… I examined Clinton’s and Trump’s convention speeches using a technique I’ve applied to almost every major-party nominee’s acceptance address going back to 1900, and I found that Clinton is indeed more optimistic than Trump by most measures. But Democrats may want to temper their optimism about that result.
The axiom that “the more optimistic candidate almost always wins” rests largely on research I published in 1990 with Harold Zullow showing that the more optimistic candidate won 18 out of 22 presidential elections, from the McKinley-Bryan race in 1900 through the Reagan-Mondale contest in 1984. …
Yet optimism hasn’t been a reliable predictor since the Reagan era. Now that pretty much everyone follows a buoyant script, it doesn’t appear to give anyone much of an edge. CONT.
Martin E.P. Seligman (U. of Pennsylvania), Washington Post