I love projecting presidential elections way too early, so obviously it's time to start predicting for the 2016 Big Game!
Today, I wanted to talk specifically about Virginia. Until recently, Virginia has been considered "safely" Republican during the presidential election - even if you count 2008, when Barack Obama won the state. What do I mean?
Let's go back to 2008, when Barack Obama won Virginia by a 6.3% margin, while winning the US popular vote as a whole by 7.3%. Now let's say we adjust our magical "popular vote" dial, reducing the democrat's share of the popular vote equally among all the states. The first state to flip to the republicans would be North Carolina. Then Indiana, Florida, Ohio, and then Virginia, at which point John McCain would still have been 11 electoral votes shy of winning. On top of all those states, he would also have needed to flip Colorado and finally Iowa, which would have been unlikely if he hadn't ALREADY won Virginia. So, for Obama, Virginia was unnecessary to his win, and for McCain, winning Virginia would be a given if he had carried Colorado and Iowa, which would have been required to win the election. Let's use Nate Silver's terminology and designate Iowa the "Tipping Point State" for 2008. Under that model, either candidate just has to win Iowa and all the states on their side of Iowa, assuming each state has a reasonably similar per-capita elasticity (voter response to campaign activity) and each campaign has pretty good knowledge of current polling in each state. How will each state change with respect to the national average? Let's zoom in on Virginia:
In the graph above I've plotted Virginia's Democratic (2-party share) vote margin for the past seven presidential elections. Although the national and statewide margins bounce around chaotically, by looking at the difference ("how republican Virginia is compared to the nation as a whole"), we can see that Virginia has slowly but clearly been drifting away from Republicans since 1988, culminating (so far) in the 2012 election, when it had essentially the same vote margin as the nation as a whole. Based on a simple linear fit, I predict that in 2016, the democrat will get a higher margin in Virginia than nationwide, by about 2%, for the first time since FDR. That means that even if the Republican gets 51.00% of the national popular vote, they'd still lose Virginia.
[Update: the error bars show +/- one standard deviation from the linear model. In other words, if all my assumptions are true, there is a 68% chance that Virginia in 2016 will fall between the two error bars, and be somewhere between 0.8% and 3.3% more democratic than the country as a whole.]
I'm sure there are numerous expensive demographic studies out there detailing exactly why Virginia is drifting from right to center ... so does anyone want to trudge through them for me? My guesses at the moment:
1) growth in the DC suburbs and exburbs,
2) more generally, increasing urbanization throughout the state, and
3) a growing young and minority population, which is disproportionately happening in Virginia.
I hope to complete a similar analysis for all of the so-called "battleground" states, and calculate a prediction of the systematic advantage the democrat or republican has going into the election. I'd be so excited if the democrat won the electoral college but lost the popular vote; then we might finally see some bipartisan reform to the current broken electoral college system!
Today, I wanted to talk specifically about Virginia. Until recently, Virginia has been considered "safely" Republican during the presidential election - even if you count 2008, when Barack Obama won the state. What do I mean?
Let's go back to 2008, when Barack Obama won Virginia by a 6.3% margin, while winning the US popular vote as a whole by 7.3%. Now let's say we adjust our magical "popular vote" dial, reducing the democrat's share of the popular vote equally among all the states. The first state to flip to the republicans would be North Carolina. Then Indiana, Florida, Ohio, and then Virginia, at which point John McCain would still have been 11 electoral votes shy of winning. On top of all those states, he would also have needed to flip Colorado and finally Iowa, which would have been unlikely if he hadn't ALREADY won Virginia. So, for Obama, Virginia was unnecessary to his win, and for McCain, winning Virginia would be a given if he had carried Colorado and Iowa, which would have been required to win the election. Let's use Nate Silver's terminology and designate Iowa the "Tipping Point State" for 2008. Under that model, either candidate just has to win Iowa and all the states on their side of Iowa, assuming each state has a reasonably similar per-capita elasticity (voter response to campaign activity) and each campaign has pretty good knowledge of current polling in each state. How will each state change with respect to the national average? Let's zoom in on Virginia:
[Update: the error bars show +/- one standard deviation from the linear model. In other words, if all my assumptions are true, there is a 68% chance that Virginia in 2016 will fall between the two error bars, and be somewhere between 0.8% and 3.3% more democratic than the country as a whole.]
I'm sure there are numerous expensive demographic studies out there detailing exactly why Virginia is drifting from right to center ... so does anyone want to trudge through them for me? My guesses at the moment:
1) growth in the DC suburbs and exburbs,
2) more generally, increasing urbanization throughout the state, and
3) a growing young and minority population, which is disproportionately happening in Virginia.
I hope to complete a similar analysis for all of the so-called "battleground" states, and calculate a prediction of the systematic advantage the democrat or republican has going into the election. I'd be so excited if the democrat won the electoral college but lost the popular vote; then we might finally see some bipartisan reform to the current broken electoral college system!
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