FL-PPP: Hillary leads all Pubs

[bedstuy]

You people are crazy. 

1.  These early individual polls don't matter.
2.  Favorability goes down in primaries among your party and then rebounds once people rally around the candidate. 

[bedstuy]

You people are crazy.  

1.  These early individual polls don't matter.
2.  Favorability goes down in primaries among your party and then rebounds once people rally around the candidate.  

Uh, the primaries haven't started, heck, Hillary hasn't even announced yet, so that argument doesn't hold true! And of course the "muh early polls don't matter" argument is true but when a poll shows Hillary leading all Republicans by at least 15 points (sometimes even in their home states), you guys are gloating about it, too The only demographic group that would carry FL for Hillary is white women. If she does as badly as Obama among this group, she will almost certainly lose FL because she will probably do worse than Romney among white men, Hispanics and Blacks.

The primary race has started because the media is talking about it.  And, great, we agree that these polls don't matter.  I don't gloat about polling more than a year and a half from an election.  You can get a general sense from the early polling, but I would never claim it matters that much in the final analysis, certainly not the crosstabs.

You mean worse than Obama among white men, Hispanics and blacks though?  I'm confused.

You need to tone down the potted election trend prediction.  When you add together all the conditional points, if this and that happens, then probably this, probably that, etc, you just have reckless speculation.  That's the problem with all this predicting, there are tons of variables and assumptions built into any given prediction.  Ultimately, maybe you're right about one variable, but wrong about three others and so who cares?

The only good single predictor of winning an election is a lead in public polling.   Not being at least at 50% favorability, not a certain unemployment number, not getting as many black votes as the last candidate, not winning independents, not getting more likes on facebook, not one person's subjective opinion about which candidate is shrill or mean or killed Vince Foster.  And, I think we all ought to know, it's better to be the one gloating about their lead in public polling than the person making excuses about why that lead will evaporate or doesn't actually exist.

[bedstuy]

Think about favorability this way.

In the electorate, there is your base, persuadable voters and non-persuadable voters.  Your base will basically always vote for your party and non-persuadable voters will never vote for your party. 

If you were just trying to get the highest favorability rating, you would want a high rating among all three groups.   Because, if you start off with every Republican disliking you, your max approval rating is something like 60%.  And, you basically want to appeal to all three groups equally.

However, if you want to win an election,  your priorities are different.  You don't want the support of each group equally.  In order, you want 1. Persuadable voters 2. Your base and you don't even care about non-persuadable voters.  Because, your base will vote for almost any member of their party at the end of the day, even if they scream and cry during the primary.  We saw this with the lack of actual PUMA voters in 2008 or the lack of anti-Romney conservative voters going third party or sitting out the election in 2012. 

What actually matters is not favorability or whether the most number of people like you;  what matters is whether you can get enough votes to win.