Posts Tagged ‘2012 elections’
It’s so hard to say goodbye to yesterday
Nothing much to add to this, but half of Republicans believe that ACORN, an organization that no longer exists, stole the election for Barack Obama:
49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn’t exist anymore.
The crosstabs show a slightly larger percentage of “very conservative” respondents believing ACORN stole the election (53%), and I wonder if this is the sort of question where ideology trumps partisanship, even though it’s typically the other way around. Republican leaders are going to have a politically tough time talking about ACORN in specific for obvious reasons (e.g., it doesn’t exist anymore), but the ideological leaders of very conservative voters may not be restrained by such “reality-based” concerns.
There’s also some very interesting fake knowledge stuff from the same poll:
The 39% of Americans with an opinion about Bowles/Simpson is only slightly higher than the 25% with one about Panetta/Burns, a mythical Clinton Chief of Staff/former western Republican Senator combo we conceived of to test how many people would say they had an opinion even about something that doesn’t exist.
Bowles/Simpson does have bipartisan support from the small swath of Americans with an opinion about it. Republicans support it 26/18, Democrats favor it 21/14, and independents are for it by a 24/18 margin. Panetta/Burns doesn’t fare as well with 8% support and 17% opposition.
I’ve been curious about the assertion of fake knowledge for quite a while (I conducted a study way back when that found people claiming more knowledge about a fake race riot story than the real Canadian elections), and I wonder if there isn’t a connection there to the belief gap mechanism.
Filed: Science Is Real || 9:36, December 13 || View Comments
Midwest aftermath
This fight is everywhere. Photo by John Rummel.
The levers of power are inherently political, Michigan edition:
The state House of Representatives voted 58-51 today to pass a right-to-work bill for public employees, and 58-52 on a bill for private sector workers.
Both right-to-work bills have already passed the Senate. All that is needed now is Gov. Rick Snyder’s signature and Michigan becomes the 24th right-to-work state.
In a parliamentary manuever, the House Republicans asked for a reconsideration of the bill to keep Democrats from asking for the same thing, which would have delayed final passage until Wednesday. Technically, the Republicans could remove that request later today and the bills will automatically head to Snyder.
It almost goes without saying that the Michigan GOP didn’t campaign on this in 2012, and that Snyder even testified earlier this year before the U.S. Congress that right-to-work wasn’t right for Michigan. But much the way traditional norms of government have been violated up and down the ladder of power over the past couple decades, so it is. The disparate protest movements that rose up in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere in 2011 failed to congeal into something broader, and that’s left Michigan vulnerable. It’s left state employees in Illinois to watch their pensions be stolen. And wherever else it’s possible, it will happen there, too.
Rep. Brandon Dillon — inexplicably elected as a Democrat from Grand Rapids — railed against this bill, saying that it’s only being shoved through now because the votes won’t be there in the 2013 session. Maybe that’s true, but it elides the point a little bit. It’s being shoved through now because this is the period of least accountable power. It’s why George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security immediately as his second term began, it’s why Scott Walker went after the unions only weeks after being sworn in, and it’s why there’s such demand for a bipartisan “Grand Bargain” to keep rich people’s taxes low and destroy entitlements.
President Obama has thrown his weight behind the unions (which he somewhat conspicuously didn’t do in Wisconsin), and that’s big, but it’s probably too late. It’s entirely possible that Michigan unions are simply screwed. Even if the momentum built this week is enough to drive Snyder from office in 2014, keep in mind that when Tom Barrett ran against Scott Walker in the Wisconsin recall, he never promised to repeal Walker’s unionbusting bill. In Michigan, there’s no guarantee that Snyder’s replacement (with the help of a Democratic legislature) would undo this. (And if you want close coverage of the Michigan protests, follow Eclectablog.)
Voters with a union member in their household voted 40% for Mitt Romney. In 2008, it was 39% for McCain. That’s about 7% of all voters casting their ballots in favor of the gun that’s pointed at their own feet. Typically I’m happy to blame voters for their own bad outcomes, but in this case I think it’s a tremendous failure of imagination on the part of the Democratic Party. Get half of those voters back and you win every election forever. This ought to be the mandate for the politically unshackled and, yes, largely unaccountable second Obama term: Look for the union label.
