The other day NRO ran an article of mine laying out why I think Hillary Clinton is likely to win next year. I’d like to make three clarifying points in response to some of the feedback I have gotten on that article.
1) There are some years when a party’s nomination is worthless. I think that was true for Republicans in 1996 and 2008: No Republican candidate was going to win those races. I’m not saying, and don’t think, that 2016 is one of those years. I’m just saying the Democrats have an edge.
2) Some people questioned why I said that Pennsylvania “has been getting less Democratic” in the context of talking about the “blue wall” in the Electoral College. Hasn’t it voted for Democrats in every presidential election since 1988? Yes, it has. But I’m talking about how much the state votes for Democrats compared to the rest of the country–and that gap has narrowed over time. In 1988, George H.W. Bush won the state but did 2.7 points worse in it than he did nationally. In 2000, his son underperformed his national vote by 1.5 points. In 2012, Mitt Romney was only 0.6 percent off his national vote percentage.
3) I suggested that one of Clinton’s advantages will be that her party has an advantage on “middle-class economics,” noting that she had more policies to make that sale than Republicans do. Some correspondents said in response that I was overestimating the importance of policy debates in elections: Voters don’t pore over the details of candidates’ platforms. That is certainly true. But voters do tend to think that the Republican economic agenda will help rich people and big business but has less to offer most people. Republican candidates can do more or less to address this problem: to create the impression, in part by using policy proposals, that they aren’t that kind of Republican. Rick Santorum, for example, says he would raise the minimum wage, and basically says that’s one of the reasons he favors it. I don’t happen to like that way of addressing the problem, because I disagree with the policy. But my point in this article was merely that based on their behavior, most of the Republican candidates don’t seem to think the problem is as big as I think it is.