FlyOnTneWall

Expediency, Morality and the McCain Economy

2008-03-28T11:01:00.001-04:00

Last week, I picked on the Democratic candidates, for their failure to accurately diagnose the causes of our present economic crisis, or to offer effective proposals for dealing with it. Since then, both Obama and Clinton have sharpened their critiques. There's a lot to praise in their speeches, and a fair amount to criticize. But sometimes it's worth pausing to remember that, for all our internal debates, the gaping chasm between Republicans and Democrats on these issues makes our own divisions all but vanish in comparison. So let's take a good look at the economic address McCain delivered on Tuesday to prove his sound grasp of the issues.

He begins with a classic McCain line, a reminder of why so many Americans find the man's approach to politics refreshingly honest:

Let's start with some straight talk: I will not play election year politics with
the housing crisis. I will evaluate everything in terms of whether it might be
harmful or helpful to our effort to deal with the crisis we face now.

Fantastic stuff. A no-nonsense approach to the crisis. The trouble is that he repudiates it in the very next line:

I have always been committed to the principle that it is not the duty of
government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are
big banks or small borrowers.

Here's the rub. McCain starts by promising to apply a basic standard of expediency. He'll weigh his policies solely in terms of their effectiveness in responding to our present crisis. Then he reframes the issue in moral terms. Those who have acted irresponsibly will get their just deserts - the government won't intervene to help them. There's just one problem with that - what happens an effective response to the crisis serves to aid those who acted irresponsibly?

Enter the McCain double standard:

Government assistance to the banking system should be based solely on preventing
systemic risk that would endanger the entire financial system and the economy.

Let's translate that. When banks and other financial institutions behave irresponsibly, McCain's saying, he'll bail them out if allowing them to fail seems likely to cause collateral damage. In other words, when his two principles come into conflict, he'll choose expediency over morality - not because the banks deserve to be rewarded for their sins, but because failing to act could endanger the interests of innocent parties.

And when it comes to the millions of ordinary Americans facing foreclosure?

In our effort to help deserving homeowners, no assistance should be given to
speculators. Any assistance for borrowers should be focused solely on
homeowners, not people who bought houses for speculative purposes, to rent or as
second homes. Any assistance must be temporary and must not reward people who
were irresponsible at the expense of those who weren't.

Suddenly, morality trumps expediency. McCain is focused on punishing the guilty. When it comes to the financial sector, he suggests our guiding principle ought to be the intent of our actions - so long as we act in the furtherance of the general good, we can overlook incidental benefits to the guilty parties. But when it comes to homeowners, his overriding concern is the effect of our actions - if policies would, in part, deliver relief to people who behaved irresponsibly, they must be rejected, even if they offer the most effective response.

Undergirding this double standard is a very particular understanding of the origins of the present crisis, which McCain traces to two specific problems. The first of these was the creation of a speculative bubble in housing. "Some Americans bought homes they couldn't afford," explains McCain, "betting that rising prices would make it easier to refinance later at more affordable rates....and those homeowners are now facing the reality that the bubble has burst and prices go down as well as up." But it's not all 55 million mortgage borrowers in America whom McCain blames for our present troubles, but rather the 4 million whose lenders have foreclosed or who are more than 30 days late with their payments and so considered delinquent. The other "51 million," he says, "are doing what is necessary -- working a second job, skipping a vacation, and managing their budgets -- to make their payments on time." Note the implication. If the other 4 million had just worked a little bit harder and tightened their belts a little more, we wouldn't be facing this mess.

That borders on delusion. I'm sure there are some examples of profligacy leading to foreclosure. But for the most part, the folks facing foreclosure are doing everything they can to stave it off. They may take third jobs, in addition to the second jobs they were already working just to make ends meet. Forget vacations - they're spending less on food, or their children's clothing. And in most cases, it's still not enough. When the first balloon payment hits after two years, when the adjustable rate starts to float, when they get hit with an unexpected medical bill, when a spouse gets laid off in the faltering economy - they still fall behind on the payments. Their attempts at home ownership were doomed the moment they signed their loan papers, and their hope of escape was sealed by the declining market. And yes, they certainly deserve to be blamed for their original mistakes in borrowing as they did. But the 4 million already falling behind - and the millions more who certainly will in the coming year, absent intervention - aren't in trouble because they're taking too many vacations, or because their family budgets are bloated and wasteful. They're in trouble because they can't afford to repay the loans they signed, and in many cases, because they can no longer sell their homes for enough to repay their loans, either.

McCain demands, later in the speech, that henceforth, borrowers "should be able to understand easily the terms and obligations of a mortgage" and that "every lender [must be] required to meet the highest standards of ethical behavior." But it's not clear why such reforms are necessary - after all, he never claims that borrowers weren't able to understand the terms of the deals they were signing, nor that lenders failed to meet the standards of ethical behavior. All the lenders were guilty of, says McCain, was growing "complacent," enjoying "a false sense of security," and lowering "their lending standards." The lenders erred, in short, by failing to be on guard against those unscrupulous borrowers.

But that's just one cause of the crisis. There's also the turmoil in the financial markets, the result of "an explosion of complex financial instruments that weren't particularly well understood by even the most sophisticated banks, lenders and hedge funds." These instruments "weren't always managed wisely because people couldn't properly quantify the risk or the value of these bets." As a result of complexity and a basic lack of transparency, "the initial losses spawned a crisis of confidence in the markets."

Let's line those two explanations up, side-by-side. In the housing market, millions of ordinary Americans displayed remarkably little financial sophistication by taking out irresponsible loans, offered to them by a variety of lenders and then packaged and resold by our most sophisticated financial institutions. The borrowers alone are to blame for this mistake. But in the financial market, the problem was that everything grew too complicated, and none of the analysts, brokers, or executives really had any idea what it all meant or how to manage it. So these experts, these financial wizards, piled on risk without understanding what they were doing. It's not clear to McCain that anyone should be blamed for this.

You read that correctly. John McCain believes that Joe Average needs to be punished for his irresponsible speculation, buying a home by signing a mortgage he didn't fully understand, thereby shouldering risk he failed to manage properly. But John Banker, who irresponsibly speculated by creating and trading in complicated securities he didn't fully understand, thereby shouldering risk he failed to manage properly? Well, if it helps the economy, he should be bailed out. Not only that, but since his irresponsible speculation and ineptitude have drained his bank's reserves, we need to replenish them by "removing regulatory, accounting and tax impediments to raising capital." And then, because the credit crisis has severely shaken our economy, we need to respond by "reducing our corporate tax rate" and "eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax," so that neither John Banker nor his employer will be unduly restrained from seeking to maximize their profits by fear that the government will make them share.

I'm not arguing that we should blindly bail out borrowers, or that intevening to shore up financial markets is a mistake. Clearly, we need to weigh any response carefully. But I do think we need a single, consistent standard. We need to acknowledge that there's more than enough blame here to go around - that borrowers, brokers, lenders, banks, investors and regulators all behaved with breathtaking irresponsibility. And then we need to take appropriate action, ensuring that the damage doesn't cascade through the economy. It's immensely gratifying to moralize, but weathering this crisis will require making difficult choices and compromises. There's no room for inflexible, rigid approaches.

Not to worry. McCain offers us these comforting words:

In this crisis, as in all I may face in the future, I will not allow dogma to
override common sense.

Of course not. Dogma is what the other guy believes. Sticking inflexibly to your own irrational views? That's just plain common sense.

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E Pluribus, Unum

2008-03-19T14:44:00.000-04:00

Four years ago, Barack Obama burst upon the national stage with an inspirational address, decrying those who would seek to divide the nation. "There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America," he thundered, "there's the United States of America."

Yesterday, an embattled Obama articulated a far more realistic vision of the role race plays in our society. He acknowledged that there is indeed a black America and a white America. That a racial divide runs so deeply through our nation that we fail to credit or understand each other's grievances. That anger on either side of that divide is so real, and so profound, as to have produced a racial stalemate.

And yet, precisely because of that dour realism, this second speech was far more compelling than Obama's debut. To understand that apparent paradox, it's worth considering what Obama actually said about the state of race in America.

First, let's sketch the broad contours of the debate into which he was inserting himself. There are those on the left who contend that race is chimerical, a tool used by elites to divide the working classes. On the right, culture has largely supplanted genetics as the explanation of choice for racial disparities, in either case, rendering the problem all-but-intractable and absolving society of blame. And, as Obama himself pointed out, in the broad American center silence has been the rule - resentments fester just below the surface, but are rarely voiced in public. Into that void stepped the junior senator from Illinois.

As is his wont, Obama drew upon the most compelling elements of each of these visions, without succumbing to their excesses. He echoed the classic leftist critique of political and business leaders who exploit racial divisions to distract "attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze." And he affirmed the right's insistence on the danger of "becoming victims of our past" and the need for "taking full responsibility for our own lives."

Then he went a step further. "Trinity," Obama said "embodies the black community" in all its richness and all its shortcomings, and he is as much a part of that community as it is of him. And buried in that is a radical claim about the nature of America. By speaking of the joys of communal life and the strength he draws from his Christian faith, Obama was making the case for the importance of the particular amidst the universal. That's why he chose to read aloud from his memoir a passage describing his sudden epiphany that Trinity was built upon a foundation of collective experience. That much, one suspects, Reverend Wright would have applauded.

But Obama was not finished: "Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black." There, in a single sentence, is the essence of Obama's insight. Our identity as Americans neither elides nor erases our other affiliations. Quite the contrary. It is our strong grounding in our own particular communities and traditions that allows us to unite around our shared American values. That's why the young community organizer on Chicago's South Side struggled to connect with his audience until he found a church of his own - a particular community to ground him, and to allow him to reach for the universal. It's why communities of faith and of ethnicity, of shared values and activities, have always formed the basis of our vibrant civic life. When Obama speaks of "binding our particular grievances...to the larger aspirations of all Americans," he's simultaneously arguing for the importance of particular identities, which provide the basis for mobilization, and for the primacy of shared national goals. We are a United States of America because, instead of simply denying or suppressing our differences, we choose to build upon our unique identities in the pursuit of a more perfect union. E pluribus - out of the particular - Unum - we construct the singular.

And that's the second key insight that Obama offers. Differences need not be divisive. They can provide the basis for cooperation as readily as the grounds for animosity. In fact, Obama may be uniquely positioned to make this argument, born into a family "of every race and every hue." He reminds us that our separate communities blur at the edges, that they are fluid things, that they overlap and intermingle. That if we choose, our tragic racial history can at last be consigned to the past. That America is not static. That "our America can change. That is true genius of this nation."

It is, in the end, a subtle shift - but no less profound for that. If four years ago, Obama asked us to subsume our particular identities in the furtherance of collective goals, yesterday, he called upon us to harness our particular needs in the service of national aims. A call to unity that asks us to draw upon our separate identities is far more likely to provide a lasting basis for cooperation than one which relies upon our forgetting our differences. With his speech in Philadelphia, Obama finally offered a vision of unity that was sufficiently mature and sophisticated to be more than inspirational - it was convincing.

