Prolonged Campaign Helps Democrats?

Bouncing between historical analogs and modern day media realities Walter Shapiro answers the biggest question bounding around the blogosphere yesterday: Is the prolonged Democratic race bad for Democrats come November?

Conventional wisdom and Rush Limbaugh (oddly enough) agree that it does. Clinton and Obama both vying for the lion’s share of the ever-diminishing pool of available delegates will resort to nastier and nastier attacks. Already critics of Clinton’s smear machine have spoken up against Clinton’s 3AM ad which implies, not only that Clinton will be ready on Day One, but that Obama will cause your children to be murdered in their sleep if he’s the guy in the Oval Office. The problem, of course, is that a charge like that doesn’t go away when the person delivering the message is John McCain. In fact, it gets worse. “Look,” Citizen McCain can say, “Even his fellow Democrat doesn’t trust this guy to keep your children safe.”

Shapiro takes issue with the conventional wisdom by focusing on two specific pieces of data. Democrats are famous for settling on a candidate fairly early, by March at least and it hasn’t helped them so far. Even Bill Clinton, he points out, was only nominally challenged until the California primary and despite his early clinching of the DNC nomination, he trailed behind both Bush 41 and Ross Perot.

And the other reality is the slathering maw of a press hungry for drama-laden stories. There is no more drama in the Republican race. According to Shapiro there were roughly four times as many stories following up on the Democratic primaries as on the Republican ones–and that despite the fact that McCain still had a “challenger” in Mike Huckabee.  In the months and weeks ahead, with McCain campaigning for November with the full arsenal of the GOP, he can only divide his attacks between both candidates or hurl them more broadly on Democrats  in general–and no one will care.

Meanwhile Clinton and Obama will dominate the press as they go for each other’s jugulars.

It bears pointing out that this is exactly what did in John Edwards  before Nevada and South Carolina. Despite running strongly in both Iowa and New Hampshire, the press completely ignored Edwards when Obama and Clinton began flaring up at one another, focusing instead on the tit-for-tat going on between the frontrunners.

Is the double-headed beast Clintama-Obamaton going to Edwardsify McCain? It could happen. I think Shapiro is ignoring the harms of a prolonged campaign in favor of underscoring the gains, which is probably for the best since most everybody else is doing the opposite.

Back to the Races

So the biggest delegate-granting state had their primaries last night and Tsunami Tuesday is just around the corner. By next Wednesday we should all know who our presidential candidates will be. It’s probably unfair of me to say that. Only 40% of the delegates will have been parceled out by next Wednesday which means the race will not technically be locked up even if every state goes toward one candidate. But, c’mon, we all know what will happen: the press will treat the new frontrunner as the anointed candidate, the perception (press-inspired or not) will be that the frontrunner on Wednesday is “the winner” and “the only serious candidate.” It will become important to display “party unity.” The winner on Wednesday will likely waltz their way through the rest of the primaries. So, like just about everybody in the political/political science blogosphere I feel obligated to share with ya’ll my take on the race.

Republicans (Delegate count so far: McCain-97; Romney-74; Huckabee-29; Paul-6; Giuliani-Who cares?)

Giuliani: Thankfully out. He was by far the worst candidate the Republicans had running. He’s a balls-out fascist, a dirty politician, a despicable human being, and possibly certifiably crazy. He should just put on some plaid pants, buy a golf cart, and stay in Florida.

Romney: Well, the race is far from over but McCain’s victory in Florida has put him nearly an entire Huckabee ahead in terms of delegates–making him the frontrunner going into Tsunami Tuesday. McCain’s popularity is rising and has been for awhile. All trend lines have been coalescing around a McCain nod. Meanwhile, Romney’s trend lines could use a shot of Bob Dole’s Viagra. Right or wrong, Romney’s religion probably hurts him. Evangelicals were tempted to vote for Romney when they thought the race was just between him and Giuliani. Then Huckabee showed up to prove that there still were Christians in the Republican party. The evangelicals flocked around him like he was Jesus at a fish and bread dinner and they haven’t looked back. With Huckabee incapable of having another “miracle” comeback (despite God’s best efforts) it looks like evangelicals will stick by their initial promise and just stay at home in November.

Basically what I’m saying here is that McCain is most likely a lock as long as Huckabee stays in the race. If he drops out, the evangelical choice is between the guy who says that there should be more religion in politics (Romney) and the guy that called evangelicals “part of the problem” back in 2000 (McCain). And while McCain has won more delegates than Romney, he hasn’t won by that much. Good baptists in Alabama, Georgia, (most of) Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Texas could still hurt his chances.

