Bernie Would Rather Be Heard Than Nominated. (Updated Democratic Forecast)

                                         The highlight of the Chafee 2016 campaign.



I am late in writing about the first Democratic debate because I missed the first 40 minutes of it and it took me a day or two to find the stomach for watching the whole thing.  Because a few days have passed I am writing with the benefit of at least one post debate poll. That said, here's how I felt about the candidates' performance and how it will affect their chances of being nominated.  For each candidate I give a letter graded followed by how I think the night affects their chances of being nominated.

1. Hillary Clinton: A-  (Greatly improved).
Hillary had a bad summer.  The only things keeping her in the news were the scandal related to her use of a private e-mail account and the continued stubborn surge in support for Bernie Sanders.  The debate gave her a chance to finally be herself.  She's not a great debater, but she's perfectly competent and she's always well prepared.  This debate was no exception and the first post-debate poll in NH shows her taking the lead back from Bernie.  But the best news of the night actually came when her primary opponent was speaking.

2.  Bernie Sanders: A- (Significantly diminished.)

Bernie has a pretty straight-forward shtick. There's only two issues that he cares about: enhancing the social safety net and reducing income inequality. They are closely related and Bernie knows exactly which points play best, especially to a left-leaning crowd.  He was predictably put on the defensive on the subject of gun control but his explanations were plausible enough, at least superficially.  He did nothing to undermine his support among his most avid supporters.

But the moment of the night came when Bernie chimed in to respond to a question about Secretary Clinton's use of a private e-mail server.  He could have kept his mouth shut. He could have offered a halfhearted comment about there being more important issues in the campaign. Instead, he sounded like a complete partisan: "Enough with the damn e-mails."  The line brought the house down and got him some dap from the front runner. It also probably doomed his chances of being the nominee.

Bernie was always a long shot. He is doing far above expectations but he still needs to pull an inside straight if he wants to be the nominee.  This answer seemed to indicate that he doesn't expect that to happen.  Hillary Clinton is competent and well-liked by most Democratic partisans. Her positions are aligned with the party majority in almost every subject. Where they are not, she has bent to the political pull from her left, such as her opposition to the PTP trade deal.  If she is to be beaten, it will be because of a scandal serious enough to make people believe she is unelectable. At this point, the e-mail survey does not rise to that level. But it has clearly hurt her polling numbers, especially with independents.  She is vulnerable there, especially if more unfavorable details emerge in the next month or two.  Bernie decided to take it off the table as an issue.  He can't retract that.

The truth is Bernie doesn't expect to be the nominee. He wants to affect the race, and he already has. Clinton would not have come out for a repeal of the tax on Cadillac insurance plans or against the Pacific trade deal unless she was worried bout her left flank.  What Bernie wants is to talk about the two very important issues that motivate him. He thinks Hillary's e-mails are just a distraction from time spent talking about those issues.  So he gave up one very plausible rationale for nominating someone other than Hillary. Maybe he knows that he has his own issues related to perceptions of electability.  Maybe he just genuinely does not care about Hillary's e-mail. Either way, his already slim chance of being nominated are now much slimmer than they were a few days ago.

This doesn't mean he won't get a lot of votes. He might win New Hampshire. If he does that he can probably win one or two states on Super Tuesday and of course he'll probably win Vermont. He might win 5 or 6 states, control a few hundred delegates and get a plum speaking spot at the convention. If Hillary really stumbles, he could do better than that and drag the race out into June. But it's very unlikely that he will be the nominee.

3. Martin O'Malley. A (Very slight improvement.)

O'Malley was prepared and he seemed confident and even presidential. If this was a competitive race, he would have stood out for sure. But it's not a competitive race for him and nothing that came out of his mouth was going to change that.  Despite his strong performance, that NH poll showed him going down from 2 percent to 1 percent.  The only scenario in which he is the nominee requires Hillary to drop out of the race and him to run as the mainstream alternative to Bernie.  That's extremely unlikely.

4. Jim Webb  B- (He won't be the nominee, but he will get more votes than I thought.)

I wish Jim Webb was running for the Republican nomination. He would be a breath of relative sanity on that stage. But on the Democratic stage, he looked awkward and uncomfortable and not just when talking about killing a Chi-comm during the Vietnam war. There is a small sliver of the Democratic party that Webb appeals to: working class white men who realize that Republican economics is harmful to them but who disagree with the Democrats or don't sufficiently care about issues like gun control, affirmative action and environmental protections. The first post debate poll shows him going from 1 percent to 3 percent. I think he can do better than that if he works a little harder over the coming months. (His campaign presence in the early states is almost non-existent.)  He can get to high single digits in New Hampshire and he might do better than that in South Carolina. But the nomination? Impossible.

