I know, I know. I said this before the first presidential debate, and how did that turn out? At the risk of a repeat performance, I’m here to remind you that tonight’s V.P. debate is not likely to impact the presidential race very much. Democrats, of course, are hoping a strong performance by Joe Biden will blunt some of the momentum Romney acquired coming out of the first presidential debate. A quick look at the RealClearPolitics composite poll suggests Romney netted 4% as a result of his strong performance last Wednesday, and that gain has boosted Romney to varying degrees in all the battleground states t as well.
I don’t see tonight’s “winner” gaining nearly as much in the polls. But then, when it comes to assessing the winners, there’s not much polling data regarding past vice presidential debates. In 2008, a CBS poll of uncommitted voters indicated that most of them thought Joe Biden had “won” his debate with Sarah Palin, but most of those polled remained uncommitted. Gallup has this table showing the impact of debates on voters’ party preferences.
As you can see, the VP debates haven’t been very consequential, at least by this measure.
So, I certainly don’t expect Biden to regain all that lost polling territory tonight. But he may be able to lay down some markers that will serve him and the President well on the stump, and during the next presidential debates. In this sense the debate is probably better viewed as a preview for next Tuesday’s rematch between the President and Mitt.
I won’t bother providing any pre-debates “what to look for” insights since there’s plenty of that elsewhere (see here and here). You know the drill by now – both sides want to stick to their talking points, hammer home their dominant campaign themes, and paint the opposition into a corner. If you saw Biden debate Palin in 2008, you know he’s good at this format, despite his reputation for dropping Bidenisms into his off-the-cuff remarks. Ryan has less of a track record that I know of in this format, so I have less to go on. However, the Onion indicates that he’s been taking his preparation to extremes (hat tip to Jeff Cason)! The one wrinkle is that foreign policy is on the table, and the moderator is Martha Raddatz, the chief foreign correspondent for ABC. So I expect some foreign policy discussion, including efforts by Ryan to capitalize on the unfolding Benghazi security story. It will also be interesting to see how Ryan reacts to the inevitable efforts by Biden to tie Ryan’s budget around Mitt’s neck. Keep in mind that this debate is not between Ryan and Biden – it’s between surrogates for Romney and Obama.
I’ll be live blogging tonight with a new format that, I am told, will make it easier for you to comment. So join in the fun – I’ll be back on at about 8:45.
I’m posting at the Economist’s Democracy In America website today, discussing the post-debate fallout that has seen President Obama’s lead in national tracking polls completely dissipate. Today’s Gallup poll of likely voters shows the race tied at 48% a piece. Rasmussen has Romney up by 1%, 48%-47%, as does the RCP composite poll, which has had Romney ahead the last two days for the first time since early summer. In my Economist blog post, I argue that we shouldn’t be surprised by this, given that the aggregate forecast from 13 political science forecast models essentially call this race a dead heat. Three of the forecasts have Obama winning the popular vote, five more have him ahead, but with the race too close to call, and five have Romney winning outright. The mean prediction of the two-party vote is 50.3% for Obama, and the median is 50.6% – both well within the polls’ margin of error. So, given the fundamentals, the question was always why Obama had managed to outperform the fundamentals for as long as he did. I try to provide an answer in the blog post, but the short response is that he was more effective at framing the narrative in a way that negated Mitt’s strengths and masked his own weaknesses. However, there is some evidence that the race was tightening before the debate, and that Obama’s relatively poor debate performance coupled with Mitt’s strong one served primarily as a focal point that accelerated a process that was already underway.
Note also, consistent with what I have been arguing for some time, that the battleground states also tightened considerably in tandem with the national polls. This is to be expected and it is a reminder that these states do not operate in a national vacuum, but instead are influenced by broader factors affecting the race. Put another way, I have never bought into the argument that the President is protected by an Electoral College firewall.
