political report v.1 i.10 February 18, 2008

This time I’m going to mix it up by starting with a reader comment, then going into polls, then giving the meat.

Not everyone is drinking the Obama Kool-Aid. A lot of people out there are focused on Hillary because she is an inspiring leader who knows how to get the system working for people.  To be honest, some of J-Mac’s [John McCain for those who don't speak Jive] criticisms of Obama today are kinda true - he gives cute speeches but where’s the beef? He can’t answer questions about how his ideas are going to work. Barack doesn’t want to debate Hillary as she has repeatedly requested because he knows he’ll lose like he has every debate they’ve had. Let’s put Obama on ice for a few years and bring him back once he’s had a little experience. Directions for leading the free world do not show up on a teleprompter.

My take is that Obama won’t debate because he’s got serious ups on her right now and in general in politics, the insurgents want to debate while the frontrunners don’t.  The front runner has everything to lose in a debate while the insurgent (like, say, Ron Paul) has everything to gain.  Obama was fully willing to debate while he was still unknown.  Now that he’s known, he has more to lose by debating while giving his opponent openings to claw back in.

As far as the where’s the beef thing, you have to be very careful here.  The Hil campaign is pushing that angle very hard right now but it’s resonating about as well as the “ready to lead from day 1!!!” angle.  You can see both angles falling flat.  They’re just not good arguments, especially since Bill Clinton ran in 1992 with very little experience (a bit of time as gov of a small southern state — big whup!!).  The Hil campaign has to find some better stuff to take Obama on.  We don’t elect presidents because they give fine-detail specifics during their campaigns.  We know they are going to have staffs of hundreds to do that for them.  We elect them for their abilities to pull together highly effective and competent people.  Bill Clinton did great at that, GW did really poorly.

As far as inspiring leader, yea, I mean that’s an individual, intuitive choice.  My take is that both would be, but up to this point Hillary’s leadership qualities were known while Obama’s weren’t.  Now that his are known (you can’t get as far as he has in a campaign like this without being a strong leader) people are seeing an alternate path.  As far as leadership styles, this is one place that they are truly distinguishing themselves.  Their policies on most of the major issues are effectively identical, but Clinton has been making clear that her path is to lead as Bill led: make deals when you can, but fight the opposition like hell when it suits you better.  Obama has been repudiating that tactic as often as possible, catching on to a feeling of tiredness that a lot of people have for the left vs. right hatefest that has been embodied in a radio-hates-Clinton and Clinton-pillories-the-right circus ever since 1992.  Not everybody is tired of it, though, and wants Hillary to continue to carry the mantle into battle against the dittoheads.  To me, this essentially is the choice between the two.

Finally, in terms of experience and “ready to lead,” Obama’s counter to Hillaryland’s talking points (the last two sentences of the reader email above) sounds a lot better than the talking point itself.  The obvious response is, what does it matter if you’re ready to lead if you’re leading in the wrong direction?

Polls   I have both cited polls time and again in this report and trashed them as unreliable.  They are unreliable, but they are also (usually) all we have.  As I have also said, individual polls of small sample sizes usually mean little by themselves.

Even if you aren’t a stats person, if Rasmussen has Hillary beating Barack in TX by 16, and American Research Group has Barack beating Hillary by 6 in polls taken on the same day, what does that tell you?  Could be bad polling methods in one or both.  Could be different demographics being hit.  Could be that sampling less than 0.01% of the voting populace gives a much higher degree of randomness than claimed in the margin of error.  One thing you know intuitively is that the average of the two polls (Hillary winning by 11) is most certainly NOT the answer.  To expound on that a bit more is Carl Bialik of the WSJ who writes The Numbers Guy blog and says, “The basic objection to combining polls is that different surveys, conducted differently, at different times, with different sample sizes, don’t belong in the same stew.” He also reprints a quote from the founder of pollster.com: “If pollsters disclosed more about how their polls were conducted, we would be in a better position to know which polls are likely to be right, and which ones can be safely ignored.”  This is exactly right.  I’ve been spending the better part of the past two months trying to decide for myself which poll results sound likely and which don’t pass a BS test.  Some polls seem to do consistently well (SurveyUSA and they’re not shy about telling you about their accuracy, either), some seem to do consistently poorly (Zogby, Quinnipiac).  When you hear a poll cited by the press you need to be very skeptical and try to figure out whether it’s a single poll (shady-to-meaningless), an average of different polls (misleading), or an intelligent analysis of poll trends (rare).  This is especially true of the national polls.