5. Lincoln Chafee: D- (Dead as a door nail.)

He was awkward and awful. He didn't say much of substance that was bad but his tone and body language were all wrong.  He's a dead end.  I'm still probably going to vote for him next year but that will almost certainly be a protest vote. I think it's very likely that he will drop out before Iowa.


The Wild Cards: Incomplete (But a bad night still.)

The most significant story line was Bernie's capitulation on the e-mail issue. But I thought a close second might be that Hillary did well enough to freeze out the candidates waiting on the sidelines, specifically Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.  Right now there is no need to come to the rescue of the party. Hillary looked good and she will look even better next year when she's debating someone who believes crazy nonsense about economics, science and reproductive choice.  She is very likely to be our next president.

But the rumor mill says Joe Biden is going to get into this race.  I don't know exactly what the rationale of his candidacy will be. But politicians are not like regular folks. Joe has to know this is his last chance to be elected president. I don't know if he can live with saying no.

It's Not All Roses for the Frontrunner.

Secretary Clinton gave a strong performance but there was one point that she needs to work on. Twice during the debate, she replied to questions about her candidacy by saying that she is the best candidate because she is a woman.  In 2008, Barack Obama let the significance of his race speak for itself. He would allude to it, but never make it an explicit reason to vote for him. Hillary does use gender as an explicit justification for her candidacy. That only helps here with people who are going to vote for her anyway. This tactic might hurt her in the general election.

Barack Obama's political brilliance was to make his race about the country, rather than about him. His comments about race had the cadence of a Yakoff Smirnoff joke: "Can you believe a skinny kid with a funny name is about to be elected president? What a country!" He left it for the audience to realize that the reason his name sounded funny was its African origins. He made people good about themselves for wanting to vote for someone who "just happened" to be black. He never would have been President, or even nominated if he framed his campaign as "It's about time we put a black guy in charge!"  Even though it was. And now it is time to put a woman in charge.  We all know that. We don't have to be told that. But Hillary seems incapable of that nuance. She needs to work on it.

Hillary's last hurdle might come next week. She is set to testify before the Benghazi committee on October 23rd.  The Republican majority will grill her about her e-mails.  She better be prepared. Her job is to make the casual voter believe this is pure politics. The GOP's job is to pretend that it's not and to state good reasons why her handling of these e-mails makes her unfit to be president of the United States. At least one e-mail apparently revealed the name of an intelligence source in Libya. That e-mail came from Sidney Blumenthal but Hillary forwarded it to others and apparently did not tell Mr. Blumenthal to not send such information to her by a private e-mail server.

This is fertile ground. If Gowdy is worth a warm bucket of spit, he will make some fodder for the general election. But Hillary just might have answers for most of the allegations and she has the benefit of facing some truly mediocre opponents. If that's the case, she will emerge unscathed. Not unlike the other night in Las Vegas.

UPDATED Nomination Forecast:

Candidate	Nov-14	Jun-15	15-Sep	15-Oct
Hillary Clinton	70	95+	83	91
Bernie Sanders	N/A	-1	5	3
Martin O'Malley	1	-1	1	1
Jim Webb	10	-1	1	-1
Lincoln Chafee	N/A	-1	1	0
Undeclared
Elizabeth Warren	12	n/a	5	1
Joe Biden	5	n/a	3	2
The Field	-1	-1	2	1

For a sanity check I looked up a European betting website. They have Hillary at 78% and Biden and Sanders each at 10%. I think Hillary is a buy at that number.

The Fun Stuff: General Election Matchup Speculation

Things Change.

Note: a draft of this post was accidentally posted on October 5th. The final version was written on October 18, 2015.

The above map looks very different than our current political alignment. But it wasn't so long ago. That election was held 2 days before my 3rd birthday.  In 2012, only 20 states voted the same way they did that night. And only 8 states (plus DC) have given all of their electoral votes to the same party in every election of my lifetime.  (Minnesota and DC for the Dems, Alaska, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas and Oklahoma for the GOP. Nebraska has been won by the Republican candidate in all those elections, but Obama did win one electoral vote from there in 2008.)

