After a two month break iapprovedthismessage is back for some more exciting political and social commentary, and it couldn’t be at a more ground-breaking time politically. Right now we’re looking at an electoral map that John Kerry couldn’t have imagined four years ago. Here is fivethirtyeight’s current projection.
With Obama seriously contesting in states like North Carolina and potentially winning in places like Indiana, Missouri and Virginia it’s getting to be panic time for the McCain campaign. McCain needs to make a splash somehow to counteract the Obama momentum that he continues to carry from the end of the primary campaign. I think the best way to do this is to pick a VP now and get him (or her) out on the campaign trail as quickly as possible.
I say her because I know there is a school of thought that thinks McCain would benefit significantly from picking a woman. The problem is, there aren’t a whole lot of particularly viable candidates, outside of Condi Rice (who has said she wouldn’t do it), that McCain could pick that wouldn’t cause his selection to look like some kind of gender gimmick. Retiring Texas Senator Kay Baily-Hutchinson could be a possible option but she doesn’t have a whole lot of name-recognition and she has that grandmother-look to her that wouldn’t help McCain either.
I think it seems the obvious pick at this point is Florida Governor Charlie Crist. Crist would, of course, secure Florida’s 27 votes but would also be a defensive pick for McCain. However, he doesn’t have any other particularly good options at this point. But having an energetic and moderate Crist on the campaign trail would be very beneficial to McCain, at least in the short run.
Yesterday I wrote about Hillary’s recent surge in polling against John McCain. I said this was likely due to Republicans picking up their attacks on Obama as he became the front runner, which drove up the negatives for both Obama and McCain while leaving Hillary untouched. Now this morning the guys at fivethirtyeight have published a study of press release attacks by all three campaigns and both national committees during the last nine months. This chart really couldn’t be more explicit in showing how much the national committees have attacked both McCain and Obama in the last four months while leaving Hillary virtually untouched.
It’s interesting to see how little, at least through press releases, Obama has attacked both Hillary and McCain over the course of the campaign. This is likely due to the fact that he was never really behind electorally and also his calls for a new kind of politics makes it difficult for his campaign to attack blatantly through press releases. Another thing to point out is that Clinton has significantly toned down her attacks against Obama in May and actually attacked McCain more in this month than Obama.
That’s at least her strongest and most articulated argument at this point. See this story from CNN. If by more electable she means currently polling ahead of John McCain she is certainly right. Most polls have Senator Clinton ahead in the Kerry states as well as Florida, Ohio and Arkansas. Fivethirtyeight.com reflects this by producing a Clinton electoral victory about 62 percent of the time. The Clinton campaign has also issued a graphical memo that exhibits her advantage.
While this map takes some liberties with Kentucky and maybe New Hampshire I think it’s generally pretty accurate. But I should also point at that Hillary’s surge in the last month or so is likely due to Republicans picking up their attacks on Obama, which has driven up his negatives. If the situation were reversed it’s likely Obama would be doing better than Hillary against McCain, but at the same time a lot of Obama’s woes have been self-imposed.
Hillary’s Obama/McCain map (after the flip) shows Obama 46 points behind McCain but shows McCain winning in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio in all of Which Obama is actually about even or slightly ahead. If Obama were to win two of these three he would surpass 270.
At this point Senator Clinton’s only real argument is that she is ahead in the popular vote going into Oregon and Kentucky.
“I believe that with your help we will send a message to this country because right now more people have voted for me than have voted for my opponent,” she said.
Despite how desperate this claim might sound, Hillary is correct in that more people have actually voted for compared to Obama. With the votes in Michigan and Florida included, Real Clear Politics maintains that she holds a 26,967 vote lead including RCP’s estimates for New Hampshire, Nevada, Maine and Washington, which don’t include popular totals in the caucus returns.
However, when one considers that Obama’s name was not even on the ballot in Michigan and he lost to Senator Clinton 328,309 to 0 in that state, Hillary’s claim becomes absurd. Including the count in Florida, where Obama was on the ballot, but not Michigan, produces a 301,342 vote lead for Obama.
Also, let’s consider that back in September Hillary agreed, like every other candidate not to campaign in either Florida or Michigan because of their violation of the DNC sanctioned schedule. That doesn’t give her a whole lot of sway in arguing that their votes should be included.
Those who think that the extended Democratic primary is hurting the party and the electoral chances of the eventual nominee only need look at the most recent Rasmussen party I.D. poll for a rebuke. According to the poll, 41 percent of respondents claimed to identify with the Democratic Party compared to only 31 percent who said they were Republicans. While the number of Republicans has remained somewhat constant over the last two years, Democratic identifiers have risen five percent since last year. This is the highest number of Democrats since Rasmussen began tracking party I.D. six years ago.
A couple weeks ago I wrote about how competitive primaries, sometimes even if they involve incumbents, are almost always healthy for the party. While I said that the primary will help Obama because Clinton is exposing him to the Republican attacks he will be subject to later, the extended primary is also clearly a positive because it is exposing so many more people to, and making them feel like they are part of the process.
