Over at Plum Line, I ask: what if Santorum manages to stay very popular...but his campaign continues to be a shoestring operation. Could he wind up winning the bulk of the primaries and caucuses and still fall farther and farther behind on the delegate count?
It's most just political junkie daydreaming, but it technically could happen. In fact, I think it's still more likely than a real deadlocked convention.
By the way, Romney is now up to 9 of the 29 Republican Governors, and Santorum is still...crickets. Bizarre, really. Two Members of the House, zero Senators, no Governors, after winning Iowa, Colorado, Minnesota, and a tick ahead of Romney in national polling. He does have the evangelicals, though. Very, very odd, it seems to me, that he can't get any politicians to jump on his bandwagon.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Read Stuff, You Should
Happy Birthday to LeVar Burton -- hey, that's the second Star Trek one this week! Apparently, Geordi was...er, will be also born on February 16.
Ah, the good stuff.
1. Charles Franklin tells newspapers and cable nets that it's just silly to pretend that robopolls don't exist (via Harry Enten).
2. Asawin Suebsaeng over at Mother Jones has five more things you may have missed in the president's budget.
3. Could Scott Brown know what he's doing? David S. Bernstein thinks so. Even if that's true, though, it's a long way to actually winning re-election.
4. Yeah, you could have guessed that Garry Wills would not be a big fan of Rick Santorum -- or the current GOP position on contraceptives. Click and read, if only for the insults.
5. And Sarah Kliff explains why prevention efforts get the short end of the budget stick.
Ah, the good stuff.
1. Charles Franklin tells newspapers and cable nets that it's just silly to pretend that robopolls don't exist (via Harry Enten).
2. Asawin Suebsaeng over at Mother Jones has five more things you may have missed in the president's budget.
3. Could Scott Brown know what he's doing? David S. Bernstein thinks so. Even if that's true, though, it's a long way to actually winning re-election.
4. Yeah, you could have guessed that Garry Wills would not be a big fan of Rick Santorum -- or the current GOP position on contraceptives. Click and read, if only for the insults.
5. And Sarah Kliff explains why prevention efforts get the short end of the budget stick.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Plum Line: Post-Michigan
Over at Plum Line, I have a post up talking about what happens next if Rick Santorum wins in Michigan.
That said...Intrade has Santorum at 56% and Romney at 44% to win Michigan, and if I were betting I'd be with Romney. Nate Silver's polling model gives Santorum a 77% chance of winning there, but it doesn't know that Romney has a enormous advantage in resources. It also, on the technical side, treats Santorum's surge as a plus going forward. But I suspect that's probably wrong; in the immediate aftermath of Santorum's big day last week a lot of people were hearing only good things about him, but that's not all that likely to continue. And there's another thing...Romney has been far more successful in the debates than has Santorum. he's especially been strong in "confrontation" debates -- when a candidate has newly surged and everyone expects a showdown between the new polling leader and Romney.
The other thing to note is that Romney is very likely to sweep Arizona's winner-take-all primary on February 28, and if it's at all close in Michigan the delegates are going to be split evenly (or close to that). So Romney's delegate lead will get larger unless something truly shocking happens.
I wouldn't be shocked by a Santorum win in Michigan. But if you asked me to guess right now who would win that state, I'd be betting on Romney.
That said...Intrade has Santorum at 56% and Romney at 44% to win Michigan, and if I were betting I'd be with Romney. Nate Silver's polling model gives Santorum a 77% chance of winning there, but it doesn't know that Romney has a enormous advantage in resources. It also, on the technical side, treats Santorum's surge as a plus going forward. But I suspect that's probably wrong; in the immediate aftermath of Santorum's big day last week a lot of people were hearing only good things about him, but that's not all that likely to continue. And there's another thing...Romney has been far more successful in the debates than has Santorum. he's especially been strong in "confrontation" debates -- when a candidate has newly surged and everyone expects a showdown between the new polling leader and Romney.
