Trump +2 in CNN/ORC National Poll

[DrScholl]

The Voter News Service ceased to exist years before the 2012 election.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Midwest
Trump 52%
Clinton 30%
Johnson 10%
Stein 1%

South
Trump 45%
Clinton 43%
Johnson 6%
Stein 3%

Interesting....

That isn't the word I'd use.

Panic?

Hardly, dear.

From the Midwest this Party was given birth and so to the Midwest this Party shall return.

This poll and the funky 50 state poll, regardless of accuracy in this instance, look straight out of the Political Trends board describing elections 20 years from now.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

i mean, Trump is winning whites without a college education by 44 points. If he keeps up that margin and pumps up turnout a win is not inconceivable.

My god, those county maps are going to be awesome.

[SirMuxALot]

past two D's have pulled the economy out from recession into (in one case, the best times this country saw in a generation; in the other case, the best that could have been expected given the massive structural obstructions he faced).

"The best that could have been expected".  This sounds an awful lot like unskewing GDP numbers.

[Seriously?]

The Voter News Service ceased to exist years before the 2012 election.

Sorry, Edison Research or whomever is doing the polls now.

[Erich Maria Remarque]

Even if the top line is an outlier, there's no excuse for the R nominee having a 15 point advantage on who you trust more on the economy for chrissakes. Particularly, given that the past two R presidents have been utter disasters for the economy, while the past two D's have pulled the economy out from recession into (in one case, the best times this country saw in a generation; in the other case, the best that could have been expected given the massive structural obstructions he faced).

I love that everyone's here is economist, statistician, doctor, psychologist and military expert at the same time. Very educated dudes

538: No, Bill Clinton Does Not ‘Know How’ To Fix The Economy

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[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

past two D's have pulled the economy out from recession into (in one case, the best times this country saw in a generation; in the other case, the best that could have been expected given the massive structural obstructions he faced).

I long for a day when Bill Clinton's term is reassessed from the perspective of what he actually did as opposed to what happened during his term.

Clinton had a recession end just before he took office, and another begin two months after he left office. The length of the expansion was due to forces decades in the making, especially in the area of technology, as well as the pursuit of regulatory and tax changes from multiple Presidents from both parties during periods when times were much tougher.

Deregulating airlines and railroads is one thing though. And the presumption on a bipartisan basis in the 1990's that expanding such deregulation to all areas and all sectors was misguided, especially with regards to a sector such as finance in an era when so much of the economy was becoming heavily reliant on debt both and the consumer and corporate level. Of course these occurred in his second term when the 1990's economy was reaching its peak levels of performance. But even so, the  legislation with the most impact that Clinton signed were the vast deregulation bills Bill Clinton signed into law in 1997 and 1999.  Of course I highly doubt Dole or some other Republican would have vetoed those bills. The only one at the time who might have done so would have either been Ross Perot or Pat Buchanan and neither of them were going to be President.

Second to that would have to be NAFTA, which benefited certain areas, benefited the overall GDP and certainly was to Wall Street's liking, but there is no arguing that it left communities across America high and dry and nothing meaningful was done to mitigate the damage to the tax base for schools nor to the employment situation in many of these communities.
 

It makes sense politically to attach oneself to the 1990's from the perspective of a Democrat, but dig a little deeper and you have to square a near austerity based approach (raising taxes to balance the budget and "boost the economy") with the purported economic philosophy that Democrats adhere to.

The simple fact of the matter is that the 1991 recession was over by the time Clinton took office. The campaign exaggerated its depth and length to weigh on Bush's population and facilitate their acquisition of power. The 1991 recession was not the worse recession since the Great Depression. The only ones who thought so were a bunch of white collar yuppies who for the first time felt the brunt of a recession (economy shifts to service based industries, those previously unharmed sectors now get hit by recessions, who knew?), and one Donald J. Trump who saw his property values tank, nearly bankrupting him.

Clinton's 1993 budget was not designed to be a stimulus, it was designed to be a deficit reduction plan sacrificing economic growth to achieve said goal. A middle class tax cut was promised down the road, but never delivered. The reason for this approach was because the economy was no longer in recession, and was growing at a fast clip as it rebounded from the recession and the budget deficit was viewed as a bigger problem.