It’s hard to see the Democratic nominee losing in November with these types of identification numbers. I would also go as far to say that the number of Democrats is even higher than the national average in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, despite how close the presidential poll numbers are in those states right now. Additionally, Democratic challengers at both the Senate and House level are probably loving these numbers.
I think it’s pretty clear, at this point, that Hillary is considering dropping out if she doesn’t win Indiana decisively. Despite her strong finish, it looks like Hillary will only pick up 10 delegates in Pennsylvania, which is probably significantly lower than what her campaign considered to be the best possible result. Thus, it is increasingly less-likely that she will have enough Super Delegates to hand her the nomination. Compound this by the fact that there is really only two states remaining, Kentucky and West Virginia, that are sure wins, and the only other states she can win are Indiana, Oregon and maybe Puerto Rico. But I think all three of these lean to Obama.
Hillary will drop out not because she wants to do the right thing for the party or for democracy, but simply because she is resilient, not suicidal.
If Hillary draws this race out even further, and Obama ends up losing to McCain, lots of Democrats will ( I think wrongly) blame Hillary for Obama’s loss, which will end her chance of ever being president. On the other hand, if she graciously accepts defeat and strongly endorses Obama she will very likely be the default nominee against McCain in 2012, if Obama loses. Also consider that McCain will likely be a very vulnurable incumbent in 2012 if he wins in ‘08.
I would actually say that right now, Hillary has a significantly better chance of being elected in 2012 than 2008. Think of Richard Nixon in 1960 refusing to challenge the general election results despite feeling that he was cheated out of the electoral votes in both Illinois and Texas.
So the big day is upon us and I think the only reaction I have is thank God. I am so tired of this primary campaign that I have kind of blocked out a lot of it the last couple weeks. I can’t really fault the campaigns or even the media for the trivial nature of the coverage, because there has never been a campaign like this in American history. Never before has a single campaign between two candidates been the main news story for literally months at a time.
For one, a primary between two candidates has never lasted this long. Additionally, there has never been a six week period without any voting like the one we just experienced. Put these two factors together and what results is a trivia based campaign simply because the candidates haven’t had anything new to say for months. Thus, the media can’t keep reporting on the same things so they emphasize the charge-counter charge nature of the campaigns.
Some might ask, “isn’t this essentially the same thing as a general presidential election?” I would say no simply because, in a presidential, there are two candidates that are the main story at the national level, but there are also hundreds of races across the country at all levels of government that also attract people’s attention. Also, the differences between a Democrat and a Republican are a lot more stark in policy terms than between Clinton and Obama. Not to mention a general election really only last 3 months, which forces the media to discuss policy a lot more than in the 15 month primary campaign that we’re seeing now.
While the good news is that the worst is likely over with the conclusion of the Pennsylvania Primary tomorrow, there looks to be little possibility that Obama will finish close enough to Hillary to force her out of the race. (more…)
An unnamed, esteemed reader of iapprovedthismessage has asked me to comment on the controversy surrounding Barack Obama’s recent comments about rural Americans being bitter due to their down-and-out economic conditions. Here is the full quote.
“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama said. “And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Four things come to mind when I read this.
1. Hardly anyone will actually change their vote for Hillary, or John McCain for that matter, after hearing this quote. I think there is actually a large swath of people in these small towns who likely agree with Obama because this is the kind of thing they see everyday. The people who try to make political hay out of this aren’t going to vote for Obama anyway.
2. Obama wrote pretty much this exact thing several times in the Audacity of Hope and he also made statements along these lines in the debates at well without any kind of backlash. Additionally, Obama has been significantly more critical of the self-destructive nature of black-urban communities and blacks have been voting for Obama to about the tune of about 90 percent.
3. I think the timing of this statement, two weeks before a primary that could propel him to the White House, shows that Obama is probably the most authentic and wise politician since King Solomon told them to cut that baby in half. Anyone that doesn’t think this statement shows the legitimate nature of Obama as a different type of candidate is probably not paying attention. Sure you can disagree with him on policy but it’s hard to disagree with the fact that Obama is rewriting the rules of presidential campaigning.
4. Let’s just contrast Obama’s statement with Hillary hammerin’ back a couple shots like she just got off the line at the steel plant. What? That whiskey is Canadian!? SHAME ON YOU HILLARY!
I’ve never been a fan of moveon.org. I think, in lots of instances, they actually do more harm than good. Take the “General Betray Us” ad that they ran in the New York Times the day before Gen. Petraeus testified a Capitol Hill in September. The ad was as harmful to the Democrats as it was corny because, after the ad, they couldn’t ask Petraeus hard questions without appearing to be personally questioning his loyalty. This incident honestly made me think that Republicans were running Move-On.
However, Move-On has shown an incredible ability to raise huge sums of money and to mobilize really well at the grass-roots level. They’re also pretty good at making TV ads, like this one about McCain and Iraq.
I think Democrats should probably get away from talking about this “100-year war” comment because people are starting to figure out that’s not exactly what McCain meant and it sort of compromises Obama’s ability to claim a higher quality dialogue. But either way this ad from move-on is exactly the way the Obama team should go about exposing McCain and the Republicans’ rhetoric on Iraq.
