Category Archives: Political Parties

Advice To Obama Supporters: Get An Effing Grip On Yourselves!

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!)

About That Gender Gap…..

I have a post up today at the Economist’s Democracy in American website discussing the conventional wisdom regarding the source of the sizable gender gap in the presidential race. In brief, I take issue with the argument that women’s greater support for Obama can be traced to differences between the two candidates, and their parties, on the so-called women’s issues, including equal pay, domestic violence, contraception availability and abortion. As you know, the partisan differences on these issues have been magnified in recent weeks by highly publicized comments from Romney’s fellow Republicans, most notably Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin’s statement regarding how women’s bodies respond to “legitimate rape” and conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh’s earlier characterization of Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University student who testified on Capitol Hill in favor of insurance coverage for contraception, as a “slut”.

Given the negative public backlash engendered by these comments, it is not surprising that Democrats tried to capitalize by inviting Fluke to speak at the Democratic Convention, along with several other high-profile women, including Lilly Ledbetter, the namesake of the legislation Democrats pushed through Congress that required women to earn equal pay for equal work; Nancy Keenan, head of the abortion rights group NARAL; television star Eva Longoria; President Kennedy’s daughter and longtime Democratic icon Caroline Kennedy; and, not least, First Lady Michelle Obama, who delivered the capstone speech on the convention’s second night.

Collectively, this parade of speakers sought to bolster Obama’s standing among women by portraying Romney and his fellow Republicans’ as conducting a “war on women”. Romney, of course, had already played his own gender card by inviting a corresponding group of high-profile women to speak at the Republican National Convention, held a few days before the DNC. The speakers’ list included former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez, and Mitt’s wife Ann Romney, who sought to portray her husband in softer, kinder terms, presumably to better appeal to women voters. .

Given what political scientists know regarding the origins of the gender gap, however, it is not immediately obvious why either party thought their particular roster of women speakers, and the issues they highlighted, would shift the gap in either direction. As I argue in the Economist post, there is evidence suggesting that the gender gap is driven more by men leaving the Democratic Party than by women abandoning the Republicans. Moreover, the source of that gap is primarily women’s differing views regarding how parties treat the most vulnerable in society – the aged, poor, young and sick – as well as their greater opposition to the use of force.

Meanwhile, if I get a chance, I’ll post something on the debate in the next couple of hours, as prelude to live blogging tonight.

The DNC, True Lies And The Twitterverse

My unscientific sampling of the twitterverse tweets during the Democratic National Convention’s first two nights of speechifying revealed what seemed like a distinctly lower frequency of instant fact-correcting than what I observed during the Republican convention. That may be because Democrats are an inherently more truthful group of speakers than are Republicans – or it may indicate that my twitterverse feed is dominated by left-leaning pundits. I’ll let you decide.

Despite the relative lack of prodding from the twits, however, the main stream media fact-checkers such as Factcheck.org and Politifact.com gamely persisted in informing us about what the former labeled “Democratic Disinformation from Charlotte.” At the top of their list of misinformation? The claim during the first night by keynote speaker San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro and other speakers that Romney would “raise taxes on the middle class”, followed close behind by a misleading claim of job growth under Obama. (The list of false assertions is actually longer, but these two will suffice to make my point.) Factcheck is correct that Romney has made it clear that, contrary to the assertions by the Democratic convention speakers, he will not raise taxes on the middle class. However, as Greg Sargent points out, Romney has promised across-the-board tax cuts in his budget plan while insisting it will be revenue neutral (that is, it will not increase the deficit). It is possible, of course, that he could fulfill both promises, but to do so would probably require an unlikely combination of rapid economic growth and a significant alteration to the tax code that eliminates or changes many current exemptions, deductions and loopholes. The problem for fact-checkers is that Mitt has yet to specify what those changes to the tax code might be. A study by the independent Tax Policy Center that tried to reconcile the competing claims in the Romney budget plan, while stopping short of endorsing the Democrats’ charge that Romney must raise taxes on the middle class, concluded that the only way for Romney’s budget to include tax cuts for all and not add to the deficit is by eliminating current tax exemptions for the middle class. That sounds suspiciously like a version of a tax hike.

So, did the Democrats really misstate the facts? Or did they highlight inconsistencies in Romney’s budget proposal? Or both?

A similar argument can be made regarding the Obama job growth claims. Castro, the keynote speaker on the first night, asserted that since Obama took office, “we’ve seen 4.5 million new jobs.” That claim, however, uses February 2010 as the starting point – “the low point for private sector jobs” – rather than the date at which Obama took office. Moreover, as Factcheck.org points out, “if you include all jobs — including the hard-hit government job sector — there remains a net decrease of 316,000 jobs since the start of Obama’s presidency. Total employment has gained about 4 million since February 2010, not 4.5 million. It’s all in how you slice the data.”