In hindsight, we probably would all be better off today, if Clinton ate deficits throughout his whole term and instead pumped a massive infusion of infrastructure spending down the pipeline. The current level of debt might ironically be lower and the economy stronger, most likely.

From that perspective, Bush 43 was poor man for the job who was on top of that dealt a very losing hand, which arguably he played the worst way possible between the War in Iraq and trying to us a debt fueled housing bubble to lead an economic expansion.

Obama was a dealt an even worse hand in some respects but he played it much better than Bush did and the end result has been somewhat positive for him economically. That being said, completing flipping the 2012 narrative that he was unpopular on the economy and strong on foreign policy, his approach to the world has been nothing but a disastrous legacy project, which has weakened our position in many areas and allowed the threat of radical islam to morph into a far more dangerous form, but that is a topic for a different time.


Bill Clinton governed this country the way that Donald Trump ran his businesses. Stealing credit for other people's work by putting his name all over it, and shafting others with the price for his mistakes and poor decisions. If there is any justice at all, the Clintons will go down in history as the greatest political con artists in American history.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Even if the top line is an outlier, there's no excuse for the R nominee having a 15 point advantage on who you trust more on the economy for chrissakes. Particularly, given that the past two R presidents have been utter disasters for the economy, while the past two D's have pulled the economy out from recession into (in one case, the best times this country saw in a generation; in the other case, the best that could have been expected given the massive structural obstructions he faced).

I love that everyone's here is economist, statistician, doctor, psychologist and military expert at the same time. Very educated dudes

538: No, Bill Clinton Does Not ‘Know How’ To Fix The Economy

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Democrats attaching themselves to Clinton's record is like Republicans attaching themselves to the Harding/Coolidge years.

[Brittain33]

Chuck Todd noted, “Whites without a college degree appear to make up nearly half of their sample. In 2012, by the way, whites without a college degree was slightly more than a third of all voters."

Is this 2012-style unskewing? Is it a valid critique of the LV model? It's up to you.

Personally, I find it inconceivable that whites with no college degree is going to reverse its long-term decline as a share of the electorate and jump up from one-third to one-half of the electorate.

[Fmr President & Senator Polnut]

Chuck Todd noted, “Whites without a college degree appear to make up nearly half of their sample. In 2012, by the way, whites without a college degree was slightly more than a third of all voters."

Is this 2012-style unskewing? Is it a valid critique of the LV model? It's up to you.

Personally, I find it inconceivable that whites with no college degree is going to reverse its long-term decline as a share of the electorate and jump up from one-third to one-half of the electorate.

Actually, it's genuine psephology versus a baseless GOP fever-dream/hope. Could the electorate change? Sure it could, is there any justifiable reason why we should expect a collapse in minority and college educated white turnout? No.

[Erich Maria Remarque]

Chuck Todd noted, “Whites without a college degree appear to make up nearly half of their sample. In 2012, by the way, whites without a college degree was slightly more than a third of all voters."

Is this 2012-style unskewing? Is it a valid critique of the LV model? It's up to you.

Personally, I find it inconceivable that whites with no college degree is going to reverse its long-term decline as a share of the electorate and jump up from one-third to one-half of the electorate.

LOL, just stop this embarrassing. Chuck Todd lied.

It's more like from 36% (in 2012) to 39% (in CNN LV poll). Atlas was complaining in months about Trump appealing to non-college-educated Whites. Now, when non-college-educated started to show much higher turnout (57% in 2012 vs  77% among college-educated Whites), you're complaining: "How could this happen?"

Do you not really see, that Trump is almost perfect fit for this silent majority plurality? You're lucky he's not doing well among women (his incredibly stupid comments ruined it). Othervise, it'd be a f**king landslide. Chill, bro!

[Erich Maria Remarque]

Chuck Todd noted, “Whites without a college degree appear to make up nearly half of their sample. In 2012, by the way, whites without a college degree was slightly more than a third of all voters."

Is this 2012-style unskewing? Is it a valid critique of the LV model? It's up to you.

