Oh, Those Wacky Independents

If you watch the right news programs, you will surely have seen a particular tool used by the campaign consultant folks trying to analyze what is, you know, "resonating" with various target audiences who are likely to vote.

That tool consists of a video replay of a candidate saying something, while three tracks, sort of like EKGs except without the pulse, glide along the screen in front of the candidate.  The tracks are red, blue and yellow, and they represent, in order, Republican voters, Democrat voters, and independents (who have to vote for somebody, which we will get back to.

The three tracks move along in a scale which ranges from zero to 100, and that scale represents instantaneous reaction to what the candidate is saying.  Everything starts at "50", which would be a grade of "C", and then each track moves up or down practically with every word out of the candidate's mouth.  You can easily see what phrases go over well and which do not.

Last week, during the dust-up over Donald Trump's words of years back hoping for a real-estate crash so he could buy in, one of the consulting firms' representatives was on TV showing some of the tracking.  The videos were of Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren castigating the Donald for actually wanting to buy low and sell high (the horror!), followed by Trump himself explaining (as if it were needed) that that's what real-estate developers do!

You can imagine how the red and blue tracks went; the Democrats loved Hillary and Mrs. Warren and hated Trump; the Republicans gave Trump a "B" and utterly failed the two Democrats with a big "F."  We are not surprised, of course; Democrats would not understand the business cycle if it ran over them.

But the yellow line, ah, the yellow line.  Those wacky independent voters who are insanely necessary to woo and to get out to vote for you if you want to win, well, they were an interesting lot.  Whatever you might have expected, they tracked quite tightly -- to the Republicans.  Liked what Trump was saying, flunked both Democrats.

Having been watching the same person from the same polling firm come on the same shows for a number of months, I can tell you two things.

First, if they somehow imputed bias into their work, they would never get hired, because their results would be unusable.  But this tracking methodology removes bias, since no questions are asked and it is only an evaluation of the candidates' own words.

Second, the results of last week, wherein the independents tracked with the Republicans and decidedly not with the Democrats (or at least not with Hillary), is the overwhelmingly consistent outcome of almost all these instant-polling surveys.  Constantly.  They may not track as high or as tightly some times, but they certainly identify with what Trump is saying, whether on business, the border, ISIS or space exploration.

There is a presidential election coming up here in about five months.  Hillary Clinton, if she is not in prison by then (which is, incidentally, looking a bit more plausible now), will be running against Trump in that race.  And as unpleasant a candidate as she is, as grating to listen to, as ineffective a campaigner and as generally untrustworthy as everyone regards her, Hillary does indeed need every vote.

These surveys are devastating to her.  Already she is polling mostly behind Trump, and that's before the State Department's independent Inspector General, appointed by the Obama Administration, nailed her in a scathing finding regarding her use of a private email server.  She has nowhere to go but down, because we already know who Hillary Clinton is.

The only place she can find a big pile of votes is with the self-declared independents.  But these surveys, month after month, are finding that the appeal is not with the former first lady, but with the guy who has spent one-tenth as much in the campaign as she has.  Perhaps they feel that kind of fiscal responsibility might live well in the White House.  Slash a few departments, cut the bloated Federal payroll to only those people actually delivering Constitutionally-mandated services, perhaps.

Those wacky independents appear to be finding an electoral home, and it isn't Chappaqua, where it looks like Mrs. Clinton is going to return come November.

Or prison.  I'm good either way.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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