Kyle Kondik is managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a nonpartisan political newsletter produced by the University of Virginia Center for Politics. He also directs the center’s Washington, D.C., office. Geoffrey Skelley is associate editor at Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Larry J. Sabato is university professor of politics and director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, which publishes the online, free Crystal Ball politics newsletter every Thursday, and a contributing editor at Politico Magazine. His most recent book is The Kennedy Half-Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy.

We still have well over 500 days to the 2016 presidential election. At this point, the campaign is largely just performance art for the press and the donor class. This is the silly season, where partisans can dream and pundits can speculate wildly.

Maybe this is the year, they theorize, that an independent billionaire enters the race and edges out the major-party nominees (even though nothing like it has ever happened, Ross Perot included), or that California goes Republican or Texas Democratic (even though there’s no evidence either state will change its partisan hue in 2016). These fallacies will be exposed once the contest shifts into high gear next year and the factual grounding for this pontificating dwindles from meager to nonexistent.


It’s the less outrageous assertions we’ve been hearing in Act I of the campaign, those that have congealed into conventional wisdom, that are in greater need of a debunking. Below we separate a few such myths from the underlying realities.

Myth #1: The giant Republican field is unpredictable, almost anybody’s game.

With 10 Republican presidential hats in the ring, and perhaps another 10 to come, we all know the GOP is going to have the largest field in living memory. Increasingly, surveys are showing 10 or more candidates bunched in the single or low double-digits. The most recent Quinnipiac poll headlined a finding that has no modern precedent: five contenders tied at 10 percent each.

But the closeness of the race is a mirage, a false projection of the reality that exists just below the surface. At this very early stage, when every week more candidates declare, the public is mainly not engaged—not even the select contingent of voters that will turn up to cast ballots in the caucuses and primaries.

Republicans are hungry to reoccupy the White House, and the realistic among them understand the party won’t win without pitching a bigger tent. There may be no single GOP frontrunner, but there are just a few politicians who have the resources, positioning and potential to expand the base. They are former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, not necessarily in that order.

Everyone can see that Jeb Bush is doing poorly so far. He’s in a much worse position than his father was in 1987 or his brother was in 1999. This Bush intimidates no one. His political skills are rusty, he’s a pedestrian speaker and some of his views (immigration reform, Common Core, etc.) have made him many enemies among party ideologues.

Yet Bush is still undeniably among the frontrunners. The GOP’s donor class is disproportionately for him, as his Super PAC fundraising total will soon reveal. The party’s organizational leaders who care only about winning argue for him. The largest share of top elected Republicans back him openly or covertly. Four Republican senators are running, but private talks with GOP senators lead us to believe more Republican senators are rooting for Bush than for the quartet of their Senate colleagues combined.

Then there’s the experience factor. Jeb may not have been on a ballot himself since 2002, but he has been at the heart of six prior national campaigns, his father’s four (1980, 1984, 1988 and 1992) and his brother’s recent two. No other Republican candidate can boast more than one such trial by fire.

At the same time, Bush isn’t a shoo-in for the nomination. Compared to earlier decades, today’s GOP is considerably less hierarchical and deferential to the leadership. Political money can’t be hoarded by the best-known name, nor by the candidates closest to the formal party leadership. Gobs of campaign cash are just a rich person away; so far there’s seemingly a billionaire backing just about every major candidate. Finally, Jeb Bush is the early favorite in none of the gateway states, that is, the first four to vote (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada).

On top of that, Bush has formidable company in the frontrunner’s circle. One of the first big surprises of this cycle has been Marco Rubio’s success. Few thought there would be a second Floridian in the race, or that Rubio could challenge Bush as an equal in the Sunshine State and elsewhere. There are many reasons for Rubio’s rise, including his potential ability to shrink the Democratic advantage among Hispanics and the generational contrast he can offer against Hillary Clinton. It is true that Rubio’s single term as U.S. senator presents a skimpy resume, but that didn’t stop Barack Obama.

While less charismatic than Rubio, Scott Walker undeniably makes the frontrunner list as well. He has strong domestic chops, plus the potential to create a Midwestern path to victory for both the nomination and the general election. Wisconsin is in Iowa’s Midwest neighborhood, and that’s part of why Walker is ahead in Iowa, but he also seems to be in the party’s sweet spot on a host of economic and social issues. Foreign policy is a major weakness, yet he’s drilling almost daily with his in-house experts to bone up. And Walker has already gone from an uninspiring orator to a competent and sometimes imposing stump speaker. There’s still much work to do: Walker doesn’t usually strike neutral observers as having the stature and bearing of a president (his lack of a college degree doesn’t help in that regard). But he should not be underestimated.