Crazy Like an Uncle

2008-03-19T12:39:00.000-04:00

Fox News ran a typically sensationalistic report last night on the Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr, retiring pastor of Obama's own Trinity United Church of Christ. The ostensible news hook for the story was a sermon delivered by Wright on January 13, which the network suggested may have violated the church's tax exempt status. Let's get that out of the way up-front. Wright never uttered the magic words "endorse" or "vote," which would have been clear violations. If discussing the candidates were grounds for the revocation of nonprofit status, whatever the rules may technically say, then the IRS would first have to clear a substantial backlog, revoking the 501(c)(3) status of thousands of other churches before it got to Trinity.

But the real news in the report was an incendiary clip of the Reverend Wright in high dudgeon, framing the election in starkly racial terms. "Jesus was a poor black man who lived in a country, and who lived in a culture that was controlled by rich white people," he says. Perhaps enough to raise some eyebrows, but pretty much par for the course at Trinity. What followed was not. "It just came to me within the past few weeks, y'all, why so many folks are hating on Barack Obama." Unlike Hillary and Rudy, he says, Obama doesn't fit the mold of elites. Hillary has never experienced racial discrimination, he argues, and can not know what that's like. "Hillary ain't never been called a Nigger!" he shouts. "Hillary ain't never had her own people say she wasn't white enough." It's not in the clip I link to above, but Fox reports he even took a direct shot at Bill Clinton: "Hillary is married to Bill, and Bill has been good to us. No he ain’t! Bill did us, just like he did Monica Lewinsky. He was riding dirty."

First, let's be clear about what's being said. Wright is targeting those in the black community who were inclined to support Hillary. The sermon was delivered less than a week after Obama's loss in New Hampshire, but well before the Illinois primary, and his frustration is almost palpable. His argument, such as it is, is that Obama (like Jesus) knows what it is to live in a society that turns its back on him and his kind. That Hillary cannot know that. That there is no reason for blacks to feel indebted to the Clintons. And so, at least by implication, that it is incumbent on black people to support Obama and not Hillary.

I understand the man's point, but the fact remains - this is every bit as divisive and polarizing an argument as that advanced by Geraldine Ferraro. If it is wrong to suggest that gender alone entitles a candidate to votes, that the experience of being a woman in a man's world is uniquely difficult - then it is also wrong to suggest race play a similar role. Wrong, polarizing, and ultimately self-defeating.

Indeed, Obama's campaign was quick to recognize that these remarks were beyond the pale. Campaign spokesman Bill Burton issued this response:

Senator Obama has said repeatedly that personal attacks such as this have no place in this campaign or our politics, whether they’re offered from a platform at a rally or the pulpit of a church. Senator Obama does not think of the pastor of his church in political terms. Like a member of his family, there are things he says with which Senator Obama deeply disagrees.

That, I'm afraid, isn't going to cut it this time. Obama may not think of Wright in political terms, but it's quite clear that the converse is not so.

It's worth exploring the relationship between Obama and his pastor in somewhat greater depth. Here's Senator Obama, in perhaps his most affecting explanation of that relationship:

It is true that my Pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who will be retiring this month, is
somebody who on occasion can say controversial things....It is also true that he
comes out of the 60s; he is an older man. That is where he cut his teeth. That
he has historically been interested in the African roots of the African American
experience...
He is like an old uncle who sometimes will say things that I
don't agree with. And I suspect there are some of the people in this room who
have heard relatives say some things that they don't agree with...
And as I
said that last point I would make is that you know my Pastor is going to be
retiring over the next month. So my general view, and the reason that I raise
this, this is always a sensitive point, what you don't want to do is distance
yourself or kick somebody away, because you are now running for President and
you are worried about perceptions, particularly when someone is basically
winding down their life and their career.

I find myself empathizing with Obama, and admiring his instincts. He doesn't want to denounce a man who played a crucial role in his own life, who was a friend and a mentor when he needed one, just because it's now expedient to do so. He understands that Rev. Wright hails from a different generation (what, in another context, he labeled the Moses Generation) and Obama's entire candidacy is premised on the notion that that generation's day has passed, that it is now time for the next generation to take the reins of leadership, to transcend the divisiveness of earlier battles, to move us forward to a better future without neglecting the sacrifices of the past. I'm even sympathetic to the problem of a controversial spiritual leader. Who among us attends religious services with regularity, and hasn't squirmed in the pew from time to time, as the pastor or preacher or reverend or rabbi gives voice to a thought with which we adamantly disagree? Perhaps even a thought that is politicized or prejudiced? Or hasn't had an elderly relative do the same?

That's why I've always moved the scurrilous, conspiratorial e-mails to the trash bin on my computer. I was content to know that Obama was attracted to Reverend Wright and his church for the "cultural community" that they embodied; for their recognition that not just material interests, but also "hopes and dreams and...ideals and...values" motivate actions; and yes, for their Christian faith. If there's a single theme to Obama's intellectual achievements, it's been his ability to sieze upon powerful words and themes, lifting them out of their original context and reframing them to be inclusive and uplifting. Thus, Rev. Wright's fiery sermon on "The Audacity to Hope" in a racialized world becomes the title of Obama's serene meditation on the possibilities of transcending political and racial polarization. That seems to hold true more broadly. It's how Obama is able to credit the honorable motives of his opponents even as he disagrees with them. It's how Obama took the best of what Reverend Wright had to offer - community, inspiration, rebukes for his congregation's shortcomings - and set aside the anger and divisiveness that seemed to him relics of an earlier time.

The problem is that, with just weeks to go before he stepped down and removed himself as an ongoing issue, Reverend Wright crossed the line. Obama was succesful in his efforts to distance himself from Wright's opinions on myriad other subjects; he simply said he disagreed. That won't work for Wright's opinions on Obama. If these sorts of attacks have no place in our political dialogue, then a generic denial by a campaign spokesman isn't going to cut it. Obama himself will need to forcefully and clearly reject the logic of Wright's claims, the tone of his remarks, and the words that he used. Then he has to take the most painful step - he needs to distance himself from Wright.

There's a lot of glee on these boards this morning regarding the Ferraro debacle. I don't share it. Ferraro has left us weaker, as a party and as a nation. "I don’t think identity politics has served the Democratic Party well. I think it’s been an enormous distraction," Obama said in response to her comments. As usual, the man had the right words for the occasion. But now that one of those closest to him has made statements that are at least as divisive and egregious, he needs to find similarly powerful words to express his rejection of those statements.

It's not that the Clinton campaign, or for that matter, conservatives or the media, have gotten in his head, or that Obama's too weak, or that he needs to prove his manhood. Not every incendiary remark made by a supporter is a test of a candidate's ability to withstand attacks, to hit back, to give as good as he gets. Sometimes, those remarks are a test of what the candidate believes, and of the ideas he's prepared to embrace, even implicitly, in his pursuit of power. It's a test Clinton failed with Ferraro. And without denouncing these remarks, Obama fails it twice. He loses on a tactical level, because a campaign that splits along racial and gender lines is a campaign he loses. And he loses on an ideological level, because he has devoted his political life to convincing Americans that those divisions are less important than the things we share in common.

This one's not going away until Obama puts it to rest. So, Senator, what do you have to say?

It's the Economy, Stupid

2008-03-17T13:34:00.000-04:00

I think it's fair to say that, as of this morning, economic concerns have fully and firmly eclipsed other issues in the presidential race. We're likely already in recession; the Federal Reserve is taking unprecedented steps to bail-out the financial markets; consumers are reeling from higher prices; and this may only be the tip of the iceberg. But you wouldn't know it to listen to our presidential candidates, who have remained resolutely oblivious to the nature or extent of the present crisis. For the most part, they continue to recite the poll-tested bromides that have dominated economic policy discussions on the left for much of the past decade. When they turn to the economy, the candidates compete to denounce free-trade pacts and decry excessive corporate pay. It's tough to believe that they're changing the minds of uncomitted voters that way. If the Democrats are going to prevail in November, they need to explain to voters how the Republican Party managed to derail the world's most powerful economy - and then they need to convince them that Democrats have a plan to get it back on track. But even a cursory review of the rhetoric on the trail reveals how poorly the candidates have performed at that essential task.

Let's start with Obama. A speech he delivered last month in Wisconsin lays out his approach in a fair amount of detail. It begins promisingly enough by assigning responsibility for the present disastrous state of affairs in clear and direct language:

We are not standing on the brink of recession due to forces beyond our control.
The fallout from the housing crisis that's cost jobs and wiped out savings was
not an inevitable part of the business cycle. It was a failure of leadership and
imagination in Washington - the culmination of decades of decisions that were
made or put off without regard to the realities of a global economy and the
growing inequality it's produced.

But what are those decisions? Obama simply recites the standard litany of Democratic complaints: tax cuts, trade deals, Iraq, corporate lobbying, CEO pay, and outsourcing. The mortgage crisis, he argues, was simply "the straw that broke the camel's back." You'll forgive me, senator, if I don't join you in blaming NAFTA for this recession. Obama seems to have mistaken the peripheral for the central, and the central for the peripheral.

Hillary, remarkable though it may seem, has been even further from the mark. She, too, starts by assigning blame:

[T]he problem with our economy is not the American people. Instead, the problem
is, in part, the bankrupt ideas that have governed us for the last seven years.
They have rewarded the very few at the expense of the many.

But it's tough to tell, from her speeches, precisely what's gone wrong - just that it's all Bush's fault. The speech almost immediately turns into a laundry-list of popular policy proposals, many with their own catchy names. The highlights include suspending foreclosures and adding green-collar jobs in the short-term, and then looking forward by addressing the energy crisis, investing in infrastructure and education, expanding unionization, reforming the tax code and health care, and encouraging saving for retirement. It's all part of her Economic Blueprint for the 21st Century. And they may all be worthy notions, even if the particulars are debatable. But other than suspending foreclosures, none of them is more than remotely connected to the present crisis.

So let's detail what neither candidate seems willing or able to say on the stump. The present crisis is indeed the result of decades of poor decisions made by successive administrations, compounded by the specific policies embraced by President Bush and his appointees. But it's not (mostly) about any of the problems listed by the two candidates.

We face our present crisis because the government chose to abdicate its regulatory responsibilities in favor of blind faith in the marketplace. Seventy-five years ago, after the worst financial catastrophe in our nation's history, FDR oversaw the passage of an extensive regulatory regime intended to insure that such a collapse could never happen again. Over the subsequent decades, as the financial system evolved and banks found innovative ways to evade these regulations in the pursuit of profits, those rules were updated in an effort to keep pace with the changes. Then, during the Reagan administration, there was a fundamental change of course. Instead of trying to keep up with changes, regulators began racing in the opposite direction, hurrying to remove regulatory hurdles in the interests of growth.

The theory was simple. Spreading risk over a broader array of institutions and investors would serve to diminish the exposure of individual banks, thus accomplishing by market forces what once required regulation. These institutions could then offer an array of innovative products that would benefit consumers. The theory was also spectacularly wrong.

