French politics: houlala!

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

33 minutes ago, Loge said:

I don't see huge discrepancies there either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statewide_opinion_polling_for_the_United_States_presidential_election,_2016

You have to keep in mind that the margin of error is usually larger than for the national popular vote and that some polls were already a bit dated on election day.

Smaller sample, larger margin of error?

[mormont]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I watch the state polls more than the popular vote polls.  Those were way off in the key States that Trump won.  

'Way off' is a descriptor I'd reserve for polls outside the margin of error, which in most cases means wrong by more than 6%.

Even then, there is simply no chance that the polls in France are far enough out that Le Pen could currently be winning, or even be competitive with Macron, and the polls simply aren't showing it. She is behind, way behind, and she needs to close that gap.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Sorry for the brief responses, but I have a ton of new cases on my desk to work. It's gonna be a fun 12 hours......

15 hours ago, theguyfromtheVale said:

@Tywin et al. Complacency is of course the wrong position to take, but I'm not massively worried right now. Macron is ahead by a 20 point margin in the polls right now. That's quite the head start; the polling errors for Trump's election and for Brexit were in the order of 1 to 3 percentage points. The only comparable event to a 20 point miss would be Sanders' primary result in Michigan - and primaries are much harder to poll than actual elections.

It is, but that also leads to higher levels of complacency. And from what I've read he isn't the most inspirational candidate.

14 hours ago, Altherion said:

But if they were going to do that, why didn't they do it in the first round? Remember, we already had an election with a secret ballot and Le Pen got almost exactly the number of votes pollsters predicted she would get (actually a bit less, but by less than 1%). There is no hidden reserve for Le Pen; she either has to win over people who voted for Mélenchon and Fillon or convince the abstainers to come out an vote for her. The polls say that she is unlikely to do either one in numbers large enough to make a difference.

Because she wasn't their first choice. Look at it like the never Trump Republicans who ended up voting for him anyways. Also, more on hidden reserves in a minute.

14 hours ago, Rippounet said:

I don't think anyone is dismissing the possibility of a Le Pen victory out of hand, but the obstacles she faces are formidable.

 

Huh? It seems like almost everyone is dismissing it. Look in this very thread.

14 hours ago, Rippounet said:

- Yes, 95% of Le Pen supporters will make it to the polls. But so will the people who voted Macron in the first round. The fact remains that she now needs to convince more people than Macron, which should prove extremely difficult.

 

Doubtful. His supporters are no where near as enthusiastic. Turnout will be down for him.

14 hours ago, Rippounet said:

 

That being said, Le Pen is certainly trying her best to convince Mélenchon voters to switch to her. She may end up doing better than the 12% or 9% predicted on that front. Mélenchon and his supporters have a history of opposing the National Front though, so it's doubtful they would massively turn to Le Pen, but she may manage to convince most of them to abstain and thus make the race a much closer thing.

 

Yeah I've seen a lot of reporting on this. It sounds like the far left and the far right in France hate each other while also agreeing on a lot of policies. This is where Le Pen's surprise reserves might come from.

14 hours ago, Rippounet said:

 

Generally speaking, I think the danger of complacency doesn't lie with us, the observers (and voters) but with Macron himself. He has a nice headstart, but he needs to show that he can defend a project rather than merely criticize Le Pen for hers. Right now, I don't think he's doing too well. He should be focusing on explaining why his program is the right choice instead of relying on the anti-fascist sentiment. While the anti-fascist sentiment may prove enough for him to win, it it will also robb him of his legitimacy as president. Of course, asking the man to act presidential may be too much, since he was never the people's candidate in the first place and he has little actual experience of politics.

 

 

Hmmmm.....This sounds familiar. Recently was there another boring centrist candidate who rested on their laurels because they thought they had it in the bag?

I can't think of a single one.

Oh wait...

[Loge]

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Smaller sample, larger margin of error?

Yes, exactly. That's why the sample shouldn't be much smaller than 1000 but making it much bigger won't gain you much either. Some pollsters here use 2500, but most use 1000. Probably to big an effort to do for all 50 US states.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_of_error

[Rippounet]

9 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Doesn't Brexit weaken the neo-liberalism of the EU a tad? Surely the UK was one of the most neo-liberal members, i.e. had pretty much the weakest welfare states. So with it gone is there a better chance for moving away from neo-liberalism?

