A Few Political Consequences of the Democratic Surge Among College-Educated Whites

The Pew Research Center recently released an informative report on the composition of the American electorate, based on a survey of citizens whose electoral participation (or lack thereof) in 2016 was confirmed by matching their names to state voter turnout records. High-quality studies like those conducted by Pew provide more reliable information on the distribution of attributes within the voting public than the more commonly-cited (but less methodologically sound) national exit polls, and thus any discrepancies between them are usually best resolved in favor of the former.

For example, exit polls can overestimate the degree of educational attainment in the electorate. In 2016, the national exit poll found, improbably, that a full 50 percent of voters had earned at least a bachelor's degree, with just 18 percent reporting no more than a high school education. The new Pew study estimates that the true figures are the following: 37 percent with a BA degree or more, 34 percent with college experience short of a four-year degree, and 30 percent with a high school diploma or less—much closer to a rough three-way split among the no, some, and completed college categories than an even divide between four-year college graduates and non-grads.

But if the true proportion of college graduates in the voting public was smaller than the exit polls indicated, these voters also seem to have preferred Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump much more decisively than the exit pollsters believed. The national exit poll estimated that Clinton had prevailed over Trump by 52 percent to 42 percent among all four-year college graduates, narrowly losing white college grads by a margin of 48 percent to 45 percent and carrying white female grads by 7 points (51 percent to 44 percent). According to the Pew researchers, however, Clinton outpolled Trump by a full 21 points (57 percent to 36 percent) among all college graduates, by 17 points (55 percent to 38 percent) among white grads, and by 26 points (61 percent to 35 percent) among white female grads.

The Pew figures aren't likely to be precisely correct; sampling error and other methodological limitations apply to them as well. But they surely come closer than the exit poll data to the true values within the American population. Since pre-election surveys and other forms of evidence indicate that Trump carried non-college-grad whites overwhelmingly (perhaps by as much as 40 points), the most logical way to account for the fact that Clinton outran Trump by 2.8 million popular votes nationwide is to assume that she prevailed among the college/post-grad sector of the electorate by a comfortable margin. In fact, Clinton is almost certainly the first Democratic presidential candidate in modern history to win more votes from white college graduates than the Republican opposition.

This achievement undoubtedly reflects the limits of Trump's appeal among college-educated voters more than any special devotion to Clinton. But the Democratic Party was evolving even before 2016 to become more dependent on the votes of racial minorities, young adults, and highly-educated professionals (the "Obama coalition") while relinquishing much of its previous electoral support among non-college-educated whites to the GOP. Moreover, recent opinion polls and the results of special elections indicate that the pro-Democratic shift among white college graduates evident in the 2016 contest has survived into 2017 and 2018, suggesting that the Democratic leanings of these voters will endure for at least as long as Trump is the leader of the Republican Party.

What are the implications of a newfound preference for Democrats within this formerly majority-Republican sector of the electorate? Here are a few areas of American politics that will be measurably affected by such a change:

1. Geography. Because educational attainment is not evenly distributed across geographic boundaries, the places where each party can expect to win votes will evolve along with the demographic composition of their voter coalitions. In general, we can expect the growing partisan divide between increasingly "blue" large metropolitan areas and securely "red" small towns, a trend explored in my recent book Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics, to persist into the future. This will help Democratic candidates in high-education suburbs where a number of vulnerable Republican-held House seats are located, such as those actively contested this year in greater New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, and Los Angeles. But most of these places already vote Democratic at the state level, while the erosion of Democratic support among non-college whites endangers the party's Senate prospects in states like Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota. As a result, it's quite possible that the midterm elections this year will result in a majority-making Democratic "wave" of 25 seats or more in the House while simultaneously preserving, or even strengthening, Republican control of the Senate.

2. Participation. Level of educational attainment is always a powerful predictor, and often the most powerful predictor, of citizens' propensity for political engagement. Participatory activities that go beyond merely voting for president every four years—from turning out in midterm and primary elections to volunteering for campaigns, making monetary contributions, and organizing political events and groups—are all disproportionately the domain of the highly-educated. Democrats already appear to be benefiting this year from the energetic mobilization of metropolitan professionals, which has led to both a rise of political networking at the local level and a cascade of individual financial donations to Democratic candidates. In contrast, one of the biggest unanswered questions as we look forward to the 2018 midterms is whether the Republican Party will succeed in motivating the non-college-grad whites who supported Trump in heavy numbers two years ago to turn out at sufficient rates in a non-presidential election when Trump himself is not on the ballot.

3. Candidate Recruitment. Whites with college degrees are a minority of the total electorate, but they always constitute a large majority of the pool of candidates for federal and state office. A partisan shift among this population therefore influences the relative supply of strong candidates within each party's activist base. The particular antipathy to Trump evident among college-educated women in the Pew data helps to account for an unprecedented spike in the number of female candidates on the Democratic side in 2018, and the desire to send a message of opposition to Trump's behavior seems to have inspired Democratic primary voters to frequently choose these women to be standard-bearers for the party. Through the first 41 states to hold primaries so far this year, 41 percent of all Democratic House nominees this year are women, including 48 percent of all non-incumbent nominees—an astonishing increase over all previous congressional elections:

4. The Polarization of Education Policy. Education has not always been a strictly partisan or ideologically-charged issue. Past Republican presidents like George W. Bush adopted ambitious education initiatives in order to bolster their appeal among suburban moderates, while state governors and legislators of both parties have often viewed the authorization of ample K-12 and public university funding as both economically and politically advantageous. But there are signs that this bipartisan consensus is coming apart. In recent years, Republican governors in Kansas and Oklahoma have enacted ambitious tax reductions that required deep offsetting decreases to local education aid, while GOP legislators in Wisconsin have targeted state universities for budget cuts and other restrictions. In addition, conservative media sources now repeatedly direct sharp criticism at the American educational system, often describing universities as bastions of intolerant leftism and mocking college students as hopelessly coddled "snowflakes."

If highly-educated voters continue to drift toward the Democrats, a key constituency that might be expected to serve as an internal base of resistance against these policies will lose its current degree of influence within the Republican Party—which may well only further reinforce the trend of growing polarization. Trump has not made education a presidential priority, and his appointment of the controversial Betsy DeVos as secretary of education has done little to bolster his popular standing on the issue. But while Republicans may pay an electoral price in the short term due to the countermobilization of concerned parents and outraged teachers, the prospect of a perpetual partisan war over the value of American education ultimately threatens the interests of educators much more than those of politicians.

Pennsylvania Special Election Recap: Good News for Democrats? Yes. 100+ Seats in Play This Year? Not Quite.

It's always possible to overinterpret the outcome of a single special election; at the same time, even one more data point can help us make a little bit more sense of the political world around us. Here are a few things that can be gleaned from tonight's results in Pennsylvania:

1. The photo finish between Democratic candidate Conor Lamb and Republican nominee Rick Saccone (with Lamb currently in apparent position to eke out a victory) in a district previously considered safely Republican indeed represents a notable development, but not a shocking one. It comports with the historical pattern of electoral politics: the opposition party reliably makes gains in midterm elections, and the magnitude of the swing is correlated with the (un)popularity of the president. The importance of tonight's outcome lies primarily in its confirmation that these dynamics still hold today as they have in the past. But the current state of President Trump's job approval rating and the congressional "generic ballot" polling already signaled that 2018 is likely to be a good year for Democratic candidates.

2. Even so, the outcome in PA-18 may itself prompt members of the Washington community to revise their predictions about what's likely to happen in November, although there's plenty of existing information on which to base their analyses. There's an undeniable psychological difference between expecting something to happen and actually watching it occur. I remember the 2006 midterms, when—despite piles of survey data pointing to a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives—a number of pundits had a hard time actually envisioning an end to what at that point was a 12-year Republican reign over the House until the votes actually came in on the night of the election.

As for the parties themselves, whatever spin we hear from either side doesn't mean very much. What's important is what they do. Will Republicans start to act as if they believe their majority is now in serious danger? Will there be criticism directed, on the record or on background, by rank-and-file members of Congress toward Republican leaders, including the president, for putting the party in such a precarious position? Or will incumbents sincerely adopt the view that the results in PA-18, along with those in the Alabama Senate race last year, reflected a mismatch in candidate quality more than a fundamental deterioration of the GOP's electoral strength?

