Catch of the Day

Great post from Dan Hopkins about how a belief that "messaging" works gets politicians into trouble.

What I've become interested in are the incentives for politicians to believe the myth. There are a couple of things going on here, I think.

One is to recognize the distinction between candidates and candidacies and the analogous distinction between elected officials and their full operation, their offices (we don't really even have a proper word for that one). Within those candidacies/offices, there are a number of people -- the communications operation, probably polling, media, maybe more) who have a direct interest in believing that the words that politicians say have a direct effect on public opinion in a way that really matters.

The other one is about efficacy.

In some situations -- campaigns, in particular -- "messaging" actually does have some marginal utility, and while it's only on the margins, it's one thing that is actually within the control of the candidates, so they might as well do it as well as possible.

But even when it has no effect whatsoever on  public opinion, it's likely to produce tangible results. Take for example the House mini-CRs during the shutdown, or the First and Second Battles of the World War II Memorial. We know that they were utterly unsuccessful at moving public opinion. However, they also were heavily reported, especially within the GOP-aligned press. In other words, they had tangible effects, even if they didn't actually have meaningful effects. And within most organizations (and remember, House offices, Senate offices, political parties, the White House, campaigns, and federal agencies are all organizations), tangible accomplishments tend to be rewarded. Even if tangible may not, at the end of the day, be as substantive as something else which doesn't have any visible gain that one can point to.

And as I've said, I think this is particularly a problem for Republicans, both because their party-aligned press is a bigger deal, and because it is generally even more accepting of GOP spin than the Democratic-aligned press is. Which means that GOP spin becomes tangible more easily, which should mean, all else equal, that Republicans will be even more susceptible to the trouble that Hopkins talks about than Democrats will be.

Also: Nice catch!

Why We Have Campaigns

Alex Roarty called Ted Cruz the 2016 Republican "frontrunner" today:

The Republican establishment despises Ted Cruz. And that’s great news for the senator from Texas: It’s the most prominent sign that he’s the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination.

He also gets one good quote from Iowa conservative leader Bob Vander Plaats: “I really believe if the Iowa caucuses were held today, I don’t even think it’d be close. Ted Cruz would walk away with it.”

But here's the thing: it's not just a quirk of timing that the Iowa caucuses aren't being held today. What it means is that we're only at the beginning of a very long campaign.

And campaigns matter. Even general election campaigns matter; what they mainly do is remind people which party they belong to, and inform them that the nominee of that party is a perfectly acceptable representative of that party. That's a big party of why if you ask before the campaign you'll find all sorts of people ready to jump to a third party candidate, or in some circumstances even cross over to vote for the other party's candidate, but by November most people are back where they "belong."

In primary elections, the information environment is more complicated, because there are fewer obvious cues. Tail Gunner Ted is taking advantage of one of those cues right now -- he's been the most visible, recently, of the radical Republicans, so those who basically look for the representative of that strain of the party are moving to him.

Whether that lasts, however, is another story, as Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain could tell you.

What's going to happen is that Iowa voters will learn more about the various candidates. Recently they've had more exposure to Cruz; later, all the fully-funded candidates will get their own messages out. And, meanwhile, the press coverage will increase, both in the neutral press and the GOP-aligned media. And here's the thing: to the extent that GOP opinion leaders either hate Ted Cruz or, now, think that Ted Cruz is a loser, that's going to show up on the coverage that Cruz gets. Sure, not in all the coverage; there were, I'm sure, plenty of conservative blogs that were with Bachmann or Cain (or the Newtster for that matter) to the bitter end). But clearly enough to get the proper cues to a sufficient number of primary and caucus goers that they figured out: hey, that's not our candidate.

To the extent that those future negative cues are already baked in -- and I'm fairly confident that's the case for Ted Cruz -- no, he's not the frontrunner. Not at all.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Jenny Lewis, 37.

Some sad news, and the good stuff:

1. Richard Ben Cramer, RIP. If you haven't read What It Takes...it's just wonderful, and marvelous accomplishment. Here's a C-SPAN spot; here's a Ben Smith profile from two years ago.