That's what many are hoping for. Macron doesn't seem to be a step in that direction though.

47 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Doubtful. His supporters are no where near as enthusiastic.

But you don't know that, do you? Right here on the ground I find Macron supporters to be just as enthusiastic about their candidate as the others. And because Macron won the first round one can assume they are about as numerous as Le Pen's  -as incredible as it is.

47 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Turnout will be down for him.

There's absolutely zero reason to say that. People who voted for Macron in the first round when there were plenty of alternatives have absolutely no reason not to do so in the second round.

47 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Because she wasn't their first choice. Look at it like the never Trump Republicans who ended up voting for him anyways. Also, more on hidden reserves in a minute.

Yeah I've seen a lot of reporting on this. It sounds like the far left and the far right in France hate each other while also agreeing on a lot of policies. This is where Le Pen's surprise reserves might come from.

Every single source I have (whether it be the Mélenchon supporters I know, the polls, the articles and analyses in the media... etc) shows that the threat is that they abstain. Very few of them even consider voting for Le Pen.

It's ironic because a lot of attention is focused (in the media as well) on Mélenchon supporters because they "might" vote Le Pen, when any reasonable analysis concludes this is rather unlikely. Meanwhile we know for a fact that about a third of the conservatives who voted for Fillon will vote for Le Pen, and nobody seems to care. Probably because pointing out that xenophobia and nationalism are quite common among "traditional" conservatives might ruffle a few feathers...
 

[Altherion]

Here is a FiveThirtyEight article with several views on the topic. Strangely enough, there do exist people who are giving Le Pen much better odds than one would expect and even putting money on it:

Quote

The same polls show Macron in a dominant position in the runoff. He leads Le Pen by 26 percentage points in polls testing the two-way matchup, according to data compiled by G. Elliott Morris of The Crosstab.

And yet, observers of the race seem cautious about Macron’s chances. Betting markets give Le Pen a 13 percent chance — about 1 in 7. Ian Bremmer, a political scientist who runs The Eurasia Group, has given Le Pen a 40 percent chance, meanwhile. (Bremmer’s estimate wasn’t based on any sort of statistical model; he argues that the polls don’t reflect major elements of French politics.) And esteemed publications such as The Guardian are questioning whether the polls can be trusted at all, despite their accuracy on Sunday

I wouldn't read too much into Bremmer's 40% (it's usually possible to cherry-pick an outlier), but the betting markets are just bizarre: Le Pen's odds are better than they gave Trump just before the election and it's not clear why nobody has driven them lower yet. Silver concludes that nobody is coming back from being down 20+ points and that sounds pretty reasonable.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 hours ago, Rippounet said:

 

But you don't know that, do you? Right here on the ground I find Macron supporters to be just as enthusiastic about their candidate as the others. And because Macron won the first round one can assume they are about as numerous as Le Pen's  -as incredible as it is.

There's absolutely zero reason to say that. People who voted for Macron in the first round when there were plenty of alternatives have absolutely no reason not to do so in the second round.

I guess I can't say I know that for sure, but it's what all the analysts I've heard have said. And the reason why it's fair to speculate that people who voted for Macron will show up in lesser numbers is because of overconfidence. 

Look, I'm not saying that I think Le Pen will win, but her path is not as absurd as some people make it out to be. 

[mormont]

13 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Look, I'm not saying that I think Le Pen will win, but her path is not as absurd as some people make it out to be. 

I dunno. It's not impossible, but it's considerably less likely than either of the events people keep citing as precedent (Trump/Brexit). Those were surprises. This would be something else.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

5 hours ago, mormont said:

I dunno. It's not impossible, but it's considerably less likely than either of the events people keep citing as precedent (Trump/Brexit). Those were surprises. This would be something else.

It would be quite shocking. 

[Rippounet]

19 minutes ago, Triskan said:

I just learned that Melenchon (sorry, don't know an easy way to do the accent mark) said that he wanted a "Bolivarian Alliance" with Cuba and Venezuela.  That's pretty hardcore.

To be clear, he wanted France to join the ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALBA
Whether or not it's hardcore is a question of perspective. It certainly didn't sell well in the media.

