In certain ways, this sample-size-of-one stuff is antithetical to what we do around here. But I could not let the convention go by with at least one man-on-the-street perspective.
My cabbie and I had a good conversation about politics yesterday night. Interesting guy; he has a masters’ degree but is driving a cab, and says he knows a lot of people in the same boat. This is going to sound a little xenophobic, but one thing I have noticed in Chicago is that the higher the percentage of taxi drivers that speak English without an accent, the worse off the economy is doing. Lately, I've had a lot of cabbies who spoke the King's English.
He’s a swing voter – white, maybe 53 years old, listens to Air America one night, Rush Limbaugh the next. He isn’t buying what John McCain is selling, and thinks it’s pretty obvious that he’ll take the country in the wrong direction.
But he’s yet to be entirely persuaded by Obama. Likes what Obama has to say. Liked Michelle’s speech. But he feels like he’s heard a lot of the same rhetoric before, and seen too many politicians who couldn’t deliver on it. Says he might vote third party instead, or just sit the election out. He didn’t like the Biden pick, and says a lot of his customers didn’t either. Reinforced too much of his sense that Obama is a typical Washington politican, perhaps well enough intentioned, but like most politicians inclined to overpromise and underdeliver.
He also expressed a great deal of admiration for Ross Perot, particularly Perot’s foresight on NAFTA. And this is one that I have heard before – I had a very similar conversation with a man in Austin, who said in essence that Perot was the only politician he’d trusted in the last thirty years.
Perot’s name still has a lot of currency among certain voters, especially here out West. Perot is not any fan of John McCain, but he’s yet to endorse a candidate. If Perot were to endorse Obama, that would be a very big deal – bigger, perhaps, than any endorsement of the general election campaign, save perhaps for Colin Powell. But even if he doesn’t (and it isn’t likely that he will; Perot made a fairly soft endorsement of Mitt Romney in the Republican primary), the Obama campaign ought to invest some thought into what made the Perot voter tick. I know of at least one vote he’d win that way.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
The NASCAR Dad of 2008? It Might be The Perot Voter.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Biden: A New Trick for Old Fogeys
Yesterday, I argued that Joe Biden is not an especially popular politician, and would start out with an unusually high number of unfavorables for a VP selection, almost all of whom have been either relatively unknown at the time of their selection (allowing the campaign to build a favorable narrative around them), or almost universally well-liked to begin with.
However, Biden's case is probably stronger than I indicated, because he tends to be most popular among voting groups with a lot of undecided voters, which means a lot of persuadables. In particular, Biden's strength with senior citizens could be a real asset. How so? Because seniors are far more likely to be undecided in this election than their younger counterparts.
Below, I have averaged the Gallup national tracker crosstabs by age over the course of the last three weeks. The only thing I am interested in is the number of voters who are not committed to either Obama or McCain (either truly undecided or claiming that they'll vote third-party). This is how that vote breaks down by age group:18-29 9% undecided/otherSeniors are about 50 percent more likely than other voters to be uncommitted at this point in the race. Voters aged 65+ will eventually represent about 20 percent of the electorate, but they may represent more like 30 percent of the pool of persuadables.
30-49 9% undecided/other
50-64 10% undecided/other
65+ 16% undecided/other
Now, what did Joe Biden's favorables look like in that recent Rasumussen poll?VF = Very Favorable
That is a pretty strong age-based correlation. The only figure that breaks the pattern is Biden's relatively strong performance among 18-29 year olds, but that is probably because that cohort is so overwhelmingly Democratic at the moment that they are likely to support any Democrat.
SF = Somewhat Favorable
SU = Somewhat Unfavorable
VU = Very Unfavorable
Age VF + SF = Favorable SU + VU = Unfavorable
18-29 3 + 26 = 29 14 + 8 = 22 (+7)
30-39 4 + 19 = 23 17 + 16 = 33 (-10)
40-49 8 + 19 = 27 22 + 18 = 30 (-3)
50-64 19 + 24 = 43 19 + 18 = 37 (+6)
65+ 21 + 24 = 45 12 + 21 = 35 (+10)
Biden's net favorable score among seniors was the highest of any Democrat that Rasmussen tested, except for John Edwards, who has since disqualified himself:Edwards +21What a Biden pick really would be is a redux of Gore-Lieberman. Al Gore got quite a large bounce in Florida when he selected Lieberman, and if Obama were to pick Biden, he is probably committed to playing Florida out to the end, or at least until the last 15 days of the campaign.
