Dwarfs

Haven't you sat around some afternoon and re-cast the WH 2012 Republicans as...the WH 1988 Democrats? Sure you have. But if not, here's what I've got. OK, it's mainly the first two, but as long as I'm at it...

NEWT GINGRICH as Gary Hart -- revived campaign phase. Gary Hart was drummed out of the campaign in Spring 1987 after a sex scandal, but then jumped back in late in 1987 and actually led the polls...before fading out rapidly. Both are disliked and not trusted by Washingtonians, but seem more presidential to many voters than the rest of a disappointing field. Not to say that Newt will fizzle as rapidly as Hart did (but he could!).

JON HUNTSMAN as Bruce Babbitt. This is actually the one that got me started. Both are loved by the press. Both are liked and respected by a lot of party actors, but not actually supported by them. In both cases, voters have zero interest. Both tried the same Big Campaign Strategy of packing their debate prep with one-liners. Babbitt's comedy writers were better than Huntsman's, but neither revealed any sense of comic timing whatsoever. I'm waiting for Hunstman to Stand Up! for, oh, I don't know, the scientific consensus on climate change? But I guess he's abandoned it.

MITT ROMNEY as, obviously, Michael Dukakis. Technocrat Massachusetts Governor that everyone figures will get the nomination despite the disadvantage of no one actually having any strong feelings about him one way or another.

RON PAUL as Jesse Jackson. Repeat fringe candidate doing better this time. Only candidate with actual enthusiastic supporters, but support capped thanks to qualification/mainstream deviation problem. Many party actors sort of like the idea of the candidate and his platform, but not the actual candidate and his platform.

HERMAN CAIN as Joe Biden. Says crazy things. Wacky campaign gurus are part of the story. Dropped out of the race after a scandal. Will become VP twenty years later. OK, maybe not that last part.

These are getting to be more of a stretch at this point...

TIM PAWLENTY as Dick Gephardt. Perfectly respectable and successful pol; very, very, very boring as a presidential candidate.

RICK PERRY as Al Gore. Well, Perry supported him, right? Candidates who appeared better on paper than
in real life. Southern. Actually, Perry's more of a John Glenn 1984, at least so far.

MICHELE BACHMANN as Paul Simon. Improbable candidate, ideological, briefly relevant.

And...

SARAH PALIN as Mario Cuomo. The one who makes everyone else look like small, albeit in totally different ways.

Also: you may be thinking that I should have Buddy Roemer as James Traficant. Blasphemy! No one can ever take the place of Traficant. Have I mentioned that I own a genuine 1988 Traficant For President button? Don't you wish you had one?

How To Make Palin Go Away

Steve Kornacki and John Sides have a debate going today about How To Make Palin Go Away. Kornacki argues that if she winds up an official candidate for the presidency, she'll be exposed as unpopular. Sides responded that by not running, she's already marginalized herself. Kornacki shot back that his way "could last for years." Great debate!

Who is right? I absolutely love Kornacki's vision of a Palin campaign rapidly turning into Gary Hart's trek through the wilderness when he tried to revive his candidacy in 1988, after he had a scandal-induced hiatus from the campaign. But I'm not really convinced it would work out that way. I absolutely agree that Palin has to date managed to alienate much of the GOP, and that would severely limit her upside. But it's not at all clear to me that she would be as big a joke as Hart was. Gary Hart never really had the kind of strong supporters that the Sage of Wasilla has had for the last few years, and so once he lost the folks who thought he might win, there was really nothing remaining.

Moreover, at the rank-and-file level, and perhaps even among some activists, the sorts of things that Palin have done to antagonize most of her party are understandable as pluses, not minuses. There certainly are lots of Republicans out there who believe themselves to be very hostile to the GOP "establishment," and might be persuaded to stick with her, especially given the other options.

I also continue to believe, even at this very late date, that Palin would be capable of mending her reputation considerably if her actions changed. Granted, I don't expect that by now; for whatever reasons, the Palin we've seen is probably the Palin that we're going to see. But everyone loves a redemption story, and I suspect that there are a lot of reporters and more than a few Republican operatives and activists who would be happy to talk about how Palin has "grown" over the years. If she would only let them.

Could she still win? I'm not quite ready to take her off my list of plausible nominees, but she's obviously wasted a ton of time, and even if she did suddenly change there's an excellent chance that it's too late. But if she does decide to become a formal candidate, I don't think she'll wind up as Gary Hart II, at least not for some time. Kornacki does have a point, however; should she back off this time and the Republicans lose, the tease will start again right around the time that the polls close on the west coast, and it won't let up for the next three years. Losing this time around -- not informally through testing the waters and backing off, but with a solid defeat at the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire -- is the best way to prevent that. Well, other than having a different Republican in the White House.