In my last post I made the case for why I believe the Democratic nominee is likely to win the next presidential election. My premise is that Democrats have a small but significant and growing advantage with the current presidential electorate.  To demonstrate this advantage, I categorize all of the states based on how they have voted in the past four presidential cycles.

True Blue (18 states that voted Dem in all four Bush/Obama Elections):  241
Baby Blues (3 states that voted Dem 3 out of 4 times)                                 15
Purple States (5 states that voted for the winner 4 times:                              75
Pink States (2* states that voted for the GOP 3 out of 4 times)                     27
Deep Red (23 states that voted GOP in all 4 Bush/Obama elections:         179
Note: Nebraska's second district is counted with the pink states.

So there are 256 votes likely to vote for the Democrat and 206 likely to vote for the Republican in a close election.  These 206 votes are the exact votes that Romney won in 2012.

But it's not all good news for Team Blue. In 2012 the Democrat won every close state except North Carolina. That is actually good news for the next Republican nominee. He or she will only have to really defend one state in a close election. Everywhere else they will be on offense.  So the biggest question is what is the quickest path for them to get to 270.  The simplest way to compute this is to flip the states they came closet to winning last time.

Here is every Baby Blue, Purple and Pink State, Red font indicates jurisdictions won by Mitt Romney in 2012.

Competitive States
Votes	State	Margin 2012
29	Florida	0.88%
15	N. Carolina	2.04%
18	Ohio	2.97%
13	Virgnia	3.87%
9	Colorado	5.36%
4	New Hamp.	5.58%
6	Iowa	5.81%
6	Nevada	6.68%
1	Nebraska-2nd	7.17%
5	New Mexico	10.15%
11	Indiana	10.20%

So the Republican nominee can get to 235 by just adding Florida, 253 by also adding Ohio and 266 by flipping Florida, Ohio and Virginia. Beyond that they only need to pick up one more state. Colorado, New Hampshire and Iowa were all decided by less than six points and would be competitive if the Republicans run a better candidate and campaign than they did last time.

Establishing a Baseline.

Incumbent candidates tend to be re-elected but incumbent parties running a new candidate lost more often than they win. Since 1952, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and Bush 43 were all re-elected. Jimmy Carter and Bush 41 were the only incumbents to lose. That's 5 out of 7. In that same span, Adlai Stevenson, Dick Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Gerald Ford, Al Gore and John McCain all lost when running as candidates of the incumbent party who were not running for a second term. Only Bush 41 succeeded in that role. That's 6 out of 7.

But that is a small sample size and I think the historical trends discussed in an earlier post make the Democrats favorites to win next year.  Another factor that has to be considered is the effect of race. Some credible analysis of the election returns suggest that Barack Obama' race cost him about 4 points in the 2008 election.  (Source)  But that effect was strongest in states that were not particularly competitive, with Missouri being the only state that might have gone blue but-for the Democrats nominating a black candidate. Missouri was not competitive in 2012 and as we've already seen, Barack Obama carried most of the close states in 2012. The only additional state that probably would have been carried by Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden was North Carolina.  I also think Hillary will outperform Obama in that state next year. But for sake of simplicity, we'll stick with 332-206 as our baseline.

Match-ups with Hillary Clinton

1. Marco Rubio. I think Rubio is by far the strongest candidate that the Republicans might nominate. If he is the nominee, he has a very high likelihood of carrying Florida, which would get the Republicans to 235 electoral votes.  He would do well to consider John Kasich for a running mate and that will help in Ohio.  That would get them up to 253. Then they would have to win Virginia and one more Obama state. That is the best scenario for them and why I think Clinton is likely to choose Tim Kaine or Mark Warner as her running-mate. In any close election scenario, Virginia becomes extremely important.

Official Prediction:  Clinton 303, Rubio 253.  

2.  Jeb! Bush.  Jeb! is also more likely than not to win Florida but it will be very competitive there and I think the Bush name will hurt him in the rust belt. He also should pick Kasich to make Ohio competitive but Jeb! has already shown himself to be a lackluster (read: low-energy) candidate and I don't think he will make the race as close as handsome, charming Rubio.  I suspect he's pick up Florida but lose North Carolina.

Official Prediction: Clinton 318, Bush 220. 

