Donald Trump For President: What Are The Odds?

From the day he said he would run in June 2015, pundits thought Donald Trump’s campaign for president was a joke. With two months to go until the Republican convention in Cleveland, Trump is the last man standing in a once crowded field.

Now pundits are asking, what are his chances of attaining the highest office in the land?

According to RealClearPolitics’ average of recent polls, as of May 24th Trump beats Hillary Clinton by 0.2 percentage points in a head-to-head contest, while Bernie Sanders – who has little chance of becoming the nominee – wins by 10.8 points. (See also: Trump Campaign Contributions Drop 37% in April.)

CNN has published an interactive prediction page that allows users to vote on what they think the outcome of the presidential election will be. The “wisdom of the crowd” predicts Trump has a 32% chance of winning in November. The British betting website OddsChecker gives Trump slightly worse odds at 33.3%. CNN gives Clinton a 71% chance of winning, while OddsChecker gives her a 69.2% chance. (See also: Clinton vs. Trump: How They Match Up as Investors.)

Trump has defied conventional wisdom at every turn in this election cycle. Though it seems demographics are against him, two polls taken on May 22 from the Washington Post-ABC News and NBC News/Wall Street Journal have Trump and Clinton in a statistical dead heat, with each candidate just ahead of the other in the respective raw numbers.

Will he be able to do it again in November?

Long Odds for The Donald

When Trump announced his candidacy at Trump Tower in New York City on June 16, 2015, the initial reaction of the press on both the left and right ranged between bemusement and disbelief. Leon Neyfakh remembers, “The guy was a novelty act, we thought – a narcissistic dingbat who was going through the motions of running a political campaign in service of nothing more sinister or consequential than promoting his big dumb brand.” Few in the commentariat believed Trump could get far after launching his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and insisting he would slap a 35% tariff on Ford cars made in Mexico. And yet, other than a brief surge by Ben Carson, Trump led in the polls up until the important Iowa caucus, which Senator Ted Cruz won by 3.3% of the vote. (See also: Stocks, ETFs to Watch if Donald Trump Becomes President.)

Trump’s loss in Iowa became the first of many events pundits seized on as evidence that Trump’s candidacy was about to go down in flames. Unfortunately, his resounding 20-point win in New Hampshire (Ohio governor John Kasich came in second with 15.8% of the vote, and Cruz came in third with 11.7%) upset that attempt to narrate Trump’s end. Particularly disappointing to observers were the poor results for former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio, the two establishment favorites, who only garnered 11% and 10.6% of the New Hampshire vote, respectively.

Trump gained momentum in early 2016 by dominating televised debates and unequivocally “winning” on social media. Trump’s intuitive understanding of Twitter in particular allowed him to dominate the news cycle and suck air from his competitors’ campaigns. At the Republican debate in Greenville, South Carolina on February 13, Jeb Bush openly attacked Trump, saying, “While Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe.” Trump shot back “The World Trade Center came down during your brother’s reign. Remember that?” The Iraq war was a topic other Republicans wouldn’t touch, and initially Trump’s critics thought it would alienate the Republican base. To the contrary, his supporters praised him for being a straight talker. Immediately after the debate, Trump attacked Bush on Twitter saying:

How can @JebBush beat Hillary Clinton- if he can’t beat anyone else on the #GOPDebate stage with $150M? I am the only one who can!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 14, 2016

Meanwhile, an accusation Trump made the previous summer, that that Bush was “low-energy,” had gained enough traction to define the candidate. Bush dropped out of the race after the debate in Greenville and a week before the Super Tuesday primary on March 1st. But Trump’s ability to skewer Republican pieties, from sacrosanct policies to party elders, continued to be a strength. After Bush endorsed Cruz, whose popularity among party elites was only marginally greater than Trump’s, Trump easily painted Cruz with the brush of both “the establishment” and being a loser by association.

Low energy Jeb Bush just endorsed a man he truly hates, Lyin’ Ted Cruz. Honestly, I can’t blame Jeb in that I drove him into oblivion!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 23, 2016

At the Republican debate in Houston on February 25th, Rubio took the lead in attacking Trump from the position of the establishment candidate. But Trump easily deflected Rubio’s jabs by reminding the audience of Rubio’s frightened performance in the New Hampshire debate on February 6: “I watched him melt down on the stage like that, I’ve never seen it in anybody…I thought he came out of the swimming pool.”

Trump won seven of the 11 contests on March 1, also known as Super Tuesday, and 254 pledged delegates. Cruz and Rubio traded second and third place in several states, but Rubio only won Minnesota. Direct dismissal of Trump’s candidacy turned into worried talk among Republican party regulars that Trump had to be stopped.