3. Special elections can also be opportunities for the parties to test out their campaign messages in advance of a national vote. One lesson that the Republicans appear to have taken away from their Pennsylania experience is that the December tax cut bill is of limited popularity and/or salience in the electorate. Since the current congressional majority has few other accomplishments for which to claim credit, this suggests that the fall elections will be fought over something other than the legislative record of the past two years. (It's likely at any rate that the midterms will be dominated by Trump and Trumpism regardless of what most individual candidates do.)

4. It's common for election analysts these days to use the 2016 presidential election results, or measures derived from them (such as the Partisan Voting Index, or PVI), as a benchmark to characterize the party leaning of states and congressional districts: a +5 Clinton seat, a +10 Trump seat, etc. In general, presidential and congressional voting results are strongly correlated, making these figures good rules of thumb in most cases. But there are still parts of the country where voters behave somewhat differently when choosing presidential and non-presidential candidates; moreover, the distinctive candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump (and, before that, Barack Obama) have the potential to produce slightly misleading pictures of the "fundamental" partisan composition of a particular constituency.

Specifically, it's worth noting that while PA-18 gave Trump a 20-point margin over Clinton in 2016, Democrats still slightly outnumber Republicans in the district's party registration figures. Washington County, most of which lies within the district, supported Trump over Clinton by 60 percent to 36 percent and Mitt Romney to Obama in 2012 by 56 percent to 42 percent, but had narrowly preferred John Kerry to George W. Bush in 2004 and had given Al Gore a 53-44 advantage over Bush in 2000.

Of course, things have changed since 2004, and recent elections are more predictive of future outcomes than more distant ones. But it's worth keeping in mind that the world of American politics did not experience a complete rebirth in 2016, rendering all previous history irrelevant. With more time and perspective, we'll be better able to tell how much of the 2016 alignment represents a "new normal" and how much is a temporary deviation from longer-term patterns.

The demonstration that a Democratic candidate like Lamb could win back many former supporters, especially among the white non-college population, who had defected in 2016 is good news for the party. Democrats are defending multiple Senate seats in states that not only supported Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, but also shifted significantly in the Republican direction in 2016—including Missouri, West Virginia, North Dakota, Indiana, Montana, and Ohio. In order to avoid a devastating series of defeats in Senate races this year, Democrats need to attract voters who had previously backed the party's candidates but who either abandoned Clinton for Trump or merely stayed home.

At the same time, I'd recommend being a bit wary of the claim, oft-repeated during Tuesday night's coverage, that there are more than 100 Republican-held House seats that are more electorally vulnerable than PA-18. Again, that's true if we use PVI or Trump's 2016 margin over Clinton as the sole measure of partisan competitiveness, but PA-18 has more of a Democratic tradition—and labor union presence—than most other districts that gave Trump (and Romney before him) comparable margins.

Republicans undoubtedly appear to be in serious danger of losing their 24-seat (now, perhaps, 23-seat) House majority later this year. But any implication that the number of seats gained by Democrats in November could approach triple figures is not exactly realistic.

In Today's America, Small Voting Shifts Can Have Really Big Effects

My new book Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics demonstrates that American elections have become more geographically polarized over the past 25 years and investigates the causes and consequences of this important development. I argue that it's very difficult to understand how politics operates today without recognizing the ways in which the spatial distribution of party votes across geographic lines interacts with the rules and mechanisms of our electoral institutions to produce representative democracy in the United States.

One of the most distinctive attributes of our current political era is that the two parties are closely balanced at the national level, yet each side maintains a formidable record of electoral dominance across large regional subsections of the United States. Since the 1990s, we have experienced a series of elections in which the overall outcome has been decided by a narrow margin even as most states and congressional districts are securely and reliably either Republican or Democratic. While it was once common for most states—and nearly all large states—to be electorally up for grabs and thus actively contested by both sides in a national campaign, the number of "battleground" states has dwindled in the 21st century to a small minority of the nation:

At the same time, the election-to-election stability of these state alignments has reached historically unmatched levels. It's not just the case that most states in any given year will be safely pro-Democratic or pro-Republican while a shrinking remainder of states will be open to contestation—instead, it's increasingly the same states that are predictably "red" or "blue" in election after election,  and the same few swing states, like Ohio, Florida, and Michigan, that hold the national balance of power from one election to the next. Over the past five presidential elections, 37 states and the District of Columbia have aligned with the same party in each contest; as the graph below shows, this represents a record degree of state-level consistency. We're a long way from the presidential elections of 1956 and 1964, when all but five states in the nation voted for opposite parties in two races held just eight years apart.

Because of the winner-take-all American electoral system, these trends mean that partisan shifts among a relatively small subset of voters in a relatively small section of the nation can have a tremendous effect on outcomes if they happen to be concentrated in exactly the right place. My political science colleague Seth Masket wrote today in Vox about the changing partisan preferences among non-college-educated whites in the small-town Midwest that proved electorally pivotal in 2016, delivering the White House to Donald Trump despite his loss in the national popular vote (see my own graph below as well). Seth concludes, I think persuasively, that these shifts are not broad enough to add up to a party "realignment"—but they still proved to be decisive because they occurred in a few key states that were otherwise closely divided between the parties. Hillary Clinton ran particularly well among college-educated whites and racial minorities in 2016, which helped her outperform previous Democratic candidates in non-battleground states like California, Texas, and Arizona but didn't pay her any dividends in the unique arithmetic of the electoral college.

The Geographic Polarization of the Midwest, 1980–2016

Because the leadership of the two parties is as mutually polarized and otherwise differentiated as at any time in modern history, the consequences of these electoral outcomes for the trajectory of national politics are increasingly significant even as the outcomes themselves are more and more likely to be contingent on the attributes, and eccentricities, of the electoral system itself. Historically speaking, there wasn't much of a difference between how Americans voted in 2012 and how they voted in 2016. But there's an awfully big difference between President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump.

Think Politics Will "Get Back to Normal" After Tuesday? This IS the New Normal!

We've reached the stage of the presidential campaign in which everyone who's either a participant or a close observer has reached a state of complete mental overload. Colleagues, friends, and students have frequently remarked over the past week or two that they are desperate for the election to be over. This is especially true of Clinton supporters of my acquaintance, who nurture (perhaps unrealistic) hope that Trump and Trumpism will face a popular rejection on Tuesday that will expel both the man and his brand of politics from the American party system.

Given everyone's frayed nerves, it seems almost sadistic to suggest that less will change after the election that many might wish. If Trump somehow manages an upset, of course, the fallout will be unprecedented—even more so now that the events of the past few weeks have set Democrats up to view such an outcome as an effective hijacking of American democracy by the Russians and the FBI.

The more likely outcome remains a Clinton victory, though by less-than-landslide proportions. But here, too, the potential for political combustion is enormous. The entire Republican popular base is poised to go ka-BOOM in response to the ascension of President Hillary, and Republican leaders will see no choice but to ratchet up the vehemence of their opposition to a level that will even exceed that of the Obama years. For the duration of his presidency, many Republicans have viewed Obama as an arrogant Marxist incompetent who hates America and all that it stands for; they think all those things of Clinton, too, but add to them the belief that she is also a criminal who belongs in prison. The race among Republican members of the House of Representatives to be the first to file articles of impeachment against her promises to be a competitive one, and the GOP congressional leadership will face considerable pressure to engage in even-more-frequent acts of dramatic—and high-risk—confrontation.

We already know what the biggest fight will be. It hasn't received a great deal of attention in an all-Trump-all-the-time campaign, but the vacancy on the Supreme Court promises to serve as a particularly bloody partisan battlefield once the election is over. If the Republicans hold the Senate, it is likely that they will prevent Clinton from filling the Scalia seat for the entire four years of her term. While this would be an unprecedented act, there is simply no political or ideological incentive for any Republican senator to allow the confirmation of a fifth liberal justice. (Democratic hopes that the blockade of Merrick Garland would prove electorally costly to swing-state Republican senators this year seem to have gone unfulfilled, only increasing the likelihood of indefinite GOP obstruction.)

