More on polls...and the media

I'm going to brag a little here. Just a couple of hours after I wrote the previous post, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight filed this article that agreed with my assertion that Democrats shouldn't panic yet. In addition to his polls only and polls plus models (both indicate that "Clinton is as likely to continue losing ground as opposed to regaining ground from this point forward"), he posits another perspective:

Another way to hedge against short-term swings in the polls would be to assume that polls tend to revert to where they’d been previously. Over the course of the campaign, Clinton has been ahead by an average of about 5 percentage points, although she has ranged between being virtually tied with Trump at her worst moments to being ahead of him by as much as 10 points at her best moments. In fact, the election has tended to ebb and flow between these boundaries like a sine wave:

If we had a model like this — basically, a version of polls-plus that partially reverted the current polls to the long-term mean of Clinton +5 — it would show her as about a 70 percent favorite instead of a 60 percent favorite. But would that be a good set of assumptions? Does the fact that Clinton has usually led Trump by a larger margin than she leads him now mean anything? This is a complicated question, and one that we might want to revisit over the next couple of weeks. But the short answer is… I don’t know.


What we do know is that favorable/unfavorable coverage of the candidates comes in waves. Candidates invariably receive a bump after their respective conventions (note Trump's bump at the end of July and Clinton's drastic rise immediately after). Candidates rising in the polls receive more coverage (Trump over the past week) and the media can be counted on to scrutinize the front runner (Clinton, basically the entire campaign). John Favreau, former Obama speechwriter, puts it another way:

When Clinton dominates the coverage, polls tighten.

When Trump does, they widen.

Except DNC, when her message was largely unfiltered.

— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) September 13, 2016

Sabato's Crystal Ball puts it this way:

"Generally, when the campaign has been more about Trump, he has suffered, and when it’s been more about Clinton, she has suffered."

Over the past week, the critical coverage of Clinton's deplorables comment and illness did its dammage. This week's polls reflect Favreau's "tightening" and Sabato's "suffering." Now that Trump is leading, he's in a prime position to take a beating. The outrage sparked by Friday's press conference and the media's reaction is the first blow.