CAMERON: Dem premise faulty

Steve Cameron’s Sept. 28 piece titled “Where have the Democrats gone?” presents an argument about local and statewide Democratic candidates’ potential based on President Trump’s purportedly low approval ratings. An otherwise interesting argument is substantially weakened by incorrect reasoning about the numbers presented in the article’s graph and text.

Mr. Cameron’s graph shows three columns per state: President Trump’s popular voting margin of victory, an apparent composite of two polls of presidential approval, and then a “change” column that shows the difference between the two previous columns. From these figures, Mr. Cameron draws the conclusions that “Trump has lost ground in all 50 states” and “the president is even crashing in Idaho, his third-worst state in terms of lost approval.”

The first column actually shows a very different metric than the second: the percentage of voters in a first-past-the-post presidential election where both major candidates had majority unfavorable approval ratings at the time of the election who chose President Trump over Ms. Clinton. The second column is an entirely different measure in terms of population (as it is a putatively representative sample and it is not limited to those who voted), what it is measuring (approval vs. disapproval), and its presence of an uncounted “neither approve/disapprove” option that doesn’t exist in presidential vote.

Thus, the premise of the article is unproven as are its conclusions.

DOMINIC BLAIS

Coeur d’Alene