Mark Mellman: The candidate or the circumstances

Human beings display a natural inclination to overweigh the causal role of people in producing outcomes, while underweighting the role of circumstances, of situations.

Indeed, this tendency is so pervasive and so significant, psychologists call it fundamental attribution error.

{mosads}It’s no surprise then that political analyses also attribute less causal impact to underlying structural dynamics than they deserve.

As regular readers of this column know, economic performance, partisanship and the length of time a party has held the White House are among the structural fundamentals that help determine the outcome of presidential elections.

A veritable cottage industry has arisen among political scientists and economists in developing statistical models designed to forecast election outcomes.

Some of these models incorporate polls that can help make the predictions smarter, but they sacrifice a real understanding of the significance of underlying structural dynamics.

Nine academic models I am aware of rely only on fundamentals and do not include any polling data about the presidential race itself.

On average, before Election Day, these models predicted a 2-point popular vote victory for Donald Trump.

Through the eyes of these models, the stage was set for a Trump victory in the popular vote just based on the state of the economy, variously measured, the two previous terms during which Democrats had controlled the White House and some other measures of partisanship.

The role of economic performance in determining election outcomes is widely recognized.

In a poll we conducted just before the election, the relationship was tight. We indexed several different questions designed to measure evaluations of the national economy and split the electorate into five categories based on their responses.

Those most positive about the economy gave Hillary Clinton a margin of over 90 points. In the second-most positive group, her advantage was about 60 points.

Voters who were most negative about the country’s economic circumstances gave Trump nearly a 60-point margin, while the next-most negative voted for him by about 40 points.

Those in the middle broke, well, down the middle, supporting Trump, but by just 5 points.

The problem, however, is that more voters remained negative than positive about the nation’s economic circumstances.

A party’s tenure in office is another structural factor that has direct bearing on presidential election outcomes.

Americans seem to exhibit an innate proclivity for rotation. Only once since World War II has a party won a third term in the White House — George H.W. Bush after two terms of Ronald Reagan.

In fact, the econometric models mentioned above find about a 4-point penalty for the candidate seeking a third party term.

If, without that penalty, Clinton had emerged with a 6-point advantage over Trump — the 2 points she got, plus the 4 taken away by the third party-term penalty — she would certainly have won the Electoral College and the White House.

Trump’s failure to capture a plurality of the popular vote suggests he failed to live up to the potential created for him by situational factors over which neither he, nor Clinton, had any control.

As I noted throughout the campaign, Clinton was running an uphill race based on the fundamentals.

Fundamental attribution error, though, focused our collective attention on Trump’s many personal failings, while partially blinding us to the precarious position Clinton occupied because of the situation in which she was running.

I, like many others, just did not believe that a guy who 65 percent of Americans thought was not qualified to be president could win the election.

Of course, he did lose the popular vote, but about 1 in 6 voters who believed him unqualified supported him anyway.

Their desire for change — or their confidence in Clinton’s ultimate victory — was strong enough for them to take the risk. Which is to say the situational triumphed over the personal.

We should have paid more attention to the fundamentals and less to our own evaluations of the candidates.

Mellman is president of The Mellman Group and has worked for Democratic candidates and causes since 1982. Current clients include the minority leader of the Senate and the Democratic whip in the House.