Huckabee: In case your just skimming to read about the candidate you like, I’ll repeat what I said above. Huckabee is toast. After helping him win Iowa, God hasn’t reached down to help the declining Huckabee campaign since. If God had given Huckabee just 15,000 more votes in South Carolina he could have had two wins and fourteen more delegates (and of course, “momentum” which may have helped out in Florida). But he didn’t. For some reason God, despite what you may have thought, seems to prefer McCain.

Huckabee appeals to the evangelicals and is probably pulling votes away from Romney. If Huckabee stays in until February 6, you can call him the kingmaker. The real question is, is he angling for a cabinet/veep spot in a McCain presidency. (I say, “you betcha.”)

McCain: McCain is the big winner in the two most important races so far. He’s ahead in delegates and all signs point to his coming out on top after the February 5 Tsunami Tuesday. This is both bad and good for Democrats and Liberals. On the one hand, a McCain presidency would be better than whatever monstrous crimes would otherwise be committed by Presidents Romney, Huckabee, Giuliani, or Thompson. On the other, well, he’s still not all that good and he’s the one who is likely to put up the best fight against either Clinton or Obama (but especially Clinton). It’s hard to decide if I’d rather line up a “best of all possible worlds” scenario with McCain vs. Clinton in November where I could easily end up with a President McAngryPants or if I want to root for Huckabee dropping out, relinquishing the evangelical vote to Romney who will then likely become the Republican nominee. Because…if that happens, Romney will likely lose to Clinton or Obama…but, if he doesn’t, we’re screwed.

Democrats (Delegate count so far [remember Dems have "superdelegates" so I count them here but their actual delegates are in parentheses]: Clinton-232 (48); Obama-158 (63); Edwards-Who cares? (Who cares?))

Edwards: Let’s get him out of the way early. He’s out. (Note: I actually wrote this this morning before he officially dropped.) He hasn’t performed since his close second place finish in Iowa and he’s not going anywhere after February 5. Pundits and bloggers are speculating that he’s staying in because he pulls (white) votes from Clinton and is therefore acting as kingmaker for Obama who he (presumably) prefers. I’m not sure if I believe that or not. He could just as likely be pulling progressive votes from Obama making him a queenmaker instead. In either case, I think his presence is negligible going into next week. (And of course, completely negligible since he won’t be there). If he really wants to help someone he should drop out during prime time on February 4th. The tiny bump his dropping out/endorsement might give to his preferred candidate might make a difference in some close races.

Clinton: She’s the likely candidate. When people first started talking about her assumed candidacy back in 2004 she was preferred. She was preferred after the rockstar Obama put his hat in the ring. She was preferred up until a week before Iowa and then was preferred after New Hampshire. So with that anomalous week between her third place finish in Iowa and her (rigged?) victory in New Hampshire aside, she has always been the preferred candidate. Going into next week she has the most superdelegates and the second most actual delegates. Her “scorched earth” campaign damages her possibilities in November but probably doesn’t hurt her chances that much in the primaries, where her lead contender can’t seem to get over a third of white voters. (We’ll have to see if that remains true after Edwards’ withdrawal.)

Obama: He’s technically the frontrunner with the most earned delegates and he’s been raking in some high-profile endorsements which may or may not help him on Feb 5. Perhaps the biggest helping hand came from Kennedy which may raise Obama’s appeal with two important (northern) constituencies [white people and Catholics] and one important western one [old people]. Unfortunately the jury is out on whether any endorsements matter. They certainly didn’t help him in the Florida “beauty pageant.” Of course, turnout there may have been hampered by his lack of campaigning there since the delegates don’t count (yet).

At least on blogger seems to think that Obama’s loss in Florida is indicative of a larger trend.

James Joyner from Outside the Beltway:

I believe it foreshadows what will happen on Super Tuesday. Despite both Clinton and Obama raising unprecedented sums of money, campaigning in 22 states in six days is next to impossible. As in Florida, no campaigning gives the advantage to the candidate with the best organization and name recognition. My guess is Clinton will have an impressive showing next week and all but wrap up the nomination.

This seems a reasonable and insightful analysis of what we’re likely to see. If the primaries had been spread out–given Obama’s messaging, his “above the fray” and “hopeful” image, and his momentum–he might have been a more clear favorite going into a Tsunami Tuesday. If he fails to win the nomination, this is why (not, as it will be written, because of the Clintons’ race baiting and “dividing the black vote.”)