The other thing to note is that Romney is very likely to sweep Arizona's winner-take-all primary on February 28, and if it's at all close in Michigan the delegates are going to be split evenly (or close to that). So Romney's delegate lead will get larger unless something truly shocking happens.
I wouldn't be shocked by a Santorum win in Michigan. But if you asked me to guess right now who would win that state, I'd be betting on Romney.
Deadlocked Fantasies
Sean Trende tries to find a way to make a deadlocked* convention pan out by looking at the past for examples, but I think I see where he goes wrong, and it's instructive. Looking at 1984, Trende writes:
The problem is that you have to think about these things dynamically: if one candidate improves, everyone else loses vote share, and thus doesn't get the resources going forward (money, organization, positive attention) that they earned from the vote share they actually got. It's just not reasonable to assume that a candidate will do exactly as well in May as he or she did in February; that assumes an equilibrium that just isn't seen very often in nomination fights.
In the current cycle, that means that if Rick Santorum does well enough to split delegates from here out with Mitt Romney, that probably means that Newt Gingrich gets few if any delegates going forward. And if that's the case, either Romney or Santorum would need only a narrow margin in order to win the nomination. Of course, more likely than that is that Romney (or Santorum for that matter) just wins the bulk of the remaining contests.
I think part of the problem here is that what happened with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton -- where two very strong candidates basically had a stable contest in which demographics, and not campaign dynamics, proved important -- is misleading people. Normally, candidates who fall behind just drop out, and that's that.
*Except Trende calls it a brokered convention, which is, as I've said many times, wrong. What we won't get will be a deadlocked convention, or I'm okay with a "contested" convention, but a brokered convention requires delegates willing to be brokered, and that's just not the case under current procedures.
But as a thought experiment, let’s assume that Jesse Jackson had run as strongly in 1984 as he eventually would in 1988. In his first go-round, Jackson didn’t win any primaries and received 3.2 million votes. In 1988, he won 11 primaries and caucuses, receiving nearly 7 million votes.Well, no. If Jesse Jackson had won a lot more vote and delegates in 1984, he would have been taking them from someone. I'm not going to look it up, but my memory is that Walter Mondale did reasonably well with African Americans and Latino voters that year; Jackson's improvement in 1988 was probably partially a result of him winning a higher percentage of those constituencies. On the other hand, Jackson also probably won some support from relatively wealthy, highly educated liberals in 1988, the kind that Gary Hart did well with in 1984. Here's the thing: there's no reason to believe that a stronger Jackson in 1984 takes equally from both of those groups (or that he draws from nonvoters). If not, then either Hart or Mondale is helped in the battle between them in a world in which Jackson does better. And if Mondale gets stronger at all, Hart probably fizzles out entirely somewhere along the way -- and, with just a bit more leeway, if Hart does better than Mondale drops out. For example, on Super Tuesday that year, had Jackson taken just a few votes from Mondale in Georgia then Hart would have won the state, giving him a 4-1 state advantage that day instead of 3-2 -- and perhaps changing the complexion of the race enough to kill off Mondale entirely.
If Jackson had been sufficiently organized and funded in 1984, we would have had a scenario vaguely similar to what we have today: Gary Hart winning prototypical “New Democrats” (“Atari Democrats,” we called them), Mondale running strong with “traditional Democrats,” and Jackson running well with African-Americans. In that scenario, a brokered convention would have been likely.
The problem is that you have to think about these things dynamically: if one candidate improves, everyone else loses vote share, and thus doesn't get the resources going forward (money, organization, positive attention) that they earned from the vote share they actually got. It's just not reasonable to assume that a candidate will do exactly as well in May as he or she did in February; that assumes an equilibrium that just isn't seen very often in nomination fights.
In the current cycle, that means that if Rick Santorum does well enough to split delegates from here out with Mitt Romney, that probably means that Newt Gingrich gets few if any delegates going forward. And if that's the case, either Romney or Santorum would need only a narrow margin in order to win the nomination. Of course, more likely than that is that Romney (or Santorum for that matter) just wins the bulk of the remaining contests.