Biden +10
Clinton +8
Kaine +1
Webb 0
Sebelius -1
Bayh -6
Hagel -9
*-*
By the way -- I wouldn't read too much into Biden's "I'm not the guy" statement because his demeanor seemed to be pretty sarcastic and jocular. Then again, assuming it was an unplanned joke, his statement couldn't have gone over too well with the Obama campaign. Hell, if they were really evil, they could have told all the candidates they weren't the one and then saw who leaked or broke their game face.
In any event, based on my 99.99% uninformed aggregation of information and intuition, I'd probably place the candidates into something like the following tiers:
1. Biden, Kaine
2. Sebelius, Clinton
3. Bayh, Reed, Other
Thursday, August 14, 2008
McCain Improves With Base, Obama Stays Flat
Good news for John McCain in one key area – Pew finds his base support is firming up while Barack Obama’s continues to hold steady. Last month, the two candidates held an even share of the base at 83%. While Obama is holding steady after quickly consolidating most of Clinton’s support (69% in June, 72% since July), McCain has 88% support of his Republican field-mates’ former support, up to 87% overall of the Republican base from 83% in June.
Pew has an even more interesting chart measuring hard support compared with swing voters. While 35% support Obama with no chance of supporting McCain and 32% support McCain with no chance of supporting Obama, one in three remain swing voters. Of these, 36.4% lean Obama with a chance of McCain, 33.3% lean McCain with a chance of Obama, and 30.3% are truly undecided.
Each candidate’s supporters can find solace in the numbers. McCain supporters will be happiest knowing the "McCain, no-chance-Obama" supporters have upticked from 29% to 31% to 32% since June and that Obama’s support from the "no-chance-McCain" group dropped from 38% to 35% in July and stayed steady at that number in August. Among former Clinton supporters, the percent planning to support McCain in the fall upticked slightly from 17% to 18%.
Obama supporters will note that within the swing voters group, August’s 36.4% lean Obama - 33.3% lean McCain - 30.3% undecided pattern has reversed itself from June, when it was 36.4% undecided - 33.3% lean McCain - 30.3% lean Obama. Assuming an equal likelihood of Obama leaners flipping to McCain as McCain leaners flipping to Obama, McCain would have to win a hard break of better than 70% true undecideds to win the popular vote (often, but not exclusively, a proxy for an electoral win). Another bit of good news here for Obama's supporters is that among former Clinton supporters who weren’t sure who they’d choose in the fall, Obama has gained roughly 75% of the ones who’ve now made up their minds.
If the 3/4 pattern among the supported-Clinton-but-now-undecided continues to break at the same 3/4 rate for Obama, we can expect a roughly 80-20 split of former Clinton supporters overall (if we assume he does not eat into any of the Clinton-to-McCain voters between now and the election, an assumption to be tested after Clinton's performance at the convention and on the trail). This would mean that McCainocrats would out-percentage Obamacans as a percentage of each party’s respective base. However, a word of caution: many of those who consider themselves Obamacans may have switched party identification to Democratic or independent over the past four years and would thus not be counted in the percentage of Republican base McCain support.
The bottom line in the Pew findings is that McCain is steadily consolidating his base while Obama is treading water, so McCain's supporters should take more comfort. On the cusp of a VP pick that could impact McCain’s numbers with his base support, it’s useful to take a snapshot of where we are. For example, the floated idea of pro-choice Tom Ridge (who would “deliver” PA, per Chris Matthews) might be very unpopular with many members of McCain’s base and reverse this trend in the polling that is helping McCain stay very close behind Obama. Though there are rumblings from the Democratic blogosphere that Evan Bayh would represent an unacceptable choice because he supported the Iraq War, for example, I’m not sure I buy a hands-sitting affair by Dems over something relatively insignificant like a VP choice, particularly when we are told that picking Bayh would be an olive branch to Clinton Dems who Obama has not fully reeled in yet.