Filed: We R in Control || 15:00, December 11 || View Comments
Effetes don’t fail me now
It’s never the same thing, but it’s always something. American presidential elections are horrible things, though I can’t say whether they’re any more or less horrible than other countries’. Ours are sinkholes of mendacity and gamesmanship, in which winning is measured by the players in skim and by the public in the desperate hope that things don’t get any worse. At best, the campaign provides a distraction from the fact that our government is designed to fail, the institutional version of Monty Burns’s million diseases all getting in one another’s way. A public mismatched with its responsibility will again send a divided government to rule a structure that even one party could never reliably handle, expecting the president to “reach out” to the other side, and for the parties to “come together,” as if these magic words will erase the serious and deep divisions between them on fundamental issues of policy, values, and beliefs. If we’re lucky, only one incompetent or corrupt local election official will screw up thousands of ballots, and the winners will be known before the morning after Election Day; if so, we’ll be ready to leap right into Decision 2016. The lessons we will have learned this year are that truth, on every level, is valueless in the gate-kept circle of Hell inhabited by the Gang of 500; that because money couldn’t buy the presidency or the Senate, it’s OK if it buys mayors and judges; and that everyone who uses science to correctly predict things is just getting lucky or at least gay. We’ll play out this psychodrama again in four years, because most of us have no choice.
And now, on to the predictions!
I made a friendly wager that Barack Obama would defeat Mitt Romney well before the Republican primaries began, and I see no reason to deviate from that prediction now. His electoral vote margin will be smaller than it was in 2008, losing six votes to post-census shuffling, and then losing Indiana (11 votes), Florida (29 votes), North Carolina (15 votes) and the 2nd district of Nebraska (1 vote). All the other states will hold steady, for an Obama win with 303 votes to Romney’s 235. Obama will also become the first president to be elected a second time with a lower share of the popular vote than he got the first time since Grover Cleveland returned to the White House in 1892 with slightly less than he’d won in 1884. A final tally of 51% for Obama and 48% for Romney (rounded) will also indirectly point to the incredible disappearance of Gary Johnson, who had been seen as having the potential to swing New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and maybe even Colorado. Total votes cast for president will be around 135 million.
Democrats will retain control of the Senate, flipping seats in Massachusetts and Maine (via Dem-caucusing independent Angus King), while Republicans take Nebraska and Montana. The push on Election Day will leave the Senate split 53 to 47. Democrats will gain five seats overall in the House of Representatives, but will be well short of a majority, leaving John Boehner with the Speaker’s gavel by a count of 237 to 198. I’d like to be wrong about that one, but I have a hard time seeing where 20 more seats are going to come from.
Effete liberals, commies, moochers and anti-colonialists, let’s get out there and make it happen.
Filed: We R in Control || 15:08, November 5 || View Comments
Fact-checkers are stupid things
From the AP’s fact-check of Bill Clinton’s DNC speech:
CLINTON: “Their campaign pollster said, ‘We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.’ Now that is true. I couldn’t have said it better myself — I just hope you remember that every time you see the ad.”
THE FACTS: Clinton, who famously finger-wagged a denial on national television about his sexual relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky and was subsequently impeached in the House on a perjury charge, has had his own uncomfortable moments over telling the truth. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” Clinton told television viewers. Later, after he was forced to testify to a grand jury, Clinton said his statements were “legally accurate” but also allowed that he “misled people, including even my wife.”
Clinton lied about something unrelated 14 years ago, so therefore his claim that Romney is lying now is false, because balance.
Filed: Watching the Detectives || 10:47, September 6 || View Comments
Twitter as a micro-targeted mobilization tool
Higher rates of Twitter usage for blacks and for sub/urban dwellers, but neither category is anywhere near as strongly predictive as age. (Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project)
Yesterday I mentioned the turnout uncertainty of Barack Obama’s young and black supporters, built at least partly on the perception that their votes aren’t needed to get Obama over the top. These aren’t people who need to be persuaded to vote for Obama, but they do need to be persuaded to vote. We know that simply being asked to vote does a surprisingly good job of getting people to the polls, which suggests that the Obama campaign to target these would-be voters with a GOTV message. Traditionally, this is the domain of the campaign’s ground operation, but is that still the best or only thing to rely on?
