Questions and press inquiries regarding this article and the data analysis contained within can be directed to:  info@olsonkroeger.com or call Kent Kroeger at 515 512 2776

By NuQum.com Analytic Team (Source:  NuQum.com, January 5, 2017)

One Los Angeles Times writer called it the “scorched-earth” campaign.  Even his critics will agree, Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was like no other in American political history.

Yes, we’ve had negative campaigns before this one.  In the 1828 campaign, John Quincy Adams called Andrew Jackson’s mother a prostitute and Jackson’s wife an adulteress.  More recently, George W. Bush’s 2000 primary campaign was accused of indirectly promulgating a rumor among South Carolina Republicans that John McCain had a “black baby” out of wedlock.

But most examples, like those, were ancillary to broader campaign motifs that generally leaned more positive.  In 1988, George H.W. Bush’s campaign infamously used the “Willie Horton” ad to accuse his opponent, Michael Dukakis, of being soft on crime. But, even in that election, Bush’s message was much more about “no new taxes” than it was about attacking his opponent.

But now comes along Donald Trump who seemed to change the rules of American political campaigns that, heretofore, were assumed to be inviolable.  Trump’s most notable deviation was in his ground game, or lack thereof, according to many political campaign experts.  Where the political consultants expected door-knockers and phone banks, Trump gave us campaign rallies and more campaign rallies.  And not just rallies, but human waves, often more than 10,000 attendees, that strode across cornfields and stadium parking lots, often waiting hours just to see their new political liberator.  Trump rallies were events, similar to the atmosphere one experiences while tailgating prior to a Big 10 or SEC football game.

In contrast, Hillary Clinton ran a more traditional campaign that put a much higher premium on advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts than did the Trump campaign.  This difference in campaign strategy was, in part, a function of Clinton having more money and a more established campaign organization; but, it was also a function of expectations.  Modern presidential campaigns are supposed to look like Hillary Clinton’s campaign.  Who needs creativity when you have a proven model for winning presidential elections.  Barack Obama didn’t re-create how modern campaigns are structured.  He simply did it better than anyone else in 2008 and 2012.

Trump has changed the rules.  So what if he was outspent by $600 million.  He’d make up for it through free media (euphemistically called “earned media” nowadays by the media) and campaign rallies.  He also employed a level of negativity unseen in modern presidential elections.

“(Trump) sketched out conspiracies involving global bankers, casually threatened to jail his political opponent, and warned in increasingly specific terms that a loss by him would spell the end of civilization,” wrote Los Angeles Times writer, Noah Bierman.

Here is an example of a Trump rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan:

Yes, this campaign was different.  But did it really make a difference in the final election outcome?

Using state-level event data from the website  www.nationalpopularvote.com and aggregated polling data from RealClearPolitics.com, we analyzed the relationship between the candidates’ travel schedules and changes in their state-level of support.

Since over 95 percent of 2016 candidate events and most state-level polling occurred in just 15 “swing states,” our analysis is restricted to those states (see list of states in table below).  The table shows the opinion polling data averages at the state-level at the beginning of October (RCP Poll Avg. as of Oct. 1^st,) and the candidate’s actual vote percentage on Election Day (Actual Vote %).  The column on the far-right summarizes this information by showing the extent to which Trump’s support changed between Oct. 1^st and Election Day.  As you can see, in the final month of the campaign, Trump gained support in all by two of the 15 swing states (Colorado and Nevada).

Based on this evidence alone, you might conclude that Trump had the superior campaign.  However, it is fair to ask, was this domination simply the result of two exogeneous factors:  The Comey letter and the Podesta emails?

If those two factors alone drove Trump’s dominance, we’d expect the impact to be similar across all 15 swing states.  After all, voters’ exposure to these two factors come primarily from national media outlets, not local or state-level sources.

Yet, we see from the table above that Trump’s support gains were not evenly distributed across the “swing” states.  In fact, there is a lot of state-level variation that warrants explanation.

The next table shows the number of post-convention candidate visits for each of the swing states and the percentage of the eligible voter population that was Hispanic/Latino as of January, 2016.  Without formally testing the relationships, it is evident that in states where the Hispanic voting population was large (>10%), Trump did not make significant inroads into Clinton’s early October lead (Arizona +1.1%, Colorado -3.4%, and Nevada -2.6%).

