EZRA KLEIN VOX
The latest Washington Post/ABC News poll sure looks like a nightmare for Donald Trump.
- 57 percent of voters have an unfavorable impression of Trump
- 56 percent of voters think Trump is unqualified for the presidency
- A plurality of voters (44-39) think Clinton better understands "the problems of people like you"
- A plurality of voters (44-40) say Clinton better represents their personal values
- A majority of voters (59-33) think Clinton has a better personality and temperament to serve as president.
- A majority of voters (57-34) think Clinton has more realistic policy proposals
- A majority of voters (50-36) trust Clinton more to look out for the middle class
- A plurality of voters (48-47) prefer a candidate with political experience to an outsider
- A majority of voters (64-25) think Trump would do more to advance the interests of the wealthy than Clinton would
- A plurality of Republican-leaning voters don't think Trump represents the values of their party.
- All in all, a disastrous poll for Donald Trump. Except for one thing: Among registered voters, he leads 46-44. (He trails by 6 among all adults.)So the question arises: What the hell is going on here? How can the candidate that most voters consider an unqualified champion of the plutocratic class be leading in the polls?
VOX
A spate of new polls has pushed Trump into the lead against Clinton in the RealClearPolitics average for the first time ever — he is now ahead of her by 0.2 percentage points.
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Clinton is still in front in the HuffPost Pollster average, but just barely, with her lead having narrowed to a mere 1.6 percent.
Just one month ago, Democrats were supremely confident they would easily defeat Trump in the general election — and the vast majority of polls seemed to back up this confidence. From January until mid-April, Clinton led in 60 out of 65 polls pitting her against Trump. At that point, she led Trump by 9 points in both averages, which would have positioned her for the biggest presidential election victory in decades.
What everyone is wondering, of course, is whether this change is merely a temporary blip based on the fact that Trump has wrapped up his nomination while Clinton hasn't — or a harbinger of a new, nail-bitingly close status quo that will persist for the rest of the campaign.
And there are strong cases on both sides! Here they are.
The case for Democratic optimism: Just wait till Clinton wraps up the nomination (or maybe until the conventions)
The Democratic case for optimism is pretty simple: This is a weird period of the election in which only one of the two likely nominees has wrapped up the nomination. Therefore, the hope is, once Clinton clinches her own nomination (likely in early June) things will return to "normal," and Clinton will regain her lead.
For one, polling changes in past campaigns around this time of year have tended not to "stick" all that much, according to political scientists Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien's analysis. The next volatile period in which polls' predictive value has tended to surge isn't until the convention season (which this year is in late July), since the conventions seem to concentrate and focus many voters' attention on the choice they're facing.
Second, there's good reason to believe Trump has gotten a "winner's bounce" that will end up being temporary. For instance, in 2008 John McCain clinched the Republican nomination months before Barack Obama clinched the Democratic one. And as the Washington Post's Philip Bump points out, McCain got a bounce in the polls and very briefly passed Obama in polling averages, before soon falling behind again.
Third, there are some indications that Clinton is currently being hurt by holdout Sanders voters. This is somewhat masked in polls by the fact that many Sanders supporters identify as independents rather than Democrats, as Nate Silver has written. For all intents and purposes, the Republican Party has officially galvanized and rallied around Donald Trump. And one of the reasons why Hillary's polling so badly right now against Trump is that just simply hasn't happened with the Democrats. If it eventually does, you could see Hillary put up a 10-point lead over Donald Trump. But Clinton's decline in general election polls has also coincided with a precipitous increase in her "unfavorable" ratings among Sanders backers.
Clinton and Democrats think — or hope — that once the primary wraps up, tensions will subside, Sanders will endorse Clinton, and both candidates' supporters can unite around the shared goal of stopping Donald Trump. Then, they think, sanity will be restored to the universe.
The case for Democratic pessimism: Partisanship rules our world, so this thing will be close
Here's the unmistakably bad news for Clinton from the new polls, though — Republican voters are falling behind Donald Trump.
One key question of this race has been whether a significant portion of Republicans would refuse to support their party's nominee — either backing Clinton, opting for a third-party candidate, or staying home.
Indeed, Democrats' dreams of a landslide rather than just a victory were partly based on the idea that a significant portion of Republicans would neglect to support the billionaire — recoiling at his lack of qualifications, his racism, or even his heterodoxy on a few issues important to conservatives.
Yet instead of a vibrant #NeverTrump movement, efforts to draft a third-party candidate who would appeal to conservatives have sputtered, and the past few weeks have seen many key Republican Party actors instead fall behind their likely nominee. And the party's voters appear to be following suit. Eighty-five percent of Republicans intend to vote for Trump, according to the new Washington Post/ABC News poll.
This development is a further testament to the importance of partisan loyalties in our modern, polarized political system. It suggests that a landslide on the scale of Lyndon Johnson's 1964 win over Barry Goldwater or Richard Nixon's 1972 win over George McGovern isn't really possible anymore — and that instead, like most recent contests, this year's election will be a slugfest decided by a few swing states. Democrats still feel like the swing-state map gives them an advantage, and they're probably right.
Another possibility is that Americans so loathe the political system and so mistrust Clinton that they're willing to consider Trump even despite their misgivings. Probably the best result for Trump in this poll is that people trust him to bring needed change to Washington, 53-39.
Which explanation is right? It's impossible to say. Sam Wang notes that May polls are notoriously unreliable. "Truly, now is the single worst time to be paying attention to fresh polling data," he writes. "I don’t know why this is. It could be because typically, one or both parties are still going through an active nomination contest ... national polls won’t reach their February levels of accuracy until August."
My instinct is that this shows the size of Trump's challenges, not his opportunity. I don't think you have to be overly confident in the wisdom of the American voter to think it unlikely that we'll elect a candidate who nearly 60 percent of voters think is unqualified to hold the presidency.
And I don't think the Clinton campaign needs to be stocked with geniuses to see Trump's weaknesses, or how to attack them. As Brookings's Bill Galston told Vox, "Look at voters' evaluation of the traits of the different candidates; then you see the raw material for the general election."
But this certainly shows the size of Clinton's challenge, too. A majority of Americans fundamentally don't like her. She's locked in a bitter Democratic primary with a challenger who's temperamentally and institutionally capable of going to war with the party if he feels ill-treated. And she's trying to follow a two-term president from her party — a rare feat, historically.
Given all this, Clinton is extraordinarily lucky that she's facing a candidate who's as mistrusted and disliked as Trump. But if the polls are showing anything, it's that it won't be enough for Clinton to be lucky. She'll also have to be good.