Those of us on the left have spent a good deal of time
lately worrying about Trump’s prospects in a general election, seizing on early
polling match-ups with Sanders or Clinton to reassure ourselves that he would
not win. Here is one small inconclusive
bit of good news. Sam Wang, a Princeton
neuroscientist who runs a nerdy blog in his spare time that crunches the election
numbers, and who has had spectacular success in past cycles predicting
outcomes, has lately been handicapping the Republican primary battle, and he
has found that although Cruz regularly outperforms his polling numbers, Trump’s
actual results track his polls very closely.
In the absence of contrary evidence, this offers some assurance that Trump’s poor performance in hypothetical races against Clinton predict how he
would actually do in the general. Since
Wang, after some very complex modelling, puts Trump’s current chance of the nomination
at 70%, I think we must prepare ourselves for a Trump/Clinton race. I choose, at least for a while, to take
comfort in his interim calculations.
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3 comments:
It may be nice to take comfort in that interim report, but just the statement "Trump versus Clinton" makes me viscerally nauseous on both counts! Here we live in a supposed representative democracy, where both likely candidates are universally disliked and not trusted!
Couple that with the fact that I'm teaching my students the second chapter of In Defense of Anarchism this week, and it makes me sick.
"Universally," except for a plurality (and in one case a majority) of primary voters in their party.
If Clinton wins, that's almost 2/3 of my life under Bush-Clinton rule. Take that King George III and your lineage Monarchy!
(Tom take into consideration all the people not voting because they are totally disenfranchised, uninterested, or see through the chicanery of representative democracy)
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