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Is Hillary up for the biggest Presidential landslide victory in history?

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That reminds me that I couldn't believe Ross Perot got 18% of the vote in 92. I really don't remember him being that effective.

By third party standards he was incredibly effective. In popular vote terms it was the best performance by a third party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt got over 27% of the vote (good enough for second place) in 1912 under the banner of the "Bull Moose" Progressive Party. Of course Perot's strong showing was good for a whopping zero electoral votes, which is a good illustration of the incredible uphill climb third parties face in the US system.

A common myth is that Perot cost George Bush the election, but exit polls indicated that he drew equally from Bush and Clinton. He probably made the difference in a couple of states (Montana for example), but not in terms of the overall outcome.
 
Might not be and probably won't be but it won't matter because minorities are only voting one way.

Let's not even forget that Trump has decided to target states he has absolutely no chance in.
some Republicans will sit this one out and stay home instead of voting for anybody
 

Plinko

Wildcard berths that can't beat teams without a winning record should have homefield advantage
Alternatively, the opposite could also happen.

1OfrqV4.png

LOL at Trump winning every swing state.
 

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
Wait, why would it be more efficiently allocated today? The number of small states has only gone up over time and it's also halfway through a census cycle.

I don't think the words I used conveyed the thing I was trying to convey.

What I had in mind is this: If every state exactly tracked the national vote, then winning 50%+1 of the national two-party vote gives you 100% of the EVs. If, on the other hand, states are bifurcated into deep rep states and deep blue states, then winning the exact same number of votes nationally would not result in 100% of the EVs, and depending on which states are red and which are blue, you could even lose if your opponent more efficiently translated votes into EVs.

Okay, now imagine that states have all different proportions of underlying support. We can't measure underlying support, it's a theoretical quantity. Apply a shock to the system that swings every state uniformly (or proportionately) in some direction by some amount. If there are a lot of states in the 47-53% range, then that shock swings comparatively lots of EVs per percentage point of vote swing--if there are a lot of states in the <40% >60% range, then that shock swings comparatively fewer EVs per percentage point of vote swing.

Applying the same logic to this election, my point was that I suspect--and I don't have data for this although it would be fairly easy to do--that a uniform swing (or proportional swing) in national popular vote does not buy you as many EVs as it did in 1984 or 1936. I guess what I mean is I suspect there are fewer swing states now than there were then. Partisan self-sorting has been very well documented over the last few decades, which is what people talk about when they say polarization. I think the evidence on geographic partisan self-sorting is a little weaker. I'd have to check the literature so this is a more vague intuition.

Of course a complication is that we don't expect the swing to be uniform/proportional, especially if we believe Trump is going to cause a major bump in Hispanic turnout and we know Hispanic voters are allocated in a very lopsided way. But yeah, my sense is that if you gave Hillary 57-59% of the vote, you wouldn't see a 500+ EV blowout.
 

Aurongel

Member
The only landslide this election is going to be record lows for voter turnout and maybe a slight bump for third parties. Trump might be a dumpster fire that's dividing his party but Democrats are similarly (but less so) fickle and torn about the presumptive candidate.
 

4Tran

Member
I feel like it could end up a 60/40 split. Trump is a better showman and entertainer than Hilary, and there's a sizable chunk of Americans for whom that's reason enough to vote for him, combined with hatred of liberalism/Hilary.

Ha, I see many others are predicting 40%. Great minds think alike. ;)
Bear in mind though that even the Reagan-Mondale landslide still wasn't quite as big a split as 60/40. If Trump actually does that badly there will be a civil war in the Republican party.

The only landslide this election is going to be record lows for voter turnout and maybe a slight bump for third parties. Trump might be a dumpster fire that's dividing his party but Democrats are similarly (but less so) fickle and torn about the presumptive candidate.
Democrats are guaranteed to come out in droves to vote against Trump. This only fails to happen if everyone thinks it's a done deal.
 