One key difference between base Democratic objection to Obama choosing someone like Bayh versus base Republican objection to McCain choosing someone like Ridge is that Dems do not mistrust Obama on ending the Iraq War and would not suddenly do so if Obama picks an Iraq War-supporter, whereas the Republican mistrust of McCain is about his commitment to social conservative issues that would be badly shaken by picking a pro-choice running mate.
Friday, July 25, 2008
Name ... that ... Subgroup!
Bloomberg on a slow news day:
July 25 (Bloomberg) -- Political strategists and pollsters are on the hunt for the ``soccer moms'' and ``Nascar dads'' of 2008, the blocs of swing voters with enough clout to turn the tide in the presidential race.
Pollsters haven't yet popularized catchy labels for key demographic groups, like the minivan-driving suburban ``soccer moms'' deemed crucial in 1996.
There is one group that's up for grabs and could swing the election to Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain: women in their 50s and 60s without a college education.
Yes, the outcome of this election will be entirely determined by non- college educated white women between the ages of 50 and 69. In fact, political strategists have determined even more specifically that it will be 57-year-old women named Cynthia who skipped their high school reunion and live within three miles of a Pottery Barn.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Did Clinton Misplay her Ace?
Hillary Clinton lost last night by a combined 222,000 votes. Given that parameter, is there any way that Clinton might have distributed those votes in order to make herself more viable going forward? I suppose that, if she could, she would take about 50,000 votes from North Carolina and transfer them to Indiana. That would have allowed her to win Indiana by 4-5 points, enough to avoid the appearance of a "virtual tie" and probably to allow all of major networks to have called the race for her at some point in the early evening. She would have lost North Carolina by 18.5 points rather than 14.8, but perception-wise, it's not like the former number is much worse than the latter.
The reality however is that working from a deficit of 222,000 votes (larger than her winning margin in Pennsylvania), there is very little that Clinton could have done to create the perception of a split decision on Tuesday night, much less a game-changing victory. I have Clinton gaining 228,610 votes over the remaining primaries. To stay on a pace where she could have won the +FL popular vote count (which she currently trails by 526,354), she would have needed to do about 300,000 votes better last night than she actually did. That means that she would have won the night by about 80,000 votes, which could have taken the form of either a solid win in Indiana plus a small win in North Carolina, or a double-digit win in Indiana plus a small loss in North Carolina. These were roughly the scenarios that the media seemed to be looking for in order to declare a 'game-changing' moment for Clinton.
Immediately after Pennsylvania, I proffered that considering that her paradigm at this point is to maximize her popular vote count, Clinton should have been just as devoted to North Carolina as to Indiana. And indeed, that's the viewpoint that her campaign seemed to have taken. According to the Washington Post Candidate Tracker, the Clinton campaign held 54 events in North Carolina since Pennsylvania concluded, as compared with 43 in Indiana (note: many of these events were Bill's, rather than Hillary's). The distribution of advertising expenditures was fairly lopsided toward Obama in Indiana, but more equitable in North Carolina. And Clinton deployed top campaign operative Averill "Ace" Smith to Tarheel Country.
After looking at the exit polling results, however, I'm not so certain about that decision. In North Carolina, 20 percent of voters made up their minds in the last week. But this includes only voters who went to the polls on election day, and about 25 percent of the state voted early. So the true percentage of late deciders was about 15 percent.
By contrast, in Indiana, 25 percent of election-day voters made up their minds in the last week. Early voting was a factor in Indiana too, but made up only about 10 percent of the electorate. So the true percentage of late deciders was 22.5 perecnt.