Less evident is the relationship between the number of candidate events and the relative change in Trump’s support.  In Ohio, where Trump’s relative position improved by 10.6% between Oct. 1^st and Election Day, the Trump campaign had 12 more events than Clinton’s campaign.  Yet, in Colorado where Trump’s campaign had 13 more visits, his relative vote position deteriorated by 3.4%.   The bivariate correlation (p = 0.45) between the number of Trump campaign events and the size of the Hispanic/Latino population (p = -0.60) with changes in vote support were statistically significant; however, the number of Clinton events and the relative difference in the number of events were not statistically significant in the bivariate correlations.  Without a more formal test, it is difficult to know the relative contribution of each factor to changes candidate support.

THE MODEL:

We estimated a linear model to explain the vote change in the 15 “swing” states (the full regression model summary and dataset can be accessed here).  We included four variables in the initial regression model:  (1) Number of Clinton campaign events in each, (2) Number of Trump campaign events, (3) Percentage of Hispanic/Latinos in the voter eligible population, and (4) a indicator variable for Colorado.  Given the small sample size (n=15) it was not feasible to include more than four variables (see the Methodological Note at the end of this article for other issues related to our regression model).

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL MODEL OUTPUT

The regression model revealed two significant findings.  The number of Trump campaign events was significantly related to changes in support for Trump.  All else equal, one Trump event translated into an increase of 0.2 percent in Trump’s vote support relative to Clinton’s.  Conversely, given the small sample size, the impact of Clinton’s events was too small to be distinguished from zero, though it was negative (-0.17) as expected.  The regression also revealed a strong negative relationship between the size of the Hispanic/Latino voter eligible population and changes in voter support for Trump.  In Colorado, Trump’s campaign events were particularly ineffectual.

Our model’s implications are summarized in the table below.  By setting the Hispanic/Latino population at two levels – 17.8% (for large Hispanic/Latino population states) and 3.2% (for low Hispanic/Latino population states – we analyzed the impact on Trump’s relative vote support given different numbers of Trump campaign visits.  In low Hispanic/Latino population states, five Trump events translated into a 3.1 percentage-point increase in his support relative to Clinton’s.  Twenty events gave Trump a 5.7 percentage-point bump up in those states.

In contrast, in high Hispanic/Latino population states, the impact of Trump events were dampened.  It would take more than 10 Trump campaign events to overcome his disadvantage in those states.

A final note, while we did not include the impact of advertising and news coverage in our regression model, we do believe those factors might help explain the intrinsic and pervasive disadvantage Trump had with Hispanic/Latino voters on a national level.  Whatever the strategic and tactical flaws in the Clinton campaign overall, it does appear her campaign was very successful at checking Trump’s support gains in states with large numbers of Hispanic/Latino eligible voters.

As for the impact of the Comey Letter or the Podesta emails, that will be left for a more thorough analysis.  Again, we do not believe inclusion of these factors would change our state-level findings.  Those are national events filtered through national media sources.  In our four-variable model, the impact of those factors may be buried in the ‘regression intercept’ which represents the starting point for changes in Trump’s support, setting all other factors to zero.  Here, the intercept was estimated to be 3.2.  That is, Trump would have gained about a three percentage-points versus Clinton in October even if all other factors — candidate visits and the size of the Hispanic/Latino vote eligible population — were non-factors.  If there is a Comey and/or Podesta effect, it is in there somewhere.  In a close election, like the last one, those could have been decisive factors, even if they weren’t the biggest determinants of the election outcome.

DISCUSSION:

It is fair to ask, how does a candidate visit change voter opinions (or, more likely, the likelihood that the voter will vote) given that so few people attend a campaign rally?  Even Trump rallies attracted only about 5,000 people per event – and most of those people were already Trump supporters.  How does a really change an election outcome?

We see it as a multi-stage process powered by word-of-mouth and television coverage.  We don’t think many voters change their vote choice because they attended a rally.  Instead, based on telephone interviews NuQum.com conducted with Trump supporters in late October in Polk County, Iowa, we heard Trump supporters repeatedly talk about the excitement surrounding the Trump campaign.  Had they attended a Trump rally?  In all but a few cases, no.  Instead, their sense of the excitement came from television coverage and world-of-mouth from family, friends, and work colleagues, some of whom had attended a Trump event.  That is a one-two-punch that, anecdotally at least, leads us to believe a single campaign event can indirectly move voters into the voter booth in favor of one candidate over another.  It’s a dynamic that we don’t think worked as consistently or as often in the Clinton campaign’s favor.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Admittedly, our analysis doesn’t address the impact of news coverage and advertising (TV, radio, direct mail).  We know those campaign factors matter – a lot.  Nonetheless, we can explain over 63 percent of the variation in the state-level vote change during the last month of the campaign by referencing just three variables:  The number of Trump visits, the relative size of the Hispanic population in each state and a deflation factor unique to Colorado.