I think part of the problem here is that what happened with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton -- where two very strong candidates basically had a stable contest in which demographics, and not campaign dynamics, proved important -- is misleading people. Normally, candidates who fall behind just drop out, and that's that.
*Except Trende calls it a brokered convention, which is, as I've said many times, wrong. What we won't get will be a deadlocked convention, or I'm okay with a "contested" convention, but a brokered convention requires delegates willing to be brokered, and that's just not the case under current procedures.
Catch of the Day
To Rachel Maddow. The liberal talk show host went off on a diatribe against Politifact after it rated "Mostly True" a claim by Marco Rubio that "The majority of Americans are conservatives."
There are a few ways to look at this. Politifact concentrated on self-identification polling, which shows far more American self-identify as conservative than as liberal, and decided that the plurality lead for "conservative" in those polls is at least close to Rubio's "majority" claim. At a narrowly literal level -- and that's not a crazy level for Politifact to use in many cases -- that's not an unreasonable position. And yet the political difference between a nation in which a group makes up over 50% of the electorate and one in which that group is at around 40% is quite significant.
One could look at it another way, which is to get beyond self-identification to go to whether people believe in conservative concepts or not. But then it gets very tricky, as can be seen easily in from the speech Politifact was fact-checking. Rubio actually said: The majority of Americans are conservatives -- they believe in things like the Constitution. I know that's weird to some people..." Politifact ignored that context of Rubio's comment, turning it into a narrow question of self-identification. But that's not actually what Rubio was saying. He's making a political claim that believing in the Constitution makes one a conservative. But that's, on the surface false -- virtually all Americans, liberals included, believe in the Constitution. Or it's false in a different way: if Rubio is going to say that believing in the Constitution means believing in a particular interpretation of the Constitution, then those who do so may all be conservatives, but now we're talking about a very small group of Americans who are well-versed in the controversies about Constitutional interpretation. Or it's just a claim not open to fact-checking, that most Americans would agree with Rubio's version of the Constitution if they thought about it. Or one could understand the statement as a rhetorical device. That's not a bad thing for someone to point out (it seems to be a staple of 6th grade education), but it has nothing to do with how many Americans self-identify as conservatives, and selecting out that portion of the statement to fact-check seems, really, sort of perverse).
Moreover, one could point out that the real answer here is none of the above: Americans are not liberal, conservative, or moderate in their ideology, because most Americans aren't ideological at all. That's one of the classic findings in political science studies of voters. Americans are, indeed, partisan -- but they don't think in ideological terms.
Anyway, I do agree with Maddow's basic point, which is that Politifact is just useless here. Indeed, it's a very odd "fact" to pull out of Rubio's speech no matter how one looks at it. Earlier in the speech, Rubio repeated the absolutely false claim that Barack Obama "got everything he wanted from the Congress" in 2009-2010. That's a pretty straightforward factual claim, and it's absolutely false (is it "pants on fire" false? I don't know, but it's flat-out false). Rubio then claims that after Obama took office, "The economy slowed down." If that's not a pants-on-fire claim, I'm really not sure what is...Rubio doesn't qualify it at all, he simply says that "everything got worse" and that "the economy slowed down." It's just a plain old lie.
Rubio goes on to say that Obama is the first president to pit some Americans against others, but of course that's both a mischaracterization of Obama's position and, on the face of it, absolutely false as well (plenty of presidents have pitted some Americans against others; I'd think all of them probably have). Oh, and Rubio also claimed that in the State of the Union address Obama didn't talk about his own record, but that's false too; Obama did, in fact, talk about recent job creation and deficit reduction.
I quit listening to the speech at that point (just four minutes in; the bit about conservatives is later), but I have no idea why Politifact pulled the majority conservative point out of the speech, and out of context at that, as the thing to fact-check.