#NeverTrump
For decades, the Republican party was famous for its discipline, but from the beginning of 2016, some Republicans started to say publicly they might not vote for Trump if he became the party’s nominee. Freshman Republican Senator Ben Sasse from Nebraska was one of the first when he tweeted:

If @GOP no longer works–to defend life, religious liberty, 2nd Amendment, etc–then people should stop supporting until party is reformed.

— Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) February 29, 2016

On March 2, a group of 121 Republican foreign policy experts signed an open letter explaining their opposition to Trump saying, “We have disagreed with one another on many issues, including the Iraq war and intervention in Syria. But we are united in our opposition to a Donald Trump presidency.” Among their list of objections to Trump were, “His vision of American influence and power in the world is wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle,” and “He is fundamentally dishonest.”

On March 3 Mitt Romney, who was the Republican nominee in 2012, said at a speech in Salt Lake City, “If we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee, the prospect for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished.” That same day, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain said Trump is “dangerous” for foreign policy.
At his own press conference, Trump dismissed Romney as a “failed candidate,” “a choke artist” and “a loser.” That evening in Detroit, Trump’s relentless assault on the establishment continued when he called Rubio “Little Marco” and defended an implied attack on his manhood from Rubio (Rubio said Trump’s hands are small) saying, “He referred to my hands; if they’re small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there is no problem. I guarantee.”

On March 17, a group of notable conservatives including blogger Erick Erickson, columnist Quin Hillyer and former George W. Bush adviser Bill Wichterman met at the Army and Navy Club in Washington D.C. to propose an anti-Trump “unity ticket” and called on “all former Republican candidates not currently supporting Trump to unite against him and encourage all candidates to hold their delegates on the first ballot.” Their aim was to deny Trump the necessary number of pledged delegates to win the nomination on the first vote at the party’s convention, which, due to the complex parliamentary rules of the convention, could release pledged delegates to vote for whomever they wanted.

Meanwhile, Romney led other members of the party, including influential conservative journalist William Kristol, in working to find a third party candidate to run in the general election. Though some names were floated, like Sasse, Kasich and U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan, by mid-May Romney was reported to have given up the search.

The Inevitable Trump

Through the beginning of March, Cruz appeared to be pacing Trump in the primaries, winning Kansas, Idaho, Maine and Wyoming by significant margins. The Ides of March put an end to all hopes that Trump would fade before the convention, however. The front-runner swept four of the five states voting, including Florida by 29 points; that led Rubio, who had made Florida his last stand, to drop out of the race. Only Ohio went for another candidate, Governor Kasich, whose popularity in the state is enormous.

Though Cruz supporters enjoyed flickers of hope when he won Utah on March 22 and Wisconsin on April 5, Trump destroyed his Republican rivals in New York on April 19, winning 60% of the vote and carrying every county in the state but one. That county, Manhattan, went to Kasich. Cruz, perhaps due to his disparaging comments about “New York values” earlier in the race, only convinced 14.5% of the state to vote for him.

In the April 26 “Acela Primary,” Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, Maryland, Pennsylvania voted for Trump by margins that beat his previous wins. Cruz ran third in four of the races, and Trump beat him by an average of 43 points. Kasich, who had a better showing than in previous primaries, only garnered 5 of the 118 delegates up for grabs and was mathematically eliminated from becoming the nominee.

Only two days earlier, Cruz and Kasich’s campaigns had made headlines by promising to help each other win Indiana, Oregon and New Mexico. The strategy was meant to deprive Trump of a simple majority of pledged delegates in hopes of forcing a second vote at the convention. Almost as soon as it was announced, however, the deal seemed to fall apart when Kasich told reporters that if voters in Indiana wanted to vote for him, they should do so. Cruz took the bold (some observers said “desperate”) move to announce Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, as his running mate. In a press conference just before the primary, Cruz called Trump a “pathological liar,” “utterly amoral” and “a serial philanderer” in a last-ditch effort to convince the voters to reject Trump.

On May 3, Indiana sealed the Republican nomination for Trump, giving him 53.3% of the vote and all of its 57 delegates. Cruz, facing cries of “no!” and tears from his supporters, dropped out of the race that night, saying:

From the beginning I’ve said that I would continue on as long as there was a viable path to victory. Tonight, I’m sorry to say it appears that path has been foreclosed. Together, we left it all on the field in Indiana. We gave it everything we’ve got, but the voters chose another path. And so with a heavy heart but with boundless optimism for the long term future of our nation, we are suspending our campaign.

After hearing that Cruz had suspended his campaign, Kasich also thought better of spending more time and money in a losing fight and also dropped out. His decision left Trump the Republican’s presumptive nominee for president in 2016.