Personally, I find it inconceivable that whites with no college degree is going to reverse its long-term decline as a share of the electorate and jump up from one-third to one-half of the electorate.

Actually, it's genuine psephology versus a baseless GOP fever-dream/hope. Could the electorate change? Sure it could, is there any justifiable reason why we should expect a collapse in minority and college educated white turnout? No.

Yes. For instance... polls. If some group suddenly starts to say to pollsters that they will go and vote, why should we not believe them [to some degree]?
Polls usually predict turnout pretty good. But yeah, Dems will be like: "Muh 2012, muh Pew"

And it is not about collapse in minority and college educated Whites turnout, no! It is about regain of non-college-educated Whites' turnout. They have incredibly low (57%) turnout. Why is it impossible that they have the same turnout as Blacks (66%) or even college-educated Whites (77%)

[Brittain33]

Chuck Todd noted, “Whites without a college degree appear to make up nearly half of their sample. In 2012, by the way, whites without a college degree was slightly more than a third of all voters."

Is this 2012-style unskewing? Is it a valid critique of the LV model? It's up to you.

Personally, I find it inconceivable that whites with no college degree is going to reverse its long-term decline as a share of the electorate and jump up from one-third to one-half of the electorate.

LOL, just stop this embarrassing. Chuck Todd lied.

It's more like from 36% (in 2012) to 39% (in CNN LV poll).

I'm sorry if this was documented further up the thread—can you point out to me where Chuck Todd's math was debunked? Thanks.

Note that the trend for % of non-college-educated whites is that it continually decreases as a share of the population as both education levels and diversity rises. Trump would need to get a relative surge in this population's votes just to hold steady at 2012 levels, much less reverse. 

[Gustaf]

We can't know for sure how the electorate will look like (partly because, let's remember, we don't actually KNOW what it looked like in the past either).

However, we have no hard evidence from the primaries so far that indicate Trump has changed the electorate in any significant way and generally speaking it is obviously hard to create huge shifts. And Trump likely needs a huge shift since the demographic trend works against him.

[Erich Maria Remarque]

Chuck Todd noted, “Whites without a college degree appear to make up nearly half of their sample. In 2012, by the way, whites without a college degree was slightly more than a third of all voters."

Is this 2012-style unskewing? Is it a valid critique of the LV model? It's up to you.

Personally, I find it inconceivable that whites with no college degree is going to reverse its long-term decline as a share of the electorate and jump up from one-third to one-half of the electorate.

LOL, just stop this embarrassing. Chuck Todd lied.

It's more like from 36% (in 2012) to 39% (in CNN LV poll).

I'm sorry if this was documented further up the thread—can you point out to me where Chuck Todd's math was debunked? Thanks.

Note that the trend for % of non-college-educated whites is that it continually decreases as a share of the population as both education levels and diversity rises. Trump would need to get a relative surge in this population's votes just to hold steady at 2012 levels, much less reverse. 

Sorry, Chuck Todd was right. I got a misstake somewhere in my calculation

I got the following (for LV):

Whites = 73.0%
Non-college-educated Whites = 44.8%

My equation looks like this:
tot = total % a candidate have
White/nonWhite = % among Whites/non-Whites
x = % of Whites

tot = white * x + nonWhite * (1 - x)
tot - nonWhite = (white - nonWhite) * x
x = (tot - nonWhite) / (white - nonWhite)

And by the same method:
whiteTot = total % a candidate have among all whites
colWhite/nonColWhite = % among college Whites/non-college Whites
x = % of Whites
nonColWhite = % of non-college-educated Whites

nonColWhite = (whiteTot - colWhite) / (nonColWhite - colWhite) * x

[Person Man]

Chuck Todd noted, “Whites without a college degree appear to make up nearly half of their sample. In 2012, by the way, whites without a college degree was slightly more than a third of all voters."

Is this 2012-style unskewing? Is it a valid critique of the LV model? It's up to you.

Personally, I find it inconceivable that whites with no college degree is going to reverse its long-term decline as a share of the electorate and jump up from one-third to one-half of the electorate.

LOL, just stop this embarrassing. Chuck Todd lied.

It's more like from 36% (in 2012) to 39% (in CNN LV poll).