I say that because his 2008 electoral map prediction for an Obama-McCain race looks very similar to the state-by-state probabilities that I made in my post predicting the electoral college expected values. This map can be found on theelectoralmap.com.
The only real differences between this map and my probabilities are the states of Arkansas, South Carolina and Michigan. It’s more or less imperative that Obama wins Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan to win the election. I think Russert is right in assuming that Michigan will be the closest of the three, but I still think it leans to Obama due to the economic circumstances in the state and McCain’s support for freer trade.
For some reason Russert also thinks that Obama stands less of a chance in South Carolina than Georgia or North Carolina. This may be true to a point, but I still have trouble writing it off to McCain at this point.
Geoff pointed out in a comment to my expected values calculation that he thought my probabilities for Arkansas and West Virginia were escessively low and that Obama has at least a marginal chance of winning in each state. However, I stand by my projections and say that Hillary likely would win in both states but Obama really doesn’t stand a chance in either due to the highly white, low income, low education democraphics. Russert seems to agree with me on West Virginia and with Geoff on Arkansas.
Below the fold I added Russert’s Clinton-McCain map just for fun. I think this map shows that Obama’s and Clinton’s expected values would be about the same, but with different strengths in different places. But I’m definately not going to take the time to add up Clinton’s values. (more…)
Looking ahead to the general election between John McCain and Barack Obama, we’re likely going to be looking at an electoral map that is moderately different from that of the last two elections. Sure Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania will be key, but other states, traditionally red and blue, will be in play and add to the dynamics of the race.
In this post I evaluated each state independently, not necessarily based on current polls, but rather on the demographics of each state and the results from the exit polls from the primaries. I gave each state an arbitrary value between 0 and 1 that is the probability Obama will win the state. I then multiplied that value by the number of electoral college votes from the state and then added up the final value of each state to get the expected number of electoral college votes for each candidate. The equation looks like this… E(X)(Electoral Votes State 1) + E(X)(Electoral Votes State 2)… = Total number of expected electoral college votes for Obama, where (E)X is the probability Obama wins the state. I also broke break down all of the states by region.
The final total for the electoral college, based on raw winner-take-all probability, is McCain 258 to Obama’s 253 electoral votes with 27 (Ohio and Iowa), which are .5 probability tossups. However, when I calculated the expected values, the total was 290.1 electoral votes for Obama to 247.9 electoral votes for McCain. Read on to see how I got these values and for additional analysis.
Obviously the green here is Obama and the blue is Hillary. The greenest and bluest counties were carried by their respective candidate with 60% of the vote. Clearly this map shows that Appalachia has not been and will continue to not be particularly friendly to Obama.
There is absolutely no reason to think that Obama will get anything but straight pwned in West Virginia and Kentucky in a worse fashion than Tennessee. Keep in mind there is no Memphis in either state that will give Obama a bump. Indiana is interesting because the conventional knowledge is that Obama will benefit from media “spill-over” from Chicago and the rest of Illinois that will help him here. But demographically, Indiana is a lot more like Ohio than Illinois and I think it’s likely that the spill-over will be overrated and, if anything, confined to the northern suburbs of Chicago. However, Obama will have a pretty good cushion in Indianapolis that will keep him from getting dominated like he will in Appalachia. (more…)
Any nerds out there looking for some really awesome, graphical analysis of American politics will love this site theelectoralmap.com. This map is just a little taste of what this site has to offer. The numbers for the graphic below are derived from a survey USA poll and show how the electoral map in an Obama candidacy would vary significantly from previous democratic presidential election strategies. To get a better perspective on the geographic strengths and weaknesses of Obama and Clinton check out the entire post from the Electoral Map.
No, unlike Richard Nixon, Obama did not thrust the country into a new era of campaigning by reducing his pastors controversial sermons to a cute furry animal someone gave to his daughter; as Nixon did in his famous Checker’s Speech. Obama’s speech was too long and lacked the necessary sound bites or gripping storyline to attract a wide viewership or garner the necessary replays on the networks to make his message stick in voter’s minds. It likely won’t have any immediate positive impact on the voters of Pennsylvania or elsewhere and it might even cause more trouble by keeping the story about Jeremiah Wright in the news for a while longer. That being said, this speech was incredibly brilliant.
I’ve done several of these Obama defense articles lately, but I just have to point out this one more argument that I think shows a basic fundamental difference in Hillary and Obama supporters concerning their perspective and vision for the future of the Democratic party.
This blogger, Anonymous Is a Woman, who was formerly an Obama supporter, finds fault in his campaign’s attempt to recruit independents and Republicans to vote for Obama in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania being especially problematic for the Obama campaign because it is a closed primary and Independents and Republicans must change their affiliation to Democrat in order to vote. What she finds particularly egregious is the particular language of the mailer that said, “They can always change back their affiliation after the election.” Though I’ll admit that such a statement is poorly articulated, it doesn’t reflect the sentiment of the campaign nor has any divisive intent.