If you’re looking for a dark-horse entrant into the first tier, it might be John Kasich. Few would bet on him today, but no sensible party will easily dismiss a popular two-term governor of swing-state Ohio. And Kasich’s federal, state and private sector experiences comprise impressive preparation for the presidency. The primary obstacle for Kasich are his positions on Obamacare and Common Core, which have earned him the RINO label. He also has to generate interest in a hurry so he can get into the upcoming debates, for which he currently does not qualify. And Kasich must make a convincing case that he’s not just another Jon Huntsman, who won more plaudits from the media than votes from Republicans in 2012.

What of the other GOP candidates? They all have advantages, as we’ve outlined elsewhere. A few will manage to win some primaries or caucuses. But if winning in November is the goal, Republicans will settle on Bush, Rubio or Walker. Some of the other candidates are too far right to win swing states, others are controversial and divisive within the party itself, still more are novices who have never held elective office, or retreads and golden oldies whose time has passed. It may look like an enormous, amorphous field of candidates, but already it’s clear that three candidates loom large.

Myth #2: Hillary Clinton’s favorability is in free-fall.

On March 2, 2015, when the story about Hillary Clinton using a private e-mail address while secretary of state broke, her average favorability/unfavorability split in the HuffPost Pollster average of national polls was 48 percent favorable to 46 percent unfavorable. Now, three months later, after countless stories about the e-mails, the fundraising of the Clinton Foundation and her refusal to take questions from the press and unscreened voters, Clinton’s favorable/unfavorable split is 46 percent favorable to 48 percent unfavorable.

In other words, a quarter of a year of largely unanswered negative publicity has moved the numbers against her only two points.

It’s true that Clinton’s favorability was much higher in the recent past. While secretary of state, her average national favorability was in the high 50s for essentially her entire term. But this was largely a product of serving in a less partisan position, and predictably when she left office and became a clear if unannounced candidate to succeed President Obama, her numbers dropped.

By the end of 2013, her favorability split was 50 percent favorable to 43 percent unfavorable, better but not dramatically different than where her numbers are now. By the start of 2015 her favorability was 47 percent/45 percent—again, better than now, but only marginally so. Recent reports highlighting that “more people have an unfavorable view of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton now than at any time since 2001,” are technically accurate, but they overstate the case when one looks at the polls collectively and over time.

Recent national surveys have also detected a significant decline in Clinton’s trustworthiness. But that’s not necessarily a deal breaker for Clinton—it certainly wasn’t for her husband, as National Journal’s Ron Brownstein pointed out recently. Brownstein looked at 1996 exit polls and found, “Clinton won nearly one-fifth of those voters who did not consider him trustworthy and almost one-fourth who doubted him on Whitewater.” Moving presidential voters from one major-party candidate to the other is exceedingly hard, and it will take a lot more than what we’ve seen so far to get Democrats to vote for a Republican.

More important for the task immediately in front of her, Clinton’s standing in the Democratic primary field appears not to have changed much. She still comfortably leads national polls of Democrats, winning more than half of the voters polled while none of her opponents even cracks a fifth. The gold-standard Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register Iowa caucus poll showed her with 56 percent of the vote in late January before the e-mail story broke, and a late May poll showed her at 57 percent. Other Iowa polls confirm her lead. There’s a long way to go until the actual voting begins, but Clinton’s problems have not drawn an especially credible challenger into the field, Bernie Sanders’ recent big swing-state crowds and positive poll movement notwithstanding. Winning the presidency is a two-step process, and most never get past the nomination phase. Clinton remains well on her way to climbing atop that first big step.

This should not be read as a defense of Clinton’s ethics, or as an argument that the coverage of her e-mails, her family’s foundation and her time as secretary of state is unjustified or unfair. She merits intense media scrutiny, not just because there’s plenty that’s fishy about her family’s foundation and the way she handled her e-mail, but also because she might waltz to the Democratic nomination without her opponents seriously challenging her on these issues. Perhaps one of these stories will produce some truly damning development that seriously harms her candidacy. We just haven’t seen it yet.

Gyrations in her various matchups with potential Republican opponents are also getting more attention than they deserve. According to The Timeline of Presidential Elections by political scientists Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien, horserace polls even six months before an election are not very predictive. “Clearly, although any presidential candidate would prefer to be ahead in mid-April of the election year, electoral prospects often change by the final polls before Election Day,” they write.

News flash: It’s not April of the election year—even that date is 10 months away. The horse race polls mean little now, especially because the Republican field is devoid of an outright frontrunner.

A lack of predictive value for the early polls cuts both ways, though. Clinton is not, in our minds, the automatic favorite to win the presidency, though she’s also not necessarily an underdog, either. This far in advance, the only logical nonpartisan projection is an election likely to be close and competitive.

While she starts with an easier path to 270 electoral votes based on recent history, a national swing toward the GOP of just 2 or 3 points from Obama’s reelection win would probably wash away the so-called “blue wall.” Obama’s approval rating has settled into a consistent range of about 45 percent to 46 percent, depending on the polling average. That’s better, though not markedly better, than his numbers before last year’s midterm, but his popularity ratio remains underwater, which could harm the Democrats’ chances. And Clinton has to fight a generic public desire for change as she seeks a third straight Democratic White House term.

