The New York Times tracks what the various competing election forecasts have been saying, here:
Right now, if you look at the battlegrounds that Clinton probably needs to win the election, 538 gives her a lower chance of victory than most of the competing sites. E.g., only 58% in Colorado, 59% in New Hampshire, 64% in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Part of the reason may be that 538 reacts more quickly to swings in the polls relative to the other sites (whether that’s a good thing is debatable; it could be reacting to noise or ephemeral bounces). But another reason is that 538’s model expects similar states (same region, similar demographics) to have similar election results:
Hence the question in the title. How much do you think we should look at the polls in states like Michigan (RCP average: Clinton +4.6), Pennsylvania (Clinton: +2.7), and Ohio (Trump: +2.0) and say to ourselves “That can’t be right…”
(For what it’s worth, I used to live in Michigan and I have family in Ohio. Although the natives of either might be offended to hear it, they seem pretty similar to me: industrial cities that have seen better days, farm country, large college towns, cold winters, big lakes. But “they seem pretty similar to me” is perhaps not the most statistically rigorous observation. ;))
Speaking as a Michigander, I can only say this proves that Ohioans are largely unsophisticated mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers who spit on ants and call it entertainment.
But now I suppose someone from Ohio will come along and shout in my face O-H-I-O in an effort to prove they can actually spell their state’s name correctly.
Note: the above statement is just a joke, there is no need to offer a critique of my post. And I mean no offense. Again, it’s just a joke. And for the sake of anyone from Ohio reading this, I have tried to keep the words in this disclaimer to three syllables or less-- “disclaimer” and “syllables” notwithstanding. Also, “notwithstanding” notwithstanding. Also I am adding a smiley with a smile on its face to further show that I am just kidding: Seriously, just kidding.
On a serious note, I think Ohio has a bit of Kentucky in it, which makes it overall a little more purple than Michigan. True, Michigan has its conservative and rural parts, but it doesn’t have Kentucky camped out in its southern regions. Plus, I don’t have numbers in front of me, but I always got the feeling Ohio’s largest college town (Columbus /Franklin County) is a bit more conservative than Michigan’s big college towns (Ann Arbor/Washtenaw County, East Lansing/Ingham County).
For whatever reason, Ohio has trended Republican and Michigan has trended Democrat for decades. There have been notable exceptions in both states, but overall, that trend has continued. If I had to hazard a guess, it would be that Michigan’s population is much more closely tied to a small number of large metropolitan areas while Ohio’s population includes a lot more middle sized communities still tied to rural locations. Ohio, with similar land area, (Michigan is twice as large, but that includes a lot of lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron with a smidgen of Erie), and only somewhat larger population has nothing like the expanse of forest that begins about half the way up the Mitten and extends across the entire UP.
You seem to be unaware of Hazeltucky on Detroit’s Northern border or Ypsilanti in which a very large portion of the population consider themselves to be Kentuckians who happen to be living in Michigan at the moment.
The UP of Michigan trend much more Democratic than you’d expect a rural/small town white area to be (look at a county map for the last few elections). This is because of a long history of unionization (it’s largely a mining area, or used to be), as well as Scandinavian (well, Finnish, if that counts) cultural roots. White Americans of Scandinavian ancestry tend to lean Democratic.
Ann Arbor is a college town, Columbus is a city that happens to have a college. OSU is a big school but Columbus is much bigger than Ann Arbor or East Lansing.
Sounds right to me. At least the difference between the states does. Ohio has been more Republican than Michigan and Pennsylvania in all of the recent presidential elections. In 2012, Obama won Michigan by 9%, Pennsylvania by 5%, and Ohio by 3%. In a closer race, Ohio would be the first one to fall. Ohio has also voted for a Republican twice since 1988. Michigan and Pennsylvania haven’t at all.
Ohio does have industrial cities that have seen better days, but none of them are Detroit*, and it also has cities that aren’t so heavily impacted by industrial decline.
*Both in the way that Detroit has struggled so much and in the way that Detroit so dominates Michigan. Nearly half of people in Michigan live in the Detroit metro area. Ohio has no one basket with so many eggs.