I'm sorry if this was documented further up the thread—can you point out to me where Chuck Todd's math was debunked? Thanks.

Note that the trend for % of non-college-educated whites is that it continually decreases as a share of the population as both education levels and diversity rises. Trump would need to get a relative surge in this population's votes just to hold steady at 2012 levels, much less reverse.  

Sorry, Chuck Todd was right. I got a misstake somewhere in my calculation

I got the following (for LV):

Whites = 73.0%
Non-college-educated Whites = 44.8%

My equation looks like this:
tot = total % a candidate have
White/nonWhite = % among Whites/non-Whites
x = % of Whites

tot = white * x + nonWhite * (1 - x)
tot - nonWhite = (white - nonWhite) * x
x = (tot - nonWhite) / (white - nonWhite)

And by the same method:
whiteTot = total % a candidate have among all whites
colWhite/nonColWhite = % among college Whites/non-college Whites
x = % of Whites
nonColWhite = % of non-college-educated Whites

nonColWhite = (whiteTot - colWhite) / (nonColWhite - colWhite) * x

Who knows? Maybe minorities won't turn out because Hillary isn't liberal enough or Trump will engage millions of poor whites for his protectionist policies on trade, immigration, and civil rights.

[Frozen Sky Ever Why]

I have the feeling the election is going to be rigged for Trump.

[Beet]

past two D's have pulled the economy out from recession into (in one case, the best times this country saw in a generation; in the other case, the best that could have been expected given the massive structural obstructions he faced).

I long for a day when Bill Clinton's term is reassessed from the perspective of what he actually did as opposed to what happened during his term.

Clinton had a recession end just before he took office, and another begin two months after he left office. The length of the expansion was due to forces decades in the making, especially in the area of technology, as well as the pursuit of regulatory and tax changes from multiple Presidents from both parties during periods when times were much tougher.

Deregulating airlines and railroads is one thing though. And the presumption on a bipartisan basis in the 1990's that expanding such deregulation to all areas and all sectors was misguided, especially with regards to a sector such as finance in an era when so much of the economy was becoming heavily reliant on debt both and the consumer and corporate level. Of course these occurred in his second term when the 1990's economy was reaching its peak levels of performance. But even so, the  legislation with the most impact that Clinton signed were the vast deregulation bills Bill Clinton signed into law in 1997 and 1999.  Of course I highly doubt Dole or some other Republican would have vetoed those bills. The only one at the time who might have done so would have either been Ross Perot or Pat Buchanan and neither of them were going to be President.

Second to that would have to be NAFTA, which benefited certain areas, benefited the overall GDP and certainly was to Wall Street's liking, but there is no arguing that it left communities across America high and dry and nothing meaningful was done to mitigate the damage to the tax base for schools nor to the employment situation in many of these communities.
 

It makes sense politically to attach oneself to the 1990's from the perspective of a Democrat, but dig a little deeper and you have to square a near austerity based approach (raising taxes to balance the budget and "boost the economy") with the purported economic philosophy that Democrats adhere to.

The simple fact of the matter is that the 1991 recession was over by the time Clinton took office. The campaign exaggerated its depth and length to weigh on Bush's population and facilitate their acquisition of power. The 1991 recession was not the worse recession since the Great Depression. The only ones who thought so were a bunch of white collar yuppies who for the first time felt the brunt of a recession (economy shifts to service based industries, those previously unharmed sectors now get hit by recessions, who knew?), and one Donald J. Trump who saw his property values tank, nearly bankrupting him.

Clinton's 1993 budget was not designed to be a stimulus, it was designed to be a deficit reduction plan sacrificing economic growth to achieve said goal. A middle class tax cut was promised down the road, but never delivered. The reason for this approach was because the economy was no longer in recession, and was growing at a fast clip as it rebounded from the recession and the budget deficit was viewed as a bigger problem.

In hindsight, we probably would all be better off today, if Clinton ate deficits throughout his whole term and instead pumped a massive infusion of infrastructure spending down the pipeline. The current level of debt might ironically be lower and the economy stronger, most likely.