2. John Sides knocks down 2012 presidential campaign effects.


3. Nice one from Timothy Noah about influential Veeps.

4. A useful overview of health care the the federal budget, from Amy Fried.

5. And from Seth Masket, who just possibly might have too much time on his hands: Jews for Cheeses.

Catch of the Day

Ed Kilgore reads a dispatch from ace Nevada reporter Jon Ralston about why Mitt Romney is actively contesting Nevada, and concludes:

So Ralston asks a simple question and comes up with a bunch of possible answers: maybe it’s about internal polls, or maybe it’s about downballot races, or maybe it’s a thank-you note to Sheldon Adelson or maybe it’s just because they have the money so why not spend it?

Truth be told, most campaigns are rolling balls of madness just beneath the surface.

Yup, and a terribly important insight. This is actually why I put so much emphasis on the likelihood that politicians will copy strategies and tactics from winning campaigns -- which is very different from copying winning strategies and tactics (that is, those things that actually made a difference). Oh, there are certainly some electioneering techniques which are carefully tested and evaluated. But as near as I can tell, lots and lots and lots of what politicians and operatives do is based on folk wisdom. Or organizational inertia. Or organizational chaos. Or organizational cross-incentives (such as when whoever was in charge of Nevada may have personal incentives for the campaign to divert resources there, regardless of whether it maximizes Romney's chances of winning). All of which might be going on at the same time.

See, for example, a nice Greg Koger post about the conflicts between party networks, candidates, and formal party organizations.

One of the implications of all of this is that reporters who are inclined to blame campaign in-fighting or other internal campaign issues for a loss can always find plenty of examples, because both winning and losing campaigns have plenty of internal campaign conflict. After all, internal conflict is built in to every large organization, but if you think about presidential campaigns in particular, you realize that they'll have more htan their share.

All of which is to say: nice catch!

A Quick Note on the Necessity of Spin

No, Jimmy Carter didn't really lead Ronald Reagan for most of the 1980 campaign, only to have Reagan suddenly surge from behind at the last minute (John Sides really took care of this a while ago).

But, you know, what's a campaign behind in the polls supposed to do? Of course they're going to find some historical evidence, no matter how dubious, to show that everything is going exactly as they want it to be. And they better do that; it would be irresponsible not to. After all, for a candidate who is not all that far behind but would need some external shock to change things (which is increasingly where it appears Mitt Romney is right now), the trick is to keep the situation from imploding so that even a significant external shock wouldn't be enough. Donors need to be told to keep giving, volunteers have to be inspired to keep volunteering...even the paid staff needs to be given some reason to believe they're not wasting their time.

It's not just the possibility of winning, either; even a doomed campaign, a Dole '96 or a Mondale '84, needs to maximize whatever vote it can get in order to avoid pulling the rest of the ticket down with them.

The Reagan/Carter/1980 thing is really just a twist on the old idea that every losing candidate in my memory would pitch themselves as Harry Truman, ready to hit the stump for personal campaigning that would turn the whole thing around. I guess the 1980 version of it appeals to Republicans because it's Reagan...and I suppose there's at least some vague analogy in the economic situation, although not really.

There's another piece of this, which is the constant partisan arguments about individual polls -- that the sample is wrong, or whatever.

The key is that unless one is that these are really pretty innocent lies. I mean, it's fine for reporters or pundits to call them out on it, but it's not on the same scale as, say, lies about policy or about the opponent's character. Just stipulate that both sides are going to  interpret the polls in whatever way serves their interest, and that no campaign is going to admit that it has little or no chance to win. It's not lazy mendacity for Republicans to dredge up this particular myth; it's really the only responsible way to run a campaign.

Q Day 4: Electioneering Bias?

Via email:

One thing I've been wondering about: it seems like building a massive amount of manpower for a campaign is (one of?) the most effective way to deploy campaign resources for voter persuasion. But it also seems presiding over a huge media budget is much more lucrative for senior campaign flacks. Is there an agency problem here?

Yes.

OK, I'm tempted to just leave it there...I don't really know how cost-effective massive personal-contact voter persuasion (and GOTV) are compared with TV ads, but yeah, I think that there's a good chance that the self-interests of campaign staff and especially consultants is a problem. I'd also guess, however, that there's also a bias among candidates in favor of electioneering that they can actually see. Stories of billboard ads purchased only on the route from the airport to an incumbent, Washington-based candidate's house in the district are not completely apocryphal.

