A look at Clinton and Trump's chances in battleground states
Polls from Quinnipiac University this morning showed very close races between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio. (He leads her by four percentage points in Ohio.)
Nate Cohn, The Upshot’s politics analyst, and Toni Monkovic, an Upshot editor, discussed the polls and other battleground states in this Slack conversation:
Toni What do you make of the Quinnipiac polling today? It’s sure to scare liberals.
Nate I think there are two basic ways to look at them.
On the one hand, the preponderance of evidence suggests that Clinton has a comfortable edge in the battleground states. Quinnipiac, for good measure, has been pretty tough on the Democrats over the last few cycles. You can see some sign of that in the racial composition of the surveys. In Florida, for instance, Quinnipiac’s registered voters are 69 percent white, 11 percent black and 15 percent Hispanic. The official data from the Florida secretary of state (since voters are asked their race when they register to vote) is 65.7 percent white, 13.3 percent black and 14.8 percent Hispanic. Similarly, the census’ current population survey in 2014 found that 64.3 percent of registered voters were white, 15.2 percent were black and 17.9 percent Hispanic.
On the other hand, this can be a pretty volatile period in the race. The polls typically get a lot more accurate between the end of the primaries and the few weeks after the conventions. The parties unify, the electorate gets a bit more polarized. You could imagine something similar benefiting Donald Trump, who has just wrapped up the nomination and has an opportunity to consolidate Republican voters. So I think we should keep an eye out over the next few months to see whether he benefits from the end of the primary process.
These Quinnipiac polls are among the first since he wrapped up the nomination. We can’t rule out the possibility that there’s some real movement here.
One thing I would note, though, is that Trump is basically winning the same share of Republicans as Clinton is winning of Democrats. So I don’t think it’s obvious that either candidate has much more to gain from party unity - at least compared to the other. Gallup came out today with numbers on that.
Toni In general, though, people should not fixate on individual polls of states this early.
Nate Yeah, I think that’s right. It’s always better to look at the preponderance of data. There’s a lot of it right now, and it’s consistent with a pretty considerable edge for Clinton nationwide and in the battleground states. A few state polls won’t change that calculus.
If all of the polls start turning toward Trump, that would be far more important.
I’d probably just watch the national polls right now.
As long as Trump is down by these sort of margins in the national popular vote, there’s not much reason to think too hard about the Electoral College.
Toni With the understanding that it’s very early, let’s start our tour of battleground states with Pennsylvania. It’s practically sacred home ground for Democrats. In sports playoff series, if you can defend your home field, you put yourself in position to win, and if you can’t you’re in trouble. But early signs suggest Hillary Clinton is not in trouble in Pennsylvania, right?
Nate Well, I guess I think of it like this: Clinton isn’t in trouble nationally, and therefore she isn’t in trouble in Pennsylvania. Clinton, at least so far, appears to be winning over many more college-educated white voters than she’s losing white working-class voters. That’s giving her a lead nationally and in Pennsylvania. If that stops being true, though - if Clinton starts losing ground among white working-class voters - that will hurt her more in Pennsylvania than in Virginia or Florida.
Toni When you say college-educated white voters, are we talking especially about suburban mothers (who may have voted for Mitt Romney in 2012) in places like the Philadelphia suburbs?
Nate The early polls do suggest that Trump is especially weak among college-educated women and suburban voters. So I think that’s probably a pretty good way to look at it.
Toni Colorado is a state you felt Marco Rubio was well suited to win if voters had been allowed to participate in a primary there. That doesn’t seem to bode well for Trump, along with the fact that it has a fairly sizable Hispanic population.
Nate Yeah, Colorado seems like a really tough state for Trump. There are more college-educated and Hispanic Republicans for Donald Trump to lose than there are white working-class Obama voters for him to win over.
Toni The Trump campaign doesn’t seem to talk as much about making gains in Colorado and Nevada. They’re obviously important states, but when Trump talks strategy, he seems to be focusing more on the Midwest/Rust Belt.
Nate I can’t blame them. Some simple factors at play: above-average Hispanic populations and a below-average number of white working-class Democrats.
Toni But when you turn to the Midwest, you run into a state like Wisconsin. It’s a state the Trump campaign would love to flip. But it doesn’t seem to set up well for him - stylistically, demographically, ideologically. Agree?
