Tag Archives: Florida primary

It’s primary day in Florida, polls opened at 7 a.m. and voting is underway. If the polls are correct, there’s not much suspense regarding who will be the winner tonight: Romney is going to claim victory.  The only question is by how much.  The most recent poll, by Public Policy Polling, has Romney up 8%, 39-31%, over Gingrich, with Santorum at 15% and Paul trailing the field with 11%.  Romney’s margin is actually smaller in the PPP poll than in most recent surveys, most of which have Romney up by double-digits.

As always, I’ll have my prediction below.  Please, no wagering at home.  I’m a professional.  But in addition to who wins, and by how much, there are a couple of other aspects of today’s vote that are of interest.  First, how much Tea Party support does Romney get?  Similarly, can he win over evangelicals?  On the other side, does Gingrich show any sign of closing the gender gap?  And what is the split between Cuban Hispanics and non-Cuban Hispanics?  The exit polls should be interesting, and I’ll be live blogging tonight when the polls close at 7 p.m. with an early analysis.

In the meantime, here are some other aspects of today’s vote to keep in mind.

1. There are 50 delegates at stake – half the normal total as a result of the penalty the national Republican Party imposed on Florida for moving their primary day forward in the calendar against party rules.  In theory, this is a winner-take-all state.  But, as Andy Rudalevige points out, there have been some suggestions by the Santorum camp that this violates party rules, and that the delegates should instead be divvied up in some proportional method.  For now, however, I’m assuming Romney will pick up all 50 delegates.

2. Remember that Florida spans two times zones – most of it is in the eastern time zone but the western panhandle extends into central time.  This time difference caused a problem in 2000 when the networks prematurely called Florida for Al Gore while the panhandle was still voting. To this day Bush supporters claim that cost him enough votes so that he failed to win Florida convincingly.  I’m not sure how the networks will handle this tonight, but you can be sure they will be under immense pressure to leak exit polls and call the state at 7 p.m. if, as expected, Romney has a big lead.

3. Note that roughly 35% of the vote already came in before today, and most of that went to Romney. According to PPP, he leads the already-voted category by a substantial 45-32%, but among those yet to vote the race is much closer, with Romney only up 36-30%.  This may be what is accounting for the differences in polls.   It does suggest that Romney’s organizational advantage came into play here, as he was better able to get his supporters to vote early.

4. Turnout demographics matter.  Romney has strong support among the 65-and-over voters, and among women.  He leads Gingrich among women by 12%, but only by 5% among men.  Although some polls indicate Cuban Americans are supporting Gingrich, in total a plurality of the Hispanic vote has been supporting Romney.  Gingrich beats Romney by 8% among Tea Party voters, but is losing badly among the non-Tea Party group. So, the final margin will be determined by the relative turnout of these different groups.

5. The debates were likely not as good for Romney or as bad for Gingrich as the punditocracy suggests.  Among those who watched the debates, Gingrich and Romney are actually tied, according to PPP, at 36%.  Among those who did not (a bit more than 40% of respondents), Romney leads by almost 20%.  Of course, this surely reflects some self-selection among viewers, with Gingrich supporters perhaps more likely to tune in to see their boy administer the expected whipping to Romney.

So, with that in mind, here is my prediction.  Just a reminder – this is not based on any forecasting model; it’s all seat of the pants guesstimating:

                Romney 41%

                Gingrich 33%

                Santorum 14%

                Paul  10%

I’ll be on shortly before  7 Eastern Time.  As always, I invite you to join in.  It should be an early night, but there’s always some excitement to be had.

Against the backdrop of three polls released today showing Mitt Romney with a double-digit lead in Florida, the New York Times ran this story purporting to show how a change in campaign tactics resurrected the Romney campaign, which had faltered in South Carolina. According to Romney aides, the key to Romney’s resurgence was a change in tactics designed to attack Gingrich’s vulnerabilities and rattle him psychologically. The authors, Jim Rutenberg and Jeff Zeleny, write: “The results of that strategy, carried out by a veteran squad of strategists and operatives assembled by Mr. Romney to deal with just this kind of moment, have been on striking display here. By this weekend, Mr. Romney’s aides were on the offensive and increasingly confident, with some combination of their strategy and Mr. Gingrich’s own performance swinging polls in Mr. Romney’s direction.”