The Clinton campaign spent much more money on advertising, according to Kagan Media; and, we have yet to see an analysis suggesting Clinton’s TV and radio were of a lower quality than Trump’s.  In our judgement, Clinton’s TV and radios were qualitatively superior to Trump’s – and we would say, it is not even close.  Clinton’s TV spots were brilliantly produced and powerful.  As the father of an autistic son, the Clinton spot with the mother of an autistic child lamenting Trump’s mocking of a handicapped New York Times reporter, was as moving as any political ad I’ve ever seen.

Furthermore, contrary to the current media narrative, Trump’s news media coverage in the general election period was significantly more negative than Clinton’s (see the charts below provided by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center).  The ‘horse-race” coverage was particularly tilted in Clinton’s favor.

Thus, we are skeptical that the inclusion of advertising or the tone of media coverage would change our main finding that campaign events were a significant factor in Trump’s electoral college triumph.

Combine the impact of Trump’s rallies with the cold-hearted efficiency of the Trump campaign’s allocation of campaign resources into the key “swing” states, and you get the most improbable electoral victory in US. Presidential history.

Questions and press inquiries regarding this article and the data analysis contained within can be directed to:  info@olsonkroeger.com or call Kent Kroeger at 515 512 2776

METHODOLOGICAL NOTES:  There are a number of caveats to our analysis.  First, we did not include state-level media buys by the two campaigns.  Our initial source for media buy data (The University of Maryland’s Center for Political Communication and Civic Leadership) lacked the fidelity we required at the state-level; therefore, we did not formally test for the impact of media buys.  However, in the media data we did obtain, the variation between non-swing states and swing states far exceeded variation between each of the 15 swing states.  We are confident that the inclusion of the media buy data would not change the results reported here.  Second, the candidate event data includes both the presidential nominee visits (Trump, Clinton) and vice-presidential nominee visits (Pence, Kaine).  Third, we only have 15 data points (one for each state) making it difficult to discern weaker relationships within the data.  For example, we find Clinton campaign visits had no significant impact on voter support.  We believe an analysis at the state and weekly levels might better reveal the nature of that relationship.

By Kent Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, December 22, 2016)

“I believe that a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an existential necessity if Israel is to remain a Jewish homeland,” recently wrote Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder and president of J Street, a nonprofit advocacy group that lobbies to end the Israel–Palestinian conflict peacefully and diplomatically. “As important, I believe ruling as an occupying power over millions of Palestinians for 50 years while denying them their rights is not only strategically unwise but also morally unjustifiable.”

“Never before has a diplomatic novice been placed in this sensitive post, where a single wrong word or move could pour fuel on fires already burning in the region,” wrote Ben-Ami in a Washington Post editorial opposing the nomination of David Friedman, a New York bankruptcy lawyer, as the U.S. Ambassador to Israel by President-elect Donald Trump.

Friedman’s response to Ben-Ami and his other Jewish-American critics has been harsh, to say the least.  He’s even included a particularly ugly and noxious slur that relates Ben-Ami and J Street supporters to “Jews who turned in their fellow Jews in the Nazi death camps.” I don’t know Mr. Ben-Ami but what I’ve read and heard from him — in his own words — does not strike me as deviant from the mainstream opinions within the American-Jewish community.

In Pew Research’s October 2013 survey of Jewish Americans, 61 percent of Jewish Americans said they were optimistic that there is a way for Israel and an Independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully, compared to only 50 percent of adults in the U.S. In the same survey, 44 percent of Jewish Americans said Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories “hurt” Israel’s security, compared to only 17 percent who said the settlements helped.

Interestingly, Ben-Ami’s position on the necessity of the “two-state solution” is also consistent with the stated position of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who in May 2016 said, “We are willing to negotiate with the Arab states’ revisions to the (Arab Peace) initiative so that it reflects the dramatic changes in our region since 2002, but maintains the agreed goal of two states for two peoples.”

I am not suggesting Ben-Ami and Netanyahu are of a like mind on how to achieve a two-state solution, but at a minimum their stated goal for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not deviate from the UN resolutions on the “Peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine” that date back to 1974.

I know little about David Friedman, except what he wrote about Ben-Ami and J Street and what I’ve heard and read about him in the media.

My general rule is:  Don’t make a judgement about someone through what you hear or read about them through the media.  I have also learned with age that sometimes people we don’t agree with (or even like) can be that shock to your own system of beliefs that moves you into a new and more productive direction. Friedman may fill that role if he becomes the U.S. Ambassador to Israel.