The result was a failure on two separate (though related) levels. The first failure has become evident over the past couple of years. A frenzy of irresponsible lending and borrowing, fueled by structural innovations like the securitization of mortgages, fueled a spectacular real estate bubble which is now collapsing. That led to the second failure, which is now being revealed in spectacular fashion. Financial institutions assumed risks they neither accurately assessed nor fully understood, while outdated rules and passive regulators failed to curtail their excesses. Now the music has stopped.

Two particularly vivid incidents can serve to illustrate this two-tiered failure. In 2001 and again in 2004, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency successfully pre-empted the attempts of state regulators to reign in some of the worst excesses of the marketplace, arguing that only the federal government had the right to intervene. It will come as little shock to learn that OCC is a classic captive agency, receiving 96% of its funding from the banks it's supposed to be supervising. Its primacy affirmed, OCC sat on its hands, refusing to act until it was far too late.

The second incident is unfolding this morning. Investment banks like Bear Stearns became, in effect, lending institutions - buying up mortgages and repackaging them for sale, thus effectively setting the standards for loans in the marketplace. Banks have long been subject to extensive regulation, in part on the theory that since the Federal Government effectively guarantees their deposits, it ought to have a say in how they shoulder risk. This weekend, we learned that taxpayers will also foot the bill for the collapse of investment banks. Alas, there is no similar regulatory scheme in place to limit their risks.

So let's return to the campaign trail, to explore the remedies being proposed by Obama and Clinton in response to the present crisis. To his credit, Obama has gone further than Clinton in focusing attention on the problem of irresponsible lending and borrowing. His platform highlights two particularly useful proposals: the STOP FRAUD Act, which would crack down on some of the most abusive lending practices; and the HOME score, which would provide a simple metric (like an APR) for borrowers to measure the costs and obligations to which they are agreeing, empowering them to act more responsibly. Both candidates have proposals to limit foreclosures. Hillary wants to do "everything possible to ensure that we don't lose any more homes" to foreclosure, calling for a 90-day moratorium, a five-year adjustable-rate freeze, a $30 billion fund for local communities, and a package of similar measures. Obama proposes bankruptcy reform (which would effectively pressure lenders to be more proactive in restructuring loans) and a generous mortgage tax credit targeted at lower income households. Most economists are agreed that Hillary's bailout would trade the possibility of short-term relief for the certainty of long-term problems; the verdict on Obama's proposals is more split.

It's easy to get wrapped up in the debate over these specifics, but that debate omits what the candidates have left unsaid. Both remain firmly committed to the notion that homeownership is an unequivocal good that ought to be enjoyed by the broadest possible number of Americans. That's the sort of thinking that landed us in this mess in the first place.

So here are two heresies that both candidates need to embrace if they're going to address the present crisis and convince voters that the Democrats have faced up to our economic problems, and have the solutions we need:

Regulation is what makes free markets function:
Every speech the candidates deliver this spring must include this essential theme - We're plunging into a recession because Republicans removed the regulations that make our economy run smoothly. And, of course, its corollary: We can rebuild our economy by standing up to special interests, and passing rules to make the markets run freely and fairly. There's no need to shy away from this sort of talk. Most Americans understand instinctively that's something has gone horribly wrong, that financial institutions have behaved with breathtaking irresponsibility, and that it shouldn't be allowed to happen again. John McCain, to the extent he pays attention to the economy at all, tends to embrace the gospel of the free markets. He and his party are largely responsible for what's gone wrong; Democrats can make a compelling case that they can set it right.

Sometimes, homeownership is a nightmare, not a dream:
When ownership can only be achieved on terms that rely on rising prices or the prospect of future wealth to finance the deal, then families are better off renting. By extension, some families are now in homes that they can't afford and shouldn't have purchased. We don't just need policies that will prevent foreclosure - that amounts to denial, and will perpetuate this mismatch of resources and obligations. We need to develop mechanisms to ease the painful adjustment, enabling families to extricate themselves from ill-advised loans without either fully absolving them of responsibility for their decisions or sentencing them to financial ruin, and without precipitating a further collapse in the market. We need to admit that home prices were artificially inflated, and aren't going back to where they were anytime soon. And then we need to change the huge array of federal homeownership incentives to embrace a more reasonable goal - equal access to homeownership for all who can afford it.

There's still time to make this economic case. Each candidate can frame it in the terms with which they are most comfortable. Obama can speak of the failure of leadership in Washington, which has allowed special interests to defeat regulation, and preyed upon the aspirations of Americans. Hillary might unveil seven discrete proposals, all part of her New American Dream Plan, designed to reform the financial industry and homeownership. I'm not going to detail the specifics. Reasonable people can disagree over both the precise nature of the failures and the proper remedies. The whole point of a campaign is to hear the candidates articulate their own understandings of the crisis, and to lay out their particular solutions. So far, however, all we've heard is silence and denial. And that's not going to put anyone in the White House.

Transforming the debate requires three simple steps. The first is to pin blame where it belongs - not on NAFTA or the decline of unions or an inequitable tax code or an unaffordable war, but on a failure of regulation and on policies that fueled a housing bubble. Then the candidates need to stop pretending that everything will be fine again, and speak a truth most Americans already know and are ready to hear - we've had a binge, and we're going to have a long, painful hangover. And that will set the stage for a message that can win in November - policies and proposals to set us on a path toward renewed and responsible growth, consistent with our values and consonant with our aspirations.

If you've enjoyed this, please share it with other readers by clicking the 'recommend this' link. You can find more analysis on my blog. As always, I welcome your comments and corrections, and thank you for your feedback.

Convention Math: Clarifying the Caucus-State Confusion

2008-03-11T15:03:00.000-04:00

Josh put a post up in the wee hours of the morning examining the intricacies of delegate selection in caucus states. The main thrust of the piece was that since delegates have yet to be fully allocated in the caucus states, there's still significant room for on-the-ground maneuvering, which might ultimately lead to swings as large as "twenty to thirty" new delegates. I'll admit that there's still some uncertainty regarding a portion of these delegates, but much of the speculation in the post seems rather more breathless than the facts appear to justify.

Now one of the things I love about Josh is that he's always careful to hedge when he wanders beyond the bounds of his own expertise, and he flags those elements of his posts that are speculative or that rely on information obtained from others. It's probably a vestige of his academic training, but whatever the cause, it elevates him above a lot of other bloggers who are considerably less careful concerning facts. So it's not Josh with whom I'm taking issue here, but rather, the sources he cites in his post.

There's also been a fair amount of speculation along similar lines in recent days. The Associated Press put out a story back in February focusing on the caucus issue, particularly the process in Nevada; diarists at DailyKos have been waxing incandescent about the goings-on in Colorado; Iowa is still up in the air; and right here at TPM Cafe we've seen some conspiratorial thinking about Texas. So it would seem to be time for yet another long-winded, overly detailed post detailing the surpassingly strange Democratic nomination process.

Let's start by noting that not all caucus states are created equal. They fall, broadly speaking, into three general categories (plus Texas, which as usual, does things in its own special way). In the first category, nothing's definitively settled until the state convention (e.g., AK, CO, IA, ME, and NV). Most of the room for maneuver comes in this small handful of states, which will ultimately hand out 162 pledged delegates. In their systems, hundreds or thousands of delegates elected at the precinct level, many of whom have little prior experience and are all-but-unknown to the campaigns, have to show up at the caucuses at the next level and vote the way they pledged in order for the initial results to be translated into strength at the state conventions. We're already seeing some signs that in Colorado the Clinton campaign is enjoying somewhat more success at this task than Obama's folks.

But that's just one category. The second uses the actual vote tallies at the precinct level to apportion its district-level delegates, some two-thirds of the pledged delegation. The caucuses also elect delegates to state conventions, sometimes via a multi-tiered process, who then choose the statewide delegates (or, in the case of Washington State, it's the district-level delegates to the DNC who make the selection). So it's possible that poor attendance or faithless delegates could affect the apportionment of the statewide delegates in these states, albeit unlikely. Overall, 95 of the pledged delegates in these states are already locked down by binding rules, and 51 are technically still in play (KS, NE, WA, WY).

The AP story glosses over the third category - states in which the allocation of every pledged delegate is determined by the initial vote, and in which all that's left for the state conventions (where they are held) is to determine the identity of the delegates, not their allegiances (e.g, AS, HI, ID, MN, ND, VI). There are 129 pledged delegates from these states, all of whom will be allocated in accordance with the vote tallies.

Texas, of course, is sui generis - its rules mandate that the delegates selected at the county/senate district conventions reflect the presidential preferences of voters at the precinct level, but then allow those delegates to vote as they please at the state convention. And of course, there's an outside chance of some shenanigans in the Lone Star State because the vote tallies at the precinct level, though binding, weren't centrally recorded. But on the whole, the incomplete tallies we have are likely to be highly predictive of the ultimate allocation of the 67 pledged national delegates, both because we have no reason to presume them to be an unrepresentative sample, and because only the (much smaller number of) delegates to the state convention are allowed the freedom to vote as they please. That makes it easier for the campaign to vet the folks they'll back for those slots, and to keep tabs on them moving forward.

So when Hillary blithely uses the term caucus delegates, she's lumping together some radically different processes. The 72 pledged delegates from Minnesota, for example, are no more in doubt than the 72 pledged delegates from Missouri - all were fully allocated on February 5. (That's reason enough to conclude that's she's challenging their legitimacy, and not making a procedural distinction.) None of the 45 from Iowa, however, have yet been allocated. To be sure, it's always wise to take any of these tallies with a grain of salt before the totals are officially certified. But I can't see any valid reason to distinguish between Minnesota and Missouri at the moment.

If you add up all the caucus-state delegates, you find that 224 have been locked down, with 280 technically still in play. But it's in the first of our three categories, among the five states with 162 delegates, that we're most likely to see swings. Let's dismiss the notion that "twenty to thirty" delegates might be in play - the only way to get a tally anywhere close to that number is to count the 14 Iowa delegates that Edwards' share of the vote suggested he would claim. And it's not at all clear that his backers intend to relinquish those slots. The Colorado experience is instructive in this regard - one county showed a five-point swing toward Hillary, another a four-point gain, and a third ran true to the precinct results. A two- or three-point swing statewide for Hillary would enable her to take a delegate from Obama; a five- or six-point swing would allow her to take two. And that in the largest of the undetermined states. We're just not talking about huge numbers of delegates, and it's unclear that the dynamic will favor Hillary across the board. Of course, there's another dimension to these defections. If Hillary or Obama were to garner more than 50% of the state convention delegates in any caucus state, including those in which the pledged delegates are already locked down, they'd be able to win that state's UADs. But the margins in the caucus states make that even more unlikely than a significant swing in pledged delegates.

The bottom line is that the possibility of faithless delegates is the sort of process story that makes political reporters and insiders salivate, but is extremely unlikely to happen. (I'll qualify that by saying that if the race is effectively over by the time state conventions meet, as it was in 1984, we could see some substantial number of defections.) Both sides, to be sure, have to turn out their supporters and do their homework in selecting higher-tier delegates. But there's no indication that either campaign will fail egregiously in that task, and despite all the jockeying, we'll probably see less overall delegate movement here than we saw in the primary state of California.