The Times story fits with the media’s more general tendency to emphasize candidate tactics and personalities as the primary influences on electoral outcomes, but as with most of these stories, it incorrectly downplays the more important factors that are behind Romney’s Florida lead.  The first, of course, is demographics.  Florida is not a typical southern state.  Indeed, as I noted in an earlier post, more than half of likely Republican voters there do not consider themselves “southern”.   Many, in fact, are transplanted New Englanders with moderate political leanings closer to that of New Hampshire voters.

Romney also leads Gingrich among Florida’s sizable Hispanic population, 52-28%, despite the harsh rhetoric he has employed regarding restricting illegal immigration. (In 2008 Hispanics made up 12% of the Florida vote.) The reason is that the immigration issue is much less salient among Puerto Ricans and Cubans, the two largest elements in Florida’s Hispanic population. Puerto Ricans, as U.S. citizens, can settle in any state, and Cubans benefit from the U.S. policy that gives them a pathway to citizenship if they make it to American soil.  So for most Hispanics, the issue driving their vote is the economy, and Romney does well among them on this point.

Although Gingrich continues to beat Romney among Tea Party supporters, at about 30% they are a smaller group, proportionally, than they were in South Carolina. Finally, Romney consistently runs stronger than Gingrich among older voters, who – at almost 40% of likely Republican voters – constitute a much bigger slice of the electorate in Florida than in other states.

For demographic reasons alone, then, it would have been a major upset if Gingrich had won here. Although he led in the initial polls coming out of South Carolina, that was before Florida voters began zeroing in on the race and actively engaging in deliberation between the candidates.  Any hope that Gingrich might parley his South Carolina success into a victory here was probably squashed by the second most important factor influencing election outcomes:  money.  Between his campaign and the SuperPacs buying ads on his behalf, Romney has outspent Gingrich on advertising alone in Florida by about $15 million to $3 million. In a state this large and diverse, where retail politics is a lot less practical, it becomes difficult to overcome that disparity in spending.  And Gingrich didn’t.

In the Times article, much is made about how a change in debate coaches and superior opposition research enabled Romney to blunt Gingrich’s previous advantage in these events.  Although the debates certainly didn’t help Gingrich, there’s not any evidence that they contributed to Romney’s polling surge either. In fact in this NBC/Marist College poll Romney actually lost support after Thursday’s debate; his lead over Gingrich remained essentially unchanged because Gingrich also saw his support drop by about the same 3-4%.  If anyone benefited from the debate, it was Santorum who gained 5% in the polls.

All this is not to say the change in Romney’s demeanor and tactics had no influence on the polling in Florida. Along with the orchestrated attacks on Gingrich from leading Republicans, ranging from John McCain to Bob Dole, it probably had some marginal impact.  But it almost certainly was not as big as the front page story in the New York Times would have one believe. And it serves as a reminder that you should be skeptical when the Times and other major news outlets begin dusting off their Romney inevitability stories after Tuesday.  As always, there will be the results, and there will be what the punditocracy say are the results.  The two are not the same.

Two new Florida polls, one commissioned by SunshineState News, and the  second by Quinnipiac, came out today, and both show Romney leading Gingrich by identical 9% margins, 40-31% and 38-29%, respectively.   Both polls were conducted prior to last night’s debate.  But nothing I saw last night persuades me that it will change the general polling trend, which since Monday’s debate has favored Romney.   As I noted at the conclusion of last night’s event, and which many of you picked up on in your comments, Gingrich was not at his best.  Although he scored some points, he was on the defensive most of the night, and even his attempt to score points at the media’s expense  – a favorite tactic – did not work last night, as Wolf Blitzer was prepared for Newt and did not back down.  In the end, the audience turned on Newt during that particular exchange.

