Concerning those Polls

So, um. There's no real way to sugarcoat it: the polls right now look bad. We're mostly into the general election now; Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee and Hillary Clinton is the basically-also-presumptive Democratic nominee. This match-up has been polled extensively since last summer, when it (to be more precise, the Trump side of it) first became plausible. And Clinton has led in the polls, constantly. At the worst of her email scandal last August, this got down to maybe a 1-point lead, but then it got bigger and for most of 2016 it's been pretty substantial. In late March Hillary was up by more than 10 point, on average. As recently as mid-April it was still around 9%.

Now it's 2%. This is, um, scary. The only thing that's made Trump's victory in the Republican primary anything other than utterly terrifying has been the thought that, of course, he's not going to win. Right now, if you look at the polls... yikes. It doesn't look especially slam-dunk that he's not going to win. And the question is what to make of this.

Obviously, given my nature, I'm going to say that we shouldn't worry too much, not commensurate with how bad it would be if we were entering this election with only a +2% advantage anyway. And I do think that's right. Equally obvious, though, is the fact that we should be somewhat worried, and that something about this current wave of bad polls is telling us that there is maybe more of a chance that things go the wrong way than we thought.

But the key to understanding what the polls are saying right now, I think, is that they're saying a different thing from a month ago. And from two months ago, and three, and four. That means we need to ask, what's changed? And there's a clear answer: Trump has wrapped up his nomination fight, while Clinton hasn't. And the Democratic side is getting nasty. We can see this in the polls, too. Bernie's hypothetical lead over Trump grew wider at about the same time Hillary's did, earlier in 2016, suggesting that that shift was caused by something about Trump (i.e., he got less popular). But right now, Bernie's lead hasn't budged. That tells me that the current shift is nothing to do with Trump, it's to do with Hillary. Note also that since mid-April, when it was Clinton 49%, Trump 40%, Trump's gone up just over 1%, while Clinton has dropped by nearly 6%. Again, this looks like a Clinton phenomenon, not a Trump phenomenon.

But I don't recall the last month as being a particularly bad one for Clinton. No new scandals, no major missteps. The latest rumor about the email thing is that she's been fully vindicated, though a formal announcement has yet to be made. Nothing's really been going on that would suggest Hillary's become that much more toxic a candidate... in the eyes of a disinterested observer, maybe. Not in the eyes of a Bernie supporter. And there's the rub: it seems basically certain that what's going on right now is that an awful lot of Bernie supporters aren't saying they'll vote for Hillary in the general election. (Nate Silver makes the same point in a series of tweets.)

So we basically know why the polls look like they do. The thing Hillary's people keep saying about how she's fighting two campaigns right now is correct. Trump has wrapped up the Republican side, and has gotten a bit of a boost from consolidating his party. More importantly, Hillary hasn't wrapped up her side yet, and the Democrats are if anything splintering a bit as our race draws to a close. So that's the big question of the election right now: once Hillary actually wins, and Bernie drops out, do his supporters go back to saying they'll all vote for her? Can he get them to do that? If so, then we're back to a baseline of Clinton +6% or +8% or maybe even +10%, and the election looks fairly comfortable, especially since I expect the campaign to wear well for her and ill for Trump. If not, then there's potentially a lot more danger.

I would really like to think that this is just a temporary phenomenon. Something similar happened to Obama back in 2008, when McCain had wrapped up the nomination but Hillary was still hanging on, and that too passed. And, hey--Trump got a boost when he wrapped up his nomination! And Republicans have way more reason to not support him than Democrats do to not support Hillary. Waaaaay more. You see prominent conservative pundits talking about how bad Trump is and thinking of running a third-party candidate or whatever. Bernie Sanders keeps repeating how much better than the Republicans Hillary is. It would just be bizarre if this election ends up with a Republican Party unified around Trump but a Democratic Party that can't unify around Hillary Clinton, one of its leading figures for damn near three decades now. So I remain skeptical that that's what's going to happen. Probably another month from now, the polls will start looking more like they should, and the best course of action until then is not to panic.

But I can't deny that the way the whole Sanders campaign is going right now has me pretty legitimately worried. I think he's done some real damage, and I think he's going to need to work real hard to repair it when the time comes. He'd bloody well better.