Nate Yeah, I agree. For most of this conversation, we’ve been talking about the “white working class” as a single demographic category. But the white working class is fairly diverse. White working-class voters in Appalachia, for instance, have behaved very differently from those across the Northern tier in recent cycles (Obama lost a lot of ground in Appalachia, but did better than John Kerry or Al Gore in a place like Wisconsin). There was a fairly similar split with Trump in the primary. He did really well with white working-class voters in Appalachia and the industrial Midwest, but really struggled in places like Iowa and Wisconsin, or Vermont and Minnesota. So I wouldn’t be very surprised if it turned out that Trump made gains among white working-class voters nationally, but didn’t pick up much or anything in a state like Wisconsin.
Toni Iowa seemed to be a promising pickup state for Republicans heading into this year, with a big victory by Joni Ernst in the 2014 midterms, for example. But it has similarities with Wisconsin. Trump didn’t win in Iowa. Ted Cruz did. And conservative talk radio - and a large group of true conservative voters - may be a problem, the way they could be in Wisconsin in causing G.O.P. defections. (Referring here to radio hosts like Steve Deace in Iowa and Charlie Sykes in Wisconsin.)
Nate Yeah, Iowa often seems to be a promising opportunity for the Republicans and then doesn’t quite come through in the end. I remember that NBC News characterized the state as “Lean Romney” at the outset of the 2012 cycle, perhaps in part on the assumption that Obama’s struggle among white working-class voters nationally augured poorly for him in an overwhelmingly white working-class state.
But white working-class voters in the Upper Midwest seem a bit more reluctant to embrace the modern conservative G.O.P. I’m not sure if it’s because of lower levels of racial resentment, lower levels of evangelical Christianity, the stronger economy, some combination of all of it, or something else. But it wouldn’t be a surprise if this proved to be a problem for Trump again.
Toni Most G.O.P. voters in Ohio did not invest in Trump with a primary vote. John Kasich, a more mainstream Republican, held on to his home state. Any possible residual effect from Trump’s loss? It would help a little if Kasich were his vice president, I suppose.
Nate I don’t know how much to read into Trump’s struggle in Ohio in the primary against a very popular incumbent. I guess all I would say is that if Trump can’t be competitive in Ohio, he’s not going to even come close nationally, or in states like Virginia and Colorado.
Toni What about New Hampshire? Trump connected well there with Republican voters, and Clinton lost badly to Bernie Sanders - it was one of her worst defeats in a battleground state. But the state seems to be trending blue.
Nate I think New Hampshire’s an interesting test for Trump. It’s extremely white. There are a lot of white Democrats without a degree. It’s another state that I think would quickly become competitive if Trump could make gains nationally, but, right now, he’s bleeding too much support among well-educated whites to be close in the current polls.
Toni Virginia is another state that slowly seems to be trending blue. Rubio finished a solid second in the state, with strength in Northern Virginia.
Nate It’s a really tough state for Trump. Virginia is in a tight race with Florida for the distinction of being the battleground state where Obama was least dependent on the support of white working-class voters. It’s also near the top of the list for states where Romney was most dependent on nonwhite or college-educated white voters - again sitting up near Florida and Colorado, so there’s a lot of room for Trump to lose support as well.
Of all the close battleground states, I might be more surprised by a Trump win here than anywhere else. I’d also note that the affluence and establishment-friendly politics of Northern Virginia probably blunt Trump’s appeal more here than anywhere else.
Toni O.K., you mentioned Florida. Trump won convincingly there (as did Clinton), ending Rubio’s campaign. But a large Hispanic population seems to present a challenge for him. And even the Cuban population, normally reliably Republican, isn’t as big a conservative force as it used to be.
Nate I think Florida’s a really dangerous state for Trump. Forget for a moment how much the Republicans would like to make gains among Hispanic voters and think instead about how much room they have to fall in Florida. Romney won something near 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in Florida in 2012, and they represented a well-above-average share of the electorate. Can Mr. Trump really win 40 percent of the Hispanic vote there again, especially after he went after home-state favorites like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio? Then factor in the rapid pace of demographic change and the extent that Obama already lost a ton of ground among older, white working-class voters in the state. Suddenly it’s really hard to figure out how Trump is going to win the closest battleground state from the last election, even if he fixes his problem with well-educated white voters nationally.