So, if we use late deciders as a proxy for swing voters, 22.5 percent of the voters in Indiana were swing voters, as opposed to 15 percent in North Carolina; the Indiana total is exactly 50 percent higher. And this makes a lot of sense if you consider the underlying demographics of each state. Start with black voters. They made up slightly more than one-third of North Carolina's electorate, and they weren't about to vote for Clinton when she made absolutely no effort to court their votes (much to her detriment; there is a big difference between losing blacks 92/7, as Clinton did in North Carolina, and losing them 85/15).
So already your strategy is speaking to no more than two-thirds of the electorate. But even among white voters in North Carolina, a lot of them are in aligned with groups that are strongly predisposed toward one or the other. After black voters, the group that has behaved most monolithically in the primaries are Southern, rural, working-class whites, who have favored Clinton approximately 3:1. She already had those votes in the bag -- she didn't need to win them over. And Obama's best group among white voters are highly-educated folks in college and university towns. There are plenty of those voters in North Carolina too in the Research Triangle area. In other words, a considerably smaller fraction of the electorate was in play in North Carolina, which means that her return on investment was liable to be lower.
With all that said, I tend to conclude with Marc Ambinder: investing heavily in North Carolina was undoubtedly risky to Clinton -- especially if it served to raise her expectations in that state. But given her position, her whole campaign was premised on a long-shot coming through. This time, the bet did not come through -- and perhaps it had faced even longer odds than the Clinton campaign had recognized. But credit to a campaign that knows how to gamble when the chips are down.
p.s. What's interesting about the Indiana voting is that Obama beat his polling by several points, even though Clinton won among late-deciders, and even though she benefited by some margin from a Limbaugh vote that might or might not have been accounted for in the polls. That suggests that Obama did a tremendous job of turning out his base, particularly in Marion County; 17 percent of Indiana's electorate was black, much higher than anyone was anticipating.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Wright and the Obamacans
One of the many nice things about Survey USA is the extensive set of interactive cross-tabulations that they release with every poll. Survey USA has now released polls in fifteen states that were taken at the height of the Jeremiah Wright controversy (this past Friday through Sunday). We can compare the demographic groups in these polls to Survey USA's previous set of polls, which were conducted in the last couple days of February.
I will be keeping track of five sets of demographic characteristics that Survey USA included among both sets of polls: gender, age, race, party ID, and orientation on the political spectrum (conservative/moderate/liberal). Another demographic that would be nice to look at -- income levels -- was tracked by Survey USA in their February polls but not in their March polls, so we have no choice but to ignore it.
One other methodological annoyance: Survey USA used different age brackets between the different surveys. Although the 18-34 age group was common to both polls, Survey USA handled the other groups of voters differently. I will be lumping the brackets together as follows:
Age February March
"Young" 18-34 18-34
"Mid-Age" 35-54 35-49
" " 50-64
"Old" 55+ 65+Otherwise, this is a rather straightforward exercise: I'm merely comparing Obama's net advantage against McCain between the February and the March surveys. If Obama was leading among whites in Oregon by 6 points in February, but he trailed by 2 points in March, that would be recorded as a "-8".Here come the numbers:
(That chart might be a little hard to read, so I've temporarily created a larger version of it along the right-hand sidebar. Yes, we're the only website in the world that devotes more space to its sidebar than its main column).
Let's pick through these demographic groups one by one:
Gender: Obama's margin declined by a slightly larger margin among women (7 points) than men (4 points), but the differences are small enough that they're probably not worth worrying about. The gender gap was most noticeable in the Midwestern states. Between Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin, Obama declined by 12 points among women but 4 points among men. Elsewhere in the country, the gender differences were roughly equal.
Age: There do seem to be some age-related effects, with the Wright story tending to have done more damage to Obama among older voters, but because of the ambiguities of Survey USA's age brackets, it would be dubious to come to too many conclusions. Taking the 55-64 year olds and shifting them from "Old" to "Mid-Age", as we had to do here, would likely have a deleterious effect on Obama's numbers irrespective of the Wright controversy.