So... Things are not looking too good here. Le Pen is pulling off a pretty good campaign and even won over a minor Gaullist candidate (he won 4,7% of the vote) by promising him the premiership if she is elected president. Macron's campaign seems to be stagnating and his numbers have dropped a bit in some polls. Everyone seems to be accusing everyone else of being responsible for Le Pen's rise. There are a lot of minor scandals about very high-ranking National Front members (negationsim, homophobia, hate speech... etc) and many calls to oppose fascism in the country, but Macron seems like he just can't convince voters to share in his enthusiasm for his program (in his defense, he seems to be trying).
He should still win (his odds are still excellent), but people are starting to be a bit worried now (and Breitbart has started publishing articles predicting her victory). It may prove salutory in the end, since abstention is the major threat, but the next week isn't going to be easy. There's a real possibility that Le Pen gets more than 40% of the vote now, which is disastrous for the future.

[Altherion]

6 hours ago, Rippounet said:

He should still win (his odds are still excellent), but people are starting to be a bit worried now (and Breitbart has started publishing articles predicting her victory). It may prove salutory in the end, since abstention is the major threat, but the next week isn't going to be easy. There's a real possibility that Le Pen gets more than 40% of the vote now, which is disastrous for the future.

From the most recent polls, it looks like she went from being down by around 26% to down by about 20% (i.e. almost exactly 60-40). This looks like a substantial change for a single week, but it just about matches her previous high point so it could just be the peak of a fluctuation. It would be much better evidence of a real shift if she could go beyond that even by a little bit (e.g. make it 58-42). Of course, even in that case there is no plausible scenario in which she wins, but her loss will look somewhat more respectable.

[denstorebog]

17 hours ago, Rippounet said:

He should still win (his odds are still excellent), but people are starting to be a bit worried now 

I've always wondered if worry or optimism was the greatest obstacle to voter absention in these types of voting scenarios.

But god damn, 40% for the neo-fascists. And Marine Le Pen is ~50 years old now. She'll have at least 4 future elections in her, if she's up to it. It seems almost inevitable that she will become president at some point, if not this time around. I hope Macron has a whopper of a strategy for appealing to the working class throughout his presidency up his sleeve, because as a central opposition figure over the next years, Le Pen is going to be leading the first round of the next election and hit >50% in the second round if things keep polarizing along the current lines.

All we can really hope for is a Melenchon/Sanders type figure to start doing to real ground work over the coming years to siphon away Le Pen's non-asshole voters.

[ljkeane]

So what does Macron really stand for other than not being as bad as Le Pen? I must admit after reading a few profiles the main thing I've retained is that he's married to his ex teacher after an extremely dubious relationship. Is he just sort of running as a generic centrist/centre-right candidate or is there more to it than that?

[Loge]

20 hours ago, ljkeane said:

So what does Macron really stand for other than not being as bad as Le Pen? I must admit after reading a few profiles the main thing I've retained is that he's married to his ex teacher after an extremely dubious relationship. Is he just sort of running as a generic centrist/centre-right candidate or is there more to it than that?

Well, looks like he is pro-business but not right-wing. Sort of a French version of New Labour or the German Social Democrats under Schröder. And he can pose as being anti-establishment with his newly founded party without being politically extreme in any way. 

[mormont]

21 hours ago, denstorebog said:

All we can really hope for is a Melenchon/Sanders type figure to start doing to real ground work over the coming years to siphon away Le Pen's non-asshole voters.

I don't know much about Melenchon but the idea that Sanders was/could have siphoned away non-asshole Trump voters seems... unsupported by any actual evidence. I strongly doubt that Melenchon could do this for Le Pen voters.

These voters are not voting for illiberal right-wingers because they're so desperate for a proper left-wing candidate.

[Rippounet]

2 hours ago, Loge said:

Well, looks like he is pro-business but not right-wing. Sort of a French version of New Labour or the German Social Democrats under Schröder.

He's very pro-business (and pro-finance) and his main objective seems to "reform" the labor laws. He's already made firing people and working on sundays easier for instance, and generally speaking has started doing away with a lot of regulations that protected workers from pressure by their employer to work more. He's also quite ambiguous as far as welfare is concerned, claiming he wants to protect it, but either freezing or cutting spending.
He's center-right in my book.