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The Perils of Indecision: How Clinton Cost Herself the Race

2008-03-10T14:29:00.000-04:00

Hillary Clinton's latest gambit is raising eyebrows across the political spectrum today. In an interview with Newsweek, Clinton explained that the electoral math:

...doesn't look bleak at all. I have a very close race with Senator Obama. There
are elected delegates, caucus delegates and superdelegates, all for different
reasons, and they're all equal in their ability to cast their vote for whomever
they choose. Even elected and caucus delegates are not required to stay with
whomever they are pledged to. This is a very carefully constructed process that
goes back years, and we're going to follow the process.

There's so much packed into that short paragraph that it's necessary to unwrap it at some length. Let's begin with the latest Clintonian coinages of elected delegates and caucus delegates. It's a clear effort to advance the notion that the primary contests are inherently more legitimate than caucuses. I've done my best to bat down these sorts of invidious distinctions before, but it seems each week the Clinton campaign rolls out a new means of adding up the votes to produce a clear edge for Hillary. Rather than recapitulate those arguments, I'll simply say that the rules vary more between some primary states than they do between some of those states and firehouse caucus states, making these groupings rather arbitrary; that any representative system will fail to produce a perfect translation of the popular vote; and that complaining about the rules only when they prove inconvenient is hardly an honorable tactic, and can only serve to undermine the legitimacy of the eventual outcome. At any rate, I suspect that caucus delegates will soon be consigned to the same fate as automatic delegates, a nomenclature that even Clinton has evidently already abandoned.

The real stunner here is Clinton's blithe assertion that pledged delegates and superdelegates are "all equal in their ability to cast their vote for whomever they choose." For the most part, she's absolutely right about that. But it's not an idle observation, it's an apparent appeal for their support. And that's a line which no recent candidate has been willing to cross - enticing delegates pledged to support a candidate to abandon that pledge. In the next breath, Clinton vows to "follow the process." There's a narrow legalism to this approach, a willful disregard for the spirit of the rules coupled to a faithful adherence to their letter.

In this case, I rather doubt Clinton is contemplating a serious run at the pledged delegates. Those folks have been carefully vetted by the campaigns, and are unlikely to prove faithless in any significant number. It is, instead, yet another effort to soften the ground for the superdelegates. She is attempting to reframe the debate. It's not that Obama will enter the convention with a triple-digit pledged delegate lead, Clinton's suggesting; rather, when 4,048 delegates convene in Denver, we shouldn't consider any of them really committed to either candidate. All the delegates are ultimately free to vote as they please. So if when the votes are cast, Obama happens to garner more support among pledged delegates and Hillary a decisive edge among the superdelegates, then that's just the way things fall out. No one overturned a pre-existing outcome - it was all up in the air until that final vote. Her caucus vs elected distinction likewise seems aimed at persuading superdelegates that if they squint hard enough, they can still see Hillary holding on to some sort of lead, and that their votes for her would really be ratifying the popular will and not overturning it.

But as easy as it is to pick on Clinton for her endless attempts to reframe the process in her own favor, I think that such an approach misses something significant in her argument. Hillary is genuinely, thoroughly distrustful of the caucus process. At the urging of her advisors, she swallowed her misgivings and campaigned in Iowa. Her defeat in Iowa left her feeling burned, and confirmed her doubts. She had, reports the Washington Post, "become allergic to caucuses, deeming them unfair." That aversion, as much as anything else, is the reason why Clinton now finds herself facing an all-but-insurmountable chasm among the convention delegates.

For that reason alone it would be important to understand the origins of Clinton's self-defeating disdain for caucuses. It's not solely an instrumental position, nor (contra the Post) is it an expression of her pique at being spurned in Iowa. The truth is more nuanced. Hillary was not willing to roil voters in those states when her nomination appeared inevitable by using her substantial clout on the DNC Rules Committee to eliminate caucuses, nor to mandate changes to their procedures, back when the primary rules were being debated and enacted. When she thought she could win in Iowa, she poured time and resources into the state, never uttering a word about her dislike for its process. In Nevada, she held her fire until the Culinary Workers endorsed her rival, and then focused her ire on the at-large caucus sites, which (somewhat ironically) were designed to remedy many of the inequities she decried. But it seems fairly clear that her distaste for the caucus system is genuine, and deeply rooted.

My problem with Clinton's present approach is that she has crossed over from critiquing a system she dislikes to attempting to subvert it. It's instructive, in this regard, to recall her response to an earlier electoral controversy. In the fall of 2000, it became clear that although Al Gore had won the popular vote, he was likely to lose narrowly in the electoral college. At the time, more than a few activists suggested a simple means of reversing the outcome - persuade three electors to switch their votes. The most prominent advocate of this solution was Mario Cuomo, who observed: "Why should [Gore] concede as long as it’s still possible that electors might change their mind, which they’re free to do?"

But Cuomo was pretty much alone among prominent Democrats. Gore himself repeatedly said that he would not encourage any electors to switch their votes. It remained, for the most part, an expression of grass-roots frustration. Senator-elect Hillary Rodham Clinton entered the fray just a few days after the election. On Nov. 10, she told an upstate NY audience:

I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect the will of the
people. And to me that means it's time to do away with the Electoral College and
move to the popular election of our presidents. And particularly in this
situation where we have a popular vote total that favors the Vice President, I
think it sends a message to everyone. Many of us who have run for office in this
last election have spent a lot of time telling people their votes would count.
... We need to make it clear that your vote counts and that the total votes cast
for a person running for president in our country should determine the outcome.

Let's set aside, for a moment, the delicious irony of a woman about to take her seat in the United States Senate, perhaps our system's most extreme expression of republican distrust for popular democracy, decrying the inequities of a system that stands in the way of the people's will. We'll set it aside because, as best I can tell, Clinton was perfectly sincere. Then, as now, she distrusted processes that failed to embrace the popular vote. For all that, she never took the next step. She never crossed the line and encouraged electors to switch sides. In fact, less than two weeks after her initial assault on the electoral college, she backtracked on a pledge to make its abolition the subject of her first bill, calling the idea unlikely to be successful and opting to focus instead on reforming the electoral machinery to ensure more accurate vote counting.

Back in 2000, Clinton seemed to understand that the integrity of our Democratic system is more important than the outcome of any given election. The time to challenge its legitimacy or to reform its byzantine processes is between elections, not halfway through them, or after their results appear to be distasteful. In her seven years in office, Clinton never did follow through on her initial pledge to discard the electoral college. Her work on voting reform never extended to the primary system. She never pushed the DNC to change its guidelines. She never spoke out before Iowa against the caucuses, nor did she choose to boycott the process in that state. Last week, she decided to (once again) swallow her objections and to campaign full-bore in Wyoming, even as she continued to mock the caucus system there.

This morning, The New York Times ran a remarkable piece on the dissension within the Clinton campaign:

Mrs. Clinton accepted or seemed unaware of the intense factionalism and feuding
that often paralyzed her campaign and that prevented her aides from reaching
consensus on basic questions like what states to fight in...

One pundit they quote was considerably less charitable:

It’s a legitimate question to ask: Under great pressure from two different
factions, can she make some hard decisions and move ahead? It seems to just
fester. She doesn’t seem to know how to stop it or want to stop it.

Hillary's approach to the caucus system suggests that Thurber is closer to the mark. Had she trusted her own instincts, and either pushed the DNC to change the rules or skipped Iowa entirely, she'd probably have locked up the nomination by now. If, instead, she'd followed Ickes' advice and competed vigorously in caucus states, the outcome would have been the same - smaller margins for Obama producing a Clinton lead. But by vacillating between the two approachs - by competing in Iowa and Nevada, then not in other caucus states, then again in Wyoming - Clinton has transformed her nomination from inevitable to improbable.

But it's not her failure as a manager that's ultimately to blame for her defeat. Clinton knew her own mind on the subject, and voiced her opinions as far back as 2000. Had she followed through on her misgivings, she would have won. Had she set them aside to fight the election on its own terms, she would have won. Instead, she vacillated. Not because her staff pulled her in opposite directions, and not because she was unaware of the conflict. Those were the symptoms of her indecision; we ought not mistake them for its cause. She vacillated because she did not know her own mind. And that inability to choose a position and stick to it will ultimately cost her this race.

If you've enjoyed this, please share it with other readers by clicking the 'recommend this' link. You can find more analysis on my blog. As always, I welcome comments and corrections. And thanks to all who have responded for their feedback.

Convention Math: Remember the UADs!

2008-03-06T13:35:00.000-05:00

A reader's comment on my last post sent me back to the ever-exciting topic of Unpledged Add-On Delegates (UADs). Those who have suffered through my previous explorations of the subject will recall that UADs are the forgotten superdelegates - the 76 bonus delegates awarded to the states. It turns out that they were dreamt up by Tad Devine in 1988, as a means of rectifying Jesse Jackson's gripe that he was winning states but only splitting their delegates. The original idea was that UADs would be awarded in each state as an extra bonus to the winner of the popular vote. Somewhere along the way, however, UAD allocation was largely divorced from the popular vote. Today, states follow a wide variety of methods for awarding their UADs (see my previous posts for more).

So who cares? Well, I do. And I hope you will, as well. But not, as best I can tell, the national media. The delegate calculators out there seem blissfully unaware of the UADs, lumping them in with the other superdelegates as if they're just sitting on the fence. Most projections I've seen do the same. This is problematic. To the best of my knowledge, only two UADs have been selected thus far, and so they're the only ones being included in most counts of superdelegates. But it's fallacious to think that the UADs will choose between the two candidates; rather, the UADs will all be chosen based on their public backing for one or the other. They don't fall into the pool of undecided superdelegates, and claiming they do makes that pool seem larger and more influential than it is - and, as it happens, makes a Clinton comeback seem plausible, when it's not.

Witness last week's fight over UADs in Alabama, one of the states in which the state executive committee makes the decision. Each campaign selected a single, loyal backer, and ran him as their candidate. Obama controlled six more votes than Hillary, and so his man won the slot. There was no sense in which this delegate was unpledged; in fact, he was vetted at least as carefully as any of the pledged delegates on Obama's slate. We're going to see the same in every state that awards UADs. Given that some of these will be awarded by a vote of a body whose composition is already a matter of public record - a state convention, the members of the DNConvention delegation - we can actually be as certain of these UADs votes as of those of their pledged peers, even if we don't yet know their names.

Here's a quick rundown of UADs in states that have already voted:

Clinton Obama Undetermined

IA: 0 0 1
NH: 0 0 1
NV: 1 0 0
SC: 0 0 1
AL: 0 1 0
AK: 0 1 0
AR: 1 0 0
AZ: 0 0 1
CA: 5 0 0
CO: 0 1 0
CT: 0 0 1
DE: 0 1 0
GA: 0 0 2
ID: 0 1 0
IL: 0 3 0
KS: 0 1 0
MA: 0 0 2
MN: 0 2 0
MO: 0 0 2
ND: 0 0 1
NM: 0 0 1
NJ: 0 0 2
NY: 0 0 4
OK: 0 0 1
TN: 0 0 2
UT: 0 1 0
WA: 0 2 0
NE: 0 1 0
LA: 0 0 1
ME: 0 1 0
DC: 0 1 1
MD: 0 0 2
VA: 0 2 0
HI: 0 0 1
WI: 0 0 2
OH: 0 0 2
RI: 0 0 1
TX: 0 3 0
VT: 0 1 0

TOTAL: 7 23 32

So the states that have already held their initial contests award 62 of the 76 superdelegates. About half of those delegates have been or will be selected by bodies whose allegiances are already known, allowing us to predict that Obama will take 23 UADs to Hillary's 7. Obama's substantial lead in the category is based on two factors - he's won many more states, and more of the states he's won use caucuses or other processes that allow us to predict the selection of UADs.