Maengun1

Member
A nearly fully blue map just isn't gonna happen in this era of polarization. Throughout the 20th century the majority of Americans were fine with voting democrat, then republican, then democrat again, etc., and that just hasn't happened since 2000-ish. One of the major parties could literally run a dog turd against the other party's solid candidate and the turd WOULD get a minimum of around 45% of the vote due to the letter next to its name. It's just the way things are in this era.

Hillary could, though, outperform Obama's numbers, even his stronger 2008 showing, due to the Trump factor. That alone is rather remarkable because its rare for the same party to win 3 in a row *and* Hillary is considerably less liked in 2016 than Obama was in 2008.

That's not to say the Democrats shouldn't be trying to expand the map in an effort to humiliate Trump, I think they should -- with caution. I'd say right now focus on all the states Obama won in 2008, minus Indiana probably, plus Georgia and Arizona. See how that goes for a while. If things continue to tilt away from Trump, run up the score more and more into the fall.
 

LosDaddie

Banned
With the recent favorability polls, many Republicans potentially staying home over choosing to vote for Trump, and even the slight possibility of historically red states like Utah going blue, I'm wondering if this is potentially the biggest gap in polls we'll see in history come this voting season?

I still feel strongly that we've only really seen a vocal minority pour support for Trump, and once the real voting wave comes in for the Presidential election, they'll be crushed into obscurity as well as having been exposed for supporting a racist.

Has the OP responded at all?
 

Staccat0

Fail out bailed
I sincerely think Trump has no real interest in winning. It seems like his job (until after the conve tions) right now is easy. A parrot could be doing a better job right now.
 
Could be, but don't underestimate Trump. All it takes is him getting momentum from a really good debate and it could go anywhere. I've seen this sort of stuff in my own country, don't count your chickens before they hatch, especially with this 1 on 1 format you guys have in the US.
 

rjinaz

Member
The only landslide this election is going to be record lows for voter turnout and maybe a slight bump for third parties. Trump might be a dumpster fire that's dividing his party but Democrats are similarly (but less so) fickle and torn about the presumptive candidate.

We have a celebrity taking over the party and the first woman president if she wins and minorities trying to stop a bigot.

I honestly don't see it. That and voter turnout for the primaries were high. Not Obama 08 high, but high.
 
Has the OP responded at all?

Respond to what? I'm simply reading everyone's thoughts and answers on the matter, and learning a lot from it. I'm certainly not as informed as poligaf on the matter (obviously) which is why I posed the question based on my pedestrian observation of the polls and news coming in the last week, that's all. As I wrote in the OP, I certainly hope it would be a landslide for the non-racist, but it seems like that is impossible today due to polarization.
 

Angry Grimace

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
She'll win for sure. I think if she gets over 60% of the vote that's enough to count as a landslide.

5 points is a landslide. If she had 60% of the vote it would somehow mean the GOP lost the Senate, the House and practically every governorship.
 

mo60

Member
No, but Hilary's probably going to end up winning by 10%+ or maybe even 15%+ if things continue to get worse and worse for trump. She has a legit shot at breaking 400EV's in this election cycle with trump on the republican ticket. I would be absolutely shocked if there was anywere near a 20 point gap between Hilary and trump in this election.Expect Hilary to get anywere between 51% and 58% of the popular vote on election night.
 

avaya

Member
332 or 347 EV (Obama 12 + North Carolina) is the most likely result. Pushing it out 358 EV with Arizona and above are just the icing.
 

LosDaddie

Banned
Respond to what? I'm simply reading everyone's thoughts and answers on the matter, and learning a lot from it. I'm certainly not as informed as poligaf on the matter (obviously) which is why I posed the question based on my pedestrian observation of the polls and news coming in the last week, that's all. As I wrote in the OP, I certainly hope it would be a landslide for the non-racist, but it seems like that is impossible today due to polarization.