Western PA is a lot like eastern OH, but Eastern PA is like much of the East Coast, and it has the bulk of PA’s population. David Plouffe explained how PA works pretty well in a recent interview with WaPo saying that Trump almost has no chance at all in PA because Clinton will far outpace him in Greater Philadelphia and that there just aren’t enough Trump supporters in the rest of the state to make up the difference. I suspect Michigan is also, for all practical purposes, out of reach for Trump. He can win in Ohio and he may well do just that, but I don’t see Trump putting MI or PA into play unless something off-the-charts bad happens to Clinton’s campaign. It could get closer - closer than we’re comfortable with - but close doesn’t count. Trump’s best bet is to a) perform better in the next debate and b) focus on winnable states such as FL, NC, CO, NV, NH, and, as crazy as it sounds, maybe WI as well.
Western PA also has Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh (IIRC) is one of the few cities where ordinary people actually did really well under the Obama years, because of the fracking boom. (That may be at an end now, not sure).
The Detroit metro area is actually not as economically struggling as most people seem to think: it’s a middle income place as large metro areas go. The city of Detroit is very poor, but its residents are, well, overwhelmingly African-American, so unlikely to vote for Trump, or for that matter any Republican.
Race is the other issue here: Michigan is more African-American than any other northern state besides Illinois.
Ohio is a very demographically representative (i.e. average) American state, in many ways a microcosm of the U.S. as a whole, and it’s big, which is why it’s the quintessential swing state. But the Republican Party has been dominant in state politics for decades. Through gerrymandering, strong support from Big Business and a better field organization, Republicans have a pretty strong lock - Democratic wins statewide are the exception rather than the rule.
But it’s a very competitive state in Presidential years - Ohio voters don’t mind splitting their tickets, have done so often in the past, and probably will again this year, keeping GOP U.S. Senator Rob Portman but voting for Hillary over The Donald, I suspect. No Republican has ever won the White House without carrying Ohio, so Trump’s team know they’re going to have work hard here.
Michigan is upper Midwest and has a strong union and “working man” tradition that tends to favor the Democrats statewide even as locally it’s a good deal more diverse than that.
Pennsylvania is the one east coast state with one foot firmly in the Midwest, the other equally firmly planted in the east. These “two Pennsvlanias” are likely to cancel one another out in the November election, and my guess is that Hillary will win, if by a smaller than expected margin.
Ohio was once called, years ago, America in miniature, which is to say that the state represents in one form or another, in its various regions, the U.S. as a whole. This is why pollsters and pundits pay so close attention to it. However, Ohio has changed a good deal in recent years, as has, needless America, and it’s now rather more than a little behind the curve, as the nation is increasingly dominated by the coasts.
Some parts of Ohio are doing very well, while others are economic basket cases. In this it’s still a lot like an encapsulated America, but in a way that doesn’t lend itself to easy interpretation. My sense is that Ohio, with its rifts and economic woes, doesn’t make for a good template for anything except for maybe that part of the U.S. that mainstream pols would rather ignore. It’s up for grabs.
Isn’t that a slightly misleading piece of trivia? Ohio has voted for the winning candidate 27 of the last 29 elections, missing only Roosevelt and Kennedy. So for the last 50 years no Dem has won without Ohio either.
From the way things look atm, this might be their next miss.
Ohio has A LOT of farm country. There are a great number of people here who speak with a “southern” accent (at least up here in Northeast Ohio where everyone came from WVA to work).
We’ve got our pockets of strong Democratic voters but now those pockets have been infiltrated by Trump and he’s rallied the Secret Racists (which is how racism works up here in the north). My dad is a lifelong Democrat who worked 40 years at Ford, and came from a Democrat family and raised a Democrat family.
He has glommed on to Fox News and the whole idea that They are coming to take away his Money (all that good union money, which is lovely but doesn’t put him in any sort of high tax bracket or anywhere near “inheritance tax” level). The 2008-2012 Republicans couldn’t quite reel him in but now there is Overt Racism on the table and Trump is saying the shit dad wants to hear about Those People and dad is not only voting this year but also sent a donation off to the RNC.
Anyway, I don’t know how it works in Michigan and Pennsylvania but from what I see in Ohio, the Angry White Ex Democrat is going to be the tipping point for Trump here.
Perhaps. For Republicans, though, the must-carry-Ohio imperative goes back to 1860 and it’s had zero exceptions since, so I’d say it’s still got some legs.
Yesterday, I drove route 30 from the Philly area to Gettyburg and then down 15 to Virginia, and I saw plenty of Trump signs along the route (even in Maryland!), but none for Bill’s wife…
Seriously, just kidding.