Subject: Re: What would have happened if Joe Biden had run? - The Washington Post
From: "Alexander S. Mackler" <[email-masked]>
To: "Eric Schwerin" <[email-masked]>
Cc: "Ted Kaufman" <[email-masked]>, "Hunter Biden" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2016 14:35:39 -0400

Doesn't even account for all the Ds whose primary motivation for supporting
HRC at this point is "we have no other choice"...

On Sun, Jul 3, 2016 at 8:43 AM, Eric Schwerin <[email-masked]>
wrote:

>
>
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/03/what-would-have-happened-if-joe-biden-had-run/?tid=sm_tw_pp&wprss=rss_the-fix
>
> What would have happened if Joe Biden had run?
>
> Joe Biden speaks after touring the Port of New Orleans to commemorate the
> seventh anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in New
> Orleans, Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2016. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
>
> It's the first thought that enters Vice President Biden's head every
> morning, the moment his bedroom windows at One Observatory Circle grow
> light from the sun. "What if," Joe Biden thinks.
>
> "What if I had run?"
>
> The race for the Democratic presidential nomination was never supposed to
> be as close as it ended up. Last spring, Hillary Clinton led her possible
> opponents by a country mile; by July, 12 months ago, she still led Bernie
> Sanders by nearly 50 points. But over the summer and into the fall, her
> lead narrowed, and by the time Biden announced that he wouldn't run in late
> October, Clinton's lead over Sanders had been as small as 13 points
> <http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2016_democratic_presidential_nomination-3824.html>.
> Then Biden made his announcement and, as expected
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/08/13/expect-a-boost-for-hillary-clinton-if-and-when-joe-biden-bows-out/>,
> Clinton saw most of the benefit. Why? Because Clinton and Biden shared
> similar bases of support: Those without college degrees, those earning
> lower incomes and, most importantly, non-white voters.
>
> Once Biden declined to run, it was fair to assume that was it. For her
> clear path to the nomination, Biden was now offering Clinton a ride.
>
> But then Sanders kept closing.
>
> As voting began, thanks in part to Clinton's decision not to take the
> gloves off against Sanders in a number of contests, Sanders caught up. By
> April, the two were nearly tied nationally. It was too late
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/16/bye-bye-bernie-the-democratic-race-is-all-but-over/>
> for Sanders to catch Clinton in delegates, but it showed that there was
> still a big appetite for a non-Clinton in the contest.
>
> So: What if? What if Biden had stayed in? What if voting in Iowa and New
> Hampshire kicked off with Biden joining Clinton and Sanders on the ballot?
>
> Fundamentally, this question is impossible to answer. So much changes and
> evolves over the course of a campaign that it's hard to simply imagine a
> realistic counterfactual that incorporates every possible scenario. Joe
> Biden has an unfortunate habit of saying things he's not supposed to say,
> for example, like when he made
> <http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/31/biden.obama/> condescending and
> racially loaded comments about Barack Obama early in the 2008 primary
> cycle. You can't account for things like that.
>
> But if Biden had stayed in and not shot himself in the foot, there would
> clearly have been a shift to the dynamics -- especially in one important
> way: Clinton's margins of victory (if not her victory itself
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/06/09/black-voters-gave-hillary-clinton-a-big-win-but-she-would-probably-have-won-anyway/>)
> were due to her massive advantage with black voters. That's a voting bloc
> with which Biden also did well. So: What if?
>
> We can try to answer that question by looking at how polling last fall
> looked with and without Biden in the race. The Post and ABC News polled in
> September and October, and we can look at the results of those two polls
> through two lenses: How support broke down among all three candidates and
> how it broke down if we reallocate Biden's support to voters' second
> choices. What's interesting about these two polls is that they reflect two
> very different moments in the race. The September poll was a particularly
> bad one for Clinton, putting her at just over 40 percent -- one of her
> lowest levels of support of the campaign. By October, she'd rebounded
> somewhat.
>
> In that September poll, Clinton earned the support of 42 percent of the
> Democrats and Democratic leaners that were surveyed. Take Biden out,