3.  Donald Trump.  Let's put Trump mania in some perspective. In 2008 Dean Cain was the polling front runner for about three weeks.  Donald Trump has now led the Real Clear Politics Polling Average (RCPA) for more than 11 weeks. After the 2nd debate his poll number slipped a little. And then they rebounded.  He has a clear and often commanding lead in every national poll and almost every state-specific poll.  All very impressive.  But he averages about 25% in recent national polls. Consider that around 20 million people voted in the Republican primaries in 2008 and 2012. So 25% of the likely Republican primary voters is around 5 million people. In 2012 Mitt Romney got just over 10 million primary votes and 60 million votes in the general election.

So Trump holds sway over a plurality of Republican voters but those translate into a small sliver of the general election electorate.  If he is nominate he will get most Republican votes and some smattering of quirky independents. But his shtick would run very thin. Clinton will wipe the map with him.  She will win North Carolina, she will win Nebraska's 2nd congressional district and she will have the luxury of campaigning in places like Georgia, Missouri and Indiana in hopes of running up the score on election night. She might make Mississippi competitive if she can match the black turnout from 2012.

Official Prediction: Clinton 374, Trump 164.  (That's Clinton winning NC, NE-2, MO and GA but not Indiana. I think her husband will be an asset in MO, having carried the state twice and having been a long term governor of a neighboring state.)

4. Ted Cruz.  Senator Cruz is taking an interesting tact in this election.  He plans to run to the far-right in the primaries and hope to be the last man standing. Then he will try to increase voter turnout among working class whites in states like Pennsylvania to win the general election.  He seriously overstates his charms.  He may succeed in making some places like PA and WI competitive, but he will not flip any of them, although Ohio would probably be a true toss-up.

 (This prediction is rooted in my belief that those working class whites he thinks he speaks for are actually unlikely to be motivated to vote for a Canadian of Cuban ancestry who drips with Ivy league snobbery.)

Official Prediction: Clinton: 348, Cruz 190 (NC and NE-2 go back to blue.)

5. Carly Fiorina.  She'll fight hard and she'll sell herself well. But Hillary will savage her with commercials about outsourcing and layoffs. This will be a blow out.

Official Prediction: Clinton 363, Fiorina 175 (NC, NE-2 and GA go blue.)

6. John Kasich.

I think he'll win his home state of Ohio and be competitive in all the right places but I don't see him flipping Florida or any other battle ground. Clinton should also be able to carry NC against him.

Official Predicition: Clinton 329, Kasich 209.

And the Rest.

It's very difficult for me to imagine any of the other candidates being nominated, but I'll humor them with an official prediction.

Same Result as Trump:

7. Ben Carson: Clinton 374, Carson 164 

8. Chris Christie: Clinton 374, Christie 164 (Same result as Trump)

Same Result as Romney in 2012:

9.  Mike Huckabee: Clinton 332, Huckabee 206

Same Result as Cruz

10. Rick Santorum Clinton 348, Romney 190.  (With a lot of  wasted resources in Pennsylvania.)

11. Rand Paul Clinton 348, Romney 190

Why are the Bothering?

12.  Pataki: Clinton 385, Pataki 153 (That's the Trump result minus Indiana)

13. Jindal:  Clinton 396, Pataki 142 (Trump minus Indiana and Arizona)

14.  Lindsay Graham; Clinton 385, Pataki 153

15. Jim Gilmore: Clinton 372, Gilmore 165. (I'm giving him his home state of Virginia. This blog post is the high-watermark of Gilmore 2016.)

Match-ups With Bernie Sanders.

I think Sanders' identification as a democratic socialist is at least as big a handicap in a general election as Barack Obama's race was in the past two cycles.  If Clinton would have outperformed Obama in 2012 by carrying NC, then I think it's equally true that Sanders would have under performed by not winning Florida. So his baseline is 303 to 235.  

But I would still favor him against most likely Republican nominees. I think he cold beat Jeb! like a drum by using his family name against him and he probably salivates at the idea of running against an actual plutocrat in the form of Donald Trump.  But Rubio will play the commie card deftly. And he is a handsome young latino that listens to Jay-Z, not an aging Hippy who probably does not own an Ipod.  I think he would carry the truly close states: FL, OH, NC and VA. That gets him to 266 and he just needs to win Colorado or Iowa or Nevada.  My official hunch: he wins one of those states and sneaks into the White House.