(To try to get it out of the partisan side of things...looking at Rubio, it turns out that Politifact gave him a "half true" for saying that Mitt Romney was "one of the first national leaders to endorse" him in his Senate nomination bid. The item weirdly focuses on whether Romney's endorsement was after Rubio had the nomination wrapped up, which Rubio's "fact" doesn't make any claims about. It counts four national Republican leaders who endorsed before Romney, but puts way more weight on how the campaign was doing when Romney endorsed. That's ridiculous! As long as Romney was one of the first to endorse him, the statement is totally true. If it's true but trivial...well, maybe their categories don't work well, or maybe it wasn't a good claim to fact-check. But that doesn't make it only half true!).
And that's why Maddow's main point, that Politifact has become a disaster, is correct. The problem here is that there's simply no rhyme or reason to what gets checked, or what the standards are for checking it. It is, as Maddow says, just a mess.
There are a few ways to look at this. Politifact concentrated on self-identification polling, which shows far more American self-identify as conservative than as liberal, and decided that the plurality lead for "conservative" in those polls is at least close to Rubio's "majority" claim. At a narrowly literal level -- and that's not a crazy level for Politifact to use in many cases -- that's not an unreasonable position. And yet the political difference between a nation in which a group makes up over 50% of the electorate and one in which that group is at around 40% is quite significant.
One could look at it another way, which is to get beyond self-identification to go to whether people believe in conservative concepts or not. But then it gets very tricky, as can be seen easily in from the speech Politifact was fact-checking. Rubio actually said: The majority of Americans are conservatives -- they believe in things like the Constitution. I know that's weird to some people..." Politifact ignored that context of Rubio's comment, turning it into a narrow question of self-identification. But that's not actually what Rubio was saying. He's making a political claim that believing in the Constitution makes one a conservative. But that's, on the surface false -- virtually all Americans, liberals included, believe in the Constitution. Or it's false in a different way: if Rubio is going to say that believing in the Constitution means believing in a particular interpretation of the Constitution, then those who do so may all be conservatives, but now we're talking about a very small group of Americans who are well-versed in the controversies about Constitutional interpretation. Or it's just a claim not open to fact-checking, that most Americans would agree with Rubio's version of the Constitution if they thought about it. Or one could understand the statement as a rhetorical device. That's not a bad thing for someone to point out (it seems to be a staple of 6th grade education), but it has nothing to do with how many Americans self-identify as conservatives, and selecting out that portion of the statement to fact-check seems, really, sort of perverse).
Moreover, one could point out that the real answer here is none of the above: Americans are not liberal, conservative, or moderate in their ideology, because most Americans aren't ideological at all. That's one of the classic findings in political science studies of voters. Americans are, indeed, partisan -- but they don't think in ideological terms.
Anyway, I do agree with Maddow's basic point, which is that Politifact is just useless here. Indeed, it's a very odd "fact" to pull out of Rubio's speech no matter how one looks at it. Earlier in the speech, Rubio repeated the absolutely false claim that Barack Obama "got everything he wanted from the Congress" in 2009-2010. That's a pretty straightforward factual claim, and it's absolutely false (is it "pants on fire" false? I don't know, but it's flat-out false). Rubio then claims that after Obama took office, "The economy slowed down." If that's not a pants-on-fire claim, I'm really not sure what is...Rubio doesn't qualify it at all, he simply says that "everything got worse" and that "the economy slowed down." It's just a plain old lie.
Rubio goes on to say that Obama is the first president to pit some Americans against others, but of course that's both a mischaracterization of Obama's position and, on the face of it, absolutely false as well (plenty of presidents have pitted some Americans against others; I'd think all of them probably have). Oh, and Rubio also claimed that in the State of the Union address Obama didn't talk about his own record, but that's false too; Obama did, in fact, talk about recent job creation and deficit reduction.