If the Democrats gain a majority in the Senate, the working assumption is that they will jam Garland, or a replacement Clinton nominee, through the chamber on a party-line vote. This is probably correct, but the political cost and pain involved is underappreciated. Any Democratic majority in the Senate is likely to be very narrow—it could even hinge on the vice president's role as a tiebreaker—and dependent on a few pivotal electorally vulnerable senators from normally Republican states, including Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota.

These Democrats will need to join with their more liberal fellow partisans not only to confirm the fifth liberal justice, but to invoke the "nuclear option" preventing a Republican filibuster of the nomination. This involves not changing the formal rules of the Senate—a process that is itself subject to the filibuster—but using a parliamentary point of order, sustained by a simple majority, that the cloture rule does not properly apply to Supreme Court nominations. (The previous use of the nuclear option in 2013 removed the filibuster for lower court candidates but left it intact for the Supreme Court.)

Regardless of what one thinks about the filibuster rule or its increasing use by the Senate minority, removing it by brute partisan force rather than via the normal procedures for modifying chamber rules adds fodder to what will be fierce Republican charges that the whole thing is an illegitimate power grab. If Democrats take majority control in January, they will face the choice of whether to invoke the nuclear option preemptively or wait until Republicans actually filibuster Clinton's Supreme Court nominee. There is some logic to ripping the Band-Aid off quickly, but red-state Democratic senators may prefer to wait for weeks or even months, giving Republicans the opportunity to amply demonstrate their intransigence before "reluctantly" concluding that the nuclear option is an appropriate response.

All of this will play out in an atmosphere of unconstrained partisan-ideological rancor. The stakes are indeed high—the formation of a liberal majority on the Court for the first time in 40 years is understandably unacceptable to pro-Trump and anti-Trump conservatives alike, while simultaneously representing an important potential legacy for a Hillary Clinton presidency that is likely to be prevented by congressional gridlock from enacting its major legislative priorities.

The election next week will resolve some important questions; the difference between the two presidential candidates is in many respects the biggest in living memory, and one will be president while the other one won't. But the acrimonious nature of party politics in the United States may only be reinforced by the outcome on Tuesday. Once the results are in, many Americans will return to their "normal" routine of only intermittent attentiveness to the world of politics. But those who continue to follow the daily march of events cannot count on the end of the campaign to provide a respite from the perpetual partisan battle.

Post-Debates Recap: Is 2016 An Exception Or the New Normal?

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton engaged in the final scheduled debate last night, passing a milepost marking the home stretch of the campaign. The overall dynamics and candidate strategy on display last night closely resembled those of the first two debates. Clinton was once again well-prepped and bent on goading Trump into counterproductive responses on his main points of vulnerability. Trump was once again extemporaneous and free-associative, focusing on broad themes instead of policy details.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Trump has been badly hurt by the debates. On September 26, the day of the first debate, the FiveThirtyEight model estimated that Clinton was leading Trump by 46 percent to 45 percent in the national popular vote and by 278 to 260 in the electoral vote, with just a 55 percent projected chance of winning the election. Today, Clinton is estimated to hold a lead of 50 percent to 43 percent in the popular vote and 343 to 194 in the electoral vote, adding up to an 87 percent chance of victory on November 8.

This shift no doubt partially reflects other developments that have occurred over the period that the debates were held—especially the Billy Bush tape and subsequent accusations against Trump. And Clinton was already the favorite to win the race even before they occurred. But I think the bulk of the evidence points toward the debates having a significant independent effect on the relative standing of the candidates, especially because they generated negative news coverage of Trump that persisted for days after the events themselves. Trump's refusal last night to commit to respecting the outcome of the election is likewise poised to dominate this week's coverage—to his further disadvantage—which means that the debates may continue to hurt his chances further over the next several days.

If true, the power of the debates to shift public opinion is another way in which the 2016 election departs from the usual pattern. Though debates receive a lot of attention every year, and media figures always spend a lot of time explaining which candidate "won" each face-off, previous research had concluded that the effects of debate performances on the horse race tended to be quite temporary when they existed at all. If Clinton winds up winning the election by a margin comparable to her current lead, we may regard the debates in retrospect as significant events in the trajectory of the race.

Political scientists have taken our share of lumps this election from our critics, largely because most of us didn't expect the Republican Party to nominate Trump (a conclusion which, to be fair, we were hardly alone in reaching). One recurrent point of difference between political science and popular media is that many journalists and pundits tend to interpret electoral outcomes as mostly reflecting the different personalities and strategies of the candidates, while political scientists more commonly emphasize the role of fundamental factors like partisanship and economic performance in shaping the choices of voters. (This view is sometimes caricatured as a belief that "campaigns don't matter," which no political scientist I know has ever claimed.)

If the debates are revealed to be a major factor in determining the vote margin in the 2016 election, however, it's fair to point out that campaign effects turned out to be bigger than some of us assumed. When analysis built on investigation of previous elections fails to hold in a new case, there are three possible explanations:

1. The analysis was flawed even when applied to previous cases.

2. The analysis was sound in the past, but the current case doesn't fit because the world has changed—and future cases will resemble the current case more than past cases.

3. The analysis was sound in the past and will be again in the future, but the current case represents a temporary deviation from the long-term norm.

Our least charitable critics will probably argue that (1) is likely to be true—we just don't know what we're talking about and never did. But as even they must acknowledge, there's plenty of reason to believe that this particular election is just different from previous elections, with Trump's nomination either a cause or a symptom of this difference.

We can even come up with very plausible hypotheses about why the debates would matter more for a candidate like Trump than a candidate like Mitt Romney or John McCain: perhaps voters had less confidence in Trump's ability to do the job of president, rendering a substandard debate performance all the more damaging to his chances. Or maybe the press coverage of Trump has been much more negative than previous candidates over the same period. Alternatively, though it's tempting to rely on a Trump-centric explanation to account for everything that's distinctive about this election, maybe the debates mattered more because of something unique about Hillary Clinton. Perhaps her relatively strong debate performances helped her consolidate the support of younger voters and independents who never liked Trump but preferred Bernie Sanders to Clinton and were won over once the debates focused their attention on the choice before them this November.

The bigger challenge is to distinguish condition (2) from condition (3). In the heat of a campaign's final weeks, when it's very hard to step back and gain a broader perspective, we often assume that the current state of the world will pertain indefinitely into the future—for example, that Trump's particular brand of politics is here to stay in the Republican Party even if he loses the election. Sometimes that's right, but sometimes we're simply in the midst of a temporary departure from the usual order of things. Until we are able to gain the benefit of experience—or, as political scientists might put it, more data—we won't know for sure how much of what's extraordinary about the 2016 election is merely a product of the moment, and how much is a foreshadowing of the new normal.

Paul Ryan's Job Just Keeps Getting Harder

The luck of the Irish is not smiling on Paul Ryan. Last week, I noted that the probable loss of Donald Trump in the presidential race has placed Ryan in an increasingly precarious position. If Hillary Clinton is the next president and the Democrats gain control of the Senate, responsibility for leading the partisan opposition will fall to Ryan (assuming that he remains speaker of the House). Ryan will then face the challenge of negotiating regular bipartisan agreements with Clinton and Senate Democrats to fund the government and increase the national debt ceiling while simultaneously avoiding threats to his leadership from the hard-liners in the House Freedom Caucus—a difficult task that his predecessor John Boehner ultimately found impossible to achieve.

Unfortunately for Ryan, things just keep getting worse by the day:

1. Trump's position in the polls continues to slide in the wake of the well-publicized assault charges against him. A few surveys released yesterday even suggested that the margin between Clinton and Trump in the national popular vote is flirting with double digits, while the Clinton campaign hinted at a tactical offensive into a few traditionally red states that amounts to a declaration of victory three weeks before Election Day. This decline doesn't have much of an effect on Trump's already-slim chances of winning, but it does increase the likelihood of significant Republican losses in House elections that could leave any future majority with a very narrow margin of control—further enhancing the leverage of the Freedom Caucus over Ryan's speakership.

