Subject: Why Polls Have Been Wrong Recently - The New York Times
From: Brent Budowsky <[email-masked]>
To: "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>, "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>, "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>, "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2016 05:14:00 +0000

This is an interesting statistical analysis that backs up my theory of the election, that turnout is the key and that Hillary faces greater danger than polling indicates because of her enthusiasm gap.  That the danger is that because of her enthusiasm gap the 2016 general election could be closer to the turnout pattern of midterm elections than most presidential elections have been.  If my theory of 2016 is correct Hillary will underperform compared to her pre-voting polling numbers and Bernie and Cruz, and possibly Trump, will overperform and receive a higher percentage of the actual vote than pre-voting polling suggests.

This also explains my observation in recent years of foreign polling that the right has performed better than a string of pre-election polling in a number of nations such as Israel, Britain, Poland and U.S. Midterms.

However this patten was broken in the Canadian election, where Trudeau outperformed, and in the recent French regional elections where the national front dramatically underperformed in actual voting in the second round lower than first round voting and pre-election polling before the second round as voters had to make the power decision of actual electing they pulled back from the far right.

Net net the biggest danger to Hillary, in my opinion, is not Bernie or Republicans but Hillary. The nature of her calculating and maneuvering political style is an enthusiasm reducer, in the same way and for similar reasons that Obama had the exact same result in 2010 and 2014 midterms of depressing Democratic voters and energizing Republican voters.

This is why I have long believed that nobody will win in 2016, the issue is which candidate loses in 2016.....whether Hillary depresses more voters through the enthusiasm gap she generates or whether the Republican right will look strong in primaries but weaken in the general election as the national front did in the recent French elections.  Either outcome is possible. If we add a new variable, a potential major terror attack in America in the months before the election, there is a conceivable scenario in which a rightist candidate is elected president because her Secretary of State experience becomes more of a negative, because she will share blame with Obama for the attack, while Republican and rightist turnout soars through the charts on the upside because of anger and fear.

This is how I suggest viewing the Pew study referred to in this story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/08/upshot/why-polls-have-been-wrong-recently.html?mabReward=CTM&action=click&pgtype=Homepage®ion=CColumn&module=Recommendation&src=rechp&WT.nav=RecEngine&_r=0

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