The Unmaking of the President 2016
Page 13
Prior to the Comey letter, Fay reported, both Clinton and Trump had net negative sentiments toward them, with Trump’s exceeding Clinton’s. However, after Comey wrote and published his letter, the huge change against Clinton measured by voter sentiments was impossible to deny. See the graph below:
CLINTON AND TRUMP NET SENTIMENT
Note that the graph depicts Clinton’s substantial increase in net negative sentiments, from 29 percent to 42 percent, almost entirely in the two days immediately after the Comey letter hit the media, from October 28 to 30. Similarly, Trump’s relative improvement from -53 percent to -42 percent is also shown to be in the same two days. That is a total net increase in negative voter feelings toward Clinton versus Trump of 24 points in two days.
Fay’s analysis from the Engagement Labs survey also showed that the Comey letter had an effect of accelerating the “Republicans come home” trend and may have discouraged Democrats and depressed turnout. Fay wrote:
The Comey letter . . . did make a difference . . . in the motivation of Democrats to vote. The drop in net sentiment for Clinton was largest for Democrats at -19 points, while it remained unchanged for Republicans. Meantime, in the week of the Comey letter release, Trump’s net sentiment improved by 21 points among Republicans and by 6 points among Democrats. Thus it appears that the experience of these conversations depressed Democratic turnout at the last minute while increasing it for Republicans, making Trump’s narrow victories in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania possible [emphasis added].
As everyone knows, had Clinton won these three states she would have won the presidency.
Fay concluded, “Humans are a herding species, susceptible to sudden changes in direction when confronted with the right stimuli, and when surrounded by other people of like-mind who are impacted by the same stimuli. Comey’s letter provided the stimuli for a sudden change in the peer influence dynamic that drove the election outcome.”
* * *
A more traditional method of measuring voter’s feelings toward a candidate is the question whether the voter has a “favorable” versus “unfavorable” opinion of the candidate. As noted in previous chapters, Clinton’s “favorable impression” ratings had been net positive in healthy double-digit margins during her tenure as secretary of state. Then when the email story was first reported in March 2015 and the criminal investigation was concluded in July, Clinton’s ratings turned negative through the rest of the campaign, often by double-digit margins. But by mid-October 2015 there was a definite movement reducing her net negatives down to single digits and heading to 50-50 or even positive by Election Day. This could be seen in three separate independent national polls, all conducted in the same time period between October 20 and 24 (i.e., ending four days before the Comey letter). In the Reuters/Ipsos poll of 1,506 voters, Clinton’s negative impressions exceeded her favorable ones by 6 percent—53 percent unfavorable versus 47 percent favorable. Similarly, in the AP-GfK national Internet/website poll of 1,546 adults taken during the same four-day period, the same results were reported—Clinton had a net -6 rating (44 percent favorable, 50 percent unfavorable). And in the Suffolk University/USA Today poll taken during the same period, consistently ranked as one of the most reliable, Clinton’s net minus unfavorable impression was down to 1 percent.
So while there was some apparent tightening of the race in the week before the October 28 letter, by a point or two toward Trump as “Republicans came home,” there is no doubt that Clinton was trending upward as voters were giving her increasing favorable ratings and decreasing unfavorable ratings, while Trump remained as he always was during the campaign, substantially net negative in voters’ opinions of him. It was the expectation of most pollsters that Clinton would continue to gain as the calendar approached Election Day, November 8.
And then came the first poll results reflecting the Comey letter (conducted from October 26 to 30). The well-respected ABC News/Washington Post national poll of 1,776 registered voters reported Clinton at net -21 percent. In other words, as compared to the three previous polls completed before the Comey letter, Clinton’s net unfavorables had increased by 16–22 percent in a couple of days.
From that point on through Election Day, every major national poll showed double-digit net-negative unfavorable ratings for Hillary Clinton. Gallup reported a net negative for the last week’s polling of 17 percent favorable versus unfavorable opinions of Clinton. There could be no doubt that Comey’s letter had caused this substantial negative shift—put simply, the bottom fell out.
3. Post-Comey letter, Clinton’s national popular vote polls immediately declined by a significant margin.
In national polling, a shift of one or two points in a short period of time is significant; more than that is unusual—and not likely to occur unless some substantial negative event has occurred affecting one candidate and has been taken up big-time by the national media.
That is why, as we shall see, the almost immediate drop in Hillary Clinton’s margin over Trump of about 4 percent within a couple of days, found in several major independent polls, was virtually without precedent. No other reason, no other event, could explain it, in that short time period of a couple of days after October 28—other than the impact of the Comey letter.
As Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight concluded in his definitive analysis of media coverage: “The sharpness of [Clinton’s] decline—with Clinton losing 3 points [nationally] in a week—is consistent with a news-driven shift, rather than a gradual reversion to the mean.”
Silver tracked the effects of the Comey letter from October 28 through Election Day. Clinton’s lead had declined by 3.8 percent by Election Day.