2. Trump has taken to repeatedly attacking Ryan personally for distancing himself from the presidential ticket, even accusing Ryan of hoping for a Trump defeat so that he could run for president himself in 2020. Ryan might not care too much about what Trump personally thinks of him, but it doesn't help his own future standing in the Republican Party to be charged with disloyalty to the GOP's presidential standard-bearer.

3. Trump's increasingly vociferous claims that a "rigged" electoral system is poised to deny him the presidency suggest that he, or at the very least many of his supporters, will not accept the legitimacy of a Clinton victory in November—which would in turn lead to demands on Republican elected officials to demonstrate their own thorough rejection of the new president. With 84 percent of Trump supporters in Florida—presumably representative of the national party—agreeing that Clinton should be in jail, it's near-certain that some conservatives will pressure Ryan and other Republican congressional leaders to initiate impeachment proceedings against a future President Clinton just as they did for the last President Clinton. Ryan is unlikely to view impeachment as a smart political move, but resisting it may not be a costless act for him within the GOP.

The Republican base is poised for a volcanic eruption if Clinton wins this election, and it will be difficult for Ryan to avoid sustaining some of the damage. Ryan has already signaled that he will respond to a second Clinton presidency by attempting to recalibrate the grounds of Republican opposition, exchanging Trumpist ultra-nationalism for more intellectually-styled lines of attack that paint Clinton as a big-government leftist who is hostile to individual liberty. But it will be difficult for Ryan to lead any larger reform effort within the GOP that successfully marginalizes the party's rightmost fringe given his own growing political vulnerability. As things stand now, he'll need a little luck just to keep his current job for the next four years.

Why Paul Ryan's In More Trouble Than Mitch McConnell

The events of the past two weeks have taken a lot of the suspense out of the outcome of the presidential race, unless you're the kind of person who is fascinated by the question of whether normally "red" states like Arizona and Georgia will actually flip into the Democratic column this year. (Full disclosure: I am that kind of person.) Comebacks are possible in politics, but the Trump campaign seems particularly ill-equipped to make one—especially with damaging revelations and counterproductive strategies emerging on what now seems like an hourly basis.

A decisive Republican loss in the presidential contest would probably be accompanied by a switch in party control of the Senate. All but one of the competitive Senate races this year are for seats now held by Republican incumbents, and a net change of four seats would be sufficient to produce a Democratic majority in the event of a Hillary Clinton victory (since the vice president would break a 50-50 tie). Most Republican Senate candidates are likely to outrun Donald Trump in their home states, but GOP nominees in electoral battlegrounds like Pennsylvania and New Hampshire will find it difficult to attract enough crossover support from Clinton voters to prevail over a national Democratic wave, should it appear. If Trump demoralizes enough of his own party's supporters that Republican turnout falls across the nation, Democrats could wind up winning a near-sweep of the key Senate races.

Compared to the Senate, Republican prospects in the House look considerably brighter. It's difficult to know exactly how vulnerable the Republican House majority is in the wake of Trump's latest problems; we suffer from a lack of good survey data on congressional races (media polling budgets are getting tighter, and the presidential race has consumed virtually all of the attention this year). But Republicans have the twin advantages of a structural edge in the configuration of House districts and a superior crop of candidates compared to Democrats, who failed to recruit a large number of high-quality challengers. A pro-Democratic electoral tide would need to be quite massive indeed to flip the 30 seats necessary to shift party control of the House.

And yet Paul Ryan is in a much tougher position, politically speaking, than Mitch McConnell.

Even if the House GOP ultimately retains its majority, the party's likely margin of control narrows by the day with each new Trump mishap. Ryan is already operating with little room for error, as he is situated between the hard-line House Freedom Caucus on one side and the opposition Democrats on the other. A Democratic victory in the presidential race would mean that Ryan would, like his predecessor John Boehner, need to cut bipartisan deals in order to fund the government—which would inevitably leave him open, as Boehner was, to criticism from party purists that he did not sufficiently defend conservative principles. The fact that the new Democratic president would be a figure uniquely loathed on the popular right—especially after a presidential campaign in which the Republican opposition characterized her as a literal criminal—further threatens Ryan's ability to hold off such attacks.

Boehner's departure from the speakership last year was prompted by the unique constitutional requirement that the Speaker be elected by a majority vote of the full House, which gives any dissident faction of the majority party tremendous procedural leverage. Even if Ryan were able to win an initial vote for Speaker this coming January, he would serve under a constant threat of defenestration from an purist right motivated by fierce antipathy to Hillary Clinton and to any Republican who faces her with less than total opposition.

By comparison, McConnell has it easy. To be sure, he is more likely than Ryan to lose his governing majority in this election. But if the worst happens, he will slip smoothly back into his role as minority leader, leading filibusters against Democratic legislation and waiting for the 2018 midterms, which will provide Senate Republicans with a very favorable set of vulnerable Democratic seats.

Ryan was famously reluctant to seek the speakership upon Boehner's resignation. When he was finally prevailed upon to do so, he probably assumed that there was a fairly good chance of a Republican presidential victory in 2016—which would both hand him an opportunity to implement his national policy agenda and relieve him of responsibility for leading the opposition to a Democratic administration.

Today, those hopes have faded away entirely. Ryan as much as conceded the presidential race in a conference call with House Republicans earlier this week, telling them to do whatever they needed to do in order to save their own seats. Even that admission earned him some blowback from conservative purists within his own caucus—a preview of what may turn out to be an even uglier conflict within the Republican Party if Trump goes down to defeat. If Ryan is handed a narrow majority on November 8 along with four guaranteed years of a Democratic president, he will need to draw upon all his political acumen in order to prevent suffering the same fate as John Boehner.

2nd Debate Recap: Back to the Tape

I wrote earlier that Donald Trump's real audience tonight was the press and other Republican politicians more than the voters. On this score, Trump probably emerged from the debate having preserved, but not necessarily improved, his current standing. The general media consensus seems to be that Trump, even if he did not "win" the debate outright, performed better than he had last time. He at least avoided any kind of immediately embarrassing gaffe or line-crossing in the eyes of the press that would be a candidate for constant TV replay and/or viral video status over the next week.

At the same time, the debate failed to produce a sufficiently memorable positive story for Trump that would be likely to divert attention for very long from his remarks on the Access Hollywood bus, which will probably continue to dominate media coverage and political chatter over the following days. Most debates, despite their extensive advance hype, tend to soon fade into history without pushing the race very far in either direction, and the emergence of other, more fascinating developments over the weekend may hasten this pattern in the present case.

We can probably conclude from Hillary Clinton's fairly unmemorable performance that her campaign wouldn't mind if people spend the next week talking about the Trump tape rather than the debate. Clinton was well-drilled as always, but she lacked some of the prefabricated attack lines that she had brought to the first event. Even her response to the subject of the tape was less impassioned than it could have been, which suggests that she has adopted the front-runner's traditional strategy of staying out of the way of the opposition as the clock runs down.

Van Jones of CNN advanced the theory that Trump's good-enough performance was actually the worst-case scenario for Republicans, because a total meltdown would have prompted them to dump Trump from the ticket and replace him with a stronger candidate. But Trump can't actually be dumped—people are already voting in some states—and the Republicans are stuck with him as their official nominee for the duration. Whether or not Republican leaders renounce him or deny his campaign the resources of the Republican National Committee will not be affected by his debate performance Sunday night, but rather will be determined by the fallout of the Access Hollywood tape—and the natural question of whether any more damaging revelations still await us.

It's Not Just Millennials: Third Party Candidates Always Do Better With Young Voters

Over the last few weeks, reporters have published a number of stories about the struggles that Hillary Clinton has faced in convincing millennial-generation voters to support her over third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. The Clinton campaign has recently taken steps to rectify this apparent problem, such as booking their candidate to appear on the Zach Galifianakis talk show parody "Between Two Ferns" while enlisting Bernie Sanders, who carried the under-30 vote in the Democratic primaries by a nearly 4-to-1 margin, to stump on her behalf.

