What would a Rubio electoral map have looked like?

[Arbitrage1980]

I think Rubio would have defeated Hillary Clinton; he also would have won the national popular vote. But the electoral map would have looked different since Rubio would have outperformed Trump with minorities and college whites but underperformed with working class whites. He probably would have won NV, CO, VA, NH, NC, MN, and obviously FL, but lost IA, WI, MI, ME02. The tough ones are PA and OH. He would have done better in the philly suburbs although I'm not sure if it would have been enough to carry the state. In OH he would have crushed it in affluent delaware county and Cleveland suburbs as well as win Hamilton County but would have done far worse in the rural areas, especially the traditional democratic strongholds in the eastern part of the state.

[Arbitrage1980]

Let's dispel the notion that rubio has broad appeal amongst hispanics. He lost hispanics overall in his home state to a candidate the dems abandoned (murphy) in a senate race. Over two-thirds of non-cuban latinos voted for Murphy. So taking that into account, NV is gone. VA is not going for a social conservative, if there was one state consistently showing Clinton winning easily it was VA. By the way, ME-2 is basically 'working class white' Lepage land, so if you subtract boosed totals amongst working class whites, you can subtract that too. OH would still be a toss-up, it's full of non-college educated whites, the same kind that majorly flipped to Trump.

Let's not forget FL, in his home state of notoriety, he was constantly tied in the polls v. Clinton.

Combine that with no russian released hacks depressing Dem turnout, it comes down to OH/CO/FL in a tight race with a Hillary had an electoral advantage, not that different from a race with Jeb.

*The only reason MN is ever close is due to turnout issues, which wouldn't have happened to the extent that it did without the hacks.

Laughable if you think the DNC hacks is the reason Hillary lost. She was a terrible candidate with no compelling message, running on an ultra-liberal democratic platform that the voters did not want.

[Arbitrage1980]

I think that Rubio would have beaten Clinton. The electoral margin may not have been as large, but he would have won the popular vote because he would not have done a lot better in California and Texas than Trump. Third party voting would be lower because Republicans would have an easier time getting behind Rubio.

Rubio: 288
Clinton: 250

His appeal amongst affluent voters gives him Virginia, and his appeal amongst Hispanics gives him Colorado and Nevada. However, he would be weaker amongst white working class voters than Trump, so he would not win Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania. He would still win Ohio and Iowa.

Isn't Rubio far more likely to lose Iowa since that state has a higher % of working class whites than WI or PA?

[Arbitrage1980]

I agree with this map. I would probably have flipped Michigan to Rubio.

If Rubio won the nomination and made the rumors true by selecting Nikki Haley as his running mate, he probably would have won more rural voters as Trump did. It would also had boosted him among African-American voters since Haley removed the Confederate flag from South Carolina's Capitol Hill after the shooting in Charleston in 2015, which would have made Rubio competitive in Detroit, thus helping him winning Michigan.

Despite historic turnout and support from working-class whites, Trump's margin in MI, WI, PA were pretty thin (below 1% and just 1.2% in FL). This is because he underperformed with college whites. Rubio would have done better than even Romney with this group. The fact that Trump beat Hillary by just 9% in Texas, 3.6% in Arizona, and 5.1% in Georgia, is indicative of Trump's weakness with college whites in suburbs.

[Arbitrage1980]

Clinton did have a compelling message; she won the popular vote.

The national popular vote is a totally meaningless statistic, akin to total yards gained by a football team in a game. Hillary did not "win" anything because the national popular vote is not how we select our president.

[Arbitrage1980]

Amazing debate in this thread. Very well-informed and articulate posts by both sides.

It seems like everyone agrees that Rubio most likely would have won the national popular vote since he would have done significantly better in CA, AZ, TX, GA, than Trump? Rubio probably would have lost CA by around 15 points (compared to Trump's 30) and won TX by 12-15 (compared to Trump's 9). My guess is GA would have been a comfortable 8-10 point margin.

[Arbitrage1980]

Rubio wouldn't have lost IA in the GE, but he probably wouldn't have won NV either. I think it would have been Romney 2012 + FL + IA + OH + WI + ME-02 + maybe CO + maybe PA.

Well, keep in mind that ME-02 is lepage/trump land, but besides that, rubio would have problems in CO due to his federal drug position, and Hillary would've been able to run a more effective rustbelt campaign without the russian hacks, if it was a more conventional race, allowing her to consolidate more votes from bernie supporters. She'd remind people of rubio's positions on the auto bailouts, etc. and how it's the same as romney's. She does that and she is much more likely to keep the blue wall in tact causing an electoral problem for him.

*Kasich is a more unique kind of candidate with the specific type of regional appeal for the area, which is why they shouldn't be grouped in together electorally. Remember, Kasich was going to do the OH-PA-Upstate NY route, which is very similar to what Trump did, Jeb and Rubio don't have the same appeal in that corridor, it's highly probable that Jeb/Rubio would've tried to push through NV anyway, and run into EV issues and come up short electorally.

I must have missed the part where Putin's agents forced Hillary to make the deplorable comment and not campaign aggressively in WI or MI.