Not surprisingly, Republicans and Democrats slice that data differently. Like Paul Ryan, Castro might not have been “lying”, but clearly he was shading the facts in a way to make Obama’s job creation record look better. But isn’t that the point of a convention speech? In defense of Castro’s spin, the economy is creating jobs and has been for many months (albeit more slowly than one might like.) And one might argue that Obama’s policies prevented an even worse job loss – most economists argue that without the stimulus bill the number of jobs lost would be even greater. Shouldn’t Obama get some credit for this? Isn’t that the point Castro was trying to make?

Look, I have nothing against the efforts by independent factcheckers at sites like this to police politicians’ statements in order to catch the most egregious errors. But as I hope I’ve demonstrated in these last few posts, once the factcheckers move beyond simple factchecking and attempt to compensate for partisan-induced “misleading statements”, they enter a deep thicket of half-truths, spin, and rhetorical excess that makes it almost impossible to locate the “truth.” Moreover, we are naive if we think the partisan bloggers living in the twitterverse will, through the wonders of “crowd sourcing”, hold politicians’ feet to the fire and elevate the accuracy of political discourse. Instead, the evidence so far suggests that the twits in the twitterverse are largely reinforcing the partisan spin that characterizes political debate today. They are awfully quick to point out the other sides’ misleading statements, but perhaps a bit slower to hold their own side accountable. It is a reminder of the old adage that there are three sides to every story: yours, mine and the truth.

A final thought: if Factcheck and Politifact really want a challenge, I dare them to enter the twitterverse and try to hold participants there to some standard of “truth” in real time! As the journalist Herbert Agar reminds us, “The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.” The denizens of the twitterverse, it turns out, are particularly hard of hearing.

P.S. Sorry about the last-minute decision to live blog last night, but Clinton is such as charismatic figure that I fell under his spell and couldn’t help myself. I realize some of you wanted a deeper analysis of the particulars of his speech, but I was trying to view it not as a partisan supporter, but as an undecided voter who might be tuning into the convention for the first time. First impressions can matter. (Also, I was trying to put together a course syllabus while tweeting and listening to the Big Dog Bark. There’s a reason I caution my students not to multitask!) I’ll say more about Clinton’s speech in a later post.

Lies, Damn Lies and Nail Polish

In what is likely the peak for his post-convention polling bump, Mitt Romney yesterday edged ahead of Barack Obama in the composite polling at the Pollster.com website by a scant half a percentage point, at 46.6% to 46.1%. This is the first time Romney has led in Pollster’s aggregate poll against Obama dating back to June 2011 and the start of the election cycle. While perhaps symbolically important to some, however, Romney’s “lead” does not represent much if any real change in the election polling – the race continues to be close to a dead heat. It is also further evidence that Romney received a smaller than historically average polling bump from the Republican Convention. The RealClearPolitics composite poll, where Obama’s “lead” has shrunk to .1%, tells a similar story.

Romney’s Pollster.com “lead” may prove short lived, however, as President Obama is likely to get his own small bump from the Democratic Convention, which began yesterday with a night of speechifying headlined by Michelle Obama. For what it’s worth, I thought the First Lady gave a very impressive performance. Most of today’s punditry, however, focused more on her dress and her nail polish. These are, evidently, issues of national importance.

Tonight we get to see the Big Dog himself, as former President Bill Clinton takes the stage. I don’t expect him to be given a very long leash by the Obama team – they will want to make sure he sticks to the convention schedule (always a worry with Bill), and doesn’t talk to any chairs. There has to be some trepidation among the Obama people that Bill is going to steal some of the convention thunder. It is a sign of just how close this race is that despite these worries, Team Obama is asking Clinton to help out. Frankly, they need him, and his ability to rally working class Democrats back into the fold.

One thing I am interested in seeing is how carefully his, and other convention speeches, are “fact-checked” by the denizens of the twitterverse and national media. It is clear to me that the partisan pundits are now using twitter to conduct an initial fact-check of speeches in real time. In so doing, they are establishing a first-take news narrative that the mainstream media, including the various fact-checking sites, feels obliged to respond to. Several of you, in your comments to a previous blog, argued that this instant “crowd sourcing” is a useful check on politicians’ tendency to stretch the truth both by embellishing their own record and distorting their opponents’. This is a point that bloggers are making as well.

I confess that I remain skeptical. As I noted in my discussion of the media reaction to the Ryan speech, it would be one thing if the ‘fact checkers” limited themselves to catching obvious errors of fact. But in Ryan’s case they went beyond that to correct “misimpressions” created by his speech. This is a worrisome trend, I think, because it presumes there is a “truth” out there that the often partisan fact-checkers can unambiguously identify. So, many of my colleagues were up in arms when Ryan, in his convention speech, criticized the President for not actively supporting the recommendations of the Bowles-Simpson bipartisan deficit reduction commission. As they correctly pointed out, Ryan was a member of that commission, and he voted along with the other Republican members against its recommendations. My fact-checking colleagues think Ryan should have pointed this out in his speech. But while what Ryan said may have been hypocritical and self-serving, it wasn’t factually wrong. “Fine,” you respond, “but it is important that we identify self-serving and hypocritical statements.” It seems to me, however, that fact-checkers are stepping onto a slippery slope when they go from identifying clear falsehoods to taking on this additional interpretive task. Last night Ted Strickland gave a rousing speech defending Obama’s decision to bail out the auto companies. He also noted that “Mitt Romney proudly wrote an op-ed entitled, ‘Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.’ If he had had his way, devastation would have cascaded from Michigan to Ohio and across the nation. Mitt Romney never saw the point of building something when he could profit from tearing it down. “ It is true that Romney wrote an editorial opposing the auto bailout. But I suspect he would argue it is misleading to claim that “if he had had his way”, economic calamity would have resulted. Should someone correct the misleading impression created by Strickland’s assertion? Or should we chalk it up to the usual rhetorical excesses of convention speeches?

