In two separate posts at The Glittering Eye, Dave Schuler highlights opposing arguments regarding which political party has the advantage heading into the 2016 elections. The conclusions that the two pieces reach couldn’t possibly be more opposite in how they see 2016 turning out for their respective parties. Since they both can’t possibly be right, though, it’s not at all clear that either one should be taken all that seriously.

First up, there’s Democratic Pollster Stan Greenberg, who forsees a big Democratic wave coming:

The United States is being transformed by revolutions remaking the country at an accelerating and surprising pace. Witness the revolutions in technology, the Internet, big data and energy, though just as important are the tremendous changes taking place in immigration, racial and ethnic diversity, the family, religious observance and gender roles. These are reaching their apexes in the booming metropolitan centers and among millennials.

As the revolutions interact, they are accelerating the emergence of a new America. Consider that nearly 40 percent of New York City’s residents are foreign-born, with Chinese the second-largest group behind Dominicans. The foreign-born make up nearly 40 percent of Los Angeles’s residents and 58 percent of Miami’s. A majority of U.S. households are headed by unmarried people, and, in cities, 40 percent of households include only a single person. Church attendance is in decline, and non-religious seculars now outnumbermainline Protestants. Three-quarters of working-age women are in the labor force, and two-thirds of women are the breadwinners or co-breadwinners of their households. The proportion of racial minorities is approaching 40 percent, but blowing up all projections are the 15 percent of new marriages that are interracial. People are moving from the suburbs to the cities. And in the past five years, two-thirds of millennial college graduates have settled in the 50 largest cities, transforming them.

Shifting attitudes were underscored in this year’s Gallup Poll when 60 to 70 percent of the country said gay and lesbian relations, having a baby outside of marriage, sex between an unmarried man and woman, and divorce are all “morally acceptable.”

The United States is emerging out of its revolutions as racially blended, immigrant, multinational and multilingual — and diversity is becoming more central to our multicultural identity.

Further, these revolutionary transformations have accelerated the growth of a new majority coalition of racial minorities, single women, millennials and seculars. Together, these groups formed 51 percent of the electorate in 2012, but our analysis of census survey data and exit poll projections indicates that they will comprise fully 63 percent in 2016. With these growing groups each supporting Hillary Clinton by more than 2 to 1 in today’s polls, it is fair to say that the United States has reached an electoral tipping point.

The Republican Party’s battle to defeat this new majority has reached a tipping point, too. The brand of the Republican Party today has probably not been as tarnished since the Watergate era.

(…)

For Republicans, 2016 will prove to be no normal election, because it will confirm that the new America is here and that the counterrevolution has lost. That is why I expect the result to be shattering for the Republican Party as we know it.

Eric Fehrnstrom, a top Republican political adviser who served as one of Mitt Romney’s most trusted adviser’s sees things differently:

Likewise, there are two statistical measurements that, more than anything else, will determine whether the White House changes parties in 2016: Obama’s job approval and the direction of the country, measured by whether voters think we’re on the right track or the wrong track.

In terms of job approval, Obama has been under 50 percent for most of his presidency. The most recent Real Clear Politics monthly polling average says just 45 percent of Americans approve of the job Obama has been doing, while 52 percent disapprove. If the president remains net negative, voters should expect to hear a lot from Republicans on how the Democratic nominee is really running for Obama’s third term.

The Real Clear Politics average also says 64 percent of all voters think the country is on the wrong track. Only 27 percent believe we are headed in the right direction. As with job approval, if this number stays inverted, it’s going to be difficult for a Democrat to win no matter what.

The only question is which Republican will reap the benefits.

Off the top, it’s important to remember where both Greenberg and Fehrnstrom are coming from. Notwithstanding whatever claims either one of them might make to the contrary, neither one should be considered an objective political analyst who is simply looking at the political model they find to be the most persuasive and sharing the conclusions that they believe that model points to. They are, instead, both partisans of long standing who have a history of making arguments that are designed to advance the interests of their respective parties, or to send a message to their party when they believe it isn’t acting in an advantageous manner. Analyses such as these are also intended to reach the eyes of members of the news media and the pundit class to put ideas into their head that could potentially end up being repeated further down the line, or to shape the way that the election itself is covered. Partisan analysts of this type are also not above making comments that are, in the end, designed as much to attempt to demoralize the opposition as anything else. None of these is meant to lessen the reputations of either Greenberg or Fehrnstrom, They are both very good at what they do and the arguments that they make are worthy of consideration. At the same time, and as always, it’s worth remembering that the arguments themselves may have ulterior motives behind them.

So with those caveats in mind, who has the better argument?