Age-group differences in electoral preferences always invite analysis that generalizes about generations. These stories repeatedly portray millennials as distinctive in their political idealism, their dissatisfaction with the political system, and their view of the two major parties (and their leaders) as fatally compromised and corrupted. Older Americans who are already prone to view the millennial generation as uniquely naive, self-involved, and politically unsophisticated can find plenty of fodder for such negative impressions from anecdotal accounts of 20-somethings who speak of voting as an opportunity for personal performances of authenticity rather than as a means of influencing the policy direction of the government, and some Democratic supporters (a fairly panicky bunch by nature) seem poised to blame millennials for a Trump victory, if it occurs, lecturing voters who are too young to remember about Ralph Nader's role in spoiling Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign.

Before we get carried away with chewing over the supposedly distinctive attributes of millennials (an exercise that has a 90% chance of ending up in a hazily-informed debate over the deficiencies of Snapchat and/or Lena Dunham), it's worth pointing out that third-party candidates always run better among younger voters, regardless of the era. Nader was more popular among the youngest cohort of voters in 2000 (today's 30- and 40-somethings), Ross Perot's candidacies in the 1990s drew especially well from the young of that time (today's 40- and 50-somethings), and John Anderson's independent campaign in 1980 was also more successful among the then-young (now deep into middle age) than the then-old (now mostly departed from the earthly realm).

George Wallace, the former Alabama governor who ran for president in 1968 on a racial segregationist platform, might seem like an unlikely candidate to inspire a youth brigade, but even Wallace ran a bit better among younger than older voters. The chart below compares the performance of major third-party candidates among young (under the age of 30) and old (over 50 for 1968 and 1980; over 60 otherwise) voters, based on exit polls (1992 and after) and pre-election Gallup surveys (for 1968 and 1980):

It is clear that candidates outside the two-party system enjoy a particular appeal among young voters regardless of their specific generation. Younger voters are consistently less invested in the two-party system, more open to large-scale political change, and less strategic in their political choices. They also frequently have yet to experience politics under the rule of both parties (at least as attentive adults) and, in part for this reason, tend not to perceive large differences between the major parties as reliably as older voters with longer memories (and more grievances).

Hillary Clinton does not inspire the same level of support among today's younger voters as Barack Obama did in 2008 and 2012, leaving open the possibility of large-scale third-party defection that could possibly endanger her chances. It's likely that the Clinton campaign will place a particular emphasis on young-voter outreach between now and November, hoping to convince skeptics among the rising generation that she is, if not a thoroughly inspiring choice, still preferable to the alternative. This message may ultimately find some resonance. The third-party vote usually declines in the final tally from its pre-election levels as voters return to the major party nominees—and while millennials don't particularly like Clinton, they really don't like Donald Trump.

Debate Recap: Some Things We Learned Last Night

1. The two candidates are in some ways representative personifications of their parties. Matt Grossmann and I have a post up at the Monkey Cage today looking at the debate through the lens of Asymmetric Politics. Like a typical Democrat, Clinton emphasized specific policies, while Donald Trump's preference for broader rhetorical themes fell in line with the pattern of previous Republican candidates.

2. It is important to undergo thorough pre-debate preparation and practice in order to deliver a performance that will be judged satisfactory by the news media. The rules—both official and unofficial—of these events give a decisive advantage to candidates who have memorized pointed and pithy responses to likely topics and questions, who strategically seek to draw their opponents into discussions of unfavorable subjects, and who project an image of good-humored unflappability throughout. This was the lesson of the first Obama-Romney debate in 2012, and it was reinforced again last night. Unlike Clinton, Trump exhibited no sign of having prepared for the debate in any systematic way, which affected the crispness and intelligibility of his own responses as well as his ability to defend himself and counterattack in exchanges with Clinton.

3. With that said, it is worth considering more explicitly how much the debates should properly influence voters' impressions of the candidates. If the difference between a "good" and "bad" performance is primarily a function of how disciplined a candidate is in subjecting him- or herself to the generally annoying task of debate prep, rather than an indicator of substantive command of policy, personal character, or other attributes, are we judging debate participants on grounds that have much to do with their actual responsibilities in office?

4. For the past several weeks, there has been something of an offensive among Democrats, especially noticeable on Twitter, against the prevailing media coverage of the campaign. Democratic complaints have included what they view as insufficient coverage of dishonest behavior by Trump, ineffective or absent media "fact-checking" of Trump's public claims, and excessive media preoccupation with Clinton's email practices and the activity of the Clinton Foundation. These critiques reached a peak after the September 7 candidate forum hosted by Matt Lauer, who was accused by Democrats of being tougher on Clinton than Trump, and evolved into an open discussion over the past several days about whether it would be proper for a debate moderator to challenge or correct factual misstatements by candidates. (Not irrelevant to the partisan dimension of this subject is moderator Candy Crowley's decision to "fact-check" Mitt Romney's claims about Benghazi in the 2012 town hall debate, which Democrats and Republicans alike commonly view in retrospect as a turning point in the election.)

It seems likely that these complaints, whether they represent sincere advocacy of media responsibility, cynical working of the referees, or a bit of both, had some effect on Lester Holt's performance last night. Holt moderated with a light touch, but he did explicitly dispute Trump's claim of consistent opposition to the Iraq War, and his line of questioning included a few tough personal challenges of Trump (most notably on the subject of "birtherism" and Trump's claim that Clinton lacked a "presidential look"). When combined with recent media coverage that devotes more attention to examples of Trump's dishonesty, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Democrats have partially succeeded in convincing journalists on this point.

Two Reasons Why the Press Cares More About the Clinton Foundation Than the Trump Foundation

Over the last few weeks, the prestige press—notably led by the New York Times—has taken a renewed interest in the activities of the Clinton Foundation, running a series of stories suggesting that foundation donors might have received some sort of preferential treatment from Hillary Clinton or her staff while she was running the State Department. The lack of any hard evidence of a quid pro quo has not stopped Republican critics and good-government scolds from attacking Clinton over the foundation's existence. The former group doesn't need any proof to find her guilty, while the latter takes the position that the "appearance of impropriety" is itself a transgression—which more or less means that if anybody in the news media thinks you might have done something wrong, then, by definition, you did.

In the midst of a charged presidential campaign against a hated opponent, we might expect Democrats and liberals to mount an aggressive pushback—and indeed they have. Some Clinton defenders have focused on rebutting the news media's suggestions that the former secretary of state violated ethical norms, while others have charged the Times and like-minded press sources with imposing a double standard on the candidates. After all, Donald Trump's own foundation not only broke the law by making a campaign contribution to an elected official using the funds of a non-political organization, but did so just before the official—Florida attorney general Pam Bondi—decided not to launch an investigation into accusations of fraud by Trump's defunct "university." Yet the demonstrated illegal behavior of Trump's organization, to say nothing of the possibility that the money bought a reprieve from punishment for further criminal activity, has received much less press attention than the mere "questions" and "shadows" that supposedly "swirl" around the Clinton operation.

Why the difference? I see two reasons.

The first has to do with the press's particular preoccupation with apparent examples of hypocrisy. Democrats in general are held to a higher standard in the media with respect to scandals, or alleged scandals, involving improper influence or corruption because Democrats, more than Republicans, support the imposition of stricter rules and laws intended to reduce improper influence or corruption. Journalists are especially upset when the party that vows more frequently to clean up government is caught in an ethical lapse, as it is seen as not only dishonorable but hypocritical.

We can see this dynamic in a story the Times published over the weekend on Hillary Clinton's recent campaign finance activities. The article portrays Clinton as spending more time on the fundraising circuit than the campaign trail in recent weeks and openly argues that this shows she prefers the company of the super-rich to that of the regular people she claims to champion in her "seemingly joyless" public campaign. The clear message is that Clinton is something of a phony when she says her policies will benefit "everyday Americans" or when she advocates reform of the campaign finance system.

Republicans also spend a lot of time hanging around rich people, but they tend to openly advocate policies that cut taxes on the wealthy and reduce business regulations while opposing stringent limitations on political money. According to the press, then, Republicans may be out of touch, but they are not dishonest or hypocritical when they engage in this behavior.