I'm not sure who if anyone has done work on this, however, so I don't know whether we have any idea of the effect. Remember too that a lot of the research by Don Green and others is relatively recent, and there's also a big status quo bias against innovation. I'll also link to an article I haven't read yet about it; it's a practitioners and political scientists roundtable and is likely very useful if you're interested in these questions.

Why These Awful Campaign Flaps Happen

Look, we all know why these phony controversies flare up during presidential elections. It's just institutions. First, you have tons of pundits and reporters sitting around ready to talk about the presidential campaign, but essentially nothing much is going to happen between now and the conventions, which are months away. Second, you have the cable networks, which have to fill up 24 hours a day, and often have very little else to do.

Third, you have two campaigns, fully staffed, fully aware of the legends of campaigns past -- including the one about how Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush by having a then-state-of-the-art rapid response "war room," and the one about how John Kerry lost to George W. Bush because he failed to respond to some crazy stuff fringe conservatives were saying until it was too late. Never mind that 1992 could be more or less completely predicted by the economy, or that Kerry actually did better in 2004 than some "fundamentals" models predicted,  suggesting that perhaps the candidates and campaigns pushed things a bit towards, not away from, the Democrats that year.

Anyway, all those people are hired to monitor everything said on CNN and MSNBC and FNC and the network news and blogs and twitter and the rest of it and to make something of it, and they're not going to get a boost to their careers if they report back that nothing of any real interest was said today. No: they all have a serious career incentive to create this kind of flap.

So are we all just helpless before it? Mostly, yes, but not completely. First, obviously, reporters (and their editors) should think hard about whether they want to participate in it. Granted, some are going to; that's what they do. But for the rest of us, my suggestion isn't to react by being outraged about the outrage. It certainly isn't to assess who won, or to ponder What It Tells Us about the candidates and the state of the campaign. The only ways to respond are to remind everyone it doesn't matter (as Ezra Klein was doing very nicely on twitter today), or, even better, to just laugh at the whole thing. Just refuse to take it seriously.

The Limits of Campaigns

Nate Silver made the case this past Sunday in the NYT Magazine that Barack Obama will run a populist campaign because, all else equal, it works best for him in the electoral college.

Here's the problem with that: Silver's analysis depends on a massively unrealistic estimate about campaign effects. If the president goes populist, Silver speculates:

So let’s conduct a thought experiment. Suppose that against Romney, Obama does 10 points better among white voters whose households make less than $50,000 per year. The trade-off is that he does 10 points worse among whites making $100,000 or more and 15 points worse among whites making at least $200,000.

10 points! There's no way that an incumbent president can move voters that much by any combination of 4th year rhetoric and promises.

Fortunately, we have a bit of evidence to look at. Silver says, and I agree, that the president has shifted to a more populist tone in recent months, with policies to match. Since Gallup keeps week-to-week crosstabs on its daily tracking poll, we can see what effect, if any, the shift has. The categories don't match up perfectly -- Gallup only gives us ethnicity and income (and education) variables separately. But if there's any effect, it should show up, I'd say, in the income breakdowns. Gallup gives us four categories, by monthly income: the ones we're interested in are below $2000 (or $48K  $24K a year*) and above $7500 ($90K/year).

So: Obama gave his jobs talk to Congress on September 8. In the five weeks preceding his speech, the average approval rating difference between the "working class" and "rich" groups was 7 points (I'm using five weeks because the number jumps around quite a bit, as small-sample crosstabs in polls will do). And in the most recent five weeks, that gap has...been reduced, to under 6 points. Overall approval rating in the lowest income group went from 46.4% in August to 50.4% over the last five weeks; in the highest income category, the shift is from 38.4% to 44.8%.

Granted, these are not exactly Silver's groups, but the fact that they moved together -- and that there was more movement among the highest income group -- is certainly suggestive. Of course, it's unlikely that the president's rhetoric had much to do with the shift, which (I think Silver agrees) was primarily caused by improving economic conditions, along with getting farther away from the ugly debt limit fight. But that's the whole point; presidents really can't do much by rhetoric and position-taking alone to affect approval, or, as we get closer to November, vote choice.

