Well, here’s something different. A political scientist at Christopher Newport University has a heretical theory of American elections. At Politico David Freedlander writes:
What if everything you think you know about politics is wrong? What if there aren’t really American swing voters—or not enough, anyway, to pick the next president? What if it doesn’t matter much who the Democratic nominee is? What if there is no such thing as “the center,†and the party in power can govern however it wants for two years, because the results of that first midterm are going to be bad regardless? What if the Democrats’ big 41-seat midterm victory in 2018 didn’t happen because candidates focused on health care and kitchen-table issues, but simply because they were running against the party in the White House? What if the outcome in 2020 is pretty much foreordained, too?
Here’s her prediction:
And today her model tells her the Democrats are a near lock for the presidency in 2020, and are likely to gain House seats and have a decent shot at retaking the Senate. If she’s right, we are now in a post-economy, post-incumbency, post record-while-in-office era of politics.
and here are the details:
Bitecofer has already released her 2020 model, and is alone among election forecasters in giving the Democrats—who, of course, do not yet have a nominee—the 270 electoral votes required to claim the presidency without a single toss-up state flipping their way. She sees anyone in the top tier, or even the second tier of candidates, as strong enough to win back most of the Trump states in the industrial Midwest, stealing a march in the South in places like North Carolina and Florida, and even competing in traditional red states like Georgia, Texas and Arizona. The Democrats are likely to pick up seats again in the House, she says, pegging the total at nine pickups in Texas alone, and have a decent chance of taking back the Senate.
If Dr. Bitecofer is right, it doesn’t just mean that legions of political forecasters are wrong. It means that a lot of the savviest pols around, like Rahm Emanuel and James Carville, are not only wrong but have been wrong all along.
The opportunity of confirming or disproving Dr. Bitecofer’s theory will come soon enough, on Tuesday November 3, 2020. Whose base will be the most motivated to come out? She’ll either be hailed as a prophet or we’ll never hear from her again.
Making sweeping predictions like Dr Bitecofer’s is worthless IMO. The safer stance is to remain neutral, sticking with the fact that who wins the 2020 election is as unknown as who the eventual nominee will be for the Democrat party.
For instance HRC was the unquestioned winner in 2016, until Trump “unexpectedly†won. Trump now is predicted to be the winner in 2020, unless something unexpectedly happens between now and then. Basically, it’s always the “unexpected,†or false assumptions in computer models, that throw unanticipated curve balls into predicting future results or conditions.
Read Silver. Polls have been consistently about 2% off. When errors are made they tend to go in the same direction. So a close election is essentially a toss up. On top of that only national polls are taken often enough and with enough numbers to give reliable information. Individual state polls are much more likely to not be accurate.
As to Bitecofer. She sounds a bit like Elaine Garzarelli. She made one famous stock prediction (Black Monday) and was hailed as a guru for a while, until people figured out her other predictions weren’t much better than chance predictions. Then she disappeared. Suspect this Bitecofer for something correct once with her model and is now trying to convince she will always be correct from now on. I would bet on her following Garzarelli’s trajectory.
Steve