Election 2016 Forecast / Identity Politics: Minority Expectations of Victory
Opinion leaders in the media and even political analysis firms seem to agree that a Clinton victory is expected. But, this understanding goes well beyond opinion leaders and into the general populace. It is arguable if this is a positive or a negative for Clinton.
The current environment is one where enthusiasm seems to be on the Republicans side (covered elsewhere) but also where the general consensus is that Clinton will fairly easily win. This could create a situation of lower voter turnout for Democrats than what would have otherwise been expected.
For instance, according to The Economist/YouGov poll 49% of those supporting Clinton believe that Clinton will win in a landslide! This figure is incredibly high. Think about it. Almost half of Clinton supporters polled thinks that Trump really does not even stand a chance. There will be a fair percentage of those 49% who are so overconfident (and perhaps not overly enthusiastic about voting) that they might simply skip election-day. In contrast, only 22% of those supporting Trump believe that he will win in a landslide. The highest rating for Trump supporters is for ‘Trump will win narrowly’ at 46%. This figure seems more akin to generating higher voter turnout. In other words, if almost half of Trump supporters believe the race to be very close they will likely have more incentive to actually get out and vote than the almost half of Clinton supporters who believe it will be a landslide.
The demographic breakdown seems to further hurt Democrats. As discussed elsewhere, minorities tend to vote at very high rates for Democrats. Therefore, voter turnout for these demographic groups is important for a Democratic victory. So, what if a disproportionate part of the minority population believes the election will be a blow-out? Will this important demographic turnout to vote as they otherwise would?
Chart 1: Percent of Black, Hispanic and White Demographics believing ‘Clinton will win by a landslide’ vs ‘Trump will win by a landslide’
Source: The Economist/YouGov
The Black Demographic is by far the most confident in a resounding election victory for Clinton and the least confident in one for Trump. This group, and to a lesser extent the Hispanic Demographic, will have slightly less incentive to vote. Some might not agree with this statement and there are behavioral assumptions that you need to make to come to this conclusion. However, it makes sense that those who believe something, an election or anything else, is in the bag do not have as much incentive to execute on that something as those who believe the outcome is still in doubt.
An interesting side note is that when looking at the same data broken down by age and gender instead of race, there are no obvious outliers. Also, when using income to categorize the data, there is only a slight perceivable leaning toward Clinton. In other words, it seems like much of the apparent overconfidence for Clinton winning by a large margin is concentrated in minority groups.
Measuring the impact of apparent overconfidence is difficult to say the least without more data. My impression is that this overconfidence could amount to a relative decline of the minority voter turnout by maybe 2 to 3 percentage points. This might seem like a lot, and it is, but recall that voter turnout for the African-American community hit historical highs in both 2008 and 2012 so a decline from such high levels is not so surprising and frankly would not need much of a nudge to decline. Also, we saw in a different post that African-American enthusiasm, as measured by how much thought they have given to the election, has actually declined in 2016 in contrast to new highs for this same measure for the White Demographic. Pulling these pieces of data together tends to imply that the African-American community is in danger of posting voter turnout levels significantly below those seen in 2008 and 2012 and perhaps even lower than those from 2004.
Further, recall that the African-American community is by far the most loyal to the Democratic Party. Historically, this community has voted in excess of 90% for Democrats. Any decline in minority voter turnout will greatly and negatively impact Clinton’s chances.
In short, the combination of overconfidence of a landslide victory, slightly declining enthusiasm to vote, and record high turnout levels in the last two elections could result in a rather unexpected decline for African-American turnout in 2016, and to a lesser extent Hispanic voter turnout.