The demographic make-up of the “unlikely” supporters makes Twitter a potentially attractive venue in which to build a new kind of targeted messaging strategy. Looking at the most recent available data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project (from August 2011, unfortunately), the familiar Twitter usage pattern emerges. Overall usage is about 9.3% of the population — that’s the entire population, not just Internet users, which is the denominator Pew generally uses in their reports. But there’s a clear racial difference, with blacks using Twitter at an 18.4% rate and non-blacks at 8.0%, and an even stronger age relationship. Of those in the 18-24 group (who were mostly not old enough to vote in 2008, keep in mind), 14.4% use Twitter; for 25-34-year-olds, it’s 16.4%, and after that it drops off considerably.
But the big finding for a social messaging campaign is that race and age interact — blacks in those youngest two age groups use Twitter at rates of 33.3% and 22.6%, respectively. Not surprisingly, the division between urban/suburban and rural somewhat mirrors the racial division. The two youngest age groups respectively have 20.3% and 17.2% usage among urban and suburban residents, but just 8.3% and 10.2% among rural residents. Compare this all with Facebook, which sees no race or community type relationships — only age — across its 60% overall usage rate.
The greater prevalence of Twitter in cities suggests something of a geographic bias to its structure, and that’s something that could be leveraged in a GOTV campaign — after all, the “get out” outcome is a pretty key part of such an operation. But its social messaging structure would also be key, allowing the campaign to create starting point messages that could be retweeted and shared throughout a trust-driven social network. Twitter’s differences from Facebook come into play here, as well. Because Twitter is just a message-sharing platform (as opposed to a game/calendar/affinity/etc. platform), it could encourage the spreading of GOTV messages, particularly to individuals who might use it primarily for non-political purposes (e.g., following celebrities or talking with friends).
These messages would be received not by a representative part of the population, but disproportionately by young city-dwellers, meaning they could be targeted with that audience in mind. In fact, once the network is built up, individuals could potentially be targeted with messages tailored either for themselves or to be spread out to their networks. In a way, this approach is the opposite of what they did in 2008 with the My.BarackObama.com site, which facilitated connections within the context of the campaign, and only between those already committed enough to come in and sign up for another social network site. Targeting existing Twitter users and their extended, potentially local networks would bring the campaign to the doorstep of the loosely affiliated voter.
Filed: We R in Control || 8:38, August 21 || View Comments
Ground and pound
Interesting fact I learned while researching this post: West Virginia is less black than Wisconsin. (Photo by Matt Dell)
I spent the summer busy with travel and research, and let the blog go on hiatus. Well, fall classes start today, so now’s a great time to get back to procrastinating thinking out loud.
USA Today and Suffolk University released an interesting survey of “unlikely” voters a few days ago, which has gotten quite a bit of attention. It’s worth noting that their methodology is unclear in the report — they’ve got a sample of 800, but was that simply culled from a larger, general sample that also included some number of likely voters? At any rate, the big takeaway is that unlikely voters strongly favor Barack Obama over Mitt Romney, though about one-fifth say they would vote for a third-party candidate if they were to vote. This is perhaps the strongest evidence yet for the importance of turnout to Obama’s chances. In 2008, he got much bigger than usual turnout from traditionally low-turnout groups, most notably young adults and African-Americans. Many of these voters are probably still turning up as “unlikely” in typical polling models.
But a deeper look inside the data shows just where the Obama ground campaign is needed the most: convincing overconfident supporters that their vote is needed. Three-quarters of “unlikely” black voters expect Obama to win, but almost all say they would vote if they felt it could swing the election. Now, this probably shouldn’t be taken too literally, since no one really expects the election to come down to one vote, but it is worth thinking about how and where energized black turnout to have the most impact. Of the ten states with the highest proportion of African-Americans, six are solid red, two are solid blue, and North Carolina and Virginia are up for grabs. These were big Obama takeaways in 2008, in part because of black turnout. Florida is number 11 on that list, and carrying those three swing states would basically clinch the election.
The assumption in 2008 was that the Obama campaign had a great turnout operation, but I’m not sure if anyone knows whether that’s true or not — his candidacy certainly energized a lot of black voters on its own, but that doesn’t mean the campaign necessarily did anything extra-special to get them out to vote. If the campaign has data similar to what this poll shows, they would be well served by targeting black voters now, not with persuasive appeals that are largely unnecessary, but with sobering reminders that the election isn’t over until it’s over.
Filed: We R in Control || 10:12, August 20 || View Comments
Rick Santorum’s home turf is blue
This crazy blue football field is home to as many national championships as Republican nominations that Rick Santorum will win.