In a June 2016 interview on Israeli TV, Friedman said: “I think if you look at the Palestinians, they share something in common with the entire Muslim world, which is 90% or so of them are perfectly fine, good people. They’ve been hijacked by the 10% that observes radical, Islamic jihad. I think if you went to those 90% and said to them, ‘Would you rather live under an Israeli regime or under a new Palestinian state,’ I would be shocked if the majority of them wouldn’t prefer Israeli rule,” he said.

Prepare to be shocked, Mr. Friedman. I don’t think 90 percent Palestinians will agree with you on that. However, more and more Israeli and Palestinian activists, sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, are also saying that the two-solution is O.B.E. (Overtaken by Events) and that the resolution to the conflict requires a new paradigm.

In a recent conversation with a young Palestinian, currently studying at Iowa State University, he gave me his diagnosis on the two-state solution.

“It is dead,” he said.

“What replaces it? The one-state solution?” I asked.

“Right now, nothing. It’s the status quo – which is the most unacceptable version of the one-state solution.”

But, unlike even five years ago, when it was hard to find anyone talking about a ‘one-state solution,’ there are now prominent activists sharing the same sentiment as that ISU student. Scholars Noura Erakat and Leila Farsakh, after attending a meeting with European Union leaders in 2013, concluded that the failure of the two-state solution has left the region with a de facto one-state solution. Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, has been quoted as saying, “Good riddance! The two-state solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is finally dead.”

In his eulogy for the two-state solution during a book tour in 2013, U.S. religious scholar, Reza Aslan, gave what may be the simplest explanation for its demise:

“When Oslo was signed (in 1993) there were about 100,000 settlers living in Palestine. That was when the peace process was started. And 20 years of the peace process has led to 500,000 Israelis living on Palestinian land. The two-state solution is over.”

On that conclusion, Aslan, Barghouti, Erakat, Farsakh, Friedman and likely Netanyahu, too, aren’t that far apart. Obviously, the nature and future direction of this de facto one-state solution substantially separates Friedman and Netanyahu from the aforementioned academics and social activists. Nonetheless, Trump’s consciously provocative nominee for the U.S. ambassadorship may at least serve the purpose of cutting through the cynicism and unrealistic posturing that continues to dominate the mainstream rhetoric of Israeli, American and Palestinian leaders.

After eight years of failed American leadership with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is time for change.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, February 6, 2016)

We would love to brag that we were the only data-driven political forecasters to predict Cruz’ victory in the Iowa’s Republican caucuses.  We won’t.  Not that we don’t want to, but the truth is a bit more complicated than “we got it right and they didn’t.”

No, it would be wrong for us to highlight the logical flaws in J. Ann Selzer’s Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll, who was deemed our nation’s most accurate pollster by Nate Silver, whose own FiveThirtyEight.com forecast was similarly off the mark in Iowa’s Republican caucuses.  No, we will not boast because we would have to ignore the facts…and the facts actually support the pollsters and data modelers who predicted Trump would win the Iowa Republican caucuses.

What?  But, Cruz beat Trump 28 percent to 24 percent while the polls, summarized by RCPs rolling average, said Trump would beat Cruz 30 percent to 24 percent.  Selzer’s Iowa Poll had Trump winning 28 percent to 23 percent over Cruz, as of the weekend before the Monday caucuses.  The surface evidence indicates they missed.  But I would argue the pollsters were right given what they asked respondents and it was the caucus results that perverted the true sentiments among Iowa caucus-attending Republicans.

You may recall a similar argument about the Florida election results in the 2000 presidential election in which the final tallied results indicated George W. Bush beat Al Gore even though the exit polls indicated a majority of voters preferred Gore to Bush.  The exit polls were most likely correct; it was the vote tally that was wrong.

The argument that the caucus process perverts the true sentiments of Iowa caucus voters starts with my own experience at an Iowa Democratic caucus.  My wife and I moved to Des Moines, Iowa four years ago and she’s always been curious about how an Iowa caucus works.  While Iowans find the process a democracy-affirming experience, outsiders often find the process confusing and even undemocratic.  Further complicating things, the Republicans and Democrats have different caucus processes with the Republicans using a secret ballot and the Democrats using a multi-stage, non-secret balloting system.  The end result however makes the two processes more the same than different.  Though the Republicans use a secret ballot to cast caucus votes, the first step in the process has supporters for each candidate grouping together so they can select someone to speak on behalf of their preferred candidate before everyone casts their “secret” ballot.  The actual result is that each caucus voter discovers very quickly who their neighbors are voting for and that is start of the problem.