However, I don’t think all hope is yet lost. Obama’s been getting a lot of good publicity from his victory in South Carolina and his high profile endorsements. He’s likely to out perform Hillary in the south. If he can pull the south and some of the small states he’s visited like Kansas and Alaska he may still be “in the race” even if Clinton wins California, New York, and New Jersey (delegate-heavy states where polls indicate a Clinton victory). After all, Obama, in addition “the south” will probably win delegate-heavy Illinois and the important swing vote in Ohio. Since he goes in ahead, (and with momentum) my guess is that the sun will shine on two frontrunners on February 6: Clinton ahead but with Obama close behind.

Expect additional ugliness.

Some People Don’t Like Horse Races

There’s always a lot of talk around this time of the election cycle about how and why the primary season is a steaming movie. It starts just before New Hampshire, runs through Iowa and South Carolina and Florida and culminates on whatever the commentaria are calling Super Tuesday that year, the day when the most states vote simultaneously. The perennial complaints of non-representativeness and “momentum” are fair and just. The system is, to put it gently, stupid. There are innumerable fixes for the problems and if you want to know what they are, just pick up any of thousands of magazines or newspapers between January 1 and early February published in years divisible by four (with no remainder).

Other complaints pop up that are new or relatively new each year, although for the most part they are used as buttresses to the larger arguments. For example, some have stated that Clinton would have done a lot worse (and Obama) a lot better in New Hampshire were it not for the Accuvote machines that seemed to magically favor her. A study after the fact revealed that those particular wards using Accuvote historically have different voting preferences than the wards that didn’t use them, initially a strange defense until you consider that preferences for new voting machines and for Hillary Clinton are based on the relative affluence of those wards. Nevertheless the story received very little air even before the alleged political hijink was revealed to be no jink at all. However, I think that any press it did receive is primarily based on this idea of momentum. That is, in addition to revealing a potentially devastating obstacle to “free and fair elections” in November, the Accuvote machines might have had a significant impact on deciding who our choices would be in November. (The Accuvote machines also decreased Mitt Romney’s voter deficit by about 12 points…so it appeared that the fine people at Diebold might have been favoring a Romney/Clinton match-up for the Fall.)

Whichever candidate wins in one state, gains a bump in the polls that, if the next primary is close enough to the previous win, the candidate can often (theoretically) ride the polling bump to a subsequent victory…and so on. Although the bump in popularity in the polls is observable by looking at the polls and the theory makes good sense in a very “common” way, there is a pretty good common sense manner in which to disprove its efficacy, namely that the theory would predict that whoever wins in New Hampshire would subsequently win Iowa and then win Michigan (or wherever) then Nevada (or wherever) then South Carolina then Florida etc. Which doesn’t happen often and hasn’t happened for awhile, if ever.

Of course this flaw is only a flaw with my simplistic restatement of the theory. The bump in the polls does not necessarily bump the candidate into victory. If, for example, a win in New Hampshire provided a 5% bump in Iowa to a certain candidate, it would only ensure a victory if that person either previously led there or trailed by less than 5%. And of course, polls can be wrong.

The bump in the polls is exacerbated by the press. The press believes in momentum. In my experience the press believes in momentum far more than the average person does. The horse race analysts are nearly always more confident of their ability to predict the next winner than the average voter who, if he or she is rooting for one candidate to prevail, wastes away with anxiety. The relatively uninformed, the future voter who only knows who won previously, never seems overly confident that that person will win again. A lack of expectation that is supported by historical precedent. The press anticipates that the common reader will want to know more about the winner and less about the loser(s) and so runs more stories about them. The additional free press for the winning candidate increases name recognition and the perception that that candidate will prevail in future contests. In our primal desire to back a winner, the bump in the polls grows for days after the primary, fueled by the unceasing write-ups of once and future victory.

And the opposite is also true. Nevada voters in general and Latino voters in particular, judged by political preferences alone, should both have supported Edwards over the other two front runners. One should not have expected him to win there, or in any (geographically) large state at this stage in his campaign. He lacks the money and the volunteer infrastructure to reach out personally to large groups of voters. But neither of those shortcomings should have ended in his obtaining a measly 4% of the vote there. I would have expected no less than for him to pull in low double digits.

Do I blame the press? Yeah. I don’t think it was a malicious sinking of his campaign but rather the natural consequences of this worship of momentum. Because Edwards lost outright in an affluent, New England primary the press decided that the voters aren’t aligned with his platform. Which, I think is just flat untrue. His primary concerns are, to my knowledge reflected as the primary concerns of the vast majority of both Republican and Democratic voters. His solutions seems more or less in line with how the vast majority of Democrats think those problems should be solved. For that matter, he isn’t so far out of step with the two front runners that he should ever be very far behind them if voters’ preferences were what went to the polls rather than human beings.