> though, and her support jumped to 56 percent. Which means that Biden not
> being in the race gave Clinton a 14-point boost -- and that one-third, 33
> percent, of her support in a one-on-one contest with Sanders came from
> people who would otherwise have backed Biden. For Sanders, the numbers were
> 24 percent with Biden and 28 percent without -- so 17 percent of his
> one-on-one support came from Biden.
>
> We can do a similar calculation for all of the demographic groups with
> large enough sample sizes to be significant. And we can do it for both
> September and October, to get a sense of how much support Clinton got
> thanks to possible Biden backers during a bad month and how much she got
> during a good month.
>
> Let's now assume that those figures didn't change much. One of the things
> we know is that margins of support from demographic groups remained fairly
> consistent
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/12/the-remarkable-consistency-of-the-democratic-primary-electorate/>
> for Clinton and Sanders even as Sanders gained. As he improved, he improved
> across the board, but the gap between male and female and between white and
> non-white didn't change much.
>
> So let's assume that the percentage of support Biden drew from Clinton and
> Sanders was also somewhat consistent. This is not necessarily a fair
> assumption, any more than it was fair to assume that Sanders was D.O.A.
> once Biden dropped out. But it allows us to revamp the field in light of
> the best data we do have, from September and October.
>
> Exit polling conducted in primary and caucus states gives us a sense of
> how demographic groups voted over the course of the Democratic nominating
> process. We can use exit poll figures to approximate the breakdown of
> delegates won by each candidate, thanks to the Democrats' relatively simply
> proportional distribution process. There are gaps and flaws in this
> (including that not every state is included in exit polling), but it at
> least serves to approximate how the candidates would have done against one
> another.
>
> How? By taking the support Clinton and Sanders got in exit polling by
> gender, race and partisanship -- the three categories that overlap well
> with our poll data -- and taking out those chunks that would otherwise have
> gone to Biden. So if we're basing this estimate on the figures from the
> September poll, one-third of Clinton's statewide support would be sliced
> off and put in the Biden pile, along with 17 percent of Sanders's.
>
> We can do that calculation in each demographic category; that is, how many
> delegates Clinton, Sanders and Biden would have gotten if the polling for
> whites and non-whites was our guide, or how many each would have gotten if
> we used the polling for gender. Then, we can do the calculation using the
> polling from September and October, giving Biden bigger and smaller slices
> of Clinton's totals, respectively. Doing so gives us two theoretical
> outcomes for the Democratic primary (with the actual exit-poll-based
> results for the sake of comparison).
>
> If Biden had only pulled as much from Clinton and Sanders as he did in
> October, Clinton would still have won a plurality of the pledged delegates
> at stake. But if Biden had pulled from the two candidates at the rate he
> did in September, the contest would would have been much closer.
>
> It's critical to note that the exit poll figures here don't include a
> number of large states in which exit polls weren't conducted. They don't
> include Washington, for example, which Sanders won by a wide margin. They
> also don't include New Jersey, Arizona or California, won by Clinton and
> which offered a lot of combined delegates. If Clinton and Sanders ended up
> that close in states with exit polling, once we include Biden, it's hard to
> know who might have come out on top. It wouldn't have been Biden, if these
> numbers hold, but it might not have been Clinton.
>
> That's based on September polling, of course. Those September numbers
> didn't even last until October, so it's unfair to assume they would somehow
> have stuck around until May. Maybe Biden would have surged past Clinton.
> Maybe Sanders and Biden would have allied. Maybe Biden would have undercut
> Sanders's support with young people. None of this is captured in our rough
> calculation. All we can say is that *if* Biden pulled from Clinton and
> Sanders as he did in September and *if* nothing else had changed, then
> *maybe* Clinton wouldn't have won a majority of pledged delegates.
>
> We can put that another way: The answer to the what-if question that no
> doubt plagues Biden is: Who knows?
>
>
> Eric D. Schwerin
> [email-masked]
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>

-- 

Alexander Snyder Mackler
(302) 598-867