1 hour ago, mormont said:

I don't know much about Melenchon but the idea that Sanders was/could have siphoned away non-asshole Trump voters seems... unsupported by any actual evidence. I strongly doubt that Melenchon could do this for Le Pen voters.

These voters are not voting for illiberal right-wingers because they're so desperate for a proper left-wing candidate.

We know for a fact that Le Pen is doing very well in regions that were historical bastions of the left so she has been attracting people disapointed with the socialists and communists. Whether these voters can be persuaded to come back to the fold is an open question. Polls suggest some have in fact been convinced by Mélenchon but they seem to represent a small fraction of the overall numbers.

In the long-run however, what may prove crucial is whether the perception that there is a threat to Western civilization can go away. If ISIS is destroyed in the Middle-East (or reduced to dominating tiny pockets of lawless areas) perhaps it will slowly start reducing islamophobia.

[denstorebog]

2 hours ago, mormont said:

I don't know much about Melenchon but the idea that Sanders was/could have siphoned away non-asshole Trump voters seems... unsupported by any actual evidence. I strongly doubt that Melenchon could do this for Le Pen voters.

These voters are not voting for illiberal right-wingers because they're so desperate for a proper left-wing candidate.

There's a reason why Sanders is spending his time traversing rural America. The far-right has hijacked the notion of the workers' party by linking immigration to job loss and poverty. All over Europe, voters have migrated from the old socialst parties who have changed over time and are no longer represented by people with roots in the labour unions or who have done one hour of manual labour in their life. Where have those voters gone? Far right.

You don't win those voters back with more big government center-leftists, you win them back with candidates who care about minimum wages, affordable health care plans, etc. If voters can decide to move from party A to party B because party A is no longer what it used to be, I don't see why you can't reverse the tide by rediscovering what party A used to be. Here in Europe, that would be socialism anno 1980. That is what Sanders represents to me as well.

[mormont]

6 hours ago, Rippounet said:

We know for a fact that Le Pen is doing very well in regions that were historical bastions of the left so she has been attracting people disapointed with the socialists and communists.

This is the song that's been sung about Labour constituencies in the North-East of England, but it turns out not to be as simple as 'the far right are doing well in these formerly left-wing working class areas, so left-wing voters must suddenly be turning to them'. Instead it appears that the increase in their vote is made up of a, voters in those areas defecting from traditional right-wing parties and b, voters who had already defected from the left to other parties, often some time ago. In the latter case, enticing them back is obviously not as straightforward as has been assumed.

5 hours ago, denstorebog said:

There's a reason why Sanders is spending his time traversing rural America.

Yes there is. He has completely swallowed the line that these crucial voters are just waiting to hear the message he's been promoting his whole career. And who wouldn't, in his position? But it doesn't mean he's right to do so.

[Rippounet]

2 hours ago, mormont said:

This is the song that's been sung about Labour constituencies in the North-East of England, but it turns out not to be as simple as 'the far right are doing well in these formerly left-wing working class areas, so left-wing voters must suddenly be turning to them'. Instead it appears that the increase in their vote is made up of a, voters in those areas defecting from traditional right-wing parties and b, voters who had already defected from the left to other parties, often some time ago. In the latter case, enticing them back is obviously not as straightforward as has been assumed.

For the record, after a bit of research, it appears that you are essentially correct. Which means instead of talking about Mélenchon "winning back" NF voters we should be talking about "winning" them full stop.

[Rippounet]

Just for the lulz: so 250,000 Mélenchon supporters (the most passionate ones) said how they will vote in the second round. The results come straight from the official "France unbowed" website:

- 36,1% will cast a white vote (or a null one, which means they'll probably write "Mélenchon" on their ballot paper).
- 34,8% will vote for Macron.
- 29,1% will abstain.

Of course, that's just a small percentage of the 7 million votes that Mélenchon got in the first round, but his core supporters at least are obviously not tempted by neo-fascism.

I have to add though, that according to a recent survey, 47% of people who voted Mélenchon in the first round will choose Macron and 19% Le Pen. For Fillon it's 49% and 25% respectively.