Long, interesting. "The Fundamentals: Where Are We in This Strange Race for President?"

[jtuck004]

It's a long article, but it's worth asking questions about any assumptions in the model that underlays the poll you find believable today. Given how "models" were weaponized and used against us by the bank$ter/jihadists over the past few years, it could pay to spend some time on it.

Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley, Sabato's Crystal Ball September 15th, 2016

Every presidential election is different, but nobody’s going to tell us that this one isn’t notably different from any other in the modern period.

It’s not just that the two major-party candidates are so disliked and unpopular with much of the public. While Donald Trump’s numbers are no better and sometimes worse, Hillary Clinton’s unfavorables are about as bad as we’ve ever seen for a frontrunner, with about three in five voters saying she’s not honest and trustworthy, a product of the stories about the Clinton Foundation, her private emails, and decades-long controversies involving Clinton and her husband, the former president. Trump got some of the best polls he has enjoyed of the entire cycle on Wednesday, taking leads in the must-win (for him) states of Florida and Ohio. Clinton is struggling with concerns about her health, and her status as the frontrunner in this race is eroding. Perhaps she can pull herself out of her tailspin, and the upcoming debate on Sept. 26 should be a big moment. If she continues to sink, the electoral map we have long tilted in her favor will be getting a lot redder.

Nonetheless, the defining difference in this election is not Clinton but Trump. Forget Wendell Willkie: There has never been a presidential nominee like him. He has divided the Republican Party — separating party elites from much of the party’s populist base — and he has rearranged the electorate in ways we haven’t ever seen, at least to this extent. Minority groups appear to be rejecting him by margins as bad or worse than recent GOP nominees. Trump is having trouble winning a group that is normally quite Republican: college-educated whites. At the same time, he has drawn very sizable, exceptionally intense backing from non-college whites and, disproportionately, blue-collar white men, and he has the potential to out-perform Mitt Romney’s 2012 showing among that group.

Regular readers will have noticed that we have been publishing political scientists’ predictive models for 2016, the quadrennial attempt to use certain variables to project the election results (at least the popular vote) months in advance. We’re publishing our final update on these models this week. They are mostly derived from election fundamentals that don’t change much over time — economic conditions, the number of consecutive terms a party has held the White House, and so on. Averaging all the forecasts together shows a two-party vote of Clinton 50.5% and Trump 49.5%. Obviously, that’s very close, and taken together these models produced a very similar prediction in 2012 (Obama 50.2%, Romney 49.8%). That undersold Obama, who won with 52.0% of the two-party vote.

The problem in 2016 is that the assumptions that undergird some models are disputable. Take our senior columnist, Alan Abramowitz of Emory University. His “Time for Change” model has an admirable record of prediction over many years, nailing the popular-vote winner in every cycle going back to 1988. Yet this time, Abramowitz has declared that his model will probably miss the mark. Why? As Abramowitz explains it, the assumptions upon which the model is built are unsound: “First, that both major parties will nominate mainstream candidates capable of unifying their parties and, second, that the candidates will conduct equally effective campaigns so that the overall outcome will closely reflect the ‘fundamentals’ incorporated in the model.”
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http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/the-fundamentals-where-are-we-in-this-strange-race-for-president/