Back to my experience in the Democratic caucus.  I am kind when I say the process started out disorganized and devolved at each step.  The precinct chair’s first problem was the unusually large number of caucus-goers in attendance.  Over four hundred.  At least that is what the signed register indicated.  But even that official count of qualified voters was under suspicion when the first head-count of candidate preferences was taken after everyone moved to a specific section of the high school auditorium depending on their candidate preference.  Soon after the head-count, the precinct chair announced that the total number of first ballot voters exceeded the registered total by almost 30 voters.  Voters were counted that had not officially registered.  Did they forget to register?  Did they sneak in?  Sneaking in would not have been hard to do.  We were in a 600-seat auditorium with over eight separate doors to enter and exit and no security to speak of.  Yes, there were people standing at some of the doors, but they didn’t seem stop anybody from entering since there was no way to know if their eligibility had been validated and they had signed the register.  It was an honor system.

The register and vote total discrepancy was not a problem, said the precinct chair.  He asked that anyone who had failed to sign the register should do so before the next head-count vote.  We waited about 20 minutes while that process was completed and counted heads a second time.  We were off by only 20 or so people the second time.  Um.  A less trusting precinct chair would have read off the names from the register and kicked out anyone whose name wasn’t called.  But not this precinct chair.  Not on this night.  He declared the vote total, the one that exceeded the official register by over twenty voters, to be the final vote total and the Clinton and Sanders delegates were divided up proportionately, six for Sanders and four for Clinton.

Did I mention I, along with 27 other people, caucused for Martin O’Malley?  No matter.  We didn’t have enough O’Malley supporters to earn a delegate.  We weren’t viable.  Technically, we should have been allowed to select another “viable” candidate, but this precinct chair wasn’t about to introduce more complications into an already deteriorating situation.  We went with the 6-to-4 delegate result and walked out of the auditorium.  My wife had experienced her first Iowa caucus and as she left the auditorium wondering out-loud why Iowa should be given the honor of starting our country’s presidential selection process.  I told my wife that Stanford-educated elitists like herself are not in any position to judge our time-tested caucus system.  We also agreed not to talk about what we saw that night ever again.  We willingly participated so we felt somewhat responsible.  We felt unclean.

How does my experience relate to Cruz beating Trump?  Perhaps it doesn’t.  Maybe I just wanted to get it off my chest.  What I do know is that the Iowa caucus system is a disaster and more people, not just in Iowa, need to voice this opinion each time Iowans go through the process.  As to why Cruz beat Trump, we need to remember where Cruz drew his support — people who self-identified as “very strong conservatives.”  And these voters tend to be very religious and tend to live in rural areas.  Iowa’s rural communities are tight.  Every family knows every other family.  You know how much your neighbor owes on their house; you know how many cars they’ve owned; you know where they go to church on Sunday; and you know if they don’t.  Small Iowa communities exert a palpable pressure on its citizens not to deviate from local norms.  Of course, some do anyway.  They’re called Democrats.

The rest are Republicans and this leads us back to our original thesis:  The Iowa caucus process perverts the true sentiments among Iowa caucus-goers.  And so we get to caucus night, February 1, 2016.  Ted Cruz went from 23 percent in the Iowa Poll to 28 percent in the actual caucus results.  One theory is that conservative evangelicals in Iowa are far more organized in their get-out-the-vote efforts than other constituencies.  This is true.  But the Iowa Poll measures vote turnout intentions and its predicted evangelical turnout did not vary significantly from the actual turnout (for those details, go here).  No, the answer to the question “why did the polls get the result wrong?” lies not with differentials in socio-demographic turnouts and candidate ground-games.  The answer lies in the process itself.

People change their intended vote preferences when they see their neighbors (and their religious leaders) standing for a specific candidate.  This year it was Ted Cruz. Four years ago it was Rick Santorum.  In 2008, it was Rev. Mike Huckabee.  How do I know this?  Because I’ve seen it.  Not as much in the 2016 Democratic caucus I attended, but I saw it in 2012 when I caucused for Ron Paul and watched the Santorum contingent grow minute-by-minute as caucus voters walked in and saw neighbors and fellow parishioners standing together.  The arm-twisting was congenial but unmistakable.  “Are you supporting Santorum?”  In various forms, I heard the same question over and over.  It was not nefarious.  It is the caucus process.  It is not that much different from the peer-pressure dynamics in high school.  In fact, it is exactly the same.  Only in high school, it determines what clothes you wear, not who should be the next President of the United States.

The polls were correct leading into the February 1st caucuses. It was the Iowa caucus process that got things wrong.  The Iowa caucus system needs to end.