Here are the Sanders matchups:

Rubio 272, Sanders 266

Sanders 285, Jeb! 253 (picking up FL and OH)

Sanders 332, Trump 206 (repeat of 2012 Results)

Sanders 303, Cruz 235 (Cruz wins Florida)

Sanders 285, Fiorina 253 (same result as Jeb!)

Sanders 272, Kasich 266 (Kasich wins the three big battle grounds of OH, FL and VA but fails to pick off PA or any of the western battle grounds or Iowa.)

Cason, Christie and Huckabee would probably put up a Romney and lose 302-236. Santorum and Paul might do the same although I think Bernie wold be able to pick off NC against those mediocrities. The sad-sacks would also get crushed but probably win one or two more states than they would against Hillary Clinton.

Musing on Long Shot Scenrios.

• Joe Biden's numbers would be virtually identical to Secretary Clinton's. Elizabeth Warren would start with a stronger baseline and would be most likely to win back NC and to make places like Indiana and Missour competitive. But all of them would be in a dog fight with Rubio, and a semi-comfortable place against all other potential nominees.

• If Scott Walker is the GOP running mate there will be endless talk about Wisconsin becoming competitive but I think his early exit means he won't be on anyone's short list.  (Kasich and Susan Marinez will always be a better option for any candidate on this list.)

• Trying to think of real long shot scenarios, one might be tempted to think that Hillary Clinton could win Arkansas.  She was first lady of that state for more than a decade. But that was a long time ago. In 1992 Bill Clinton won 53% of that stat's votes in a 3 way race. Four years later his share of the national vote went up by more than six points but only by one point in his home state.  Since that high water mark of 5.38% in 1996, the Democratic nominees have gotten 46, 45, 39 and 38 percent.  Obama's share of the vote dropped that much compared to Gore and Kerry. This is the most obvious case of Obama's race affecting his poll results in a non-competitive state. I think Hillary will return the Democratic number to something closer to 45 percent but 50% seems like a very long shot. Arkansas has become a pretty conventional Red State in presidential elections. I don't think the Big Dog can change that for his wife.

• Missouri is more fertile ground for an Ozark upset. In 2008 Barack Obama came within 4,000 votes of winning that state and chose not to pursue a recount because it would not have affected the election result. In 2012, he lost by 9 points. This pattern is similar to Indiana, where he won a squaker in 2008 and lost by 10 points in 2012. Nationally Obama's vote share dropped by less than 2 points, but by more than 10 points in these states. The difference of course is that Obama actively campaigned for those states in 2008. The closer polling numbers during his re-election made it necessary to spend resources elsewhere.  If Hillary is in blowout mode, she might be able to pick off Missouri, especially if she thinks she can help some marginal Democratic house candidates or the race for Roy Blount's senate seat becomes competitive. (If for instance he loses a primary to a Tea Party fringe candidate.)
• Arizona should be ripe for a competitive race. Obama lost by 7.3 points to John McCain in 2008 and by 9.0 points to Mitt Romney in 2012. That fall off, 1.7 points was slightly less than the national trend, which makes sense since he was not running against a candidate from Arizona. But Arizona politics are warped by immigration policy more than any other state. Texas is a hopelessly red state but Arizona should be competitive. Fear of illegal immigrants has led to some ghastly laws being passed and the repeated election of a clown like Joe Arapaio as sheriff responsible for a major American city. In the long run, demographics will make this a purple state and eventually a blue one, assuming the GOP doesn't change course on some of it policies. But for the immediate future, I think immigration leaves the state off of the competive list.
• New Mexico might be the decisive state in 2016. Obama carried it by double digits twice. But Bush carried the state in 2004 and lost it in 2000 by just 370 votes. If a Republican wants to win, his or her best option is this:  Romney States (206) + Ohio, Florida and Virginia (60 to get to 266. Then one more state among Colorado, Nevada, Iowa or New Mexico. New Mexico could be influenced by having a native daughter on the ticket. The GOP may need Kasich to carry Ohio but that might be all for naught if they do not win one of these small states. Susana Martinez remains a very strong candidate for the Vice-Presidency. And under at least one plausible scenario, she could win the White House for the Republicans.

Waiting for Godot (D-DE)

The second GOP debate was the one thing I thought it would never be: boring. The consensus is that Carly Fiorina won and it certainly seems like this format plays to her strength. She is likely to gain some steam and stay near the first tier going forward. The other semi-important development was that Scott Walker did nothing to help himself. He is beginning to look like he is in over his head.