I also blame the Democratic Party. I don’ t mean that Dean and the other machinists in the DNC maliciously set out to destroy an Edwards candidacy (but what do I know?). But Edwards would likely have done pretty well in Michigan. What if he’d come in first or even second there? Clinton enjoyed no bump in the polls from her win there since the press rightfully did not consider the Michigan victory important (since she basically ran unopposed, sorry Kucinich). But a legitimate primary in the foundering blue collar state might have substantially favored the self-proclaimed “son of a mill worker.”

The primaries all lead up to Super Tuesday (Tsunami Tuesday is one of the many nicknames it has received this year…which is my preferred term). Twenty-four states will hold primaries for one or both parties on February 5th and on the morning of February 6th 40% of all possible delegate votes will have been assigned. While 60% of delegates will still be up in the air you can bet the vast majority of the voting public from there on out will be rooting for one person (well, one each for Republicans and Democrats respectively). Whoever wins the most delegates on February 5th will be the de facto nominee. The level of momentum for the leading candidate on February 6th, in part generated by the press’s treatment of that person, will ensure that most people will feel that “that person has already won” and that “voting for anybody else just indicates a lack of cohesiveness in the party.” Expect that, say, Clinton is the majority delegate vote holder on February 6th, if Obama wins in Indiana in May, various Democratic die-hards will insinuate that Indiana voters are “not indicative of larger trends” and that voters like that “threaten the unity” of the Democratic mainstream. Besides, as I said, we all like to vote for a winner.

Remember when we were all behind Howard Dean four years ago? Remember when, because of a sham recording of speech he made we all decided that he was crazy? Remember how, after not knowing who to vote for we all defaulted to John Kerry? Is there any better example of the power of winning one primary (or another guy losing one) that speaks to the power of bandwagoning in the primaries than that of Senator Frankenstein from Massachusetts?

So the criticisms will come that all the primaries after February 5th, including those held in the Hoosier state, are completely worthless. And those criticisms are fair and just.

For my part I have tended to shy away from those criticisms because they are at once too obvious and outside my realm of influence. It seems that no matter who I am talking to, liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, I am always preaching to the choir. But there’s a lot of money to be handed out during a prolonged and worthless primary season; a lot of newspapers and magazines to be bought and sold; a lot of news shows for which to cast a lot talking heads. Trying to end the current primary system, it seems to me, is akin to attempting to eradicate farm subsidies. There’s just too many of the wrong sorts of people invested in the continuance of the system.

It’s possible that the GOP and DNC will have to contend with more and more shenanigans like this years’, with more and more states trying to have their primaries earlier and earlier so their votes matter more, they get more press, and they can take in the largess of the campaign economy that follows the candidates’ tour buses. If that happens, the two major parties may start demanding some sort of order to be placed on these supposedly “democratic” proceedings. With more time to think about it, you can probably expect, some states will try and litigate against the parties on grounds of undue private pressure on elections proceedings which are constitutionally the state’s prerogative, and not the parties’, to govern.

The push and pull factors at work might work out some sort of solution by the next presidential election cycle, but I doubt it. And, even if they did, it’s not real likely that voters, citizens like you and me, will be a part of the discussions that lead to that eventual solution. As always, the two-party system that has prevailed here for the last 90 years or so will make certain that those conversations take place behind closed doors and not in the public forum. The various administrators of our two largest parties are not subject to election and are therefore accountable to no one but themselves and their largest funders.

The News You Can’t Use

I recently changed how my Google Reader and Google Homepage work together. Previously I had used my Google Homepage as a my newsfeeder by adding a baker’s dozen of gadgets that supposedly offered headlines from various news outlets: Newsweek, Foreign Policy, the NY Times and others. However, I kept noting that the headlines wouldn’t update or, when they did, I would be reading follow-ups to stories I never read lead-ins to. Meanwhile I used my Google Reader to only read blogs, which, I thought, was a pretty good use for technology I hadn’t the time to figure out. (Despite nearly a year into the game, I still am not as blog savvy as I would like.)

But being fed up with missing real news I have since upgraded. I plugged in just dozens upon dozens of news RSS feeds into my Google Reader and deleted everything but the weather, my gmail, and, of course, Google Reader off my homepage.

Now I am inundated with news. If news were the ocean, I would be literally overwhelmed with waves of information.

As a result I am suffering from a virtual blogarrhea.

Here are topics I will not be considering for longer entries for because I just don’t have the time.

