular. A more recent line of thought has settled on Clinton’s limits as a candidate. It is probably true that she lacks Obama’s talents as a communicator and a campaign organizer. A recent Quinnipiac poll showing her struggling in Iowa and Colorado attracted wide media attention and seemed to confirm that the email scandal has tarnished Clinton’s national image.

It is true that Clinton has, inevitably, lost much of the popularity she won when she was serving as secretary of State and largely removed from partisan politics. Nonpartisan figures can attract broad support, while people engaged in political fights tend to revert toward the mean. Clinton’s support is, as it has been through most of her career, closely divided:

On the other hand, Republicans are much less popular. Jeb Bush, who is probably the best known of the Republican contenders, has much worse favorable ratings:

So there is little reason to think Clinton’s personal unpopularity will hold her back in a race against a Republican who is likely to have no more personal appeal, and possibly a lot less.

4. Obama is trending up. One major question looming over the next election is whether the public feels satisfied with the Democrats’ policy direction or wants to give Republicans a chance. Importantly, President Obama’s job approval ratings have recovered since the midterm elections, when his net approval stood at minus ten, to about minus three. His approval ratings on handling the economy have risen even more sharply. Approval of Obama’s economic job performance has actually reached parity with disapproval for the first time since 2009:

If the economy continues to expand between now and the 2016 election, Obama’s approval rating will probably rise a little higher. In the modern political world, strong popularity is not necessary to win; Obama won reelection with approval ratings below 50 percent. Voters make comparative choices, and all a candidate needs is to be superior to the alternative. But the economy is currently on a course, barring a slowdown, to leave the incumbent party in a stronger position.

5. Is it time for a change? The one remaining ground for Republican optimism is the possibility that voters will decide three straight presidential terms for the Democratic Party is too much. Many political scientists (such as
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Why Hillary Clinton Is Probably Going to Win the 2016 Election - New York Magazine