The one truly disturbing moment came when Donald Trump was asked about his anti-vaccination stances. He clearly rehearsed for this moment and managed to answer the question in a way that would sound less than bat shit crazy to anyone who is completely unaware of the science. And then it got worse. Dr. Ben Carson and Dr. Rand Paul, two men with decades of experience as doctors responded to him by suggesting there was something wrong with the vaccination schedule. This is not just stupid, it's very dangerous. A lot of people had their anti-vax views validated by no fewer than three presidential candidates.  That was disgusting.

Speaking of boring, the Democrats.

There have been only two stories on the Democratic side: Hillary Clinton's emails and occasional speculation about who else might join the field. 

A. Hillary' Emails.

I haven't watched the McLaughlin group with any regularity since Hillary was First Lady but I will frame the subject as the moderator of that show might: On a scale of 0 to ten, zero being no scandal at all, 10 being a metaphysical certain death of her campaign, how you would rate the e-mail scandal? At this time Mort and Freddie the Beetle Barnes would say 8 or 9, Jack Germond would say 2 and Eleanor Clift would say zero.

I'll go with four.  It's still not clear to me if any real damage was done by her decision to not use a .gov e-mail address but it is clear that her judgment was poor. If nothing else, she saddle her candidacy with a monstrous distraction. The degree of this distraction seems worse because all of the energy this cycle has been on the Republican side. The impact on her polling numbers has also been lasting because people are simply sick of both Clintons and Bushes.

B. Whither Biden?.

Forecasting the Democratic race is boring because Hillary is and remains a prohibitive favorite to be the nominee. I don't think even Bernie Sanders would bet on himself to give an acceptance speech in Philadelphia next July. Handicapping the race has been made even more difficult by the continued practice of every major pollster to include Vice-President Biden in the field. Biden has been averaging about 15 percent in the polls that include him. In Iowa and New Hampshire that amount is greater than the gap between Secretary Clinton and Senator Sanders. It's also roughly equal to the combined polling numbers on the Republican Side of Scott Walker, Jeb! Bush and Marco Rubio. That's more than enough to distort the state of the race for a candidate unlikely to enter the field.

It's true that he has begun kicking the tires on a run but he's not in any great hurry to actually enter the fray. More problematic for him as a candidate is that there are simply very few policy differences between he and the front-runner. The only one that comes to mind is that he was against authorizing the raid that led to the death of Osama bin-Laden, a point that will be made endlessly during any primary against Clinton and in the general election against any Republican who can fog a mirror.

Yes, he has some great intangibles.  He's well-liked and very experienced. He has both an ironic hipster appeal and foreign-relations bona fides that go all the way back to the Cold War.  But he's also past his prime and better suited for his current role than for being the leader of the free world, although we'd trust him to assume that role in a pinch. His status reminds me of a sports cliche: the most popular guy in town is the backup quarterback.

But Hillary's weakness as a candidate is real.  If she wasn't a weak candidate, than Vice-President Obama would be rehearsing for his first debate against Senator Booker and a field of also-rans. So we have to acknowledge the possibility that she will not sweep Iowa and New Hampshire. If she splits them, she'll probably still look strong headed to South Carolina. But if she loses both, the party bigwigs and the Silicon Valley donor class will look elsewhere.  The only person that could raise the right amount of money and be treated seriously by both the establishment and the lefties is Elizabeth Warren. So yes, I'm including her in the forecast.

Where they stand:

Hillary still has the institutional support of all the right people. She has a ton of money and there is zero chance that she will go gracefully.  In June I said her odds of being the nominee were "comfortably over 95%" and I didn't attach a specific number to any other candidate.  That has changed, but only slightly.

Note: I used 95+ for more than 95% and -1 for less than 1% because < and > screwed up the HTML.

Candidate.                November 2014      June 2015     September 2015

Hillary Clinton                 70                             95+                  83

Bernie Sanders                  n/a                           -1                      5

Jim Webb                          10                            -1                      1

Lincoln Chafee                  n/a                           -1                      1

Martin O'Malley                  1                            -1                      1

Unannounced  

Elizabeth Warren              12                             n/a                    5

Joe Biden                            5                              n/a                   3

The Field                           -1                               -1                    2

And yes, my preferred candidate is still Lincoln Chafee. And yes, he's the only one listed with a less than 1 percent chance to win. He is moderate, centrist, even-tempered and reasonable. Just does not feel like the the year for any candidate with those attributes.  Webb and O'Malley each get one percent because they are in the field and I can imagine things going to shit in a way that it falls into their lap. Webb's scenario would have to involve some kind of horrific war breaking out. O'Malley's would be something health-related forces Hillary to drop out and then he manages to eke out a  plurality primary win in a multi-candidate field. You know, just like Carcetti did in Season 3 of the Wire.