Or, consider the question “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” I can think of multiple, factually correct but quite different answers to that question. For instance, do you think – as many economists assert – that the Obama-backed stimulus bill averted a worse economic calamity? If I’m Obama, I’m going to argue yes. But is that the “truth” – or a self-serving claim? Or both? I don’t see how the fact-checkers can expect to rule on this one.

My point is that I’m not sure I want a bevy of partisan-motivated tweeters telling me what is the “correct” answer to this, or other, political questions. But that’s exactly what we invite when we fall prey to the notion that there is an undeniable ‘truth” out there, and that it is the fact-checkers job to tell us what it is. Perhaps the one undeniable fact is that when it comes to political claims, one person’s “truth” is often another’s self-serving assertion.

By the way, that was a Tracy Reese dress the First Lady wore last night, and it worked perfectly with her bluish-grey nail polish. And that’s a fact.

Go Ahead, Make My Convention

In my most recent post for the Economist, I argued that both Mitt Romney and President Obama were likely to fall short of the 5% average convention-driven polling bounce received by presidential candidates in prior years, although I expected Romney to get a very slightly bigger bump than the President. This was for two reasons. First, neither candidate is polling much lower than one might expect, given the fundamentals. So there’s not a lot of room to grow polling support based on the convention alone. Second, because the Democratic convention, which starts tomorrow, follows so closely on the heels of the Republican convention, which ended last Thursday, the two events are likely to cut into each other’s bump somewhat. However, because Obama is the better known of the two, I thought Romney had slightly more polling upside because some people would use the convention as their first opportunity to assess his candidacy.

So far, the post-convention polls – and there haven’t been very many as yet – are consistent with the first part of my argument: Romney has received a smaller than average polling bump. In Rasmussen’s three-day tracking poll, Romney appears to have gained 6% from its pre-convention figures. However, that is based on a starting poll that probably was something of an outlier among Rasmussen’s recent tracking results, since it showed Obama leading Romney by 2%. For most of the last few weeks, however, Rasmussen has had the race tied or Romney slightly ahead. If we adjust the starting point to the more typical Rasmussen tracking poll results showing the race a dead heat, it appears that Romney gained perhaps a 2-3% polling bounce, rather than 6%. That’s pretty much what I expected.

Meanwhile, in its seven-day tracking poll, Gallup is showing no polling bump for Romney; the race remains essentially a dead heat, with Obama up 47-46%, about where it has been for a couple of weeks now. Of course, the 7-day average only includes two days of polling for the period after the RNC ended, so it may not be picking up the full convention impact. Gallup may have a better gauge tomorrow, when a full four days of post-convention polling is available.

In the RealClearPolitics composite polling average, Obama’s lead has shrunk from 1.4% on the day before the convention to .3% today. At Pollster.com, Obama pre-convention polling lead has barely budged, from .7% before the convention to .1% today. Of course, both composite polls include the Rasmussen tracking poll in their composite results, and not much else, so I wouldn’t read very much into either one.

Inevitably, some pundits are going to blame the lack of a polling bump on Dirty Harry’s – er, Clint Eastwood’s unscripted and sometimes rambling 10-minute address during the Convention’s last night, a speech that culminated with the crowd repeating one of Clint’s more iconic lines:

[youtube /watch?v=2pQwbRPwccY]

Not surprisingly, reactions to Clint’s speech broke down neatly along partisan lines. Obama supporter Steven Benen pointed out that Clint’s speech mocked Obama’s decision to first increase the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan before drawing down American forces, rather than withdrawing troops at the start of his presidency. Unfortunately, a troop drawdown is not Romney’s position either. The National Review’s Mark Steyn, on the other hand, thought Clint’s chair-talking effectively targeted undecided voters who might have tuned into the RNC event. Steyn concludes, “Incidentally, I’m not generally in favor of what Rob Long would call “working blue,” but, if you’re going to do it, doing anatomically impossible sex-act cross-talk with an invisible presidential straight-man in front of the Republican Convention is definitely the way to go.”

I’m not sure Clint’s performance moved the needle in either direction, but it surely got people talking about the convention, which is typically an eminently forgettable event. For that alone, I think Clint’s speech was a hit. Still, given what was at stake for Romney, more than one critic is wondering why he allowed Romney to appear on stage without first vetting Clint’s speech. I think the answer to that one is pretty obvious:

[youtube /watch?v=3ishbTwXf1g&feature=related]

You got that, punk?