[Arbitrage1980]

People underestimate Rubio's unlikability.  2016 was an anti-establishment year, and Rubio reeks of the establishment.  He owes his career to powerful special interests, and until 2016, he had never won FL with a majority (he won with under 50% against two candidates running to the left of him in 2010).  He was a first term Senator with a horrible attendance record who came off as the Establishment's favorite Management Trainee, and who served the purpose of advancing a kind of false sense of "diversity".  A smarmy little puke.  2016 wasn't the year of smarmy little pukes; it was the year of rebellion against national elites of all kinds, and Rubio was not destined to do well in this environment, period.

Rubio won in 2010 as an insurgent candidate, upsetting Crist in the gop primary. His voting record in the Senate has been consistently conservative. He is very knowledgeable on a wide array of issues and played a key role in risk corridors for insurance companies in the Obamacare battle. His one flaw was his role in Gang of Eight; he honestly thought he could help craft an immigration deal until Schumer stabbed him in the back.

The Rubio hate is not borne out by data. He was very well liked during the GOP primary but didn't gain traction due to the relentless attacks by Jeb, divided field, lack of ground game in the early states, and the debate debacle against Christie.

In his re-election in 2016, Rubio outperformed Trump and won 48% of latinos and 17% of blacks.

[Arbitrage1980]

I must have missed the part where Putin's agents forced Hillary to make the deplorable comment

By the way, I'm just going to reiterate how it's hilarious that you think making a comment about 'deplorables' made or broke the election, but refuse to look at the actual impact that lehman brothers collapsing had on the 2008 race, in which Mccain was ahead of Obama, right up until the day of the collapse.

The fact is that these outside events do matter and they add up.

Of course, outside events matter. When did I say that they don't? And what does the 2008 financial crisis have to do with the discussion of the 2016 election and the errors made by Hillary?

I'm not condoning the Russians hacking the DNC. But once the emails were out, the American people had the choice to incorporate the contents of those emails into their voting calculus. It's worth nothing of course that the emails were genuine; they were not fabricated or doctored by the Russians. If the emails did hurt Hillary, it's because they simply reinforced the public's perception of her and her allies as corrupt elitists who look down on average Americans. As for Comey, one can argue that he should have conducted himself differently. He was in an impossible situation: overseeing the criminal investigation of a former first lady, senator, and secretary of state, who was also the nominee of a major party for the presidency. Comey's infamous letter to congress 12 days before the election resulted from his promise to Congress to inform them ASAP of any new information in the case. Regardless, it was Hillary who sent classified information via an unsecure private server, lied to the FBI, and told her staff to delete thousands of e-mails. And it was the Democrats who nominated a person under active investigation by the FBI.

The democrats need to engage in deep introspection rather than blaming others for their failures.

[Arbitrage1980]

I must have missed the part where Putin's agents forced Hillary to make the deplorable comment

By the way, I'm just going to reiterate how it's hilarious that you think making a comment about 'deplorables' made or broke the election, but refuse to look at the actual impact that lehman brothers collapsing had on the 2008 race, in which Mccain was ahead of Obama, right up until the day of the collapse.

The fact is that these outside events do matter and they add up.

Of course, outside events matter. When did I say that they don't? And what does the 2008 financial crisis have to do with the discussion of the 2016 election and the errors made by Hillary?

I'm not condoning the Russians hacking the DNC. But once the emails were out, the American people had the choice to incorporate the contents of those emails into their voting calculus. It's worth nothing of course that the emails were genuine; they were not fabricated or doctored by the Russians. If the emails did hurt Hillary, it's because they simply reinforced the public's perception of her and her allies as corrupt elitists who look down on average Americans. As for Comey, one can argue that he should have conducted himself differently. He was in an impossible situation: overseeing the criminal investigation of a former first lady, senator, and secretary of state, who was also the nominee of a major party for the presidency. Comey's infamous letter to congress 12 days before the election resulted from his promise to Congress to inform them ASAP of any new information in the case. Regardless, it was Hillary who sent classified information via an unsecure private server, lied to the FBI, and told her staff to delete thousands of e-mails. And it was the Democrats who nominated a person under active investigation by the FBI.

The democrats need to engage in deep introspection rather than blaming others for their failures.

The 2008 financial crisis started when the FSA blocked Barclays from buying Lehman, that was an external event caused by the UK which had global political ramifications, so this time you had the russian hacks which were a similar external event, but it was caused by russia to specifically benefit one candidate.  You of all people should know what happened to Lehman, I thought you said you were a quant? There is a somewhat similar parallel in that they were both events that were started by foreign entities, that's why I brought up the comparison to Lehman.

Both events threw Mccain and Hillary off their normal game a bit.

I'm well aware of what happened during the financial crisis. And yes, both are external events that no candidate had control over, but they are actually not that similar in terms of their electoral impact. The 2008 financial crisis was a monster game changer for obvious reasons; McCain's numbers plummeted after September 15th. The Russia hacks did not have anywhere near the same impact. The emails were released on wikileaks in July 2016, not right before the election. Hillary had very large leads at multiple points since July. There is no strong data to indicate that the emails altered the fundamental trajectory of the race in the way that the financial crisis did.