[Vision2020] Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com: 8-9-18: Is Chris Collins Toast?

Fri Aug 10 12:12:09 PDT 2018

 Interesting analysis, but now I can't unread the phrase 'bigfoot-themed pornography.' :(  

debbie

    On Thursday, August 9, 2018, 7:00:27 PM PDT, Ted Moffett <starbliss at gmail.com> wrote:  

 Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com is one of the more credible Internet sources for political analysis, or so I have gathered.  Compare to Alex Jones' Infowars.com:  A good example of the corrosive influence of the Internet promoting outrageous conspiracy propaganda, which influences far too many people.  -------------------------------------------Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
-------------------------------------------https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-much-scandals-hurt-candidates-running-for-re-election/
Aug. 9, 2018, at 7:05 AM 
 Is Chris Collins Toast? 

How much scandals hurt candidates running for re-election.

By Nate Silver

Filed under 2018 Election

In the era of President Trump, it’s become fashionable to presume that politicians can do whatever they like and get away with it. But if recent elections to Congress are any guide, scandals do have large and measurable effects. So when U.S. Rep. Chris Collins, the Republican from New York’s 27th Congressional District, was arrested on insider trading charges on Wednesday morning, it took a seat that had looked to be fairly safe for Republicans and put it into the competitive category.

I’m going to be fairly circumspect in this article because I’m knee-deep in finalizing our House model, and I don’t want to scoop our own forecast. But one of the things we evaluated in designing that model is the electoral effects of scandals, based on the data set of scandals put together by my colleague Nathaniel Rakich.1

The definition of what constitutes a scandal is inherently subjective, but Nathaniel’s data set defines it as an accusation of objective wrongdoing (e.g., breaking the law, having an affair), as opposed to a subjective controversy, such as when a candidate makes an outlandish comment or deviates from social norms. As a benchmark, Rep. Jim Jordan’s allegedly lying about his knowledge of incidents of sexual assault toward wrestlers at Ohio State University while he was the coach there constitutes a scandal while candidate Denver Riggleman’s alleged penchant for bigfoot-themed pornography would not. Collins’s arrest by the FBI is unambiguously a scandal.

Below is a list of scandal-plagued incumbents since 1998 who made it to the general election and faced an opponent from the opposite party.2

That is, I exclude cases such as in Louisiana or California where there was a runoff between two candidates of the same party.

 I’ve compared each incumbent’s actual margin of victory or defeat against a projected margin based on a “fundamentals” model that accounts for: (i) the incumbent’s previous victory margin,3

Previous victory margin is adjusted for the national political environment at the time. It’s also adjusted to account for whether the candidate was already an incumbent or instead won an open-seat race or defeated an incumbent.

 (ii) the partisan lean of the district,4

Partisan lean is a measure of how blue or red a state or district is in a neutral political environment; more on this in a moment.

 (iii) the generic ballot at the time of the election, (iv) congressional approval ratings at the time of the election (which are a good proxy for the overall mood toward incumbents), and (v) the incumbent’s congressional voting record (representatives who break with their party more often overperform on Election Day). This is a slightly pared-down version of what our House model will look at, but it should be a fairly robust and reliable model.5

I deliberately excluded fundraising data and the opponent’s political experience level, even though our House model will use them, because they could plausibly be affected by the scandal — a scandal-tinged incumbent will draw more experienced opposition and may have trouble raising money.

How much do scandals hurt incumbents?

It depends on how competitive the district is

| Year | District | Incumbent | Projected Margin Of Victory | Actual Margin of Victory or Defeat | Net Effect Of Scandal |
| 1998 | GA-6 | Newt Gingrich | 31.2 | 41.4 | 10.2 |
| 1998 | ID-1 | Helen Chenoweth | 23.4 | 10.5 | -12.9 |
| 1998 | IL-6 | Henry J. Hyde | 32.6 | 37.2 | 4.7 |
| 1998 | IN-6 | Dan Burton | 51.4 | 55.3 | 3.9 |
| 2000 | GA-7 | Bob Barr | 21.0 | 10.5 | -10.5 |
| 2004 | OH-14 | Steven C. LaTourette | 34.0 | 25.5 | -8.5 |
| 2006 | MI-14 | John Conyers, Jr. | 78.1 | 70.6 | -7.5 |
| 2006 | PA-10 | Donald Sherwood | 25.1 | -5.9 | -31.0 |
| 2008 | FL-16 | Tim Mahoney | 7.6 | -20.2 | -27.8 |
| 2008 | NY-15 | Charles B. Rangel | 82.4 | 81.3 | -1.2 |
| 2010 | MA-6 | John F. Tierney | 22.3 | 13.9 | -8.4 |
| 2012 | FL-26 | David Rivera | 12.5 | -10.6 | -23.2 |
| 2012 | NY-11 | Michael G. Grimm | 10.3 | 5.4 | -4.9 |
| 2012 | TN-4 | Scott DesJarlais | 24.8 | 11.5 | -13.3 |
| 2016 | NC-9 | Robert Pittenger | 27.2 | 16.4 | -10.9 |
| 2016 | NH-1 | Frank C. Guinta | 5.4 | -1.3 | -6.8 |
| 2016 | TX-27 | Blake Farenthold | 28.5 | 23.4 | -5.1 |
|  |  | Overall average | 30.5 | 21.5 | -9.0 |
|  |  | Districts less competitive than NY-27 | 45.7 | 42.0 | -3.7 |
|  |  | Districts more competitive than NY-27 | 19.8 | 7.1 | -12.7 |

Shaded districts were more competitive than NY-27 based on their partisan lean.