Demographics and Destiny

According to a national NBC/WSJ poll taken in April, 69% of women, 79% of Latinos, and 88% of African Americans are negatively disposed toward Trump. Moreover, Clinton wins those groups by wide margins: women choose Clinton over Trump by 15 points, Hispanics by 37 points and African-Americans by a staggering 75 points. Consequently, the largest obstacle for Trump in the general election is demographics.

The U.S. electorate has changed dramatically since Ronald Reagan won the White House in 1980. That year 88% of voters were white and 51% were men. Of those groups, 56% of whites and 55% of men voted for Reagan. In 2012, only 72% of voters were white, and women had surpassed men at the polls, 53% to 47%. The share of the Hispanic vote increased fivefold from 1980 to 2012, from 2% to 10%, and the share of African-American voters increased by 3%. Mitt Romney won 59% of whites and 52% of men and still lost to Barack Obama by a wide margin.

At the same time, other kinds of political identity have waned in the last 40 years. In the mid-20th century, voters might find their political identity as union members, Daughters of the American Revolution or Veterans of Foreign Wars. Most of those party-affiliated identities have been replaced by race and gender identities. The Democrats’ coalition of the Roosevelt years brought together southern farmers and northern union members; in 2012 the Obama coalition was made up of college-educated young people, women and non-whites, while Republican voters were overwhelmingly older, white and male. Given the fundamental shift in who the voters are, it seems a candidate like Trump who openly insults women and minorities would have a tough time getting enough white men to carry the election.

Probability and Contingency
The raw numbers only tell half the tale, however; this is partly because presidents are not popularly elected, as some people were shocked to learn when Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 only to lose to George W. Bush in the electoral college. Winning the presidency is a state-by-state game. NPR has worked out the possible scenarios for either a Trump or a Clinton win, and the odds are slightly, but not overwhelmingly, in Clinton’s favor.

One assumption that must hold true for Clinton to win is that her own natural base of women and minorities will get at least some support from white men who identify as Democrats. If she does, states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan will be in her column on November 8. States like Florida, Arizona and Virginia that have a long history of social conservatism and a Republican voting record may flip to the Democratic column due to sizable gains in the Hispanic and Asian population. This way of analyzing the race reduces uncertainty to quantifiable probabilities, and the probabilities appear to favor Clinton.

But demographics are not necessarily determinative, and Trump’s combined ability to shift his message to suit his audience and his undeniable skill in making his opponents’ weaknesses the center of conversation, make this election more contingent than many pundits are willing to acknowledge. Nate Silver, who gained fame by correctly predicting Obama would win in 2012, has written a long self-critical analysis of his inability to predict that Trump would dominate the Republican race, in which he makes two important points about the difficulty in predicting this contest’s outcome.

First, the determinants of an election are split between “fundamentals” and “sentiment.” The former is evidence based on prior behavior, usually grounded in social facts like demographic identity and the state of voters’ satisfaction with the economy. The latter is the mood or zeitgeist that makes improbable events – like Trump gaining the Republican nomination – upset conventional wisdom and possibly rewrite the rule book on what’s normal. When observers are biased towards fundamentals, they sometimes discount sentiment as mass illusion and false ideology. A famous example is Thomas Frank’s book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Observers with this bias risk not seeing a sentiment-based shift in the fundamentals that Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift.

Second, historical events are not the same as natural events that the tools of natural science, like probability modeling, were designed to analyze. Though some, perhaps most, historical events, seem (like the weather) to follow the causal logic of nature, other historical events are unpredictable black swans. During the 20th century, social scientists and economists dismissed the probability of black swans, believing that with enough information uncertainty could be eliminated and risk quantified. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, however, social scientists have had to do a lot of soul searching over the possibility that some historical events might be beyond the reach of rational prediction.

The Bottom Line

The 2016 campaign season has already been the most unusual in recent memory. Both Clinton and Trump have historically high negative favorability ratings. Visceral disgust is energy-intensive, and elections where both candidates are unpopular are often marked by low voter turnout. When only the most passionate voters make it to the polls, outcomes are far more obscure.

If Trump is able to pivot away from the racist, misogynist persona that won him the primary contest and appeal to Hispanic and female voters who feel they too have missed out on the Obama recovery; if he is able to paint Clinton as a candidate without ideas or convictions; if he is able to convince passionate Sanders supporters that he is the only candidate to stand up to the neo-liberal new world order, he may be able to win his seat in the White House. We’ll only know for sure on November 9th.

This post has been updated throughout. Greg DePersio and David Floyd contributed reporting.