From that perspective, Bush 43 was poor man for the job who was on top of that dealt a very losing hand, which arguably he played the worst way possible between the War in Iraq and trying to us a debt fueled housing bubble to lead an economic expansion.

Obama was a dealt an even worse hand in some respects but he played it much better than Bush did and the end result has been somewhat positive for him economically. That being said, completing flipping the 2012 narrative that he was unpopular on the economy and strong on foreign policy, his approach to the world has been nothing but a disastrous legacy project, which has weakened our position in many areas and allowed the threat of radical islam to morph into a far more dangerous form, but that is a topic for a different time.

Bill Clinton governed this country the way that Donald Trump ran his businesses. Stealing credit for other people's work by putting his name all over it, and shafting others with the price for his mistakes and poor decisions. If there is any justice at all, the Clintons will go down in history as the greatest political con artists in American history.

I don't think what you're saying is that controversial any more. Bill's legacy came under heavy attack in the primaries on multiple fronts.

But the criticism of Bill Clinton is that he was too deregulatory and austerian, and should have spent more on infrastructure, which hardly makes it a problem for Democrats or the left, since that's where it's coming from. Except strictly as a matter of personal judgement against him. It's like Nixon being attacked for imposing wage and price controls. The actual economically progressive initiatives Bill passed are left unscathed:
- Family and Medical Leave
- Raising the top tax bracket
- Expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit
- Raising the minimum wage

And it shouldn't be a worry especially since Hillary is campaigning to the left of her husband on pretty much all of the issues mentioned mentioned, including financial regulation, and her party, (which never supported NAFTA in the first place at the Congressional level), has clearly moved to the left as well.

And while Hillary did publicly support Bill's economic policies in the 1990s (what First Lady would campaign against her own husband's policies?) she has a consistent record on being to his left. She was by accounts in the opposite wing than his Rubinite advisors during the two years she was actually involved in WH policy. She ran to the left of Obama on economic policy in 2008. Not to mention the policies she's proposing in her current campaign.

Meanwhile, Trump is still proposing massive tax breaks for his fellow real estate developers.

Again, the Democrats should own the economy question. That they are losing it to Trump is malpractice.

[SirMuxALot]

The subprime mortgage crisis was not deregulated into existence.  It was regulated into existence.  Enron-inspired mark to market rules caused forced liquidation of performing mortgages at crisis-inducing prices.  The mark to market rules were well intentioned when passed into law in 2002 (via a 334-90 vote in the House and 97-0 in the Senate, so there is a lot of bipartisan blame here), but they led to huge unintended consequences less than a decade later.  Those accounting rules were the single most significant contributing factor to the crisis.

Glass-Steagall had nothing to do with mortgages or mortgage derivatives.  Glass-Steagall was never fully repealed, in fact.  Most of the law still stands today.  What we usually refer to as Glass-Steagall "repeal" is, in fact, the Gramm Leach Bliley Act, which only allowed partial mixing of commercial and investment banking operations.  The original 1933 Glass-Steagall law already allowed commercial banks to hold mortgage backed securities in their own accounts.

In fact, if all of Glass-Steagall had still been in effect in 2008:
1. B of A could not have legally taken over Merrill Lynch (they were prodded into doing it by the Fed).  
2. JPMorgan could not have taken over Bear Stearns (more prodding by the Fed).
3. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley would not have been legally able to get access to Fed liquidity to save themselves from bankruptcy.

That's potentially *four more* very large bankruptcies that would have happened with full Glass-Steagall in force (or without Gramm Leach Bliley, to look at it another way).

I would like to think Bernanke & Paulson would have found a way to prevent those bankruptcies by...ahem, extra-legal means if necessary, but lawmakers should not rely on that!  They should prefer to have the correct laws/regulations in place instead!

I wish I could wave a magic wand and make all lawmakers (and one retired lawmaker, Barney Frank) understand these facts.  This post-mortem understanding should not be a partisan thing.  We can argue about the degree of regulation necessary (and no, conservatives/Republicans are not anarchists who want no regulation at all), but if such a large number of lawmakers have no desire to understand root causes from both government and private sector, we may be doomed to repeat more severe unintended consequences in the future.

Sorry for the rant...but in this is critical stuff, in my opinion...