For Worried Democrats: All Eyes on WikiLeaks
When a fundraising scandal threatened his reelection in 1996, Bill Clinton stonewalled. Can Hillary do the same with the Clinton Foundation?
By John Fund — August 21, 2016
Much of the media are already declaring the election an all-but-certain win for Hillary Clinton. Today, the political forecasting site FiveThirtyEight, using polls plus historical and economic data, gives Hillary a 74.7 percent chance of being elected. But smart Democrats are resisting overconfidence; they know a lot can happen before the election. “American politics is freaky and can turn on a dime and in the other direction in one news cycle,” Democratic strategist Brad Bannon admitted last week,
Forecasts like the one from FiveThirtyEight are often based on a combination of polls, economic conditions, and factors such as the popularity of the incumbent president. They clearly don’t include the inevitable “x factors” in a campaign, such as the performances in presidential debates, possible terrorist attacks, and mega gaffes by one or more of the candidates. They also ignore the impact a late-breaking scandal can have on a race. Donald Trump has to worry about a potential leak from his IRS tax returns (it happened to Mitt Romney in 2012). Hillary Clinton has known since the Democratic convention in Philadelphia just how disruptive a WikiLeaks revelations can be — the leaks of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee cost chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz her job.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/node/439217/print