Now, there are good reasons not to attempt to predict how the remaining UADs will be awarded. The Alabama fight demonstrates that the Clinton campaign isn't about to cede UAD slots even in states it lost, and if it's going to fight, it seems likely Obama's camp will, too. In some states, that's unlikely to matter. It seems reasonable to suppose that all 4 New York UADs will go to Hillary. But do Massachusetts' senators and governor have enough clout on the state committee to secure both of that state's UADs for Obama? Perhaps. And will Hillary's institutional support in states like Hawaii bring her a UAD where it failed to deliver a caucus? Could be. These things bear watching.

Nevertheless, it seemed a worthwhile exercise to award all 62 of these UADs by giving the remaining 32 to the candidates who won their respective states. If you do that, Obama wins them 38-24. That suggests what a headache the UADs are likely to become for the Clinton campaign if she stays in the race. As things stand, they widen Obama's lead by 16 delegates; and if things play out along the most likely lines, that lead would still stand at 14. (The remaining contests are likely to have about as much impact on the margins in the UAD battle as on those of the rest of the delegate tally - which is to say, little or none.) To put that in perspective, Clinton leads the overall superdelegate tally this morning, 241-198. Add in the UADs whose commitment have been determined, and that shrinks to 248-221. Even if she enjoys some success at grabbing UADs from states that Obama has won, she faces an uphill battle - almost all of Obama's likely UADs are already locked down, and almost all of Hillary's have yet to be determined. And to offset each UAD in that Obama lead, Hillary needs to win another pledged delegate or superdelegate to her cause.

So add this to the long (and lengthening) list of reasons why the numbers just don't add up for a Clinton nomination. And every time you see a tally of the 794 superdelegates, look closely to see how it treats the 76 UADs. These procedural details matter more than most people think - by mastering them, the Obama campaign has built a clear lead despite the remarkably even split between the campaigns at the polls.

If you've enjoyed this, please share it with other readers by clicking the 'recommend this' link. You can find more analysis on my blog. As always, I welcome comments and corrections. And thanks to all who have responded, and to the GhostInTheMachine and IrishTrojan blogs for linking to these posts.

Wednesday Morning Questions (and Answers)

2008-02-29T15:01:00.000-05:00

1) What's changed in the past 24-hours?

Nothing. And everything.
Yesterday, Obama had a chance to end the fight for the Democratic nomination, and Hillary faced elimination. By winning three out of the four states, Hillary seems to have convinced the punditry that she remains viable, if only barely. We now face a long and increasingly-bitter fight, as Clinton ramps up attacks on Obama. That's a big change from the relatively-civil battle we'd witnessed until the last few days, and if the contest really drags on for another seven weeks, that's also significant.
On the other hand, when the dust settles, it looks as if any changes in the delegate count will be negligible. Just a few weeks ago, the Clinton campaign was talking about narrowing the overall delegate gap to 25, pulling even, or even taking the lead on the strength of the March 4 vote. Depending on the count, the actual lead will remain somewhere around 80 delegates in most leading tallies - or just over 100, using the Obama campaign's count that fully allocates the delegates. Running out the clock is never a good way to win, but every contest that passes with that lead intact is a major blow to Clinton's aspirations.

2) Did Clinton "win back her base" last night in Ohio? Did Obama "cut into Clinton's base" in Vermont?

How to put this? No.
One of the challenges of covering the long series of contests in the Democratic nominating process is assembling a cohesive narrative out of discrete events. Sometimes, that makes a great deal of sense. In 2004, we watched John Kerry's momentum build state-by-state, as his performance in one round boosted his viability in the next. That's one reason pundits like to speak about such elusive things as momentum. The problem is that we're comparing unlike quantities. Obama, for example, has won better than 80% of the black vote in every contest since Georgia. But his share of white male voters has varied widely. There's a temptation to over-interpret those facts - to suggest that when his share surges upward, he holds more appeal for white men, but that Clinton's recent attacks have eroded that support. The difficulty is that we're not talking about the same people. There's every reason to believe that had Wisconsin not held its election until yesterday, it still would have delivered a substantial margin for Obama, even as Ohio went solidly for Hillary. The two states are quite different - driven by different issues, inhabited by populations of different socio-economic statuses, and traditionally supportive of different sorts of candidates. Conversely, had New Jersey decided to take part in the Potomac Primary, geography be damned, it would almost certainly have tipped toward Hillary anyway, even as three other contests went for Barack.
The headlines this morning all speak of Hillary reassembling her coalition or reclaiming her base, but there's no reason to believe that voters in Ohio ever left her, or that they needed to be reclaimed. In fact, the polls taken over the past month tell a different story; that Obama cut into some of her key constituencies, but not enough to win, and saw some of his gains slip away in the final days. Obama's sole triumph of the evening, in Vermont, is a similar case - he didn't have to win voters over, they'd been backing him for as long as pollsters have been asking the question.
There's another way to look at last night's results. It would appear that the Democratic primary electorate is fairly evenly divided along some fairly consistent lines. With the exception of black voters, however, monovariate explanations fall short. In other words, predicting outcomes typically means combining various traits of the electorate. It's not enough to say that Obama is likely to do better among men, even though that may be true; we have to say that Obama tends to take white men in northern states with at least a college education, and that his share of their votes increases as educational attainment and income levels rise, but falls with advancing age. We might add that he does best in this group in states where blacks comprise less than 5% of the population.
Suddenly, momentum all but vanishes. In national polls, Hillary Clinton has garnered astonishingly consistent levels of support for more than a year, almost always falling in the range of 40-45%. Obama's support has steadily risen since Iowa, as he's introduced himself to voters - but almost all of that support has been drawn from those who backed his one-time rivals in the field, and remarkably little from Hillary. (The obvious exception is the mass defection of black voters from Hillary to Obama in February.) In other words, the electorate knows exactly how it feels about the two candidates - and it's split. That's why the Obama campaign was able to make projections all the way at the beginning of February that - although sharply at odds with the polling at the time - were proven remarkably prescient last night.
That's a less exciting narrative than the surges and the improbably comebacks; the gains and the losses; the eroding bases and reassembled coalitions. But it's also more interesting. Each time the traveling circus arrives in a new state, we see a microcosm of this national narrative - the initial numbers, based largely on name-recognition, rapidly shift, until they come into alignment with the state's demographic composition. Then they remain remarkably stubborn. The major variables at play are election-day turnout, crossover voting, and local issues that cut contrary to national trends. And it also allows us to project results forward in time, with a fair degree of accuracy. The upshot is that Obama will likely add around a dozen delegates to his pledged delegate lead before the convention, even if Hillary contests every remaining race. There's margin for error there, but not much - barring a catastrophic scandal, the two rivals will roughly split the remaining pledged delegates.

3) Why is it that reporters continue to tout contests in the largest states as if they will have the greatest impact on the outcome of the race?

Almost every headline I've read, seen, or heard this morning has focused on Pennsylvania, still seven weeks away. But consider that a 60-40% Clinton landslide in that state would yield her (at most) a 32-delegate margin, only about a third of what Clinton needs to close the current gap. Recent polling puts the race closer than that, at somewhere around 55-45%, which would yield (at most) a margin of 17 delegates. In both cases, the outsize clout wielded by heavily-black districts under party rules probably means the margin would be somewhat smaller. And unless Pennsylvania turns out to be dramatically different from the other rust-belt states, Obama will rapidly make up that ground, only to cede some of it back in the final few days (a few polls show that already happening). It wouldn't be the slightest bit surprising if Clinton wins decisively in Pennsylvania, and her pledged delegate gain is somewhere around a dozen. Call it the Ohio scenario, if you will.
Compared to the 158 pledged delegates in the Keystone State, the 33 up for grabs in Mississippi and the 12 in Wyoming do indeed seem like small potatoes. But in 2000, fully 55% of Mississippi primary voters were black. In 2004, that number rose to 56%. Let's be conservative here, and assume that increased interest and higher turnout lower those percentages. We've actually seen an electorate that looks remarkably like the one in Mississippi - in Georgia, where black voters accounted for 51% of those who went to the polls. Obama took that state, 2-1. So I think it's more than reasonable to expect a 22-11 delegate split in Mississippi. Add in an Obama victory in the caucus state of Wyoming (7-5? 8-4?) and suddenly, those two states don't look so small. In fact, the 13-15 delegate margin they're likely to yield is about the same as the optimistic scenarios for Clinton in Pennsylvania.

4) If Clinton's betting her campaign on winning superdelegates to her cause, just how many of them will she have to win over?

By the most transparent count, there are some 284 superdelegates who have yet to publicly announce their endorsements. (That excludes the 76 unpledged add-on delegates, but the best-case Clinton scenario has those delegates evenly split.) Let's assume, for the moment, that the current margin holds - that's actually a remarkably rosy scenario for the Clinton campaign, given the states that have yet to vote, and Obama's built-in advantages in the allocation formulae. The Obama camp claimed 160 more pledged delegates than Hillary going into yesterday's battles - let's whittle that down to 140, in case the Obama camp's "double-digit margin" in the Texas caucuses doesn't actually materialize. Most superdelegate counts give Hillary a margin of 40-45, so we'll knock the total down to 100, because it's a nice, round number. So to grab the nomination, Hillary needs the remaining superdelegates to split somewhat better than 2-1 in her favor.
The trouble is that the current tallies aren't graven in stone. More than a few of Hillary's supporters are under substantial pressure from their own consituencies to reconsider their endorsements; I haven't seen any media accounts of similar pressures being exerted on Obama backers. Hillary also faces an uphill battle in convincing some of her own supporters, and more than a few of the fence-sitters, to vote against the winner of the pledged-delegate tally, a title she no longer even pretends to contest. And, we should mention that Hillary's superdelegate lead has fallen from around 100 to its present total over the past few weeks - the trend is not promising.
So here's a prediction that I'll reiterate: in the next week or so, we're going to see the superdelegates effectively settle this race - ratifying the pledged-delegate results. Next week's elections will see Obama's pledged-delegate lead surge back to 150 or more. With just a few dozen superdelegate endorsements - or fewer, if they include defections - he can entirely erase Hillary's lead in that category. Say he pulls that off - pulling in enough superdelegates to even things out. Hillary would need a virtually impossible margin among the remaining supers to pull out the race. But she faces another problem - the less probable her win, the less likely she is to garner further support. Her current rationale is that the superdelegates will see her as the stronger candidate and come to back her; without a superdelegate lead, that doesn't look too plausible.
We're not going to have to wait for 285 people to make up their minds. A few dozen more decisions will effectively end this thing.