My other point, however, is that this race is far from over; Romney has gained ground, but I think it fair to say that he has not pulled into a lead. Indeed, I expect the race, now that it has recalibrated to a point much more consistent with our forecast models, to stay quite close for the remaining 28 days. This is also a good time to remind everyone not to overreact to any single poll. Looked at in the aggregate, however, they will become an increasingly accurate barometer of the state of the race as we head to Election Day. In the meantime, strap yourself in – it’s likely to be one helluva finish!
I’m home after another long, long day of teaching and then another election talk, but I wanted to comment briefly on today’s Pew poll which has driven many Obama supporters to despair. That poll has Mitt Romney up by 4%, 49%-45%, over Barack Obama among likely voters, and tied at 46% among registered voters. This is a sharp turnaround from the last Pew poll in the field Sept. 12-16, which had Romney trailing Obama by 8%, 51%-43%. The latest poll represents a 12% gain by Romney in less than a month – a turnaround that just rubs salt in the wound for Democrats already reeling from polls suggesting that Romney cleaned Obama’s clock in the most heavily watched first presidential debate since 1980, when incumbent Jimmy Carter squared off against Ronald Reagan in their only debate. (The figures for the Romney-Obama debate do not include those who viewed it on social media.)
Consistent with other polls, Pew found that Romney was viewed as doing a better job in the debate by 72-20%. This included 78% of independents and even 45% of Democrats who thought Romney bested Obama.* As debate polls go, this is a rather significant drubbing; rarely do we see such a lop-sided verdict, particularly among the “loser’s” own partisan supporters. If the polls are to be believed, Romney’s debate “victory” has led to a significant tightening of the race, both nationally and in the critical swing states. For example, Gallup’s pre- and post-debate polls indicate that Romney has moved from a 5% deficit into a tie with Obama among registered voters.
In the RealClearPolitics composite poll, we see a similar result, with Obama’s 3.1% lead on the day before the debate dwindling to .5% tonight.
We see a similar effect in state-level polling in battleground states. In Michigan, the latest poll has Romney within 3% in a state considered out of reach just a week ago. Colorado, Florida and Virginia are now essentially dead heats, and Romney has moved within 3% of Obama in the critical state of Ohio, a state in which he trailed by nearly 6% before the debate.
All this is a reminder of two points I have made repeatedly: first, national tides raise all of Romney’s state-based boats. Too often pundits view states as having their own unique constituencies. But the reality is that both candidates are fighting over the same type of undecided voters across all states, and if one candidate is able to win over these undecideds, it will boost his support across all the battleground states. We see precisely this effect occurring after the debate.
Second – and in what some may view as a contradiction of my first point – we should not overestimate the impact of the first debate. I have been arguing for some time now that the state-level battleground polls will gradually align with the national tracking polls. At the same time, I have claimed that the economic fundamentals indicate that this will be a very close race (the mean prediction of the dozen or so political science forecast models has Obama winning slightly more than 50% of the two-party vote.) If the mean forecast model is correct, Obama will win by a far smaller margin than what the national tracking polls were saying for most of September. And if we factor in the uncertainty surrounding those forecasts, many political scientists believe this election is a dead heat. For that reason I was reasonably confident that the September polls indicating that Obama was running away with this race were overstating his support due, in part I believe, to how pollsters were constructing their likely voter screens. What Wednesday’s debate did, I suspect, is to impact Pew’s likely voter screen in ways that increased the number of Republican respondents they included in their final poll relative to Democrats. In other words, the debate didn’t switch votes so much as it increased Republicans’ enthusiasm for their candidate enough so that it affected Pew’s likely voter screen.
As evidence, consider the gender gap. One of the more surprising findings from the Pew poll is that Romney has apparently drawn even with Obama among women. Last month, for reasons that I discussed in a recent Economist post, Obama led Romney among women by 18 points, 56%-38%. If the latest Pew poll is to be believed, Romney has now drawn even with the President with women, at 47%. Did he really erase Obama’s lead among women in less than a month? I suspect not. Instead, I think this is probably a function of how Pew constructed their sample after Wednesday’s debate.