The second reason why the media spends more time implying that Clinton's foundation is an ethical problem than cataloging the actual transgressions of the Trump foundation has to do with the specific pre-existing flaws from which the candidates are perceived to suffer. In the main, journalists do not view Hillary Clinton as incompetent, unintelligent, inexperienced, temperamental, or ideologically extreme. Her chief fault in their eyes (and in those of the public as well) is dishonesty—a perception that stretches back to the Bill Clinton years of the 1990s but has been reinforced more recently by the Benghazi and email server issues. Any evidence, or even subject matter, that can be interpreted as consistent with the "narrative" of ubiquitous Clinton shadiness will therefore receive considerable attention, as it vindicates an existing media conclusion. (Secondarily, she is deemed to be an untalented and strategically unsophisticated campaigner—another common theme of critical media coverage.)

To be sure, the media doesn't seem to think that Donald Trump is particularly honest either. But that's far from the primary knock on Trump. His biggest alleged flaw, according to the press, is racial divisiveness, followed by (2) running a supposedly incompetent campaign; (3) lacking apparent command of policy; and (4) exhibiting "unpresidential" personality traits. Indicators that Trump's rhetoric is in fact less truthful than Clinton's are occasionally noted, but don't shape media stories to the same degree—simply because honesty is simply not Trump's #1 problem the way it is for Clinton.

Paul Krugman notes today that a similar dynamic arose in the 2000 presidential campaign. The media made a much bigger deal out of Al Gore's supposed exaggerations and misstatements than they did of comparable remarks by George W. Bush. This was because Gore's main fault was held to be dishonesty, while Bush's main fault was held to be ignorance—so if Bush said something that wasn't true, it was likely to be interpreted more charitably ("he doesn't know any better") than if Gore did the same ("he's intentionally trying to deceive us").

I doubt that the 2016 election will turn on media stories about the Clinton Foundation, and both candidates have ample opportunity to make their own case against each other via television advertising and debate performances. But journalists have hardly been shy about expressing the opinion that the election this year has left the American people with a particularly poor choice of candidates, and the tone of coverage of both Clinton and Trump is likely to be overwhelmingly negative from now until November. It is already clear that the next president, whomever it may be, will come into office viewing the press as a sworn enemy.

It Sure Looks Like the Same Old Electoral Map in 2016

The nomination of Donald Trump (and, secondarily, the performance of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries) has helped to infuse media coverage this year with a pervasive everything-is-different-now attitude that has been applied to a number of campaign attributes, practices, and phenomena. In the eyes of political analysts who have become bored with the familiar red-versus-blue pattern of the two parties' contemporary geographic constituencies, one of the more exciting aspects of the Trump candidacy was its potential capacity to redraw the modern electoral map. A few weeks ago, when Trump was within striking distance of Clinton in the national polls, pundits speculated about pro-Trump white working-class voters shifting Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, or Iowa from blue to red this year. More recently, Clinton's national lead and a few favorable state polls have prompted talk that Trump's political vulnerabilities might lead to Democratic victories in the traditional Republican bastions of Georgia, South Carolina, Arizona, and even Utah.

In truth, though, it seems quite unlikely that there will be much change in the traditional partisan alignment of the states At the moment, all three models on the FiveThirtyEight website—the polls-only, polls-plus, and now-cast analyses—produce an identical map in which every state is predicted to vote for the same party as in 2012 except for North Carolina, which flips from red to blue. (Because only two states, North Carolina and Indiana, voted differently in 2008 and 2012, FiveThirtyEight also forecasts a duplication of the 2008 outcome in every state but one.)

Four years ago, the Obama and Romney campaigns concentrated their resources in ten swing states deemed by both sides to be legitimately up for grabs: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. A Politico report published on Monday suggests that the Clinton campaign is currently making advertising purchases in seven states—the exact same battlegrounds as 2012, except for Colorado, Virginia, and Wisconsin—while the Trump campaign is currently advertising only in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Clinton is also buying ad time in the Omaha television market, which encompasses the 2nd congressional district of Nebraska (worth a single electoral vote) as well as sections of western Iowa.

If there is any change in the map compared to 2012, it appears more likely that the scope of the electoral battleground will shrink further rather than expand into new territory. The Clinton campaign has indicated that it is sufficiently confident of victory in Colorado and Virginia to divert resources to other, more competitive states, but it has yet to make an open incursion into any state that was deemed safe for McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012. Divining which states the Trump campaign views as top targets is a more difficult task for analysts, given its low rate of advertising and unorthodox candidate itinerary, but at the moment Trump is only contesting four states on the airwaves and is in no position to put any state into play that had been conceded to Obama in either of the past two elections.

We have had more than the normal share of surprises and milestones in 2016, but a realignment of the nation's political geography does not seem to be imminent. Even in an otherwise unusual presidential campaign, it will still—as the saying goes—all come down to Ohio.

The Partisan Generation Gap Is Alive and Well

One of the more interesting characteristics of the Obama presidency has been the emergence of a large and persistent generation gap in partisan voting preferences. As recently as the 2000 election, there was virtually no apparent association between age and vote choice: according to the national exit polls that year, Al Gore won 48 percent of the vote among citizens aged 18–29, 48 percent among those aged 30–49, 50 percent among those aged 50–64, and 51 percent among those 65 or older. In 2004, John Kerry only ran 7 points better among voters under the age of 30 (54 percent) compared to those aged 65 or older (47 percent).

Four years later, Obama received 66 percent of the under-30 vote compared to just 45 percent of the 65-and-over vote—a difference of 21 points. Obama's reelection in 2012 looked a lot like 2008: he won 60 percent of the under-30 vote and 44 percent of the over-65 vote, producing a 16-point gap. But Obama seemed to be a candidate whose political style was particularly well-suited to courting younger voters (and whose race might be expected to disproportionately cost him votes among the elderly), and he ran against two Republican opponents who were 25 and 14 years his senior. It was not outside the realm of possibility that the age divide in presidential voting reflected variation in the personal appeal of the candidates among Americans of different generations as well as any disagreements over ideology or issue priorities between younger and older voters.

What if the Democrats nominated someone who was a 68-year-old veteran of the political arena and who lacked Obama's natural hipness and ability to personify "change"? What if the Republicans nominated a candidate who lacked ties to their own party's traditionally stodgy national leadership and who ran as an unconventional outsider? Might we expect to find a significant narrowing of the Obama-era generation gap under such circumstances?

Well, we might...but so far it doesn't seem to be happening. Two post-convention national polls this week suggest that the Clinton-Trump contest may well produce a large generation gap just like the Obama-McCain and Obama-Romney elections:

A Public Policy Polling survey found Clinton leading Trump by 17 points among voters aged 18–29 (with an unusually high 15 percent undecided rate, probably mostly comprised of young Democratic-leaning voters who supported Bernie Sanders and have yet to rally around Clinton) and 19 points among voters aged 30–45. Trump led by 5 points in the 46–65 age range and by 4 points among those older than 65.

A CNN poll gave Clinton a 33-point lead among voters under the age of 45 and Trump a 4-point lead among voters aged 45 or older. This poll found Trump with a 19-point advantage among voters over 65.

It's not unusual for results among specific age groups to vary from poll to poll due to sampling error; what's important here is the overall pattern of correlation between age and partisan alignment, which is apparent in both surveys. Younger voters strongly preferred Sanders to Clinton in the Democratic primaries, and her favorability ratings in Gallup polls were actually weakest among the youngest generation once the Democratic nomination contest heated up early this year. But these young voters also appear particularly skeptical of Trump, and their collective affinity for the Obama-led Democratic Party seems to be fully intact even though Obama himself is no longer on the ballot.

The relationship between age and partisanship is not merely a short-term curiosity. Political science research demonstrates that citizens often develop attachments to a favorite party during their political coming-of-age period in young adulthood that can solidify into a lifelong voting habit. For example, many Americans who reached voting age during the Great Depression and presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt were still likely to support Democratic candidates like Bill Clinton in their golden years fifty and even sixty years later. The risk taken by Republicans in nominating Trump thus does not merely encompass this year's election, but could potentially extend to damaging the party's reputation among a cohort of young voters who have decades of electoral choices still ahead of them.