Now, none of this means that Silver's advice to the Obama campaign is necessarily wrong. After all, even if the realistic maximum effects are closer to 1% than to 10%, well, Al Gore would have been very happy to get another 1% in Florida in 2000. Of course, whether the electoral college math works the same way at 1% or 2% instead of 10% is another question, as is the important question of whether the tradeoff Silver speculates about would really play out evenly overall, so that the campaign would merely be shifting where support comes from. So I'd still advise a bit of caution.

The larger point, however, is just to be very careful about anyone who claims very large campaign effects in general election presidential campaigns. The truth is that if they existed, we would know about it. Campaign effects in my view do exist...but we're talking about very modest stuff, and my guess would be that's even more minimized when we're talking about an incumbent president, who is mostly going to be stuck with the reputation he's built over the previous campaign and his time in office.


*Update: apparently multiplying by 12 was too much for me; I had this wrong originally. Sorry about that. I don't think it particularly changes the point, so otherwise I'm going to leave the post alone.

The Effects of Early Ads

Political scientist Danny Hayes asks over at WaPo's Behind the Numbers whether candidates have struck too soon in Iowa, based on recent political science research that finds big effects from advertising -- but also alarmingly quick decay rates. That is, TV ads apparently can really matter, but the effects wear off in a matter of days. It's a good item, and I recommend that everyone keep an eye on that space for more posts from Hayes and other political scientists.

So: are the candidates wasting their time by going up in Iowa now and over the last couple weeks, given that there's still three weeks before the caucuses?

I don't think so. The studies that Hayes cites are interesting, but they're still really preliminary. In particular, they are all studies of effects during general elections, when we would expect relatively small campaign effects of any kind (because of the power of party identification and because of the other information available outside of ads).

But in primary elections, most voters have very weak attachments to their preferred candidate. It may be that preferences are even easier to influence, and once formed stay in place longer. Or not -- after all, we obviously have many Republicans who have changed their minds multiple times over the course of 2011.

The other key reason that early advertising might matter in primary elections is that in these types of high intensity, multicandidate contests, such things as "stories" and "narratives" are far more likely to matter than they are in low-intensity elections. Remember the example I gave recently: if Gary Johnson had done better than Herman Cain in the very first debate, it's possible that Johnson could have wound up in every debate and Cain would have been a fringe candidate. Similarly, a TV ad that pushes the polls for even a short time can then affect which candidates get coverage, which in turn can affect future polling.

So while it's certainly possible that early advertising is mostly wasted in normal general election campaigns, I wouldn't put to much weight on those findings -- so far -- for primary elections.

Where Campaigns Work Well

A lot of people are commenting on a NYT story this morning about Barack Obama's difficulties in Pennsylvania, with liberals picking up on and frustrated by the attitudes reported by a local Obama supporter who seemed to understand that Obama was getting blocked by Republicans, but nevertheless just wanted Obama to cut through all of that and just get things done. Greg Sargent has a nice item with a follow-up on the supporter; Kevin Drum comments, too, as does Steve Benen, with each of them noting the skewed incentives involved in this kind of approach to the political system. Basically, their concern is that Republicans can deliberately ruin the country, but politically that will only hurt Obama.

I don't want to minimize the problem, which I agree is to some extent real, but I'd also put a bit of context around it.

We're now about eleven months out from the (general) election. Most people tune it out until, well, after the conventions, at any rate. And once they start paying attention, one of the things that campaigns are in fact very good at doing is giving people reasons for doing what they want to do anyway. That is, Obama supporters who at this point are inclined to vote for the president but upset about the economy or whatever are likely to express that as unease by saying, well, whatever comes to their minds, which might be all sorts of stuff. But once they start paying attention, you know what they're apt to say? You got it -- whatever the Obama ads are saying, and whatever the Obama surrogates are saying on their tightly disciplined appearances on every news show local and national, and whatever Obama himself is saying on the stump. Just as Republicans will wind up saying and believing whatever the GOP nominee is saying.

