Presidential Scholar Provides Clarity to Unprecedented 2016 Campaign

Dr. Douglas Kriner, a Boston University political scientist, shared his considerable knowledge about the electoral process at an all-school lecture October 10, focusing on two main questions: how did Donald Trump defeat sixteen primary opponents, and with what level of confidence can we predict the outcome of November's general election?

Though his primary area of academic interest is the presidency itself—how presidents lead and govern—Dr. Kriner, associate professor of political science and director of graduate studies for BU's political science department, methodically explained the 2016 presidential election.
 
To the casual observer, Mr. Trump's victory in the Republican presidential primary seems an exceptional accident of fate. However, as Dr. Kriner explained, Trump took advantage of the media and long-term political phenomena to propel his one-man show to dizzying heights. Trump defeated multiple establishment candidates—like Jeb Bush, whose super PAC raised more than $100 million—and several other 'outsider' candidates, such as Dr. Ben Carson, who enjoyed relatively high favorability among the Republican base at the start of the campaign. 

Dr. Kriner linked Trump's rise to both rising global anti-immigration and anti-trade sentiments and to the reforms done to the presidential primary system after the disastrous 1968 Democratic National Convention. The McGovern-Fraser Commission, which studied the Democrats' primary process after the 1968 presidential election in an attempt to prevent party infighting, led to a far more democratic process of nominating presidential candidates, which spread to the Republican Party over time. 

The reforms ushered in by the commission, Dr. Kriner says, led more candidates to enter primaries, and, most importantly, made presidential campaigns more candidate-centric than party-centric. Donald Trump—with his distinctive personality and ability to attract wall-to-wall media coverage—is the perfect fit for such an environment. Dr. Kriner estimated that Trump has received about $2 billion in free advertising through such coverage.
 
Pivoting to the general election, Dr. Kriner then explained some basic election models to the Groton audience, specifically, models that do not use data from direct polling of voters. He presented a model that incorporates the Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS)—a figure that the University of Michigan collects in order to gauge ordinary Americans' confidence in the economy. He also used unemployment data and the approval rating of the incumbent president to develop the model. Combining these three statistics, Dr. Kriner was able to predict with a remarkable degree of accuracy whether an incumbent president's party would maintain control.

After explaining his model and illustrating its accuracy, Dr. Kriner then entered recent figures for unemployment, presidential approval ratings, and ICS, and found that the model predicted a victory for the Democratic Party by a margin of just over 1 percent in the popular vote come November 8. However, he compared these with recent polls and found that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was outperforming the model by more than five points. Moreover, Dr. Kriner noted that he was using polling figures collected before October 7—when the Washington Post released a 2005 clip of Donald Trump using graphic, offensive language.
 
Bringing his talk full circle, Dr. Kriner concluded that Donald Trump's victory in the GOP primary earlier this year was—although surprising to many—not implausible given the evolution of presidential primaries since 1968. Furthermore, Secretary Clinton's unexpectedly wide lead over Mr. Trump suggested that after a sensational and entertaining primary season, American voters are now overcorrecting by giving the established but experienced Clinton more support than they otherwise would.
 
After the all-school lecture, Dr. Kriner and about twenty students and faculty walked to the Headmaster's House, where he answered a wide range of questions. Among other topics, he discussed the widening fracture between the left-wing and centrist factions of the Democratic Party, the RNC's thwarted attempts to run a more inclusive party this election cycle, and the prospect of reforming the primary process to make it less chaotic and unpredictable. 

Dr. Kriner's visit to the Circle provided welcome clarification to a student body who, like most Americans, were beginning to feel that this election defies logic. His scientifically calculated political predictions were a reassuring sign that, despite the turbulent state of politics in America right now, the underlying science behind elections remains a powerful analytical tool.—Rand Hough '17, Communications Prefect
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