Pennsylvania Is Always Purple (And Other Electoral College Observations)

Over the weekend, the New York Times published an article titled "Electoral Map Gives Donald Trump Few Places to Go," which suggested that the electoral college was effectively tilted in favor of Hillary Clinton this year. The piece referred to a "daunting electoral map" producing a "narrow" and "precarious" path to an electoral vote majority for the Republican presidential ticket, arguing that Trump's chances of victory virtually depended on his carrying Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina—while Clinton only needed to pick off one of these four states to defeat him. Since the interaction between the political geography of the American electorate and the institutional structure of American electoral rules is a particular interest of mine, I thought I'd share a few observations based on the article, which is itself worth reading:

1. The electoral college is crucial to understanding candidate strategies, but is very unlikely to prove decisive to the outcome. The probability of a national popular vote winner failing to receive a majority of electoral votes is vanishingly small unless the popular vote margin is extremely narrow (as it was in 2000). This is because there is no significant partisan bias in the electoral college, and because individual swing states do not move independently of each other but rather collectively mirror national trends. Any analysis (like this one from the Times) arguing that Candidate X has a clear advantage in the electoral vote is thus suggesting that Candidate X is clearly ahead in the popular vote—and vice versa. Especially at this early stage of the race, it is advisable to avoid getting bogged down in trying to predict the election by gaming out various electoral college scenarios, as they will only come into play if the race is truly neck-and-neck heading into Election Day.

2. A casual reading of the Times article can leave the reader with the impression that the scope of the electoral battleground is likely to shrink significantly this year, with several states that were contested by both parties in 2012 openly conceded to one side or the other in 2016. But a more careful examination of the piece doesn't turn up any hard examples of states that fit that profile. We are not told that the Trump campaign is actually abandoning any of the states that Romney contested four years ago—only that it considers Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania pivotal to its chances and North Carolina a must-win but potentially vulnerable state. None of this should be much of a surprise; the Romney campaign was in a very similar strategic position in 2012 (except that it considered Virginia more critical than Pennsylvania). We should expect both campaigns to devote a large proportion of their resources to the first three states in any event, since they cast the most electoral votes of all the potential battlegrounds and are therefore highly likely to determine the outcome of the election. Competitive but less populous states like New Hampshire, Iowa, and Nevada are likely to be actively fought over by the campaigns as well, but they are much cheaper to contest and are less likely to serve as the tipping point that determines which party receives a majority in the electoral college.

3. The main development cited by the Times that works in favor of the Clinton campaign is the potential partisan evolution of Colorado and Virginia. In the past two elections, the results in both states closely matched the national popular vote. But if the Democrats could count on achieving slender victories in both states in the event of a very close race nationwide, the party would stand a decent chance of gaining an electoral vote majority even if it were to lose both Ohio and Florida. Note, however, that the article does not claim that either state is safely Democratic—only that Clinton is doing relatively well there based on recent polling. Moreover, these apparent trends would only make a difference in the event of a virtual tie in the overall popular vote. If Trump pulls ahead nationally, Colorado and Virginia will suddenly look quite unsafe for Clinton.

4. Because the article (justifiably) places particular emphasis on Pennsylvania's potentially decisive role in the 2016 election, it is worth noting that the state is often somewhat mischaracterized in electoral college analyses. Pennsylvania has not voted Republican for president since 1988, which prompts some writers to classify it as a dependable "blue" state or as part of the Democratic geographic "base." But this is not quite accurate. Pennsylvania is actually a competitive battleground state—"purple" rather than reliably blue—that usually sits one notch to the Democratic side of an even split between the parties. It has voted Democratic for the past six consecutive elections because Democratic nominees have won the national popular vote in five of those elections, while losing narrowly in the sixth (2004, when Pennsylvania voted for John Kerry by the same 2.5-point margin by which he lost the national vote to George W. Bush).

For this reason, Democrats should not count on Pennsylvania to be a safe bastion for their party—and Republicans should not view actively contesting it as achieving a bold invasion of enemy territory. Some analysts have suggested that Trump could outperform previous Republican presidential candidates in Pennsylvania due to the demographic composition of its electorate. Whether or not he manages to do so, it seems certain that the state will receive considerable attention from both parties between now and November—just as it has in every presidential election for the past 60 years.

In Philadelphia, the Democrats Define Their Coalition

For as long as I can remember, the two parties have each tended to rely on a favorite theme when attacking each other: the Republicans accuse the Democrats of adhering to an extreme ideology, while the Democrats accuse the Republicans of supporting extreme policies. As Matt Grossmann and I explain in our forthcoming book, there are good strategic reasons for each side to adopt its favored strategy; most Americans lean to the political right in general terms but hold left-of-center views on specific issues, so politicians respond by attempting to shift the public debate of the campaign onto turf that favors their own partisan interest.

Four years ago, the party conventions followed this pattern closely. The Republicans spent an entire evening at their 2012 convention in Tampa portraying Barack Obama as a big-government collectivist who was instinctively hostile to the private sector and individual entrepreneurship. The best-received speech of the Democratic convention in Charlotte, Bill Clinton's "explainer-in-chief" address nominating Barack Obama for a second presidential term, methodically criticized Romney's positions on a number of specific policy questions as unacceptably hostile to the interests of ordinary Americans.

But the events of 2016 have prompted both sides to rewrite their playbooks a little. There was still a fair amount of traditional conservative rhetoric at the Republican convention last week—particularly visible in the speeches of Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, and vice presidential nominee Mike Pence—but Donald Trump's acceptance address, like his campaign up to this point, relied on themes of American nationalism more than the limited-government principles ordinarily emphasized by Republican candidates, and his chief line of attack against the Democratic opposition was not that it was excessively liberal in a philosophical sense but that it was unacceptably permissive in the face of terrorism and lawlessness. Republican criticisms of Hillary Clinton, while numerous, primarily focused on the topics of the events in Benghazi and her private email server, and thus questioned her honesty, competence, and devotion to American interests more than her supposed leftism.

For Democrats, Trump's nomination presented its own novel challenge. As usual, the party's national convention this week promoted its own extensive set of policy positions, but Democrats' normal practice of characterizing Republican policies as extreme by comparison was frustrated by the fact that Trump, though he has expressed support for nearly all of the usual Republican domestic policy agenda, has not made limited government a defining theme of his campaign. Democrats who normally delight in presenting themselves as the defenders of popular entitlement programs and opponents of "giveaways" to corporations and the wealthy seem to have concluded that Trump's own personal attributes represent better attack fodder than his policy positions (such as they are). They repeatedly characterized Trump as inexperienced, ill-tempered, and divisive, with Barack Obama even referring to the Republican nominee as a "homegrown demagogue."

Most strikingly, the Democratic Party's essential nature as a coalition of social groups was on display to an unprecedented extent in Philadelphia. The Black Lives Matter cause and the Mothers of the Movement were given prominent platforms and expressions of support. Undocumented Latino immigrants spoke on Clinton's behalf, and a number of speakers, including the party's vice presidential nominee, punctuated their remarks with Spanish words and phrases. Other groups that received explicit representation from the convention stage included Asian Americans, Native Americans, feminists, gays and lesbians, transgender people, Muslims, union members, and people with disabilities. Clinton's status as the first female major-party presidential nominee and potential first female president was celebrated repeatedly during the convention proceedings—including via a video effect on Tuesday night in which a mosaic of (male) presidential portraits broke apart with the sound of shattering glass to reveal Clinton's face as she appeared live from a remote location to greet the delegates.

For much of the last few decades—especially the 1990s, when the current nominee's husband was the national leader of the party—Democrats tempered such tributes to social diversity with other gestures meant to reassure white southerners, businesspeople, and blue-collar cultural moderates that the party spoke for them too. Today, due to a combination of demographic trends, geographic realignment, and Trump's own behavior, Democratic leaders no longer feel the need to place much emphasis on courting these other voters. By nominating Trump, the Republican Party has bet heavily on a campaign message tailored to appeal primarily to middle-aged, middle-class, middle-American whites. Democrats have opted to make a different wager of their own: that the voters who will feel left out of Trump's vision for America not only represent a rainbow coalition of social groups but also a national electoral majority that can carry Clinton to victory in November.

Geography and the Veepstakes

Geography usually ranks near the top of the considerations that are commonly said to matter when selecting a vice presidential candidate. Political folk wisdom tells us that a would-be president seeks to balance the ticket by choosing a running mate from a different region of the nation, while a prospective VP from a critical battleground state holds the promise of attracting a favorite-son (or -daughter) vote that could tilt that state to his or her party, thus offering an advantage in the electoral college.