Is this your first presidential election?
 

kewlmyc

Member
I want to say so, but Trump has been a cockroach this entire election process. He just refuses to go down. I have no idea how the elections are going to go at this point.
 

mattiewheels

And then the LORD David Bowie saith to his Son, Jonny Depp: 'Go, and spread my image amongst the cosmos. For every living thing is in anguish and only the LIGHT shall give them reprieve.'
By third party standards he was incredibly effective. In popular vote terms it was the best performance by a third party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt got over 27% of the vote (good enough for second place) in 1912 under the banner of the "Bull Moose" Progressive Party. Of course Perot's strong showing was good for a whopping zero electoral votes, which is a good illustration of the incredible uphill climb third parties face in the US system.

A common myth is that Perot cost George Bush the election, but exit polls indicated that he drew equally from Bush and Clinton. He probably made the difference in a couple of states (Montana for example), but not in terms of the overall outcome.
Perot was a really interesting candidate, wherein he seemed to appeal to dems and repubs. I don't see an independent candidate doing that these days, they would either siphon one side or the other.
 
Is this your first presidential election?

Due to circumstance, yes.

So?

Am I not allowed to ask questions and learn from responses? People snickering "babby's first election" really form a toxic platform for possible discussion and education here sometimes.

I get why people ask this, but it seems to happen a lot recently, and honestly, it sounds rather condescending.

This guy gets it. It feels like the new "whatever, junior"
 

IrishNinja

Member
She would probably lose to Trump then.

she really wouldn't

Alternatively, the opposite could also happen.

1OfrqV4.png

this may be the dumbest thing you've posted since this

Either way, we're still fucked.

yeah bro, they're the same

I get why people ask this, but it seems to happen a lot recently, and honestly, it sounds rather condescending.

it's clearly intended to, yeah
 

120v

Member
though it was by no means intentional obama polarized the country a lot. otherwise we'd be looking at a catastrophic landslide, not quite 1984 but a lot of the south would probably go hillary.

but as others have said we're probably looking at somewhere between the 2008 and '12 map. can't wait for those #bittertears
 
let's not get complacent, but I am worried that Trump is imploding too fast way before the convention

This is what worries me. Though Trump is too much an egomaniac to let them take away the nomination.







To the OP I didn't think at first but Trump is not only toxic as a candidate but woefully inept. He is leading the GOP under funding them, dividing them, and without strategy. He literally has no surrogates to stump for him. I feel at the least we are getting a political realignment after this election.
 
This is what worries me. Though Trump is too much an egomaniac to let them take away the nomination.

You don't just sweep the nomination out from under the rightful winner and then come back and win in November, that's fantasy. Imagine Sanders or Biden forcefully taking it from Clinton without a truly valid reason, you think it strengthens their chances in November? Either way, they're headed for a cliff.
 

Oblivion

Fetishing muscular manly men in skintight hosery
LOL. Not even close. I wish it were the case, but it's not. Trump is terrible, but Hillary is not lighting the world on fire either, and she has even less cross-over appeal than Obama. Not to mention the country is polarized as fuck. Best case scenario is that she wins with similar numbers to the 2012 election.
 
I don't think the words I used conveyed the thing I was trying to convey.

What I had in mind is this: If every state exactly tracked the national vote, then winning 50%+1 of the national two-party vote gives you 100% of the EVs. If, on the other hand, states are bifurcated into deep rep states and deep blue states, then winning the exact same number of votes nationally would not result in 100% of the EVs, and depending on which states are red and which are blue, you could even lose if your opponent more efficiently translated votes into EVs.

Okay, now imagine that states have all different proportions of underlying support. We can't measure underlying support, it's a theoretical quantity. Apply a shock to the system that swings every state uniformly (or proportionately) in some direction by some amount. If there are a lot of states in the 47-53% range, then that shock swings comparatively lots of EVs per percentage point of vote swing--if there are a lot of states in the <40% >60% range, then that shock swings comparatively fewer EVs per percentage point of vote swing.