My bottom line is that Wednesday’s debate focused enough attention on the fundamentals to erase Obama’s polling lead which was largely based on his relative advantage in framing this race in a way that played to his strengths. But we shouldn’t overreact and buy into Pew’s results which indicate that Romney has now established a substantial lead. Instead, my read of the composite polls indicates that the race, as of today, stands almost exactly where I have been arguing it has stood for the last two months. Obama is ahead, but by the slimmest of margins.
Game on!
*An earlier version of this post had those numbers slightly off – I’ve corrected them here.
Those who saw Mitt Romney eviscerate New Gingrich in the debate just prior to the Florida Republican primary likely weren’t surprised by Mitt’s strong performance against President Obama on Wednesday night. Although Mitt has been justly cited for marring his debate performances with the occasional off-hand – and off-message – line (see: I like firing employees, buying Cadillacs for my wife and killing Big Bird), he has also exhibited an ability to devise and implement a debating game plan based on staying focused, sticking to his message, driving his points home and utilizing opposition research to put his opponents on the defensive. All these traits were on display Wednesday, and he more than met my expectations that he would do well.
But if Mitt’s performance did not surprise me, Obama’s did. While perhaps lacking the superior debating skills of a Gingrich, Obama showed in his three debates against John McCain, and against his Democratic rivals during the nomination campaign, that he is more than competent on the debating stage. Most observers thought Obama won all three of his general election presidential debates in 2008. But even many Democrats conceded that Obama did poorly on Wednesday.
In the debate post-mortem, Obama’s defenders put forth a variety of explanations for the President’s underwhelming performance, beginning with Stephanie Cutters’ effort in the spin room to implicitly blame moderator Jim Lehrer for not putting a stop to Romney’ s bullying tactics. Al Gore – he of the 2000 debating “sigh” – suggested the President had not fully acclimated to Denver’s altitude. Even less plausible was the argument voiced by many on left-leaning blogs that Obama was engaged in some “deep game” designed to lull Team Romney into complacency.
I suspect the explanation is far more prosaic. Certainly the President look fatigued, which given the demands of his job is quite understandable. In 1984 Ronald Reagan submitted a turkey of a first debate performance, and his wife Nancy argued strenuously that her Ronnie had been overworked with debate preparation while simultaneously carrying out his day job. Reagan cut back on his workload, started the second debate with a memorable joke that addressed the whispering campaign about his age and also cracked his opponent up, and sailed to victory.
Part of Obama’s poor performance, however, may also be attributable to contextual factors that affect all incumbent presidents: the need to defend a record. Romney did not miss many opportunities to point out that the economic recovery has been slower than expected during Obama’s time in office. As I noted in my previous post, two of the three previous incumbents dating back to 1992 running for reelection lost polling ground after their first debate, and in the aggregate the three dropped slightly more than 1% in their polling average (note that I had that figure wrong in my initial midnight post), and about the same amount overall after all three debates. To be sure, they weren’t each running on equally bad records, but they still had to play defense, at least on some issues. Similarly, the incumbent party’s candidate has lost a shade less than 1% on average in the pre-to post-debate polls dating back to 1988. So we shouldn’t be surprised that Obama, as the incumbent, didn’t clean Romney’s clock in the first debate – incumbents rarely do.
Nor should we overreact to Obama’s “loss”. Going back to the Kennedy-Nixon 1960 debates, Gallup’s polling numbers show that it is rare for a candidate trailing before the first debate, as Romney was, to pull ahead to win the race. The three exceptions based on the Gallup data are Kennedy in 1960, Reagan in 1980 and George W. Bush in 2000. So, the next iteration of this pattern shouldn’t take place until 2020! Of course it is not clear that the debate, by itself, had as much to do with Reagan’s 1980 victory as did the Iranian government’s announcement that they would not release American hostages prior to the Election. In 2000, of course, Al Gore won the popular vote. And Kennedy only trailed Nixon by 1% prior to their first televised debate.