John F. Kennedy's choice of Lyndon B. Johnson as his running mate in 1960 is often treated as the model case of vice presidential selection. Johnson was credited in retrospect with helping to keep most of the South in the Democratic column—especially his home state of Texas, which Kennedy carried by less than 50,000 votes—at a time when the Democratic Party could no longer take the region for granted in presidential elections. When speculation turns in the late spring and summer of an election year to the identity of the vice presidential candidates, governors and senators from swing states like Ohio and Florida are often among the most frequently mentioned, reflecting the assumption that their presence on the ticket could potentially prove decisive to the outcome just as Johnson supposedly did.

As a rule, however, presidential candidates have not consistently elevated geography among other considerations when selecting running mates. Joe Biden (D 2008/2012), Sarah Palin (R 2008), Dick Cheney (R 2000/2004), and Joe Lieberman (D 2000) were all residents of small states that were already electorally safe for their party. On the other hand, the home states of John Edwards (D 2004) and Jack Kemp (R 1996) were almost certain to vote for the opposition regardless of their presence on the ticket. Paul Ryan (R 2012) did come from the battleground state of Wisconsin, but he had never represented more than one-eighth of the state's residents in Congress (after the election, Mitt Romney advisors revealed that Ryan was not chosen because the campaign thought that he would deliver Wisconsin to the Republican Party). The home state of Al Gore (D 1992/1996) was politically competitive but not widely considered pivotal to the national outcome.

Since Johnson in 1960, two other Texans have been nominated for vice president: George H. W. Bush (R 1980/1984) and Lloyd Bentsen (D 1988). Geography played a role in the selection of both, though other considerations seemed to matter more; both Bush and Bentsen were identified with rival party factions to the presidential candidates who chose them, and were placed on the ticket largely to promote party unity. Despite Ohio's longstanding importance in the electoral college, no Ohioan has appeared on a national ticket since John W. Bricker served as Thomas E. Dewey's running mate in 1944. Florida, a more recent swing state, has yet to be represented by a presidential or vice presidential nominee of either party.

It appears, then, that modern presidential candidates seldom choose running mates whom they believe will help them carry a specific state—much less an entire region. Indeed, there is little evidence that parties normally perform significantly better in the VP's home state compared to what they would otherwise expect (most presidential nominees, in contrast, attract a reliable favorite-son bonus of a few percentage points in the state's popular vote).

Of the major potential running mates for Hillary Clinton floated so far in the media (Tim Kaine, Elizabeth Warren, Julian Castro, Cory Booker, and Tom Perez), only one—Kaine—resides in a battleground state. Similarly, the apparent field of candidates for VP on the Republican ticket (Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie, Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, and Joni Ernst) includes a single swing-state representative (Ernst, though Iowa casts only 6 electoral votes). This recent article suggests that somebody in the Trump campaign—probably pollster Kellyanne Conway—is talking up Pence by portraying his selection as allowing Trump to "shore up the Rust Belt," but there is little reason to believe that many voters outside Indiana (a state that is normally safe Republican territory) would care very much about Pence's presence on the ticket.

If Kaine or Ernst is nominated for the vice presidency this year, it is probable that political geography played a role in boosting them over other potential candidates. But recent history suggests that most presidential nominees view the potential electoral impact in a particular state or region as sufficiently modest that it does not outweigh other important factors relevant to the choice of running mate, from ideological positioning and political experience to campaign skill and personal rapport. We should not be surprised, then, if the 2016 presidential candidates follow this pattern by selecting running mates from safely red or blue states rather than electoral battlegrounds.

Beware of Analyzing Demographic Groups in Isolation (Even the All-Important White Working Class!)

Even in an election year with more than the usual degree of surprise, a few familiar patterns have returned—such as the quadrennial flurry of media stories about the supposedly pivotal role of the white working class in deciding the presidency. Some of these pieces are colorfully anecdotal tours through blue-collar communities; others are more systematic and data-driven. However, their tone and conclusions tend to converge on a single theme: the Democrats need to watch out, because the Republicans are cutting into their traditional base.

We'll probably hear this caution more often than usual in 2016, since Donald Trump appears to hold disproportionate appeal among whites without bachelor's degrees compared to other voting blocs in the American population. (I have some objections to accepting a methodological definition that classifies the richest person in the United States as "working class," but that's a discussion for another time.) It's also quite possible that Hillary Clinton is not exactly beloved by this set of voters—especially the men among them—further opening the door for Trump to win a substantial chunk of their support.

According to the polls so far, however, any newfound advantage that Trump provides the Republican Party among the "white working class" is more than balanced out by his weaknesses among the racial minorities and college-educated whites who constitute the remainder of the electorate. It is likely that both phenomena reflect the same underlying set of candidate attributes: Trump's outspoken nationalism, racially charged rhetoric, and idiosyncratic persona could be expected to attract some types of voters while repelling others.

Such tradeoffs are common in politics. Party tents can only stretch so far; the actions that welcome one group into an electoral coalition can often alienate the members of another. When the Democratic Party moved leftward on civil rights in the mid-20th century, it won a greater share of the minority vote but lost popularity in the South. The white southerners who migrated into the GOP then helped to establish social conservatism as a foundational Republican creed, which in turn propelled culturally liberal northern metropolitans toward the Democrats. Politicians often seek to raise issues or develop messages that might cause segments of the opposition to defect from their habitual partisan alignment, but such maneuvers can be risky and are seldom entirely costless.

Close study of the changing preferences of a single demographic group or stratum of the electorate can yield insights and illuminate developments that otherwise go unappreciated—such as the dramatic pro-Democratic trend among Asian-American voters since the 1990s. The evolution of the parties' popular coalitions over time holds significant implications for a number of important political phenomena, from voter mobilization to elite policymaking.

But these analyses are often conducted in the context of a campaign horse race, where any change in the prevailing partisanship (or relative size) of a particular voting bloc primarily receives attention because of its potential impact on the outcome of an imminent election. Examinations of a single category of voters may incorrectly assume that no countervailing trends exist among other citizens, potentially leading to misguided conclusions. For example, the growing electoral strength and partisan loyalty of Latino voters is surely an asset to Democratic candidates, holding all else equal—but if it is accompanied by an erosion in the party's popularity among racially conservative or immigration-skeptical whites, it will hardly provide Democrats with a decisive long-term advantage. (The much-hyped increasing demographic diversity of the American electorate notably did not prevent Republicans from winning more seats in Congress in 2014 than at any point since the 1920s.)

One of the reasons why we hear so much about the white working class every four years is that many of the battleground states in presidential elections are located in a nearly contiguous band between Pennsylvania and Iowa that roughly corresponds to the so-called Rust Belt. It is easy for party leaders and media figures alike to envision the pivotal voters in these pivotal states as retired steelworkers or out-of-work machinists, and to thus conclude that the election will turn on these Americans' specific attitudes and concerns. Despite popular perceptions, however, these states also contain plenty of professional-class residents who may be just as alienated by the Trump campaign as their blue-collar neighbors are attracted to it.

Moreover, the logic of partisan tradeoffs can apply to the electoral college as well. If Trump's rhetoric on race and immigration inspires a large enough popular backlash among minority voters to deliver the ethnically diverse states of Florida, Nevada, Colorado, and Virginia to the Democratic ticket this November, then he could carry Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, New Hampshire, and the northern district in Maine and still lose the presidency. Yes, it's a problem for Hillary Clinton if she loses Johnstown by a landslide—but it's a bigger problem for Trump if he gets blown out in Miami.

In 1996, the consultants running Bill Clinton's reelection campaign successfully convinced reporters that they had identified the decisive voting bloc in the race: white suburban women with children, whom they dubbed "soccer moms." Those of us old enough to remember that election can recall numerous media stories about this narrow supposed demographic. It is easy—and cognitively appealing—to focus the analysis of a large and heterogeneous electorate on a single "crucial" subpopulation. But everyone's vote counts the same, and restricting our field of vision to the voters shifting in one partisan direction may prevent us from noticing an equal or larger group moving the other way.