So the race is still Hillary's to lose. But unlike three months ago, I can now imagine a plausible scenario for that to happen. I will get on that general election preview soon.

The Donkeys Have an Elephant in the Room and the Elephants Have a Bunch of Jackasses Out in the Barn.

                                  Even Gene Shalit might not recognize our next president yet.

2016 is a long way away, but speculating is a lot of fun.  I chose the above clip to give you some idea of how far we are from the 2016 presidential election. It's not quite from the same point in the election cycle, but it is revealing.  In December of 1973, Jimmy Carter was able to appear on a national game show without being recognized by anyone on the panel. At the end of the video they make reference to his role in preparing the Democratic party for the 1974 midterm elections.  Less than 3 years later, he was elected 39th President of the United States.

A. The Donkeys have an Elephant, and the Elephants have a Bunch of Asses.

When David Duchovny left The X-Files, the writers were faced with a big story dilemma. The show was driven by the conflict between a skeptic and a believer in all sorts of nut ball ideas.  To write Duchovny's character, Fox Mulder out of the show, but leave a possibility of returning, should the actor come to his senses, they needed his disappearance to be cooky and unexplained.  This forced his partner, Scully, to disavow her skepticism and become a believer.  After the first episode a review summed up the dynamic between the new leads.  "Scully is now Mulder."

Well the race for the 2016 nominations are also a case of role reversal. Every Republican nomination since Watergate has been a case of orderly succession. The only exception was in the year 2000. The 1996 runner-up had been Steve Forbes.  Forbes did not run in 2000. That nomination went to the son of a recent nominee, George W. Bush. It is because of this history that I give Rick Santorum more of a chance than most observers do. But he can not be called the clear favorite by any stretch of the imagination. He might not even belong on the top tier of candidates.

Will Rogers famously quipped, "I don't belong to any organized political party; I'm a Democrat." And most years the Democratic primaries live up to that aphorism.  The typical Democratic primary process begins with a half-dozen of likely candidates battling for specific racial and economic demographics, with some regional factions complicating things. In 1976, 1984, 1988, 1992 and 2004, a nominee emerged from a field of around five serious contenders. Only twice since then the Democrats began with a heavy betting favorite.  In 2000 Al Gore was the virtual certain nominee from the beginning and he only attracted one competitor, former Senator Bill Bradley.  Bradley put up a decent fight but Gore won comfortably in Iowa and by four points in New Hampshire.  The race was all but over and Bradley never won a single primary. In 2008 Hillary Clinton was also the presumptive nominee by most accounts.  She faced a half-dozen challengers but non were taken too seriously. But unbeknownst to the chatter class of D.C., Barack Obama was building a brilliant strategy: win in Iowa, survive Super Tuesday. and squeeze as many delegates as possible out of the states where he couldn't win.  By the summer, Barack Obama was the nominee.

The 2016 nomination race will probably end up looking like a combination of 2000 and 2008.  The favorite is the same as in 2008, but the result is more likely to be like 2000.  She will face credible challengers, and one or more of them will make Iowa and/or New Hampshire competitive.  If any of them win one of those states, then we will have a race on our hands.  If Hillary wins both, she will probably cruise to the nomination, and might just run the table the way Al Gore did.

My thesis at this point is that Democrats will nominate their previous runner-up and that the Republicans will have a battle among five to seven people with credible resumes and varying regional appeals.  I think that Jeb Bush is their strongest general election candidate. His appeal is broad within the Republican factions but also very thin.  Chris Christie, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz will probably elicit more passionate support but might have problems finding support outside their regional bases.  Huckabee and Santorum probably need to win Iowa to survive.  Luckily for them, the each have accomplished that very thing in the recent past, Huckabee in 2008 and Sanorum in 2012.

B: Another Peak at the Fields.
Some months ago I wrote posts on the likely contenders for each party's nomination.  My intention was to go on the record with my first impressions of the candidates.  The campaign will begin, for real, in the next month or two, and I'm sure I will update these lists more often next year.  But I wanted to do one update before we know the results of the midterms, because next week's elections will probably shape the narrative of the election as it gets underway.