So it would be surprising, but not unprecedented, if Romney pulled ahead on the basis of his performances in the three debates this fall. However, I have been arguing for some time that the economic fundamentals suggest that this race will be quite close come November 6th and that the swing state polls showing Obama with a nearly unbeatable Electoral College edge right now are likely going to tighten, coming into closer alignment with national tracking polls, as more individuals begin focusing on the race. For this reason, I have suggested paying less attention to swing states, and more to national tracking polls.
To be sure, my view is not shared by all (Most? Any?) of my political science colleagues. For example, Emory political scientist Drew Linzer, whose election forecast website is a must read for anyone interested in the state of the current race (and whose work is completely transparent!) doesn’t think the presidential race is close at all. Instead he has Obama ahead by a comfortable margin in the Electoral College. Based in part on the polls, Drew argues, “If anyone tries to tell you the presidential race is close, don’t believe it. It’s just not true.” My claim, of course, is that those swing-state polls will begin to tighten in relatively uniform fashion, and in fact there was evidence that they were doing just that prior to Wednesday’s debate. Moreover, if the debate served to focus voters’ attention on the fundamentals, then one would expect the race to tighten even more – if my interpretation is correct.
If that happens, of course, the general sense of unease that suddenly descended on Obama Nation two nights ago will turn into a full-scale panic, and we will begin seeing exactly the type of carping and finger-pointing that broke out among Republican opinion leaders like Peggy Noonan, Bill Kristol and David Brooks when Obama appeared to open up a big post-convention, post-“47%” gaffe polling lead.* My message to Democrats tonight is similar to what I told Republicans then: Obama did not lose the race Wednesday night, any more than Bain Capital, or the 47% remark, killed Romney’s chances. Polls ebb and flow in response to media coverage and interpretation of campaign events like debates (although the polls gain predictive power as we get closer to the Election), and forecasting models based on them will respond to those fluctuations in kind. I persist in believing the race will tighten down the home stretch, so that Obama’s final vote total will come much closer to the median political science forecast than indicated by the swing state polls now.
Could I be wrong? Sure. (See 1992 and 2000!) That’s what makes this so fun! In the meantime, let the panic begin!
*See tonight’s Saturday Night Live! Wonderful parody of MSNBC cast in post-debate meltdown here.
Once again, my best intentions have been dashed – DASHED! – I tell you, by the demands of my day job. I thoroughly intended to provide an in-depth post-debate analysis designed to both talk Obama supporters back off the ledge and to caution Romney’s true believers from engaging in a bout of irrational exuberance. Instead, it’s pushing midnight and I only have time for a quick synopsis. So let me start with this succinct advice to Obama supporters: GET A EFFING GRIP ON YOURSELVES! (And I mean that in the nicest way possible. Really.) Contrary to what the devotees worshiping in the Church of Obama have tweeted/blogged in the last 24 hours – e.g., “How is Obama’s closing statement so fucking sad, confused and lame? He choked. He lost. He may even have lost the election tonight” – the race is not over. Indeed, last night is not even a game changer – no more than the secret 47% tape, or the Bain ads (sorry Kevin Drum!) doomed Romney. Let me be clear: Romney clearly “won” the debate, however we measure these things – that much, I think is indisputable. Even Democrats seem to acknowledge as much in the post-debate polls. (It is also indisputable that many pundits/Obama supporters will disagree with me.) But what impact does “winning” a presidential debate really have? History suggests not much (as I meant to tell you before last night). Here’s some evidence, courtesy of political scientists Chris Wezlien and Robert Erickson (but I could cite a lot more!):
Note that if we look at first debates that involve an incumbent dating back to 1992 (WARNING! N of 3!) the average loss for the incumbent in the post-first debate polls has been about 1.2%*. Of course, that’s just the first poll – but across three debates (we still have two to go!), incumbents have lost on average about 1%. So, given that historical record, what is the likely polling impact (notice I said polling –not vote change?) of last night’s debate? Most of my colleagues are suggesting it will be minimal – for example, John Sides is betting that Romney is going to pick up a point or so based on last night’s performance. I think it will be closer to the 2.5%-3.5% range – but that won’t be entirely attributable to the debate (although pundits will attribute any polling gains by Romney in the next week to the debate). Instead, I think Romney was poised to close the polling gap even if last night’s debate had not happened.