CLINTON’S LEAD CRATERED AFTER THE COMEY LETTER
Clinton’s vote margin, FiveThirtyEight polls-only forecast
Silver’s popular vote projection as of 12:01 A.M. on October 28 showed Clinton up 5.9 percent. For those who have criticized all of Clinton’s mistakes as the reasons for her loss, or her lack of message, or her failure to “connect” with working-class voters, this margin of 6 percent as of October 28 is substantial—greater than Obama’s margin over Mitt Romney in 2012 and almost as large as Obama’s margin in 2008 after the economic meltdown and the collapse of Republican John McCain’s candidacy. But, Silver wrote,
a week later—after polls had time to fully reflect the Comey letter—Clinton’s national popular vote lead had declined to 2.9 points. That is to say, there was a shift of about 3 percentage points against Clinton nationally shortly after the Comey letter. And it was an especially pernicious shift for Clinton because (at least according to the FiveThirtyEight model) Clinton was underperforming in swing states as compared to the country overall. In the average swing state, Clinton’s lead declined from 4.5 percentage points at the start of October 28 to just 1.7 percentage points on November 4, a drop of 2.8 points in less than a week—more than three times the margin that she lost in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (.7 percent) and more than 14 times the margin that she lost in Michigan (.2 percent).
In other words, if Clinton was up +5.9 percent as of October 28 nationally among all states, then by definition she must have been up by a lesser amount in the battleground states (4.5 percent, according to Silver, which follows, since she was up by substantial double digits in California, New York, and in general the northeast and west coast states). Thus, the impact of Comey’s letter was especially critical for Clinton because her margin was tighter in the battleground states, where the election would be won or lost.
* * *
Nate Silver disputed critics of Clinton’s campaign by pointing out that despite all her mistakes, the race was “not even close” as of October 28. He wrote: “The standard way to dismiss the [Comey] letter’s impact is to say that Clinton never should have let the race get that close to begin with. But the race wasn’t that close before the Comey letter; Clinton had led by about 6 percentage points and was poised to win with a map like on page 150, including states such a
s North Carolina and Arizona (but not Ohio or Iowa). My guess is that the same pundits who pilloried Clinton’s campaign after the Comey letter would have considered it an impressive showing and spoken highly of her tactics.”
Sam Wang, of the Princeton Election Consortium, also independently reported that his aggregate of polls showed the same lead as Silver by Clinton over Trump of +6 percent as of October 28, 2016.*3
Confirming Silver’s and Wang’s findings through aggregation of polls were the results of the “panel study” by Dan Hopkins of the University of Pennsylvania of the same 1,075 voters, polled and repolled during the campaign. The panel also showed a 4 percent drop in numbers for Clinton during the period from the last tally of the panel (the period ending on October 24) and the voters’ reporting to Hopkins after the election was over for whom they voted.
As it turns out, Hopkins could ascertain the movements of these voters in three categories, which helped explain why they dropped off Clinton’s column:
• Those who switched from Trump to Clinton or vice versa. In the post–Comey letter period, none switched to Clinton, but Trump picked up a net gain of 1.8 percent of the vote: a 0.9 percent loss from Clinton to Trump, and +0.9 percent from third parties or undecideds to Trump. That tells us a lot: The Comey Effect caused almost 1 percent of the voters in the panel to switch from Clinton to Trump. Note that this alone, if it had not happened in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, would have changed the results of the election and Hillary Clinton would be president.
• Those who switched from previously undecided or third-party backers. Trump picked up a net +0.8 percent.
• Those who switched to third-party candidates or went undecided. Trump picked up +1.4%.
Total Trump pickup: +4 percent.
Hopkins also notes signs that the pre–October 28 shift, if any, to Trump was a normal phenomenon of Republicans coming home, as many other analysts have reported. “Between mid-October and our post-election wave [survey], Trump picked up almost 4 percentage points from people who had backed Romney four years before, suggesting that Republican identifiers were doing just that” (and, one must assume, were encouraged to do so by all the negative media coverage of Clinton relating to the “new emails investigation”).
Interestingly, Hopkins reported that the same group of people had been used as a polling panel in 2012 and that Barack Obama was ahead by 7 percent during about this same time period.†4 In other words, the Hopkins panel represents the best single proof that Clinton was running about the same as Barack Obama performed in 2012 in her results in the 2016 election, even though the economy in the Rust Belt and working-class and rural areas had declined or stagnated since 2012. This result undermines those who tend to want to compare Clinton’s political performance unfavorably to Barack Obama’s in 2008 and 2012.
In sum, regarding the Comey Effect on Clinton’s standing versus Donald Trump in the immediate days after he sent his letter: It is telling that three polling organizations, independent of one another—FiveThirtyEight, the Princeton Election Consortium, and Dan Hopkins’s University of Pennsylvania panel study—all arrived at almost exactly the same percentage measuring the adverse impact of the Comey Effect on Hillary Clinton’s national popular vote—about 4 percent downward on Clinton’s margin over Trump in the first week after it was sent.