I think at least some of the blame for Newt’s less-than-stellar performance, however, has to be credited to Mitt. Whether it was his new debate coach, or some other factor, he came into the debate with a game plan – attack Gingrich – and he executed it well, if not flawlessly.   Yes, he occasionally revealed his ham-handedness in interpersonal relations, but it was also clear that he was better prepared than Newt, thanks in no small part to better opposition research.   This was one of those organizational factors which was supposed to be Romney’s strength, and it showed last night, when Newt thought he had scored a point in citing Mitt’s investments in Freddie Mac, only to have Mitt tit-for-tat Newt by citing the latter’s investments in the same mortgage company.  That blunted some of Newt’s strike, and really set the tone for the debate.

Let’s be clear here:  Florida was always Romney’s state to lose.  Newt’s only chance was to build off his South Carolina victory with two strong debate performances in order to offset Mitt’s superior organization and resources.  Remember, Mitt has been running television ads in Florida since before South Carolina, and he had a 20% lead in most polls prior to Gingrich’s victory.  Even with two strong debate performances I wasn’t sure Newt could pull this out.  At this point, however – unless I’m missing something – Romney is going to win this by a margin similar to Newt’s victory in South Carolina.

About the only other factor that might upset this outcome is Rick Santorum dropping out and endorsing Newt. Santorum had a very strong performance last night, leading some on-air pundits to speculate that he might have resurrected his candidacy.  But he has run, to my knowledge, no television ads whatsoever in Florida, and in a winner-take-all state (at least so far – there is some debate about whether that might change), he will receive no delegates here.  Indeed, beyond the visibility afforded by the national debates – and the chance to visit his remarkable youthful 93-year-old mother, there is absolutely no incentive for Rick to invest any resources whatsoever in Florida (again assuming they retain the winner-take-all delegate format).   He’s polling at about 12% – that may increase a couple of percentage points as a result of last night, but he’s not in any danger of winning there.   This was all about the road ahead, and I persist in thinking that road leads to only one destination.

So where does the race stand?  Political scientist John Sides posted this self-deprecating piece recently in which he imagined a conversation with a fictional “cranky reader” who took him to task for his failure to adequately forecast how the Republican nomination race was playing out.  And while I have disagreed with John on some aspects of his analysis – particularly the idea that the winnowing of the Republican field would benefit Romney – we shouldn’t lose sight of his larger point.  Journalists, by necessity, must chronicle the daily ebbs and flows of the nomination race, something I pay attention to by virtue of posting on a daily basis (and which I mostly critique.)   As a political scientist, however, John is really taking a longer view of this race, and everything political scientists think they know regarding the nomination process has indicated from the beginning that Mitt Romney should be the eventual nominee.   That’s John’s view and nothing that has happened so far suggests his long-range forecast is wrong, even if the race may not have played out exactly as some of us anticipated.   Contrast that with the bandwagon effect playing out in the punditocracy, which first had Mitt coronated, then after South Carolina was breathlessly speculating about a brokered convention, and after next Tuesday will likely be back to coronating Mitt again.

Nothing is certain in life except death and taxes.  The nomination process is inherently more fluid, and hence less predictable, than the general election.  But it is not a random process – political scientists have some ideas regarding which factors tend to exert the greatest influence on outcomes, even if we aren’t completely certain how they interact over a sequential process that stretches across many months.  Sometimes new variables – say, 18 debates in which one individual generally is superior – can alter the course of the process, at least in the short-term, in unpredictable ways.  But that doesn’t mean we start from scratch every four years and build a new forecast model.  It’s still all about the fundamentals. I’ll develop this notion in a separate post.

A final point.  I have long pushed back against the idea that an extended nomination fight will weaken the eventual Republican nominee by providing fodder for Democrats to use in the general election. Instead, I have said a lengthy process can only strengthen the eventual winner. Last night provides evidence supporting my argument.  Romney has sharpened his defense of what were potential weak points regarding his taxes, and his work at Bain.  He has also become a better debater – as I noted above, Newt struggled in part because Mitt was more effective at parrying Newt’s now somewhat predictable thrusts.  If Newt is to stay in this race, he has to elevate his game as well.  This will be harder to do in the absence of more debates, and with fewer resources on which to draw.  But he has no choice if he wants to remain competitive.

Less than five days before Tuesday’s Florida primary.  Are there any surprises yet in store? Stay tuned.