Most of us, most of the time, don't really have explanations for what's going on in the political world. Something is bad -- war, gas prices, unemployment? We have plenty of stuff in our heads about it, but no systematic reason to favor one reason over another, and so what we say often winds up sounding, to professionals, as poorly thought out or confused. Ah, but then: the campaign comes, and the politicians and other opinion leaders we tune in to supply us with explanations, probably incorporating some of that "plenty of stuff" (but selectively, leaving out the parts that make the wrong side look good!). And we wind up not only believing it, but believing that we always believed it. Which, in a way, we sort of did, but in a more straightforward way we really didn't.

Now, of course, there are real swing voters out there, and they might actually choose between the competing explanations that politicians are giving them during the campaign, although even there I suppose most of them decide first and come up with reasons later. But as far as partisans are concerned, the overwhelming majority of them are going to wind up back with their own party's candidate, and the campaign will do an excellent job of teaching them to explain why they're there.

Why Don't Former Staff Talk?

Alec MacGillis is looking at the Cain/Perry charges and countercharges, and has a great question:

The flurry of charges and demands for apologies between the two camps leaves me with one question: why doesn' t this sort of thing happen more often? Political consultants are famously mercenary, jumping from one team to another with the constancy of a left-handeded reliever or utility infielder. Why don't we hear of more instances of consultants picking up damaging information about a candidate they're working for one year and then using it, years later, when they happen to be working in the camp of a candidate in opposition to the former employer? Do they do so often but manage to be discreet about it? Or is there in fact an honor among thieves that generally constrains such behavior?

I've done some work on career paths of campaign professionals that's marginally relevant here, so I'll take a crack at it. I can think of three reasons:

1. I suspect the issue comes up less often than you would think. While some of these folks (media experts, pollsters) work for many candidates, a lot of consultants and campaign professionals work for one candidate per cycle, so they're not really walking around with inside information about all that many candidates -- and they're not all that likely to flip and oppose their old boss all that often. Remember, it takes a contested primary in the first place -- a contested primary with at least two candidates who are well enough funded to hire staff and consultants, with at least one of them a candidate who has hired such people in at least one previous campaign. Then you also need in that contested primary a situation in which for some reason a consultant and her old boss don't want to keep working together, and then the same consultant signing on with a different candidate. I don't know how often that whole thing comes together, but it must not be all that often.  The most likely place to find it, I'd guess, would be US Senate and gubernatorial primaries, but even those are not all that frequent, at least not contested ones.

2. MacGillis speculates about "honor among thieves", but I'd put it a bit different. It's certainly the case that reputation, including reputation for long-term loyalty, is a major selling point for campaign professionals. Would you hire a consultant who was blabbing the deepest secrets of his old boss? What's that consultant likely to do to you in the future?

3. And anyway: it's also really easy to exaggerate the number of skeletons that politicians have in their closets, at least the ones that their staff know about. Very few pols, I'm sure, have a backstory that includes multiple sexual harassment settlements! Now, presumably quite a few pols have slept with people they shouldn't have slept with, or wouldn't survive a very close examination of their old company's books and taxes...but they aren't telling their campaign staff about it.

So add that all up, and I'd guess that it explains most of why a former staffer or consultant harming her old boss that way is rare.

Congratulate Yourself...

...if you volunteered recently for a candidate.  New research just published from Seth Masket shows that Obama's field offices did, in fact, have a small but measurable effect on the vote -- enough that it probably swung Florida, North Carolina, and Indiana. You can read more about it at his blog here, where he concludes:

So, for those of you who volunteered insane hours during the campaign and wondered if what you were doing actually made a difference, it did.

What's nice about this research is that it's pretty objective (Obama either did or didn't have a field office).  Most subjective observers of elections tend to see everything through the lens of the final result -- or, during the campaign, by fluctuations in the polls.  So an ad, a debate performance, or a stump speech are judged to be good if the winner gave them.  Objective studies of elections tend, as Seth notes, to have trouble finding any effects. So it's nice that someone was able to document one.  Now, we're talking about one finding, about one kind of campaign effect, in one particular campaign, but it's still nice to know -- and I think most of us are happy that the data fell as they did.  Most of us would rather, I think, live in a world in which that sort of thing can make a difference.