I quit listening to the speech at that point (just four minutes in; the bit about conservatives is later), but I have no idea why Politifact pulled the majority conservative point out of the speech, and out of context at that, as the thing to fact-check.
(To try to get it out of the partisan side of things...looking at Rubio, it turns out that Politifact gave him a "half true" for saying that Mitt Romney was "one of the first national leaders to endorse" him in his Senate nomination bid. The item weirdly focuses on whether Romney's endorsement was after Rubio had the nomination wrapped up, which Rubio's "fact" doesn't make any claims about. It counts four national Republican leaders who endorsed before Romney, but puts way more weight on how the campaign was doing when Romney endorsed. That's ridiculous! As long as Romney was one of the first to endorse him, the statement is totally true. If it's true but trivial...well, maybe their categories don't work well, or maybe it wasn't a good claim to fact-check. But that doesn't make it only half true!).
And that's why Maddow's main point, that Politifact has become a disaster, is correct. The problem here is that there's simply no rhyme or reason to what gets checked, or what the standards are for checking it. It is, as Maddow says, just a mess.
Read Stuff, You Should
Happy Birthday to Graham Hill, b. 1929, died in a plane crash in 1975. If you're older, more interested in motor sports, or perhaps more British than I am, you might remember him as an apparently outstanding race car driver from the 1960s. For the rest of us, Graham Hill is in an odd category with, oh, Peter Brown from the Ballad of John and Yoko: real people who will be remembered long after they're gone because they were mentioned in something lasting -- in this case, the historical impersonation sketch, with John the Baptist doing Graham Hill. I suppose the all-time champs are people who get mentioned in Shakespeare or the bible. Is there a name for that? Ah well; I'd like to meet someone of superior intelligence, too.
On to the good stuff.
1. It's the national economy, not the various local economies, that appears to drive vote choice; John Sides supplies the evidence. You know my advice: ignore state polls until at least Labor Day.
2. Samuel Arbesman on "Keynesian Beauty Contests and Presidential Primaries." I'd be careful about putting too much weight on this (there's more to primaries than just bandwagon effects), but it's a good point.
3. Andrew Sprung, Obama-watcher, makes a good point about credit, blame, and the presidency.
4. The budget and health care exchanges, from Sarah Kliff.
5. A newly published party networks paper by Seth Masket, David Dulio, and Richard Skinner. Great stuff; Seth describes it.
6. Was Josiah Bartlett a lousy president? Ian Milhiser makes the case.
On to the good stuff.
1. It's the national economy, not the various local economies, that appears to drive vote choice; John Sides supplies the evidence. You know my advice: ignore state polls until at least Labor Day.
2. Samuel Arbesman on "Keynesian Beauty Contests and Presidential Primaries." I'd be careful about putting too much weight on this (there's more to primaries than just bandwagon effects), but it's a good point.
3. Andrew Sprung, Obama-watcher, makes a good point about credit, blame, and the presidency.
4. The budget and health care exchanges, from Sarah Kliff.
5. A newly published party networks paper by Seth Masket, David Dulio, and Richard Skinner. Great stuff; Seth describes it.
6. Was Josiah Bartlett a lousy president? Ian Milhiser makes the case.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Future Mitt Romney Attacks
With a tip of the hat to Paul Krugman, and leaving out the fairly obvious one of praising Romneycare while bashing ACA...
March:
March:
Barack Obama’s budget wastes money with crazy space fantasies that only Newt Gingrich could love. Remember: Obama was president when the US lost manned spaceflight capability.June:
Obama foreign policy is one retreat and surrender after another, and when will he answer one question for the American people: when are the troops coming home?August:
This summer’s record heat and drought? It’s on Barack Obama’s watch that the entirely fictional, fraudulent problem of global warming has become so bad.September:
The Obama record: endangering America with oil spills in the Gulf. Also: endangering American by preventing drilling in the Gulf.And of course, October and all year:
Barack Obama should immediately balance the budget while cutting taxes without touching any of our crucial government programs. And slashing spending.
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