I think there’s a real case that Florida could save Democrats in a close election - the sort of election where they’re in danger of losing whiter states where Democrats have more room to lose ground, like Pennsylvania or Iowa.
Toni North Carolina went for Romney in 2012, but do you think Trump could be hurt by some of the policies by the Republicans who control the state? Even though the G.O.P. has made it tougher to vote, my sense is that Democrats will be motivated and turnout will be intense.
Nate I don’t know how much the North Carolina government will help or hurt Trump. The turnout in a presidential election is always high, and there’s not too much room for state politics to make a dent. To me, Trump’s problem is pretty similar to the one he has in Virginia: There aren’t many opportunities for him to take advantage of his strengths, and there are plenty of opportunities for him to lose Republican-leaning college-educated voters.
If black turnout is high - and I expect it will be - North Carolina is going to be very close, regardless of what happens nationwide.
Toni Mitch Stewart, who served as battleground states director for President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, said that Michigan was the state Democrats should worry most about being flipped. Essentially, his argument was that Obama had an easy time against Mitt Romney in 2012 because of the auto bailout issue. “Some of the statements that Mitt Romney made, even though his father was governor there, almost disqualified him immediately in Michigan,” he said on MSNBC. “It’s a state that should be much closer than it has been in presidentials.”
Trump said: “We’ll win places that a lot of people say you’re not going to win, that as a Republican you can’t win. Michigan is a great example; nobody else will go to Michigan. We’re going to be encamped in Michigan because I think I can win it.”
Nate I think it’s hard to argue that Obama was helped so much by the auto bailout that the state would have otherwise been especially competitive. Obama won this state by 9.5 points in 2012, or a little less than six points better than he did nationally. That’s about what happened for Kerry in 2004, who won by 3.5 when Bush won by 2.5 points.
Also, Michigan is not just a state of autoworkers. Black voters represent an above-average share of the electorate. There are a lot of well-educated white voters around Detroit, or Lansing and Ann Arbor. Trump did very poorly in the primary in heavily Dutch Western Michigan, which is the real conservative base in the state.
To me, Trump does have opportunities to make inroads among Democratic-leaning white voters in Michigan, much as he does in Pennsylvania and Ohio. The difference is that Obama won Michigan by more than nine points in 2012; the Democrats have a big cushion. They can lose a lot of ground and still squeak it out, like Kerry and Al Gore did.
Toni Georgia, Arizona - maybe even Missouri, Indiana, Utah. There’s talk they could all be put in play. But that seems to be mostly a distraction. If Arizona and Georgia are competitive in late October, that probably means the Clinton campaign is in a commanding position where it really matters, right?
Nate Yeah, I agree. If we’re talking about Georgia and Arizona in October, we probably don’t need to be talking very much about the presidential race at all.
That said, I’d note that Missouri, Indiana and Arizona all have second-tier Senate races that might come in play along with the presidential race, if Democrats are so fortunate.
Toni Presuming that Clinton locks up the Democratic primary, where should the Clinton team send Bill Clinton to campaign? And Sanders if he rallies to support Clinton? Would he go to New Hampshire and Michigan?
Nate I think a quick Hillary Clinton-Sanders unity tour through New Hampshire, Boulder, Ann Arbor and Madison wouldn’t be too surprising. I think Bill Clinton is probably at his best in Ohio and Pennsylvania, which is also where the Obama campaign tended to use him.
Toni A wrap-up question: In an ideal world for the Trump campaign, you would take some of his extra strength from G.O.P. voters in the East (where he’ll most likely do poorly because there are so many entrenched blue states) and in the South (where he’ll most likely win a lot of red states regardless) and redistribute it to the Midwest, where he could hope to win more white voters and turn some blue states red. In other words, it would do him a lot more good if his specific appeal were tailored more to the Midwest. But the Midwest or Rust Belt just doesn’t seem as inviting as the Trump campaign has been suggesting.
Nate Ha ha, well, if he could, I’m sure he’d love to move every last Republican voter from New York and California to Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. I’m not sure whether there’s an actionable strategy here. I do think there’s a fair point about Republicans and the South. They’ve been running up the score among white Southerners for decades without getting much in the North. That trend has to come to an end at some point, and the Democratic advantage in the Electoral College would start to look pretty flimsy if the Republicans started to make further gains in the Upper Midwest instead of Appalachia.
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