If you've enjoyed this, please share it with other readers by clicking the 'recommend this' link. You can find more analysis on my blog. As always, I welcome comments and corrections. And thanks to all who have responded.

ObamaCare: American Incrementalism

2008-02-29T13:19:00.000-05:00

There's been a great deal of debate this cycle about the relative merits of the candidates' health care plans. The key point seems to be the issue of mandates - Obama would require that all children have health insurance, Hillary would extend that requirement to every American. Whatever the abstract merits of the competing proposals, one thing seems clear - Obama has yet again demonstrated his superior understanding of the American temperament, and that bodes well for the plan advanced by the presumptive nominee.

I would sum it up like this. Hillary may have abandoned the truly-sweeping changes she proposed during her husband's first term, but her plan remains ambitious. It is her aim to enact reforms that would, in one fell swoop, extend coverage to every American (that is, to every citizen and legal resident - she would still exclude millions of those in the country illegally). She and her advisers argue that only truly universal coverage can be economically feasible. Obama is proposing a plan that might, in any other year, seem ambitious - but stacked up against Hillary's seems relatively cautious. He would mandate that every child be covered, but not every adult. If it turns out that the numbers don't add up, he's said, he'll reconsider universal coverage. It's a relatively incremental approach. I'm not qualified to pass judgment on the economic merits of the proposals; smarter folks than I have already written thousands of column-inches on the subject. But I do think that there's another way to gauge the two plans, and that's to consider the visions of change that they embody.

For centuries, Americans have proven resistant to governmental provisions of welfare. The quintessentially American ethos of self-sufficiency and independence leads many voters to recoil from the very notion that the government should take a prominent role in their lives. Many Americans would prefer to shoulder greater risks and maintain their independence, than to surrender their freedom of choice and gain greater security. But there has always been an important exception to this general rule. Americans feel a collective obligation to care for the vulnerable and the defenseless. When proposals are advanced to care for those believed unable to care for themselves, they have almost always enjoyed tremendous support. Moreover, almost every major expansion of the welfare state has followed the same path - reforms initially proposed to benefit the most vulnerable are gradually expanded to benefit all Americans.

Let me offer a few examples. It was in the wake of the Civil War that the federal government first entered the welfare business; an enormous bureaucracy provided benefits for the wounded, and pensions for veterans and their widows and orphans. Governmental regulation of wages and of working hours was first held to be constitutional only insofar as the government acted to protect the vulnerable (women and children), and only much later extended to the workforce as a whole. Modern personal-injury law has its origins in the railroad accidents of the late nineteenth century; the courts initially moved to protect and compensate women, who were seen as dependent and vulnerable, but gradually expanded those protections to men, who were every bit as much at the mercy of machines. Modern product liability and consumer safety protections date to a series of accidents in the mid-1950s, in which poorly designed products led to the maiming or deaths of scores of small children, and were gradually expanded from that narrow base.

In other words, the courts, the legislatures, and the electorate have always been far more supportive of efforts to protect the vulnerable than they have of efforts to expand governmental authority over the able-bodied and the independent. But when those initial efforts have proven effective, they have often cleared the way for more sweeping programs that have followed in their wake.

There's a new NPR Survey out this morning that suggests this holds true for health care, as well. Let me quote Harvard Prof. Robert Blendon, a co-director of the survey:

There was extraordinary support in this poll among all groups — Democrats, Republicans and independents — for the idea of requiring that every child has a
health insurance policy and then provid[ing] help to parents that can't afford
it. And we don't have as wide a consensus for what to do about adults. So it's
the childrens' side of this which offers the possibility of a very quick breakthrough in the next Congress.

That's an important message. Obama has intuited where the American people stand on this issue, for better or for worse. His proposal is consonant with the long history of reform efforts in this nation, which extend help first to the most vulnerable. When the efficacy of those efforts is clear, the rest of the population has often come to support extending the protections. We've already seen this with S-CHIP, which succeeded where HillaryCare failed. It remains immensely popular, and has inexorably expanded in many states to cover increasingly broad segments of the population.

Obama's approach may not please economists, but in some sense, that's immaterial. He can unite the American people in support of his vision, and it's likely to lead to something approaching universal coverage in fairly short order. That ought to cheer critics of the proposal, and even dejected Clinton supports, concerned that her defeat will hamstring efforts at health care reform. If history is any guide, Obama's approach will prove far more politically feasible, and lead us to the same ultimate destination.

Parsing McCain

2008-02-22T00:13:00.000-05:00

I'll admit it (even at the price of being flamed in the comments section). When I tuned in to his press conference this morning, I wanted McCain to put this story to rest. Over the past decade, we've had enough scandal, enough personal misconduct, enough betrayal of the public interest to last a lifetime. Though I had my doubts about the sourcing of the story, its broad contours seemed to ring true. And that saddened me. John McCain has done heroic and noble things in his life, and has been a rare advocate for cleaner government on the other side of the aisle. Whatever my substantive disagreements with the man, and they are legion, it seems a shame to see his career founder on this sort of a scandal. I would far rather have the Democratic nominee prevail, as I believe he will, on the basis of the popular support for his policies than popular opprobrium for his rival. For all his flaws, McCain's not Rudy or Romney - I just can't summon the same schadenfreude.

But it didn't take very long for McCain to dig himself a deeper hole. His strategy appeared to be to deny, deny, and deny. In fact, he denied everything. Whatever the premise of his questioner, McCain appeared determined to deny it. Let's go to the transcript:

Q: But you never tried to dissuade [The New York Times]from running the story in any fashion?
SENATOR MCCAIN: No. In fact, I never spoke directly to them.

Except, as McCain himself admitted later on, for his direct call to the Executive Editor. But even then, he said,

I was not trying to dissuade him from -- in any way from doing the story.

Only, if that's true, it's only in the narrowest possible sense. McCain's aides and advisors have spent the last several months trying to dissuade a variety of media outlets from running versions of this story, at his behest. He hired a high-priced lawyer to further those efforts. So why on earth would McCain deny trying to suppress a story he alleges to be scurrilous, when every reporter in the room knows that's exactly what he did? We'll get there.

Up next, the question of what he told the FCC about television station ownership back in 2000. I'll leave debunking this one to Paul Kiel. Another denial that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

McCain went on to deny, twice, that he had ever discussed with former aide John Weaver a meeting that Weaver had in 1999 with Vicki Iseman. Perhaps they never directly discussed it. But McCain crossed a line when he was asked if Weaver had told him he was talking to the Times, and he said "No." The problem is that Weaver spent the day telling any journalist who would listen that he had been in constant touch with the campaign ("including holidays — Christmas, Thanksgiving, Labor Day — not one day has gone by when I haven't talked to the campaign") and in periodic contact with Senator, and that he e-mailed the three senior staffers on the campaign his statement as he sent it to the Times. And McCain didn't know about it until he read the story? C'mon.

But the real problem with the press conference, and I suspect, the explanation for all the other denials, was his account of his relationship with Vicki Iseman. Let me say this. I suspect that if four reporters for The New York Times are convinced that McCain was engaging in an extra-marital affair, they're probably right. But at the very least, I assume that Iseman enjoyed an unusual degree of intimacy with the senator, something that drew the swirling rumors and innuendo. Perhaps, I thought, we're going to hear a (relatively) benign explanation for that. That the aging senator was flattered by the attentions of the pretty blonde woman. That it was more father-daughter than May-December. Who knows?

The whole point of the press conference, remember, was to definitively dispel the rumors. So when McCain got the question for which he'd been waiting, the one he'd called the press conference in order to field, the exchange went like this:

Q Senator, can you describe your relationship with Vicki Iseman?

SENATOR MCCAIN: Mm-hmm. I -- (we’re ?) friends, seen her on occasions, particularly at receptions and fundraisers and appearances before the committee. I have many friends in Washington who represent various interests and those who don’t. And I consider her a friend.

Q But do you feel like, in terms of your relationship with lobbyists in general, you were closer to her than with others?

SENATOR MCCAIN: No. No, I have many friends who represent various interests ranging, from the firemen to the police to senior citizens to various interests, particularly before my committee, and I had meetings with hundreds of them and various interests....

Whoah. A lobbyist, just like any other? Is he kidding? We're supposed to believe that Vicki Iseman is precisely like, say, Dan Mattoon? That McCain was no closer to her than to any other lobbyist; that they were just friends who bumped into each other around town from time to time?

But wait, there's more. Reporters circled back for a second bite at the apple:

Q Are you still in touch with Ms. Iseman in any way?

SENATOR MCCAIN: With who?

Q With Vicki Iseman. When was the last time you --

SENATOR MCCAIN: I have not, obviously, because I haven’t been in Washington. No, not in some time.

Really, it's too much. This thing's been hovering over his head for two months, threatening to derail his campaign, and he can't recall when he last saw the woman? And the reason he hasn't seen her is that he's been traveling too much, and hasn't spent enough time in DC?

The whole thing stinks to high heaven. As best I can piece this together, we saw McCain's famous temper this morning. His integrity, his honor - the things about which he cares most - were challenged, and by gum, he was going to defend them. No apologies. No (actual) explanations. Everything, everything the Times had written was wrong. Even the things that were right. Perhaps, especially the things that were actually right.

I don't know what happened between McCain and Iseman. It's entirely possible that no one, other than the two of them, actually does. But I do know that McCain's explanation doesn't wash. He can't put this one behind him simply by asserting that he's JOHN MCCAIN, a living embodiment of honor and integrity, and so we all have to trust him. Sooner or later, he's going to have to provide a more complete explanation of what happened between himself and Iseman, who was clearly more to him than just another lobbyist, just another friendly face at cocktail parties and rubber-chicked dinners. Until he gives that explanation - and, if necessary, an apology - this is going to dog him. All his press conference did today was confirm for all who cared to listen that the man is not telling the truth. And for a senator who runs on integrity, I can't think of anything more damaging.

Part Two: The Three Commandments

2008-02-20T14:51:00.000-05:00

This is the second half of a two-part post. In the first post, I took stock of the race. This post is my humble attempt to read the tea leaves, and discern where we're headed.

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There's an old truism about presidential candidates: they never give up, they just run out of money. By that measure, we're a long way from the finish line. The Obama campaign has said it's presently pulling in more than $1 million each day, and just revised its January haul up to $36 million. (My own guess is that they'll handily top that amount in February, but that David Plouffe has belatedly realized it's not wise to goad Hillary's supporters into donating ever more to her campaign by trumpeting his daily totals.) The Clinton folks were proud to announce that in the fifteen days since Super Tuesday, they've pulled in $15 million. So both campaigns will be amply funded through March 4, and likely well beyond.

That said, I'll stand by my earlier prognostication. In making the case for her continued viability, Hillary wrote off the contests in February, and placed her chips on the March 4 contests. There's a general consensus in the party that she ought to have a fair crack at those elections, a final chance to prove that she can turn the race around. When the results from the four March 4 states are tallied and the delegate hauls projected, it won't take CNN's nifty touch-screen or any complicated math to explain to voters where the race stands. Shortly thereafter, we'll see the superdelegates begin to close ranks around Obama, in an effort to build consensus and shift the focus to the general election.