Greenberg’s argument, essentially, is one that we’ve heard in the past, and its’ one that does have some empirical evidence to support it. The American electorate is clearly changing, it is becoming less white and more culturally heterogeneous. Additionally, the voting blocs that have traditionally voted Republican are getting older while younger voters, who have been skewing Democratic, are becoming a larger part of the voting age population. It doesn’t take being an expert to see where this trend could inevitably lead as it continues and assuming that the voting behaviors of these voting cohorts don’t change, and it doesn’t look good for Republicans. At the same time, though, it’s worth remember that this is a warning that we’ve been hearing for several election cycles now and it hasn’t completely materialized. For one thing, this is because many of the growing voting groups — young people and Latinos specifically — tend to have lower voter turnout numbers than other parts of the population, meaning that their impact on election outcomes has been far less than some have thought. This has been especially true in the last two mid-term elections, both of which saw significant gains for Republicans. Even the 2008 and 2012 elections don’t necessarily help Greenberg’s forecast of a Democratic wave. The outcome of the 2008 election was influenced in no small part by the state of the economy and public rejection of the Bush Administration as a result of the Iraq War. Additionally, while the GOP lost the race for the White House in 2012, there was no wave at the Congressional or state level, and the fact that they were running against a popular incumbent in a year when the economy was doing well, which made the prospect of unseating the President unlikely to begin with. If the situation is similar in 2016 then Greenberg’s forecast of a wave would seem to be wildly optimistic.

Fehrnstrom’s argument, which relies principally on traditional polling information and public attitudes about the direction of the country, also has merit. It has generally been the case that if the incumbent President is viewed unfavorably then it is likely to be detrimental to his party even if he isn’t the one on the ticket. The impact of that number is enhanced if polling also reflects a pessimistic attitude on the part of the public in the traditional right track/wrong track poll. The evidence behind this analysis can be seen in any number of elections going back over the past thirty years or more. At the same time, though, Fehrnstrom’s analysis also tends to ignore the impact of the factors that Greenberg points out, which are slowly but surely changing the nature of the electorate, especially during Presidential election years when voter turnout is higher:

In one of his two posts on this issue, Dave lays out the likely outcomes in 2016 like this:

A. a wave election for Democrats in which Democrats take the White House, the Senate, and the House.
B. an election in which the Democrats take the White House and, narrowly, the Senate.
C. an election in which the Democrats take the White House, leaving the Senate and the House with Republican majorities.
D. an election in which Republicans take the White House, lose the Senate, and retain the House.
E. an election in which the Republicans take the White House and strengthen their majorities in both houses of Congress.
F. remarkable only in their banality.

Like Dave, I tend to think that most likely outcomes are the ones grouped in B through D, and that the odds of either a Republican or Democratic wave are fairly small. For one thing, the extent to which our politics is seemingly so evenly divided, albeit highly polarized, suggests to me that the likelihood of a wave in either direction seem rather unlikely. This would seem to be especially true if, as expected, the Democratic nominee is Hillary Clinton. Whatever one might say about Clinton, one can most assuredly say that she is a candidate about whom almost everyone has made up their mind. It’s unlikely that people who don’t like Clinton at this point some 23 years after she became a fixture in American politics are going to change their mind about her, for example, and it’s also unlikely that those who support her strongly are suddenly going to reject her in favor of a Republican. For reasons I’ve noted before, it still seems more likely than not that Clinton would win the 270 Electoral Votes she needs to become President than that any Republican would do so, but there is still a narrow avenue of victory for the right Republican candidate for President. Obviously, that analysis changes if the Republicans end up nominating a polarizing candidate like Donald Trump or Ted Cruz.

On the Congressional side, the possibility of anything other than minor change in either chamber seems slim at best. Thanks to the redistricting after the 2010 census and the small number of competitive seats, the odds that the Republicans will lose the House are, at this point exceedingly low. Is it possible that could happen under the right conditions? Yes, but I’d put the odds of the GOP losing control of the House at something significantly below 10% at this point. Things are slightly different in the Senate since Republicans will have to defend seats they won in 2010, including six seats in states that President Obama won in both 2008 and 2012, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Florida. As things stand right now, Republicans are in better shape in some of these states than they are in others, however if the GOP ended up losing all six seats next year and did not offset those loses with a pickup elsewhere, then they would lose control of the Senate. That would require Democrats running the table, though, and that’s not entirely likely. Instead, as of right now, the most likely outcome is that the GOP retains a majority in the Senate in 2016 albeit a smaller one than the 54-46 majority they have today.

As always, these are early predictions worth the pixels they’re written with, but that’s what I think the picture looks like. Partisans in both parties will hope for either Option A or Option E, of course, and those are the people Greenberg and Fehrnstrom are addressing themselves to ultimately. Given the nature of how our elections, go though, it seems fairly clear that Dave’s Option F, another banal election filled with partisan nonsense, is what we’ll end up getting no matter what the final result is.