Day: September 17, 2016

News Events Can Dramatically Affect Enthusiasm. Clinton has come off an awful few weeks. She took a bunch of days off the campaign trail for fundraisers. Then she had a media storm with "deplorables", then she collapses on camera, was diagnosed with pneumonia and then spent three or four days totally off camera and off the campaign trail. These events may hurt Clinton. They may damage her campaign fatally. But a more likely explanation of the rapid shift in the polls is that they sharply demoralized her supporters and shook free her least committed supporters. That shows up in likely voter models; it leads to differential poll response. This does not mean the polls are wrong. It means they are accurately measuring the effect of those events. But there is good reason to think that it may be ephemeral because it is more as much a shift in enthusiasm and engagement than opinion. (We've even noticed a significant drop in TPM traffic since Clinton's fainting spell. We've seen this happen before when our readers think the news sucks and some just tune out. No, I'm not basing this theory on TPM's traffic. I just think it's part of a common phenomenon.)