Mitt Romney lost two more states yesterday, finishing third in both Alabama and Mississippi. Rick Santorum won both states, which were seen as Newt Gingrich’s last chance at relevance; he’s apparently pressing on regardless, though it certainly seems that doing so hurts Santorum much more than it does Romney. Despite lackluster performances in strongly conservative states, Romney’s still basically on track to secure the nomination at some point, but it’s probably going to take winning some of the big, winner-take-all states later in the calendar. That means there’s theoretically still time for a Santorum miracle — he needs to win a significant majority of remaining delegates to actually secure the nomination before the convention — or that we could be heading for the ultimate Washington press corps fantasy, the brokered convention.
As Ed Kilgore notes, relaying comments from Jonathan Bernstein, party elites retain considerable power in the nominating process. They want Romney, and they have for a long time. Whatever happens in traditional primary states, there are enough delegates chosen at county- and state-level conventions (that is, the later parts of the caucuses that actually matter) to keep things slouching toward Romney if the voters don’t come through. But what happens if the party bigwigs change their minds? What might make Santorum suddenly palatable?
Romney’s big selling point has always been electability, and it’s been especially prominent since he’s had to focus on an opponent whose last election was a 17-point loss. But the more he tries to balance appeals to the far-right of the GOP primary electorate and general-election moderation, the tougher it becomes to secure his own base going into the general election. With the economy picking up and Barack Obama looking like more of a favorite, GOP elites might start thinking not just about who they want as President (it’s still Romney, and will continue to be), but also about damage-mitigation in the event of a loss. I don’t think there’s any question that a Santorum loss to Obama is better than a Romney loss for the future of the Republican Party; frankly, a Romney loss could lead to the kind of intra-partisan shake-up we haven’t seen since the Dixiecrats switched sides. That he wasn’t conservative enough to win would be the rallying cry of the right going into Obama’s second term and the 2014 and 2016 campaigns. A Santorum loss wouldn’t necessarily push the party back toward the center, but it would provide leverage for those trying to pull it there.
But let’s be clear: A flood of elite abandoning Romney for Santorum is the only way Santorum wins the nomination. Romney might not win it cleanly or anytime soon, but if the party chiefs want him, they’ll find a way to get him before the convention. The brokered convention dream is an illusion in modern politics, in much the same way the small-conference national college football champion dream is an illusion pursued by so many sports reporters and pundits. Like the Boise State Broncos, Rick Santorum can only win if the system wants him to win, and right now it doesn’t.
Filed: We R in Control || 16:07, March 14 || View Comments
Romney’s slalom toward the White House
Josh Marshall notes that Mitt Romney has given a thumbs-up to Paul Ryan’s plan to end Medicare:
Two contenders, Pawlenty and Daniels, haven’t done more than say kind things in general. But most have said they’re down with it. And Mitt Romney in particular has signed on for the whole thing — which means he’ll go into the 2012 primary and possibly the general election as supporting the abolition of Medicare. And that’s a tough thing to carry, as it should be.
I’m going to be really curious to see what sort of follow-up questions he gets on that position and if anybody is able to get a clearer statement out of Pawlenty on this critical issue.
My guess? No follow-up questions of any sort, unless the impossible happens and Ryan’s flight of fancy becomes a real bill. We’re presently about eight and a half months from the first ballots being cast in the 2012 primaries, and probably six months from the general public paying much attention. Anything that a candidates says now, but doesn’t want to revisit later, about an early-2011 proposal that goes nowhere will simply disappear.
But still, Romney makes an interesting case to watch in this context. He has famously held every position on many issues, and gained favor among elites for his technocratic seriousness. My own view of the 2012 race is that a Romney nomination requires him to consolidate the remaining “serious” Republican technocrats, while the other candidates fight over the far right. There are a lot of voters on the far right, but if even two strong candidates persevere over there, Romney can likely win what he needs for the nomination. And my supposition is that, for the technocrats that make up Romney’s base, what he says doesn’t really matter. They know his political operation based on its personnel, not his public statements, and they know how he’ll govern because he’s just like them — the new H.W. Bush that we the party and the country so desperately need. If he has to say he likes the idea of killing Medicare, or that Ryan’s near-future projection of 3% unemployment is reasonable, well, what candidate hasn’t had to say some silly things to get elected? This could actually be a benefit for Romney, because due to his past flip-floppery, nobody is likely to believe he actually supports the Ryan plan anyway. Once he secures the nomination, he can get the party in line and we’ll just quit talking about such ridiculous things.