One thing polls don’t have is a large (or likely a meaningful) sample size.  Example: There are close to 900,000 registered Dems in Colorado.  A sample size of 600 (which is at the upper end of the Colorado polls that ran before the caucus) is about 0.07% of registered voters (and is less than %1 of those who actually voted).  A pollster puts a “margin of error” of 4% on that number.  Do you believe it?  Most polls actually sample far fewer than 0.01% of registered voters.

Interestingly, a complaint made frequently about the caucuses is that they represent only a very small portion of the voting population, so how can they be accurate indications of who the voters want? That might be true, but if we are going to put any faith in polls that sample 500-2000 likely voters, surely we can believe that the results from the Colorado Dem caucus in which about 120,000 people voted (~15% of registered Dems) is a decent sample?  Take that, Gail Collins!   (The caucus/small sample is more of a Hillary camp spin/complaint because Obama has been wining most of the caucus states, although they always forget to point out that he’s won one more primary state than her.)

So individual polls mean little, but trends over time and many polls taken in aggregate mean more.  Three different Ohio polls by different pollsters, all taken in the last few days, have Hillary over Barack by ~15.  That is good intel, and gives a strong indication that Hillary is strong in Ohio and might remain so.  As of today her Ohio trend is still upward, although Obama’s upward slope is stronger than her’s, so if her trend starts to reverse there could be trouble.  In contrast to Ohio, Hillary’s Texas trend is sharply downward while Obama’s is sharply upward, so while she’s still ahead there in most polls, the trends favor Barack.  Remember what I said in the last report: Hillary needs to win both states or she’s gonzo.

Finally, somebody needs to explain the incongruity between pre-primary polls on “what issue is most important to you?” and exit polling on “what was the most important factor in deciding your vote?”  No time to get deeply into the subject now, perhaps in the next report we can draw that out, but suffice it to say I’ve seen incredible discrepancies in that data.

On Wisconsin?   The cheddar state (primary tomorrow) continues the trend of being underpolled prior to the election.  Two recent polls (very small sample size) have either candidate leading by ~8.  Another released today has Obama up by 13.  Intrade might be a better indication right now, which has Obama trading at 80-20, a bigger margin than he is trading for the eventual nomination.  However, Intrade might be hard to trust.  It hasn’t always been an accurate predictor of outcome and one reason may be a major barrier to entry: one of the last things Bill Frist rammed through the Senate without debate before he left was a ban on internet gambling.  This was accomplished by forbidding most U.S. credit card companies from allowing transactions to betting sites, and for some reason Intrade is considered such.  The best you can do to play is mail a check to them and wait at least ten days to become active.  This could be skewing the markets pretty significantly, but it’s impossible to tell.

In the last report I said we should probably expect Obama to win Wisconsin by 15, so if he does worse there it might be a bad sign for him.  That was written before Hillaryland decided to start campaigning hard there (previously they had all but conceded the state).  Consistent with the last two reports, I’m still holding 15 as a magic number for his win there, but anything more than 10 is still strong considering recent visits by Hillary herself.  And if she wins?  Well, then we have a completely different race and one that will probably nail Barack’s coffin.  Not likely, but entirely possible.

The upcoming races   I’ve seen some observations that Obama did anywhere from poorly to very poorly in the western parts of the mid-Atlantic states that are geographically closest to Ohio, possibly portending a better showing for Hillary in Ohio because she will do much better in Appalachian rural Ohio.  She will, but that of course misses the obvious observation that the southeastern borderland area of Ohio is the least densely populated part of the state.  The real race in Ohio comes down to Cleveland vs. Columbus vs. Cincinnati.

In Texas, the most interesting intel I’ve seen so far comes from a UT-Austin polisci prof who notes that Texas primary delegates are awarded by state senate district based on Dem turnout in the most recent election.  He notes that in the last election African American districts saw an unusually high turnout while Hispanic districts saw an unusually low turnout.  If the Hispanic edge holds for Hillary, though, she still has a big advantage in numbers: the state is 12% African American and 35% Hispanic.

