Donald Trump is running significantly behind Hillary Clinton. Voters overwhelmingly want candidates to accept the results of the election. And there are some big differences between the nominees’ Twitter followers. This is HuffPollster for Thursday, October 20, 2016.
MOST VOTERS AGREE IT’S IMPORTANT FOR ELECTION LOSERS TO CONCEDE - From a Pew Research Center report: “When the election is concluded, most voters say it is either very important (53%) or somewhat important (24%) for the losing candidate to acknowledge the winner as ‘the legitimate president of the country.’ Only about one in five (22%) say a public concession by the losing candidate is ‘not too’ or ‘not at all important.’ Clinton supporters (60%) are more likely than Trump supporters (51%) to view a concession as very important. Only about one in five of each candidate’s supporters (21% of Trump backers, 16% of Clinton backers) say this is not important. By contrast, roughly twice as many Johnson and Stein supporters (41%) think it is not too or not at all important that the losing candidate publicly acknowledge the winner as the legitimate president.” [Pew]
TRUMP IS REALLY UNLIKELY TO WIN - The HuffPost forecast gives Trump only a 4.4 percent chance of becoming president to Clinton’s 95.4 percent chance of winning. (The missing 0.2 percent is the likelihood of a tie in the Electoral College.) States in which Clinton has over a 90 percent chance of winning add up to 302 electoral votes. National polls also illustrate Clinton’s substantial advantage. According to the HuffPost Pollster aggregate, Clinton leads by 7.2 points in a head-to-head match with Trump and by 6.7 points when third party candidates are included. Only one national poll ― IBD/TIPP ― has shown Trump leading by even a single point in the four-way race, and it appears to be an outlier. In the head-to-head matchup, it finds Clinton leading by 3 points. Every other national poll from the last two weeks shows Clinton leading, often by more than 5 points.
And the final debate didn’t help his chances - HuffPollster: “Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton went three for three in the presidential debates, according to preliminary polls gauging viewers’ reactions to her final matchup Wednesday against Republican Donald Trump. YouGov’s scientific online snap poll showed Clinton winning by 10 points, 49 percent to 39 percent, among registered voters who watched the debate. Another 10 percent called the debate a tie….A CNN/ORC snap poll, which recontacted people who said in a past poll that they planned to watch the debate, gave Clinton a 13-point win, 52 percent to 39 percent…. As we’ve noted before, debate-night polls come with some heavy caveats.... But with Clinton up by more than 8 points in national polls, a debate that fails to move the needle is an unqualified win for her campaign. Trump would have needed to score a major coup to count the final debate as victory ― and the early results suggest that he didn’t even come close to doing so.” [HuffPost]
Clinton has improved her image - Aaron Zitner: “Mrs. Clinton has accomplished a rare goal in politics―she has improved her public image among the voters…. Through most of the year, Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton have had the distinction of being the least-liked major-party nominees in modern history. That’s still true of Mr. Trump. But it’s no longer true of Mrs. Clinton…. Negative views of Mrs. Clinton outweighed positive ones by 10 percentage points in the poll released this week. That’s an improvement from prior months. In April, for example, negative views of Mrs. Clinton outweighed positive ones by 24 points. The improvement leaves George H.W. Bush as the most unfavorably viewed nominee in recent history, after Mr. Trump.” [WSJ]
DIVIDES BY EDUCATION ‘REPLACING THE CULTURE WAR’ - Nate Cohn: “The predictable electoral map of the last four elections, born in part of the culture wars and split along familiar regional divides, might not look quite the same this November. This dynamic helps explain why reliably red states are now on the verge of competitiveness, even as some traditional battleground states haven’t budged. Mrs. Clinton is struggling where Mr. Obama depended heavily on the support of white working-class voters four years ago. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, is struggling where there are few opportunities for him to improve among white working-class voters, or where Republicans depend on well-educated white voters….The traditional red-state, blue-state map of the 2000-12 era was driven in part by culture war politics, which split white voters along religious lines….But the old culture war is effectively over. There have been few or no campaign advertisements about same-sex marriage or abortion in most places. This election is a hint of one way things could turn next: a new split between the beneficiaries of multicultural globalism and the working-class ethnonationalists who feel left behind economically and culturally. It wouldn’t divide the country as much by region and religion, but more along the lines of urbanization and education.” [NYT]
A MAJORITY OF VOTERS SAY THE MEDIA IS BIASED AGAINST TRUMP - Nolan D. McCaskill: “A majority of likely voters agree: The media are biased against Donald Trump, according to a national Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday. Fifty-five percent of likely voters surveyed said the media are biased against the Republican presidential nominee, while 42 percent said there is no media bias against the real estate mogul. Almost 9 of 10 Republicans said that news organizations are biased against Trump, while 3 in 4 Democrats disagree with that notion. Six in 10 independents said the media are biased against the mogul. ‘Donald Trump made the charge, and American likely voters agree: There IS a media bias against the GOP contender,’ said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University poll…. A majority of likely voters also agreed by a double-digit margin that Trump lacks the fitness and decency to be president. ‘Media bias or not, Trump’s character issues have ominous implications,’ Malloy said.” [Politico]
WHAT DOES A TWITTER BIO SAY ABOUT YOUR POLITICS? - Christopher Mathias, Samantha Storey and Adam Hooper: “Never before has Twitter played such a prominent role in an election…. The Huffington Post wanted to find out more about the people who follow the candidates. We hoped their 160-character bios might reveal a thing or two about political identity…. We downloaded the Twitter bios for people who follow either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. That ended up being about 8 million tiny 160-character self-portraits…. Mostly the profiles paint a story of identity: parental status, professional and personal accomplishments, hobbies, niche interests, a favorite Bible quote or the type of car someone drives. The bios suggest a divided nation, where a single word, like NASCAR or Buddhist, reveals a person’s politics. A big caveat: a Trump or Clinton follower does not a Trump or Clinton supporter make. In other words, this is not a scientific data set, and we’re not here to make big new proclamations about the American Voter. Mostly we’re just trying to scratch the itch of curiosity. Who is more likely to be a follower of Trump? Of Clinton?” [HuffPost]
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THURSDAY’S ‘OUTLIERS’ - Links to the best of news at the intersection of polling, politics and political data:
-Republicans are divided on who should lead the party if Donald Trump loses. [Bloomberg]
-Gregory S. Schneider and Emily Guskin write that Hillary Clinton’s gains in Virginia are fueled by “women, suburbanites, nonwhites and [the] college educated.” [WashPost]
-David Lauter notes that re-weighting the USC/L.A. Times panel to Census data puts it in line with the polling averages. [LA Times]
-Charlie Warzel profiles poll-unskewing radio host Bill Mitchell. [Buzzfeed]