Mondale 2 (and a Bit of Palin)

There's a lot going on that I didn't get to yesterday...campaign finance, presidential nomination process, and more.  I hope to get to them later.  But I gotta go back to get my licks in one more time on a subject from ancient history, Walter Mondale in 1984.  That's because Steve Kornacki responded to my earlier response.  I do want to set this in context...Kornacki is clear that he's not saying that Mondale was responsible for sinking the Democrats that year; he's just saying that another candidate, and specifically Gary Hart, would have done somewhat better.  That said: I think he's dead wrong, and it's worth revisiting because of the general question of the importance of candidates in presidential elections.

Kornacki's evidence of Mondale's weakness is, first, the logic of the situation -- as Jimmy Carter's VP, Mondale was easy to tie to the rejected Carter administration.  And, second, he cites Mondale's low favorable ratings, especially with independents, throughout the campaign cycle (I assume he's correct about that; I haven't looked it up).  The anecdote he produces to support that, however, reveals more than he thinks:

When, after a decent debate showing against a very wobbly Reagan, Mondale's favorable score momentarily outpaced his unfavorable in polling, his campaign considered it a minor miracle.

OK, now, think about that for a second.  Mondale's debate performance wasn't anything special; what was remarkable about that debate was, as he says, that Reagan did a terrible job.  But, we're told, Mondale's favorable ratings rose.  Hmmm....

The problem here is that Kornacki is following the wrong model of how voters decide things in elections.  The model he's following assumes that voters have opinions about the candidates, and assess the arguments of the campaigns, and vote based on that.  But most of the evidence (for general elections) runs the other way: people decide how they're going to vote, and then develop opinions about the candidates and the arguments presented based on their vote choice.  When people suddenly thought that Reagan might be too old for the job, and briefly considered voting for Mondale, suddenly their opinion of Mondale turned favorable.  Once they reassured themselves that voting for Reagan was okay, they remembered that they didn't like Mondale after all.

So if Gary Hart had been the nominee, some of the people who, in June, were inclined to think well of him (and to think of themselves as independents) would have by September learned to associate him with Carter, and they wouldn't have liked him very much.

How do we know that would happen?  Because it always happens; that's why the statistical explanations, which only know about objective factors such as the economy, war, the terms that the incumbent party has held the White House, and candidate ideology, work as well as they do.  And we just had a terrific test of this in 2008.  After all, Republicans in 2008 nominated a candidate who polled very well with independents, and probably had more distance from the White House than any other significant Republican.  But by November, independents had found all sorts of reasons to dislike John McCain and to support Barack Obama.

Look, when we're going through the campaign day to day, we're terribly aware of the mistakes that the losing candidate makes, and how the winning candidate is connecting with the nation.  Those things are true -- but they're also an illusion.  The winning candidate is making plenty of mistakes, too...it's just that it's easier to notice and remember the foolish things the loser did.

Candidates aren't completely irrelevant.  The statistical models don't capture everything that happens (and don't claim to); it's certainly very possible that a good candidate could do a bit better than a lousy one.  But absent something spectacular, that's apt to be in the range of a percentage point or two.

Now, the one thing to add to this, and getting back to Palin, is that so far all the major party nominees -- at least in the era for which we have good enough data to run the models -- have been more or less adequate.  There are no Sharron Angles who get nominated for president.  Gary Hart was certainly no Sharron Angle; he knew the issues well enough.  But we have no idea how he would have held up to the demands of a national campaign.  On the whole, I don't think the record is very encouraging.  Sarah Palin, on the other hand...we've never had a nominee anything like what she would be.  We've had nominees with weak polling numbers, but nothing anywhere close to her unpopularity.  We've had candidates who didn't seem to have learned much beyond the basics of public policy, but she appears (still, at this late date) to be a step or two below the worst we've seen on that score.  I don't recall anyone who was nominated after the sorts of ethics difficulties she's had; I don't recall anyone who was nominated with such little experience (and, yes, Obama in 2008 was relatively inexperienced, but not as much as she is).  Despite all that, she certainly could wind up (were she nominated) doing about as well as a generic Republican as conservative as she is would do, but it does seem to me that there's a huge amount of potential downside here that Republicans would be nuts to risk. 

Of course, Republicans would also be nuts to nominate her because, should she actually win, they'd have a disaster in the White House.