So the question that concerns me this morning is this: What sort of a campaign will unfold over the next two weeks, as Hillary prepares to make her final stand? We already have some inkling that the answer will be, "Increasingly ugly."

There are, if you will, three commandments that ought to be equally binding on both candidates as the race enters its final phase.

Thou Shalt Not Slander:

It's already apparent that this race is taking a dive into increasingly negative territory. Clinton's advisers couldn't wait to tell reporters that she'll adopt "a tougher line" in an effort to redefine her rival. Obama, meanwhile, intends to harp on Clinton's support for free trade. That's fine, even healthy. I happen to believe that this vigorous contest for the nomination has proven, well, invigorating for the Democratic Party. Voters are listening to the candidates debate the issues, donating and volunteering in record-shattering numbers, and turning out to vote at rates rarely seen. The more the candidates engage with each other, the more their supporters engage with the process.

But that's only true to the extent that the contrasts being drawn are truthful. When a candidate stoops to distorting a rival's record, it harms the attacker's credibility, the victim's approval ratings, and the party's chances in November. We've seen some of this already. Obama is way out of line when his mailers claim that Hillary thought NAFTA had provided a "boon," placing quotes around the word. The Clintons were wrong to suggest that Obama was a Reagan fan, much less that he supported his policies. And we're going to see more of it, simply because these attacks tend to work. No correction ever erases the damage done by the initial claim. This primary race ought to be won on the merits. Both candidates have the chance to draw fair, meaningful contrasts based solely on the public record. Let's hope they do.

Thou Shalt Not Challenge the Legitimacy of the Process:

When the party chooses its nominee, it is vital that all Americans believe that the process used to select the candidate was fair and transparent. As I've noted, there are abundant flaws with the process. The important thing, for this cycle, is that we recognize that it's the only process that we've got. It's well worth revising for future cycles, but challenging the rules half-way through the game is corrosive.

The Obama campaign isn't blameless here. Various campaign advisers have suggested that the superdelegates ought to follow the expressed will of voters in their districts, their states, or the nation. There's a fine line between making a case to superdelegates that they ought to vote for Obama, and suggesting that a failure to vote for the man constitutes a perversion of the process, and the campaign has occasionally strayed across it.

That said, there's simply no question that the prime offender here is the Clinton campaign. The candidate herself has challenged the legitimacy of the caucus results. Of the scheduling rules and related penalties approved by the DNC. Of Obama's victories in states with large black populations, or in those which routinely vote for Republicans. Her surrogates and supporters are now suggesting that we might attempt to discern the will of only those voters who self-identify as Democrats. This is pernicious, it's destructive, and it's wrong. It also happens to be petty, and I suspect that, far from sustaining the rational for her candidacy, it has undermined her credibility with large segments of the electorate.

We started this primary process with a badly-flawed set of rules, but that's how it is. Both candidates need to refrain from challenging the rules; the most these attacks can accomplish is tainting the victory of the eventual nominee.

Thou Shalt Not Use Race or Gender as a Wedge:

Black voters (who overwhelmingly support Democrats) and women (who trend more modestly Democratic, but compose more than half of all voters) are the twin pillars on which the party is built. Alienate either constituency, and the prospects for a win in November grow decidedly gloomy.

In an ideal world, both candidates would make their appeal to the voters by transcending identity politics. But we don't live in that world. Obama's dominance among black voters is a political phenomenon, virtually without precedent, and it presents a terrible temptation to the Clinton campaign. Without hope or prospect of making inroads among African Americans, there's very little to restrain the Clintons from exploiting the racial divide that afflicts our nation, other than their own moral judgment. The dynamics, as it happens, work differently with gender. Obama needs to tread very carefully around the issue, as he woos women to the polls, but he enjoys a healthy lead among male voters that has propelled him to many of his victories. Here, it's more of a positive commandment than a negative injunction - Obama must do more than he already has to reach out to women voters, particularly those left feeling embittered by Hillary's loss, and convince them that he can be as effective an advocate for the issues they care about as she has been.

I suspect that, after South Carolina, the Clinton campaign resolved not to raise the issue of race explicitly. But there's no question that it's still being deployed with regularity on the ground level, particularly in states with substantial Hispanic populations. The key example is Texas, where the Clinton campaign has been decrying the primary system as stacked against Hispanic voters in favor of large, urban districts - a construction of the issue that suggests black and brown voters are in a zero-sum game, and that Hispanics are losing their fair share of the delegates to African Americans. That's a particularly shameful argument to make, in that it violates both the second and third of our commandments.

Without temptation, commandments would be unnecessary. But both candidates need to resist temptation: Obama, the temptation to take women for granted, and Clinton, the temptation to write off black voters and (however subtly) exploit racial divisions. Let's hope they're equal to the challenge.

Arbiters of the Rules:

We needn't rely on goodwill or luck to enforce these three commandments. Both candidates, for the moment, are beholden to the Democratic establishment for support. Without superdelegates, neither can realistically win the nomination. We've already seen efforts among the uncommitted superdelegates to agree upon a common metric for determining the winner. I'd like to see those efforts expanded to include some clear ground rules about how the contest ought to be waged.

And then there's the invisible man - DNC Chair Howard Dean. The candidates are supposed to be focused on winning the nomination; Dean is supposed to have the interests of the party at heart. He should be taking forceful action to ensure that the candidates behave, and that their campaigns are making the party stronger, and not tearing it apart. There's a chance here to keep this primary relatively clean, and to make it the most remarkable and effective organizing tool we've ever seen. Let's not blow it.

If you've enjoyed this, please share it with other readers by clicking the 'recommend this' link. You can find more analysis, including the first part of this post, on my blog. As always, I welcome comments and corrections. And thanks to all who have responded.

2008-02-20T12:50:00.000-05:00

This is a two-part post. In the first half, I'll try to give a decent overview of how the contest stands this morning. In the second, I'll offer my thoughts on what's likely to happen over the next few weeks.
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A week ago, I offered a conservative estimate that by this morning, Obama's pledged-delegate lead would stand at 152. Last night, he turned in impressive victories in Hawaii (projected at 14-6) and Wisconsin (projected at 43-31). Add those preliminary results to the 138-delegate lead his campaign presently claims, and the gap swells to 158 pledged delegates.

There are 981 pledged delegates remaining (plus seven votes from Democrats Abroad that will be announced "shortly.") To overtake Obama, Hillary now needs to win 570 of them, or 58%. Let me be blunt: that won't happen. To take 58% of the delegates against a candidate who dominates heavily-black districts, Hillary would need to take better than 60% of the remaining votes. She'd need to clean up in the caucuses in Wyoming, Guam, and Puerto Rico. She'd have to win big in states with large black populations like Mississippi and North Carolina, and in rural states like Montana and North Dakota. And every time she fails to win 58% of the delegates, the bar gets moved a notch higher.

So I'll repeat my conclusion from a week ago - for all intents and purposes, the race for pledged delegates is over. Done. Finished. At this point, it's not even realistic for Hillary to believe she can tighten the margin to the point where its significance is questionable. So where does that leave her on this Wednesday morning?

Well, she still holds a lead among the superdelegates. For the first six weeks of the year, Hillary and Obama gained endorsements at a roughly equal rate. After routing Hillary in the Potomac Primary, Obama managed to cut Hillary's lead from about 100 down to about 80, where it's stood for the past week. Despite all the gloomy predictions, Hillary's support among the superdelegates remains impressively strong. Relatively few have rescinded their endorsements, and she's still gaining new backers at a decent clip. The problem she faces is that more than a few of her backers have made it clear that although they may be prepared to tip a genuinely split convention in her direction, they don't intend to overturn a clear majority of pledged delegates. So even holding on to that lead, and building it back up to the point where it could tip the convention in her favor, seems unlikely to be enough unless she can make the case for a split result.

That brings us to the popular vote. Obama tacked on 194,000 votes to his margin there last night, putting his total lead a hair over 900,000. Even counting Michigan and Florida, Hillary trails by almost 300,000 votes. It's possible that she could erase that smaller margin in two weeks, but any lead is likely to be fleeting, given the remaining contests. In fact, it seems most probable at this juncture that Obama will ultimately lead in the popular vote no matter how one cares to tally it - with or without caucus states, with or without Florida and Michigan.

There's a new and pernicious argument floating around the blogosphere, to the effect that Obama has been winning the popular vote on the strength of his support from independent and Republican voters, and that the appropriate method of measuring victory is to count only the votes of Democrats. On its surface, that's not an entirely unreasonable claim - the Call to Convention itself makes clear that the Democratic Party would prefer if only those who choose to register with the party were able to cast ballots. But there are three problems with this argument. First, it's yet another effort to change the rules in the middle of the contest. Various state laws mandate access to the polls for those not registered as Democrats, and the candidates have campaigned accordingly. This would have been a different race if the rules stated, at the outset, that only registered Democrats counted. But more importantly, these zealots rely upon exit polls to assemble their tally, which leads to two related problems. Exit polls ask about partisan identification, not registration - a significant percentage of respondents will offer an answer that reflects their present commitments, and not the formal record of their registration. So you'll find registered independents who tell the pollsters they're Democrats, and (far more commonly) registered Democrats who tell the pollsters they're independents. To illustrate: Hillary's home state of New York held a closed primary, meaning that only voters formally registered as Democrats participated. But only 87% of those registered Democrats self-identified as Democrats when approached by the exit pollsters. Even more disturbingly, we're talking about polls here, not formal tallies. They include margins of error, like all surveys - and in this case, the size of those margins renders any putative lead insignificant. Not to mention that their samples may not be representative, nor their models accurate. That's why we go to the trouble and expense of holding elections, instead of just asking Gallup or Edison to tell us who's going to win.

Hillary is now trying to make a case using a hybrid of these various arguments. She has a new site up this morning, that argues that the proper measure of this race is how close a candidate is to reaching 2,208 delegates. That's counting Michigan and Florida, and adding pledged delegates to superdelegates. The site overstates its case - for fun, let's choose a few examples. There are not "over 1000 delegates at stake" in the remaining contests - either superdelegates are free to ignore the results of the elections in their own states, or they're not "at stake" in the remaining elections, and fewer than a thousand delegates remain. You can't have it both ways. When the site claims that "neither candidate can secure the nomination without automatic delegates," it's engaging in the same (reasonable) projections that it slams the Obama camp for making; technically, an Obama sweep could still deliver the nomination outright. The claim that Hillary wasn't expected to win the states where she prevailed (Her victory in Oklahoma was "not expected"? In the only state where Obama didn't advertise because he rated his chances too low?) is risible. And though the site claims boldly that "there is a clear path to an overall delegate majority," it doesn't bother to detail it. That's because the clear path involves Obama winning a decent majority of pledged delegates, and Hillary relying on a lopsided vote among the superdelegates. For all its bluster, the Clinton campaign would rather not trumpet that fact. But the basic claims made by the site are these:
1) There are two kinds of contests: "primaries where millions vote" and "caucuses where thousands vote."
2) Florida and Michigan deserve to be counted.
3) Superdelegates have every right to provide the critical margin at the convention.