Applying the same logic to this election, my point was that I suspect--and I don't have data for this although it would be fairly easy to do--that a uniform swing (or proportional swing) in national popular vote does not buy you as many EVs as it did in 1984 or 1936. I guess what I mean is I suspect there are fewer swing states now than there were then. Partisan self-sorting has been very well documented over the last few decades, which is what people talk about when they say polarization. I think the evidence on geographic partisan self-sorting is a little weaker. I'd have to check the literature so this is a more vague intuition.

Of course a complication is that we don't expect the swing to be uniform/proportional, especially if we believe Trump is going to cause a major bump in Hispanic turnout and we know Hispanic voters are allocated in a very lopsided way. But yeah, my sense is that if you gave Hillary 57-59% of the vote, you wouldn't see a 500+ EV blowout.

The absolute most simplified analysis I can think of is to apply a uniform swing to either the 2012 results, or something like Cook Partisan Voting Index that is supposed to measure underlying support for the parties (I'm aware that PVI has a lot of limitations, but this is just for the purposes of having a simple analysis). There are eight states (Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama, West Virginia, Kentucky), collectively worth 48 electoral votes, with a PVI of R+13 or more. This means that those states would be expected to give a Republican 13 points more of the two-party vote (i.e., ignoring third parties) than his national share. In theory then, Hillary could win the two-party vote roughly 63-37 and still expect to fall short of 500 electoral votes. You could make the analysis a little more sophisticated by taking the elasticity of each state (i.e., its tendency to respond to swings in the national vote) into account, or doing some modeling that takes demographics into account, etc. This quick and dirty analysis suggested it would be a very tall order for Hillary to get to 500 electoral votes. The best shot of it would probably be for the Republican vote to be split.
 

LosDaddie

Banned
I get why people ask this, but it seems to happen a lot recently, and honestly, it sounds rather condescending.

It's probably happening a lot recently because the questions/statements can be so easily answered with just a tiny bit of research.


Due to circumstance, yes.

So?

Am I not allowed to ask questions and learn from responses? People snickering "babby's first election" really form a toxic platform for possible discussion and education here sometimes.

Of course you're allowed to ask questions. Other people are, of course, allowed to respond to the question.

As others have responded, in order for Hillary to have "the biggest landslide victory in history" like you've asked, she would have to win all 50 states. Yes, all 50 states. Even if you take Trump's favorability ratings out of the equation, Hillary has very a high unfavorability rating herself. Historically high, in fact.

So you'll excuse some fun being had at the notion of Hillary besting Reagan's '84 performance.
 
Don't underestimate the power of mass stupidity.
I'm legitimately worried Trump may win. His "constituency" doesn't seem to be the type to participate in polls.
 

Meowster

Member
She should but this is basically going to be the Tea Party/Racists last stand at reclaiming the world of the 50s. They're going to go all out on this one - hopefully they'll lose catastrophically and realize that they are losers and try to actively seek change. Doubt it though.
 

avaya

Member
She should but this is basically going to be the Tea Party/Racists last stand at reclaiming the world of the 50s. They're going to go all out on this one - hopefully they'll lose catastrophically and realize that they are losers and try to actively seek change. Doubt it though.

That'll be 2020.
 
I would not be surprised is the Republicans somehow manage to stop Trump at the convention and nominate a more moderate candidate that'll give Hillary a harder time. .

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...dcf74e-3491-11e6-8758-d58e76e11b12_story.html

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/anti-trump-gop-delegates-224495

That would destroy republican morale and anger millions of people, making a Hillary win even bigger. The republican voters selected Trump and constantly rejected establishment candidates. Having establishment officials block his nomination and selecting an establishment figure to replace him would cause serious damage to the republican party.
 

Cromat

Member
I really wonder about the debates. It would be a very different dynamic than the one Trump had against the extremely weak Republican field.

On the other hand, he might throw Clinton out of balance somehow because he's so unpredictable. It'll be interesting that's for sure.
 
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