1) The upcoming Latino-voter-heavy Democratic contest in Nevada favors Clinton and Edwards. Obama, if he is to be saved at all will be saved by any residual momentum left from his win in Iowa. It is a shame that Edwards’ poor showing in affluent New Hampshire has caused the press to all but seal the deal on his candidacy. His populist rhetoric brings a fresh dimension to the fast becoming stale debates between Obama and Clinton who, to most people, share identical views on Iraq, healthcare, the economy, abortion, and everything in between. Edwards needs to win (or at least come in second) in Nevada. It is lucky for him then that Latino’s are a population primed to support populist rhetoric (even if they are polling heavily for Clinton).

2) Speaking of Obama/Clinton: Rumble in the Political Jungle: I predicted here that if Edwards persisted in running after the South Carolina votes were in, that the rhetoric between them would heat up leaving Edwards as a dusty afterthought. I should have predicted that things would heat up if they split the first two states. Their “misinterpreting” of each other held the headlines from the day before the New Hampshire primary till Monday when they decided “to cool things down.” It is perfectly natural that the press would begin to shine more light on Obama and Clinton after they split the early votes but poor Edwards has had no one misinterpret anything he’s said so that he could play along. All the editorials in the New York Times, the Washington Post, in Salon and on NPR (I’m a partisan hack) have been about Obama accusing Clinton of playing the gender card and Clinton accusing Obama of playing the race card. As a white male, Edwards has no cards to play and no one to accuse him of playing them. If he even gets close, he will likely be erased. Thus, when asked in the Nevada debate why he’s even still bothering to campaign against two “historic candidates” he simply had to respond, that “They both have asked not to be considered on their gender or their race. I respect that.”

3) Speaking of all this gender and race stuff: It seems that there’s been a lot of talk about how Obama, because he’s black, will pull a lion’s share of the black voters. Clinton, because she’s a woman will pull a majority of the woman vote. Which has had the press asking all the interesting questions like: Are there black candidates not voting for Obama? Are there female candidates not voting for Clinton? and most importantly, What the heck are black women doing? I must have heard, seen, or listened to each of those “stories” a thousand times since New Hampshire. I don’t think it’s any shock to find out that there are black voters not voting for Obama. If we remember back just 12 months, I was commenting hear that I was sick of hearing that Obama isn’t “black enough.” I also don’t think it’s a shock to find out that the “unlikable” Clinton might have some female detractors. If you couple these superficial complaints with the fact that neither candidate caters to the liberal base that both women and blacks tend to fall in, well, golly, I think you might be able to find a few voters willing to cross their own race or gender line to vote for a candidate that speaks to their needs.

The black, woman voter stories have been more interesting if only because they have revealed that black, women may be the largest single demographic seriously considering both Obama and Clinton on their merits rather than some basically superfluous characteristic like skin tone or private parts. Except that, as several pundits have pointed out, there Latino voters–a lot of them. In Miami (where they vote Republican at a rate of 4 to 1). And in New York and the Southwest (and in a few Congressional districts in northeastern Illinois). And how many of them vote…how many of them can vote?

Black women are big voting block. Latinos are big voting block. Blacks are a big voting block. Women are a big voting block. You know who else is a big voting block? Whites, men, and white men. Whites have called the votes in the only two states for which have numbers and they split them, two ways (or three if you consider that no candidate won a simple majority in either state). Political minorities are fast becoming the national majority, but that is primarily a Big City and/or coastal thing. Across middle America, the northeast, much of the rural south, the Great Plains, and the Pacific Northwest, whites are still a majority of the voters. In the General Election in November that figure helps Republicans paint a picture of a “red” America. Between Democrats, I think it somewhat favors Edwards. Not because he’s more “Republican” than his opponents but because he looks more like the core Democratic voters of those areas and his broad-appeal populism speaks more to the citizens of America’s rural “fly over country” than the Big City politics of either Obama or Clinton. That is not to say I think he will win in those places, he didn’t win in white, rural Iowa (although he just edged out Clinton there for second). I just think that in the vast majority of the country Edwards can win or place second in a substantial number of primaries and caucuses in the low- to middlin’ number-of-delegates states. Right now it’s hard to say if he’s polling poorly in those places due to his earning a distant third in New Hampshire and the resultant lack of press during the Obama/Clinton shouting match. Strong enough finishes in Nevada may perk up the ears of potential voters in the sparsely populated middle part of the country.

While it must be demoralizing for Edwards to be ignored by the press right now, and while his prospects look grim (minus victories or close seconds in Nevada and S. Carolina) I would still encourage him to stick in it until February 5th when we’ll get the first real picture of how the country views his candidacy.