Even with the effect of Comey’s letter, she defeated Donald Trump with almost three million more votes than he received. Without it, say if she had maintained the margin of 6 percent she had on October 28, she would have defeated Trump by about eight million votes.
4. Clinton’s lead plummeted by an even larger margin in the key battleground states immediately after the Comey letter—costing her a majority of electoral votes.
Here is a table using the RealClearPolitics weekly polling averages between Clinton and Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin on October 28, before Comey’s letter was publicly released; on November 7, one day before the election; and the final results on Election Day.
POST–OCTOBER 28 SHIFT IN CLINTON SUPPORT (PERCENT)
As of
10/28
11/7
11/8
Net Clinton Drop—11 days
Pennsylvania
+5.0
+0.6
–0.7
–5.7
Michigan
+6.5
+3.4
–0.2
–6.7
Wisconsin
+6.5
+6.5
–0.7
–7.2
Source: RealClearPolitics
Clinton lost Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by a collective total of 78,000 votes out of a total of 13.8 million votes, or about six-tenths of 1 percent. Looking at the voter drop in each state, Clinton dropped a total of 5.7 percent, or approximately 347,000 votes, in Pennsylvania; 6.7 percent, or approximately 306,000 votes, in Michigan; and 7.2 percent, or approximately 210,000 votes, in Wisconsin in just eleven days. There was no intervening event other than the Comey letter that could have caused such a precipitous decline. Even if there were “hidden” Trump supporters, particularly in the rural, working-class areas in these three states, areas in which Trump showed greater strength than Mitt Romney had experienced in 2012, there were still not enough voters there to account for the severe drop by Clinton and gain by Trump in such a brief period of time. In short, it is hard to argue that, in the absence of the Comey letter and all the negative media about it, Hillary Clinton would not have done at least 0.8 percent better in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and at least 0.3 percent better in Michigan and won the presidency with 278 electoral votes. And her likely gain of just 1.3 percent in Florida without the Comey letter’s devastating effects would have won her that state. She would also have won North Carolina and Arizona, where polls showed her with a narrow lead over Trump as of October 28.
Silver also noted in his May 3, 2016, analysis that as of October 28, “Clinton led . . . by 6 to 7 points in polls of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Her leads in Florida and North Carolina were narrow, and she was only tied with Trump in Ohio and Iowa. But it was a pretty good overall position.”
Silver then compiled two scenarios. The first one was more conservative, in which Clinton gained only 1 percent more votes in the key battleground states in the absence of the Comey letter, which he called the Little Comey Effect. In the second scenario, Silver assumed Clinton would have picked up 4 percent of the vote in the key battlegrounds if there had been no Comey letter, which he calls the Big Comey Effect.
Here is a table showing the results of both effects:
ADJUSTED VOTE MARGIN*
Clinton Vote Margin
Little Comey Effect*
Big Comey Effect*
Clinton’s Electoral Votes Had She Won
Michigan
–0.2
+0.8
+3.8
248
Pennsylvania
–0.7
+0.3
+3.3
268
Wisconsin
–0.8
+0.2
+3.2
278
Florida
–1.2
–0.2
+2.8
307
Nebraska’s 2nd C.D.
–2.1
–1.1
+1.9
308
Arizona
–3.5
–2.5
+0.5
319
North Carolina
–3.7
–2.7
+0.3
334
Georgia
–5.1
–4.1
–1.1
350
Ohio
–8.1
–7.1
–4.1
368
Texas
–9.0
–8.0
–5.0
406
Iowa
; –9.4
–8.4
–5.4
412
Source: Nate Silver
Let’s recall how narrow the margin was in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin on Election Day, relying on the January 3, 2017, Cook Political Report’s “certified results”:
% Clinton
% Trump
% Difference
Vote Difference
Pennsylvania
47.9
48.6
0.7
44,292
Michigan
47.4
47.6
0.2
10,704
Wisconsin
47.0
47.8
0.8
10,704
Total difference: 77,744 votes ÷ 13.8 million = 0.6%
* Adjusting for the Little Comey Effect adds 1 percentage point to Clinton’s margin; a Big Comey Effect adds 4. Hypothetical scenario starts with the 232 electoral votes Clinton actually won, ignoring electors who changed their votes.
As the table shows, Clinton would have won the presidency if Nate Silver’s very conservative assumption of a Little Comey Effect of 1 percent increase in these three states had occurred in the absence of the Comey letter. Indeed, less than that increase in the Clinton vote would have elected her president—with a gain of just 0.3 percent in Michigan and 0.8 percent in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Nate Silver produced the electoral vote map below that shows what he describes as the “Big Comey Effect” depicted in the chart on page 149—i.e., with Clinton suffering a -4 percent drop in popular vote polls nationally (which, as we saw, was found by multiple independent poll aggregators and the University of Pennsylvania panel). Assuming Clinton was not harmed by this 4 percent margin because of the Comey letter, then with no Comey letter Clinton wins not only Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin but also Florida, Nebraska’s second congressional district, Arizona, and North Carolina—for a total of 336 electoral votes: