Why Trump Might Have Been Right About Gillespie

Was Trump Right about Gillespie? Maybe. You'll hear a lot of theories about Gillespie's nine-point loss to Northam in the recent Virginia gubernatorial contest. Jennifer Rubin's wrap-up in the Washington Post lists many. In a widely-lampooned tweet, President Trump said: "Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for." The data shows that Trump may have been right. If 90% of the people who support Trump unconditionally for tribal or cultural reasons, and who voted for him in 2016 had also voted for Gillespie, then Gillespie could've won. Let's tease that out. I'll begin with a number: at least 61% of Trump's voters and supporters favor him unconditionally. (If you want to know where I got that, read my analysis here.) Many of them are white evangelicals who believe that Trump was anointed by God, that his election was a result of "the hand of God," and that he serves as "the instrument of God." Not everyone who voted for President Trump and who still supports him falls into that category. I'll refer to the rest of those voters as "regular Republicans," i.e. the folks who generally vote for Republicans at the state and federal levels. These are the people who support the "3-legged Reagan stool". Even if you've never heard of it, you already know what it is: (1) "lower taxes, less regulation, smaller government"; (2) "a strong national defense"; and (3) "god, gays and guns" - i.e. social issues. (If you want more details and some historical perspective, I provide it here.) We just need a couple of extra facts. If we compare the vote totals in the recent Virginia governor's race with the 2016 Presidential contest, we find that the overall vote total in the governor's race was about 68.7% of that for President, although Northam won 71.9% of the votes that Hillary got, and Gillespie garnered 66.2% of the votes that Trump received. Now we have all the data, so let's crunch the numbers. Assume that the "regular Republicans," i.e. the conditional supporters of President Trump represented 39% of his 2016 vote total in Virginia, for about 690 votes. (For simplicity, I'm measuring votes in the thousands and rounding to the nearest 500. Trump's 2016 haul in Virginia was 1,769.5, or about 1.77 million votes). Assume further that Gillespie garners 66.2% of the 690 (i.e. 690,000) votes of 2016 "regular Republicans" for a total of 457. So basically we are scaling the votes of these "regular Republicans" down by 66.2% (0.662), which is the ratio between Gillespie's 2017 votes and President Trump's 2016 votes in Virginia. That seems reasonable because people vote less in non-Presidential elections. To equal Northam's total of 1,405 votes, Gillespie needs to round up another 948 votes from President Trump's unconditional supporters. (To keep them separate from the "regular Republicans," let's refer to them as the "fan base.") Are there enough fan base voters to make up Gillespie's deficit? Yes. 61% of Trump's 1,769.5 votes is 1,079. If the same number of fan base voters had turned out for Gillespie, then Gillespie would've netted 1,079 votes from them to which he could add 457 votes from "regular Republicans." In other words, he would've beaten Northam by almost 100 votes - remember: that means 100,000 because we're working in thousands. (And yes, in the last year some of these voters may have died or otherwise been unable to vote, but let's not quibble over the details, shall we?) Let's run the computation the other way by asking how much of Trump's fan base needed to vote for Gillespie in order to give him parity with Northam. The answer is 948 out of 1,079, or 87.9% The bottom line is that if we hold all other conditions equal, and Gillespie had campaigned side-by-side with President Trump, and Trump had successfully urged enough of his 2016 fan base voters (i.e. unconditional supporters) to vote for Gillespie, then Gillespie could've edged out Northam. You could object on the grounds that getting 88% of any group of people to actually vote is a very tall order. But remember, these folks had already voted for Trump in 2016, and they support him unconditionally. It's also possible that Gillespie calculated that campaigning side-by-side with Trump would drive up Northam's turnout, by riling up voters who didn't like President Trump. We may never know, but it's hard to see how Gillespie's hard-hitting ads on immigration and other issues already didn't already get Northam's voters motivated. Trump's argument, in effect, is that Gillespie failed to go all the way in terms of mobilizing President Trump's supporters. He may have a point. Postscript: Whither Midterms? There is a larger lesson here for the midterms. And that is that if Trump goes all-out on his issues, his fan base (i.e. unconditional supporters) can overwhelm even an energized Democratic base. Don't believe me? Read my analysis here. If you want the short version, here it is: there are five Democratic senators up for re-election in red states (Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia), as well as five more in swing states won by President Trump (Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). To those ten we might also add Minnesota, a state that Hillary Clinton won by just 1.5%. We should also consider other states won by Hillary by less than 5%. To Virginia, add Maine, New Hampshire (no senate election), Minnesota, and Nevada. You wanna talk governors? Both Pennsylvania and Minnesota are potentially flippable for the GOP. What about Democrats in House districts that she won by less than 5%? The bottom line is that Trump has to get the people who love him almost as much as Jesus to get out there and vote in the midterms. Gillespie didn't do it. But that doesn't mean that it can't be done. We Democrats shouldn't get too smug.