I. The Democrats: One Favorite, 2 Alternatives and a Sitting Vice-President.

Hillary Clinton is the heavy betting favorite to be the Democratic nominee.  So far she has avoided any screw ups and there are some indications that she will learn from her 2008 mistakes and hire the very people who beat her the first time she was the heavy betting favorite for the nomination.  I have not changed either of her numbers: she's almost certain to run, and has about a 70% chance of being the nominee. But one thing has changed in the last few months.  I can now identify 2 plausible, serious alternatives.  And then there's the vice-president.

I still do not think that Elizabeth Warren will run, but she is the clear alternative and the base loves her.  I'm sure she has had many very serious (read: rich) people whispering in her ear that if she runs, they will open their checkbooks for her.  Recently, for the very first time she indicated some hint of wanting to run.  I think she might view a run as a way to put her ideas forward. She definitely thinks that the threat of her candidacy can nudge the party in the right (read: left) direction.

The biggest mover since my last posting is the emergence of Jim Webb as a possible candidate.  I really hope that he runs because I think he would expand the intellectual breadth of the field by talking about issues that are not talked about enough, like prison reform.  He's also the perfect candidate for pointing out that Hillary's foreign policy views are very far to the right of the Democratic party's base.  It's a long trip from being Ronald Reagan's secretary of the Navy to being the darling of the Democratic base, but this Marine just might be the guy to do it.

And dear old Joe Biden is extremely likely to run. And you can never count out the sitting Vice-President if for no reason other than the uncomfortable fact that he is one heart beat away from running as an incumbent.

Soon after the midterms we'll probably hear more from the less likely candidates.  So far no one has stood out as especially credible or promising.  The two New Yorkers that I listed last time both took steps backward.  Senator Gillibrand was listed mostly because she's an obvious alternative to Hillary Clinton if she didn't run.  But as ever, there seems to be no let up in the Clinton machine. So Hillary will run and that will probably preclude a Gillibrand candidacy.  Governor Andrew Cuomo meanwhile has proven to be a borderline boob who was lucky to be renominated for Governor.  He can not win the nomination.

II. The Republicans: Lots of Options, None of them Particularly Good.

The Republican field, lacking a heavy favorite, is much harder to predict at this point.  The biggest wild card as of now is Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin.   I leave him as a pretender for now because he might lose his re-election bid on Tuesday. Nate Silver says he has a 76% chance of being re-elected on Tuesday.  If he is re-elected, even by a very narrow margin, he immediately becomes a serious contender for the nomination. He has been a semi-hero of the base for a few years and his proximity to Iowa could be a big asset But if he loses, he is toast.

The rest of the field has been very static.  Jeb Bush does seem more and more likely to run, and I think he would be the party's strongest nominee.  It's at least possible that the GOP will be so thirsty for a win by next year that they will overlook his heresies on education and immigration but the pitch forks will come out for him on a lot of fronts.

I've also added Mike Huckabee to the list of possible candidates because I think he has under appreciated appeal. He ran a solid third place in 2008 (second if you go by delegates pledged, rather than votes received)  and probably could have been the nominee in 2012 if he wasn't busy paying of his mortgage by hosting a show on Fox News.  When I see him lately he strikes me as a lot cockier than he was when he first became a national political figure.  The confidence might push him towards running but it also might work against him with voters once he is actually running for the Presidency rather than just leading jeers against the current president.

Rand Paul, Chris Christie, and Ted Cruz are all going to run.  And they will all have sizable support in different corners throughout 2015.  Any of them could be the nominee but any of them could also go up in flames early. Paul will have his father's donor base behind him, and that makes him a threat to gobble up delegates all along the way.  If the field stays splintered, he could sneak in.  But he's going to get a lot of heat about some of his less than orthodox views on war and crime.  He'll also say lots of stupid things along the way.

But he's not really any worse of a candidate than the others.  I do think he would be the worst president we have ever had, but that's not a disqualifier in this race. The nominee of this party is likely to be the person who can most convince the GOP primary voters that they hate Obama as much as they do.  But then they will have to run in the general election with some kind of health care plan that doesn't take away the benefits from the millions of Americans that received coverage under Obamacare.  I don't think any of these candidates can thread that needle.  But most of them are going to try and it will be nearly as amusing as watching a monkey try to fuck a football.