Mark Penn   I mentioned Clinton’s pollio in the last report, attributing Master Spinmeisterness to him.  This is the best I’ve seen from him so far: “Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn’t won any of the significant states — outside of Illinois? That raises some serious questions about Sen. Obama.”  Riiiiiiggghhhhtttt.  Washington?  Colorado?  Virginia?  None of these are significant states, I suppose.  For what it’s worth, the state count is 22-13 for Obama, and he’s won more blue states and red states (8-6 on the blue states, 14-7 on the red states, but she’s up 4-3 on the purple states).  The Mark Penn phenomenon is another data point in trying to figure out why people are responding to Obama so strongly.  As we discussed in a previous report and as some readers confirmed personally, many people were turned off by Bill’s race-baiting tactics in the South Carolina primary.  Turned off so much that Hillaryland had to rein in Bill quickly (which they did).  But it’s not just Bill, it’s the entire team.  What you hear from the Hillary camp is a lot of personal jibes at Barack.  You don’t hear that out of Obama’s campaign.  You hear Barack himself making pointed comments about Hillary’s leadership and policies, but you don’t hear Barack surrogates attacking her on a personal level.  This is a big difference in tone between the campaigns and while it’s not written about, it is noticed.  My sense is that older people have come to expect and accept nastiness in politics while the younger generation hasn’t.  That may be a part (small or significant?) of the difference in response to the candidates between the age groups.

Finally…   It’s a big world out there and there are a lot of people writing about politics.  Talent is Gaussian, so like anything that attracts many people, only a few political writers are to be found on the right-hand tail.  Matt Bai is a rare gem, and nails Obama’s movement problem on NYT’s political blog:

After Super Tuesday, I was surprised to find that a friend of mine, a lifelong Democrat who had been pledging his allegiance to Barack Obama all year, had stepped into the voting booth and suddenly changed is mind. He voted, instead, for Hillary Clinton, and here’s why: he’d watched that video online -you know, the one starring celebrities like will.i.am, Scarlett Johansson and Herbie Hancock-and he thought it made Obama look Hollywood smug, as if supporting him were this year’s version of wearing an AIDS ribbon on your lapel. My friend didn’t want anything to do with the latest chic cause, and he just couldn’t bring himself to pull the lever for the guy who now symbolized the things he liked least about Democratic politics, starting with all those stars who think they know more about America than the people who live in it.

There’s not really much Mr. Obama can do about the sudden trendiness of his campaign - it’s not like he called up will.i.am and said, “Dude, ever considered grooving on one of my speeches?” But watching him speak Tuesday after he romped through another patch of primary wins, it certainly seemed as if he now grasped the limits of that appeal. In his speech on Super Tuesday, and throughout much of his campaign, Mr. Obama talked so much about his candidacy in terms of a “movement” that he sometimes seemed more interested in organizing the country than in governing it. This week, in a subtle but significant shift, he hit on tax cuts and infrastructure, on the need to change the culture around education, on a national service program. He followed up Wednesday with a major economic address at a GM plant in Wisconsin, where he aggressively sought to put to rest some of the questions about whether there was substance behind the rhetoric.

This is spot on.  Hillary is making small inroads by playing up the “where’s the beef angle” but those inroads could get a lot bigger if Obama lets himself get taken over by his own movement.  (The “where’s the beef?” angle is the contention that Obama is all pretty speeches and no substance and detail.)  Inroads are possible on this question, but the last paragraph of the Matt Bai post (you have to follow the link to read it) mirrors exactly my observation to a reader about the likelihood that the “where’s the beef angle?” will gain traction: “American voters have never been big on putting technocrats in the White House.”  Isn’t that precisely why W beat Gore in 2000?  Quibble about Florida vote counts all you want, but it never should have been that close in the first place.  Gore’s run across the world for climate change since 2000 shows exactly his true technocrat colors.

One reader comment in this report

I just finished reading one of the articles you mentioned in your last report (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200611/green-hillary).  It was an amazing article (I am a new fan of the author, Joshua Green) and really helped me get a picture of Hillary.

One suggestion I have for your terrific Political email summary/report/analysis is to include a more formal “For more reading” section.  The links you imbed in the text are great, but I’d love some more articles like the one mentioned above about the candidates and key talking points and issues, for which my only knowledge comes from snip-its on CNN.

Especially as Green doesn’t express much of an agenda in his article.  It seems genuinely reported and therefore credible.  For more reading is a good idea.  So I’ll start in the next report.

Say cheese!  (And pineapple.)