Look, I acknowledge that I am either going to be the one guy who didn’t get it, or someone who looks impressively prescient (or stubborn) when this is all over, but I have not bought into the media-driven narrative that Obama has been pulling away in recent weeks. In part this is because I tend to downplay swing-state polling in favor of relying on national tracking polls, in the belief that national tides will affect all states – swing and non-swing – somewhat evenly. And the national tracking polls have shown this to be a closer race than have the swing state polls. But the bigger factor is that I’m not yet ready to abandon the political science forecast models just because a bunch of cable guys (and some name-brand prognosticators [you know who I mean]) are convinced that recent polling indicates a drop in Romney’s win probability. Yes, I know that the political science forecasts are predicting a range of outcomes – but as regular readers know, I tend to think the median prediction of the dozen or so models is pretty reliable. In other words, debate or no debate, I think Romney was likely to close this polling gap as we got closer to the Election Day. It is also worth noting, however, that those models, in the aggregate do NOT suggest that Romney will pull ahead. Contrary to what many think, the economic fundamentals do not suggest Romney should win this race outright.
So, if I’m right (and all those other pundits are not) why is Romney behind in the polls by more than what the average of the forecast models suggest? In our regular “professor pundits” taping for today, my colleague Bert Johnson sought to explain the discrepancy in the national and swing-state polls by suggesting it reflects Romney’s decision to hold back a bit on advertising in the battleground states, in the belief that he who advertises last, advertises best. The idea here – based on an interesting paper by a bunch of political scientists – is that the impact of political advertising on voters’ support has a very short shelf life. So rather than spend money early on swing-state advertising – as Obama has been doing – the better strategy is to come in late with a dominant buying spree. Of course, the fact that roughly 35% of voters will vote early makes this a risky strategy. As does relying on a single finding based on a Texas gubernatorial race, I might add! (I should note that Bert isn’t claiming that this is what Romney is doing – only that it is a potential explanation for his willingness to let Obama take the early advertising lead in the swing states.) I don’t claim to buy Bert’s explanation; I can think of a variety of reasons for why Romney’s swing-state polling hasn’t matched the forecasts as yet, ranging from oversampling of Democrats/slightly screwy likely voter screens to the usual tendency of many voters to answer polls at this point in the election in terms of which candidate is getting the best of current media coverage rather than based on who they will vote for when they are in the polling booth. (For what it is worth, I reject the conservative pundits’ claim that pollsters are in the tank for Obama.)
The bottom line is I’m sticking by my fundamentals-based methodology that has stood me well in the past. (Ok, maybe not as well as I’d like to think – my forecasts have missed two of the last six elections! Which reminds me: I owe you my traditional forecast. It’s coming, day job permitting) And that methodology says this race was going to tighten no matter what happened last night (barring, of course, a disastrous performance by Mitt.) The fact that Mitt won the debate will likely focus attention on the fundamentals in a way that might accelerate what was going to happen anyway.
Yes, Romney won the debate last night. But no, Obama did not lose the election as a result, and Romney did not win it. There are two more presidential debates to go, for Pete’s sake. (True, they will be even less influential.)
That’s my story, and I’m sticking by it. Tomorrow (day job permitting) I will explain why Obama lost the debate. In my view, it has far less to do with him, and far more with the institutional constraints that affect all incumbent presidents in their first debate.
*In my initial late night posting, my math skills departed completely and I reported incorrect post-debates averages. These have been corrected (I hope!)