Race: Perhaps unsurprisingly, Obama lost ground in every state except Oregon amongst whites. He gained ground amongst blacks in all states except the three Southern states: Alabama, Kentucky, and Virginia, where he actually backtracked a little bit. The polling data on Hispanic voters is mixed ... the only two states with a whole lot of Hispanic voters were California and New Mexico, and Obama gained a bunch of ground amongst them in California (+24), while losing a bit in New Mexico (-5). Notice, by the way, how the media seems to have completely forgotten about Hispanic voters now that we have a good ol' fashioned white-black racial controversy to kick around.
Party ID: Obama lost the most ground -- an average of 9 points -- amongst Republicans. This is actually fairly hard to do, because there weren't that many Republicans voting for him to begin with. But for the time being, the Obamacans appear to be in hibernation. The interesting piece of news for Obama is that he lost hardly any ground at all amongst independents, although the results bounced around rather radically from state to state. (Survey USA tends to have fewer self-identified independents in their surveys than other pollsters, and so the sample sizes are a little smaller).
Political Orientation: But here's the weird thing. While Obama lost the most ground amongst Republicans on the party spectrum, he lost the most ground among liberals on the political spectrum: 11 points among libs, as compared to 5 points among moderates and just 2 among conservatives (among whom he had little of the vote to begin with).
What to make of these seemingly contradictory results?
Actually, I don't have a great answer for you. Let's try and get a discussion going. But it certainly looks to be thatliberal and moderate Republicans -- not independents, but specifically voters who identify as Republican -- who were willing to indulge the idea of an Obama vote before, have at least temporarily reverted to their base.
Now, if you accept that this is what has gone on, there are a couple of takes you might have on this. Shall we spin the wheel?
Spin #1. These voters were inherently soft, vulnerable supporters of Obama anyway. It is asking a lot for Republicans to cross over and vote for a Democrat -- only 6 percent of them voted for Kerry in 2004. The way Obama -- or Clinton for that matter -- was always going to win this election was by turning out the base, winning over independents, and taking advantage of the blue-leaning shifts in party identification throughout the country. You do two out of those three things (and one of them is really a gimme), and you'll probably win the election. You do all three, and you win big.
On the other hand, if these voters were soft supporters of Obama, that likely now means that their support for John McCain is also fairly soft. There are really relatively few swing voters in the general election -- 80% of the country is voting reflexively by party ID -- which is why polling numbers in general elections are much more stubborn than polling numbers in primaries. But, sort of Linc Chafee / Olympia Snowe Republicans, and perhaps also libertarian-leaning Republicans, are a group of voters that must feel authentically conflicted about what to do. It doesn't take a lot to shift them from one group to the other -- nor might it take a lot to shift them back.
These may also have been voters who were intrigued by Obama's unity message, a brand which was at least temporarily damaged by Jeremiah Wright.
Spin #2. On the other hand, perhaps this also has to do with media consumption habits. The Wright story was handled very differently from media outlet to media outlet, from a full-frontal assult on Obama on FOX News, to a relatively benign treatment at the New York Times. (This effect is even more noticeable in the wake of Obama's speech on Tuesday, which has acted as a depth charge of sorts for partisan conservative pundits). Do Obamacans still watch FOX News and listen to Rush Limbaugh? My hunch is that they do -- that it forms their sort of home base for media coverage, even if they often disagree with its conclusions. When the conservative media went from playing relatively nice with Obama to bashing him non-stop, there was going to be an effect; the Wright incident may have catalyzed it.
Actually, now that that's written, these are really part and parcel of the same explanation. Swing Republicans were vulnerable to being swung -- and the Wright story, amplified by the conservative media, managed to swing some of them. Will Obama's speech swing them back? I don't know. As I mentioned above, it is inherently an uphill battle to ask a voter to cross party lines for you. On the other hand, I would guess that these folks are fairly sophisticated political animals -- you have to have a fairly well-thought out political philosophy to maintain an identification as a Republican these days, but ponder voting for a Democrat for President. And that means they might have been among the 2.3 million Americans and counting who have seen the director's cut of Obama's speech, rather than the sound byte version. It is likely to take at least a couple of weeks before we know for sure.
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