The Election Is A Year Away — Is Either Party Winning?

[Stellar]

Nate and Harry disagree! 4:39 PM A FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

?quality=100&strip=all&w=1030

The presidential election is now officially one year away. So for this week’s 2016 Slack chat, we chewed over each party’s general election prospects. What do we know a year out? As always, the transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): All right, we’re one year out from the 2016 general election; what’s the outlook? Does either party have an advantage?

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): No. Good chat, guys!

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): Here’s what I would say: The generic presidential ballot shows a slight GOP advantage. YouGov has tested a generic Republican presidential candidate vs. a generic Democrat four times since the beginning of September. GOP holds a 2.25 point average lead. That suggests to me, at the least, that the Democrats do not have an advantage heading into next year.

natesilver: I’m open to explanations about why the probabilities are slightly different from 50-50. But I’m not sure why I should care about the generic ballot.

harry: Well, I think it gives us a general idea of the political environment overall. And it reflects the president’s approval rating as well. The rough line of when a president’s approval rating helps or hurts a candidate from his own party is about 48 percent.

Much More: FiveThirtyEight

[daleanime]

1. No....

[yeoman6987]

2. It's going to be a long year

Every nook and cranny will be analyzed to death. Every candidate on both sides will be predicted to win and lose. Well that why were here. Very exciting year ahead of us.

[LiberalArkie]

3. The Republicans are wining the race to the bottom.

[LonePirate]

4. Horse race questions always ignore the reality of the Electoral College

Granted, Nate says the blue wall is BS; but no explanation is given how the Dem nominee could lose 65 EVs even if you reduce Obama's 2012 margin of victory by 5 points in every state. Then there is the demographic and population changes since 2012 that probably give arena another point or more of a buffer, especially in VA.

Once again the media and pundits are clamoring for a tight race when it simply does not exist.