On average, the scandal-ridden incumbents … won re-election by 21.5 percentage points! But that’s quite a bit worse than their projected margin of victory, which was 30.5 percentage points. The net effect of a scandal is about 9 points, therefore. (This finding is reasonably consistent with previous research on the topic.) Fourteen of the 17 incumbents underperformed their projection by at least some amount, and the three exceptions came a relatively long time ago, in 1998. (There’s no evidence of the effect of scandals decreasing in recent elections; if anything, it’s increased slightly over the course of the data.)

Moreover, the effect of scandals is potentially greater in competitive districts, where the other party has an opportunity to mobilize a real alternative. Let’s use New York’s 27th Congressional District as a dividing line, for instance. It has a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of R +22, meaning that it’s 22 points more Republican than the country as a whole based on its voting in recent presidential and state legislative elections.6

In a new twist this year, the version of partisan lean we’re using for the House model accounts for partisanship in state legislative elections as well as in presidential elections; more about that in the near future.

 That type of district is ordinarily quite safe, but is just on the fringe of what could become competitive if everything breaks right for the opposing party — for example, in an election in a wave year against a candidate who just got arrested by the FBI. In districts less competitive than NY-27, scandals cost the incumbents only 4 percentage points, on average. But in districts that were as competitive or more competitive than NY-27, candidates with scandal issues underperformed their fundamentals by an average of almost 13 points.

So does that make Collins’s race a toss-up? You could do a little mental math: If the scandal costs him 13 percentage points, and the national environment favors Democrats by 6 points, that could produce a 19-point swing toward Collins’s Democratic opponent, Nate McMurray — almost enough to offset the strong Republican lean of the district. But you’d be leaving one thing out: Collins is still an incumbent, and incumbents usually outperform the partisan lean of their districts.

In fact, the incumbency bonus in recent elections has been in the very low double digits — on the order of 12 percentage points.7

For instance, you’d expect a Democratic incumbent to win by 15 points in a D+3 seat in a neutral national environment.

 (It used to be quite a bit higher.) That’s just about the same as the magnitude of the scandal penalty. The typical scandal, therefore, essentially wipes out a candidate’s incumbency advantage and makes the district perform similarly to an open-seat race. But it doesn’t necessarily reverse the advantage. Republicans would be favored to win an open-seat race in NY-27, even amid a very blue national political environment, so they’re probably still favored with Collins on the ballot too.

There’s one more complication, however, which is that this data suffers from survivorship bias. The candidates with really bad scandals will often retire rather than seek re-election, or they may lose in their primary. If all scandal-plagued incumbents were forced to be renominated, we’d probably observe a scandal penalty even larger than the 10 or 12 points we’re showing here.

But in some ways, Collins and the New York GOP are in a position where their hand has been forced. New York has already held its primary and Collins is the nominee; the general election is in only three months. He seems disinclined to bow out. And it isn’t entirely clear whether it would be possible to replace Collins on the ballot even if Republicans wanted to.8

New York generally has fairly strict laws about removing candidates.

 This is the type of scandal that might have induced a retirement if it had occurred a year ago, but the GOP may not have that choice.

The Cook Political Report moved NY-27 from noncompetitive to its “Likely Republican” category after the news on Wednesday morning. I might go one step further and put it in the “Lean Republican” category instead, even though it’s a really red district. (It went for Trump by 25 points in 2016.) Soon, we’ll be able to tell you what the FiveThirtyEight House model thinks too, so it’s back to work on that.

But in general, Republicans face a very long list of potentially competitive districts — places where Democrats aren’t necessarily favored at even odds, but have a fighting chance when they have no real business doing so. That list got one seat longer after Collins’s arrest. Cashing in a few of those lottery tickets is what might turn a near-miss for the Democrats into a narrow majority — or a narrow majority into a wave.

Check out all the polls we’ve been collecting ahead of the 2018 midterms.

Footnotes

   -    
The definition of what constitutes a scandal is inherently subjective, but Nathaniel’s data set defines it as an accusation of objective wrongdoing (e.g., breaking the law, having an affair), as opposed to a subjective controversy, such as when a candidate makes an outlandish comment or deviates from social norms. As a benchmark, Rep. Jim Jordan’s allegedly lying about his knowledge of incidents of sexual assault toward wrestlers at Ohio State University while he was the coach there constitutes a scandal while candidate Denver Riggleman’s alleged penchant for bigfoot-themed pornography would not. Collins’s arrest by the FBI is unambiguously a scandal.

   -    
That is, I exclude cases such as in Louisiana or California where there was a runoff between two candidates of the same party.

   -    
Previous victory margin is adjusted for the national political environment at the time. It’s also adjusted to account for whether the candidate was already an incumbent or instead won an open-seat race or defeated an incumbent.

   -    
Partisan lean is a measure of how blue or red a state or district is in a neutral political environment; more on this in a moment.

   -    
I deliberately excluded fundraising data and the opponent’s political experience level, even though our House model will use them, because they could plausibly be affected by the scandal — a scandal-tinged incumbent will draw more experienced opposition and may have trouble raising money.

   -    
In a new twist this year, the version of partisan lean we’re using for the House model accounts for partisanship in state legislative elections as well as in presidential elections; more about that in the near future.

   -    
For instance, you’d expect a Democratic incumbent to win by 15 points in a D+3 seat in a neutral national environment.

   -    
New York generally has fairly strict laws about removing candidates.

Nate Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight. 

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