Myth #3: Billionaires are buying the 2016 election.

Politics is awash in money today, and there is little reason to think the 2016 cycle won’t break all previous fundraising and spending records. Clinton’s campaign and its allies reportedly have a goal to raise a combined $2.5 billion. That is more money than the roughly $2 billion that the 2012 general election candidates and their support groups raised and spent combined. Bush’s Super PAC, Right to Rise, apparently expected to have $100 million by the end of May, a 100-day fundraising record for a GOP presidential bid (though reports now suggest it will fall short of that mark). The Koch brothers alone have famously promised to spend close to $900 million this cycle.

Despite the mountain of cash that will be spent on campaign activities, those dollars are unlikely to decisively alter the outcome of the 2016 general election. Without question, the increasingly oligarchical nature of American campaign financing is troubling, but the presidential outcome itself won’t be determined by the whims of mega-donors. The polarized American electorate and the partisan nature of the money chase ensure it.

Voters in presidential races are overwhelmingly hunkered down in their respective party camps. In 2012 the American National Election Study showed that 91 percent of partisan identifiers (including independents leaning toward a party) voted for their own party’s presidential nominee. Given the near-certainty that we’ll have a no-holds-barred, highly partisan race for the White House, it’s entirely possible that proportion will go up, not down, in 2016. Meanwhile, less than a tenth of the electorate will be made up of “pure independents,” and their voting habits suggest that, barring a major economic shock or other big unforeseen event, they’ll split relatively evenly in the end.

So what impact will all that campaign money actually have?

If invested heavily in voter contact, cash can help a campaign better turn out its voters, since the lion’s share of the electorate is already locked-in. But donors often prefer their money go to something they can see and hear in their own homes, TV advertising, despite the fact the ads’ effect on voters is short-lived.

As John Sides and Lynn Vavreck showed in The Gamble, a useful recap of what actually happened in 2012, if one side had a serious advertising advantage on a single day, that candidate could increase his or her vote share as much as four points. But that kind of advertising edge very rarely occurred, even during Mitt Romney’s ad blitz in the final week of the campaign. And the boost from the ad imbalance lasted only about a day.

This leads to our second point: aggressive fundraising in a presidential contest will likely produce near-parity in campaign cash. Four years ago, each side doled out about $1 billion on the way to November. While we can’t know for sure how things will end up in 2016, it seems unlikely that one side will manage to drown the other out. There are so many billionaires already committed to each party. And the stakes will be too high for big and small donors to let their side be dramatically outspent.

Let’s also remember that 2016 spending will be geographically confined to a handful of true battlegrounds. This includes outside expenditures, which inevitably will be targeted to swing states, too. This happened in the midterm elections last year. As Emory University’s Alan Abramowitz found, over 90 percent of outside spending in 2014 took place in just 10 Senate contests and, in the end, that spending essentially made no impact on the election outcomes; the partisan leaning of a state and Senate incumbency were far more relevant. On top of that, the mountain of TV dollars thrown into contested states in 2016 may lead to diminishing returns because of media oversaturation.

A more uncertain question is the importance of money in the primaries. In the 2012 cycle, Romney vastly outraised his losing primary opponents. But we also witnessed the impact of a single wealthy backer propping up a contender. Most notably, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and investor Foster Friess gave millions to Super PACs boosting Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, respectively. The 2016 primary campaign may well see the Super PAC system on steroids. For example, Ted Cruz’s Super PACs (candidates may have more than one) have already received millions, in part through the beneficence of hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer.

With few restrictions on campaign finance, every primary candidate could find a couple of wealthy donors to back his or her presidential bid. If everyone has at least some money, that will make it harder for Jeb Bush or someone else to overwhelm the opposition. But as Emily Flitter of Reuters points out, a candidate who may be seen as a billionaire lackey could suffer at the ballot box, as the recent Democratic primary for Philadelphia mayor suggests. Moreover, just because someone has a lot of money to throw around doesn’t mean he or she will do so effectively or efficiently.

Myth #4: The candidates are all-important.

Voters’ evaluations of their party have remained fairly constant over the past several decades, but their views of the other party are far darker. Voters are now more motivated than at any time in recent political history by a loathing of the other side (and there are few hard-core independents). Increasingly, Americans are voting against the opposing party rather than for their own.

That’s a trend that connects directly to the three myths we’ve already discussed. The GOP nominee should be able to unify his party even if the nomination battle is divisive. Clinton’s ethical problems shouldn’t prevent Democrats from rallying around her if she indeed becomes the nominee. And even the most persuasive TV ads will do little to break up the partisanship that keeps most voters attached to their party.

The nominees and campaigns will of course have a significant say in the outcome, but one or both will either have to dramatically over perform—or underperform—to significantly expand the rather narrow Electoral College battlefield.

The campaign may be just starting in earnest, and no votes have been cast. Nonetheless, a great deal has already been determined.