We'll see whether any of those arguments gain significant traction. Certainly, they'll be discussed and debated - this race has propelled propelled cable news ratings into the stratosphere, and like play-by-play announcers late in the fourth quarter, the anchors and the pundits will start pulling out obscure precedents, dusting off improbable comebacks, and constructing unlikely scenarios to keep their viewers engaged. The problem is that, at the end of the day, the only audience that really matters at this point in the race is the superdelegates. And to date, every shred of public evidence suggests a profound reluctance even among many of Hillary's current supporters to be seen as overturning the popular will - and that's not counting the hundreds who remain on the sidelines.

Where does that leave the race? More in the second half of this post.

If you've enjoyed this, please share it with other readers by clicking the 'recommend this' link. You can find more analysis on my blog. As always, I welcome comments and corrections. And thanks to all who have responded.

TPM Muckrakers Win Polk Award!

2008-02-19T10:48:00.000-05:00

I want to congratulate Josh Marshall on his receipt of the George Polk Award for Legal Reporting. The Polk Awards are among journalism's most prestigious prizes, and have a well-deserved reputation for honoring good reporting, wherever it may be found.

From the citation:

His site, www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led the news media coverage of the
politically motivated dismissals of United States attorneys across the country.
Noting a similarity between firings in Arkansas and California, Marshall (with
staff reporter-bloggers Paul Kiel and Justin Rood) connected the dots and found
a pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the
Bush Administration's bidding.

Congratulations to the entire TPM Muckraker crew.

Convention Math: What Adds Up to Legitimacy?

2008-02-17T18:07:00.000-05:00

"It would be a problem for the party if the verdict would be something different than the public has decided," Speaker Nancy Pelosi piously intoned last week. Well, sure, Madame Speaker - but which public? And how shall we know what it has decided?

There are three paradoxes that lie at the crux of the nominating process, and which together have produced most of the quirks that have resulted in so much hand-wringing (and more than a few others that have thus far passed unnoticed). The first of these is that it is a partisan process - by its very definition, restricted to a subset of the whole - that aspires to democratic legitimacy. The second is that it aims to produce a single national result, but by means of separate processes in individual states. And the third is our nation's republican creed of representative democracy, which grants primacy to the public interest yet relies upon an elite few to discern it.

Let's consider how these three paradoxes come to bear on the arguments being advanced by the two campaigns in their quest to convince delegates that they, and they alone, have achieved a mandate for the nomination.

The Popular Vote:

The argument here is simple and intuitive. In most elections, the candidate who garners the greatest number of votes, wins. That seems eminently fair. Democrats groused about the legitimacy of President Bush's mandate in 2000, when he failed to carry the popular vote, further embedding the argument in the Democratic pysche. So why not simply tally up all the votes, and then pressue the delegates to follow the people's clearly expressed will?

The Problems

Actually, it's not that simple. Consider the first of our paradoxes, the partisan nature of the process. Are we interested in the will of all voters who will be eligible to cast ballots in November? Clearly not. The nominating process is a partisan affair, and so, contra Speaker Pelosi, "the public" is not making this decision. Advocates of the popular vote are actually championing a curious beast called "the Democratic primary electorate," which is neither fish nor fowl. Consider this: the primary system enfranchises quite a few voters who will not be eligible to vote in November, including voters in American territories and commonwealths such as American Samoa and Puerto Rico. It allows Democrats living abroad to choose between voting with Democrats Abroad and voting via absentee ballot in their state elections. But at the same time, a huge portion of the overall electorate is excluded. Voters can only cast ballots if they are registered as Democrats. Or if they switch their registration to become Democrats. Or if they are unaffiliated, but not if they are enrolled in another party. Or as long as they don't vote in the other party's elections. It's a mess.

That brings us to the second paradox, federalism. The rules, it turns out, vary state by state. We are left to tally incommensurate sums. The total number of Democratic votes in one state, the total number of all votes in the other. Even states that share formal rules may introduce other variables. Are they voting on the same day? Is there a Republican primary that day, or nothing else to siphon off independents? Is the contest held in January or May, and have voters' preferences changed in the interim? And that's before we broach the subject of caucuses. Several states produced no reliable count of the popular vote. Are they to be disenfranchised? The rules of the caucuses themselves vary widely, some resembling elections and others town meetings, but they're generally more restrictive than those used in primary elections. So, conversely, would counting the individual votes cast at caucuses serve to corrupt the tally of the popular vote?

The popular vote turns out to be a chimera, a strange creature composed of diverse tallies from disparate processes, and missing several vital parts. So where does that leave us?

The Pledged Delegates:

If the popular vote had the advantage of intuitive legitimacy, the pledged delegate tally has the virtue of internal consistency. The voters award the delegates, and the delegates award the nomination. It seems simple enough, for all that no one seems to understand the messy mechanics. If delegates are the currency of the convention, then the pledged delegates, the ones we the public elected (er, sort of) ought to make the decision. Right?

The Problems:

I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn it's not that straightforward (and, of course, since pledged delegates are selected through the processes detailed above, we start with many of the same flaws). Let's begin this time with the third paradox, representative democracy. It's so familiar that it may be difficult to step back, and see what a strange process it really is. Since the Warren Court, Americans have understood our Constitution to include a guarantee of "One man, one vote." In a series of decisions beginning in 1964 and ending in 1989, the Supreme Court declared that at every level of government (save the United States Senate) electoral districts, as nearly as practicable, must be drawn to be roughly equal in population, so that every vote is worth about as much as any other. The primaries, as extra-constitutional processes, are entirely exempt from this requirement. As a practical matter, that means that some votes are worth more than others. Much more. State parties are given the choice of four formulas for allocating a block of their pledged delegates among their congressional districts. Only two of the four give any weight at all to population, but all four place great weight on the number of votes cast for Democratic candidates in recent elections. So in Illinois,, for example, voters in some districts elect as many as 8 pledged delegates, and voters in others as few as 4. And, as if the Democratic Party can't quite decide which way is fairest, we apportion the pledged delegates based on the results as calculated at two separate levels. A good chunk of them are split among the candidates based on statewide tallies, the bulk based on the district vote. There are good arguments in favor of either approach, but I have yet to hear a compelling defense of splitting the difference.

That much has been widely reported. Less appreciated is the result of our second paradox, federalism. Not only, it turns out, are the pledged delegates not apportioned among the districts by population, neither are they apportioned by population among the states. This gets complicated; read the Call to Convention if you care about the gory details. Suffice it to say, it's a weird amalgam of each state's electoral vote, the number of votes for the Democrats in the last three presidential elections, and how late in the calendar year the contest is held. That's right - move your state's primary after May 1, and you could score 30% more base delegates. It's a fantastic system. So the next time you hear someone proclaim that the votes of all the states matter equally, snicker. The truth is, the Democratic Call to Convention resembles nothing so much as our tax code - an accretion of complicated provisions designed to achieve a diverse range of policy objectives, that surpasseth all understanding.

And that brings us to the paradox of partisanship. In this case, it's a reminder that even the Democratic Party is itself a hodgepodge of different groups, each with its own agenda. Once again, we find the familiar tension between the particular and the general. So far, we've only discussed how the pledged delegates are allocated among the various presidential contenders. But there's another stage to this process: the choice of the delegates themselves. And given that, in most cases, there's nothing to bind them to follow their pledge once they arrive on the convention floor, it's a non-trivial matter. A good chunk of the pledged delegate slots are reserved for elected officials and party leaders. Others are drawn from various minority groups: Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, American Indians. If insufficient numbers of those four groups are elected as pledged delegates by voters, the state parties are required to override the will of the electorate, and hand them statewide slots on a quota basis. (Outreach is also required to the LGBT community and to the disabled, although they don't qualify for quotas). Perhaps most significantly, delegations are scrupulously divided between men and women, right down to the district level. And who chooses them? There are almost as many answers as there are delegations. In some states, like New York, ordinary voters choose some of them in primaries; in Wisconsin, a primary state, they're mostly selected at caucuses; and almost everywhere, state conventions play a role. This system may serve the interests of the party - it may even serve the interests of social justice - yet it bears but a tangential relationship to democracy, as we generally understand the term. So much, then, for pledged delegates as a transparent reflection of the public will.

The Superdelegates:

Automatic delegates to Howard Wolfson, unpledged delegates in the quaint argot of the DNC, superdelegates to the rest of us - these men and women have attained an almost mythic status in the past few weeks. But don't villify them. Howard Dean hastens to remind us that all of them have been elected by some group of voters (or by some group that was elected by a group of voters, or...nevermind.) At any rate, this marvelous group of men and women will "exercise their best judgment in the interests of the nation and of the Democratic Party." Problem solved, right?

The Problems:

By now, you probably don't even need me to point out the first issue; the DNC chair has nicely encapsulated it for us. Are these folks pursuing the interests of the nation or of the Democratic Party? Ladies and gentleman, the paradox of partisanship.

Federalism, too, plays a role. The DNC includes the chair and vice-chair of every state party, so the eighth of the superdelegate slots tied most directly to the state parties is about as representative as the United States Senate. (Which reminds me, Senators are themselves superdelegates.) Then, the DNC awards a bonus equal to 1/4 the number of superdelegates in a state, a formula that rewards the states with the least and the most superdelegates, at the expense of those in the middle.

But it's the third paradox, that of representative democracy, which the superdelegates most embody. The problem is very simple: precisely whose interests do these delegates represent? DNC members hold their seats because they give the party lots of money. Or because they represent the interests of a subset of party leaders or members. Or because they were elected in state primaries or caucuses or conventions. Or because they're policy gurus or political operatives. The list goes on. The elected officials, when you stop to think about it, aren't in a much clearer position. As a Congressman, James Clyburn represents the people of his district - not just those who can vote, and not just those who voted for him. But we're talking about his position as a superdelegate, which he holds by virtue of his elective office, which isn't quite the same thing as an extension of it. He's made it clear he doesn't feel bound by the decision of voters in his district.

No one embodies the trouble with wearing multiple hats better than Harold Ickes. In 1980, he negotiated the removal of superdelegates from the nominating process on behalf of Jesse Jackson, decrying them as unfair, and enshrined proportional representation as the sole method of selecting delegates. Last year, as a member of the DNC, he voted to approve the rules for this year's process. And he voted to strip Florida and Michigan of every last one of their delegates, because "those were the rules, and we thought we had an obligation to enforce them." But Ickes is also one of Hillary Clinton's senior advisers, and has spent the week on the phone with the media, arguing for the legitimacy of superdelegates and the need to seat MI and FL. So when the convention rolls around, will Ickes vote as a DNC member, casting his superdelegate vote against the seating of the delegations? Or as a Clinton adviser, voting to advance her interests?

There are even competing accounts of what including superdelegates was intended to accomplish. Depending on which version of the story you believe, their inclusion in the process was intended to keep party leaders engaged in the campaign and its outcome; to ensure that the DNC would vote for a new convention plan by throwing them the sop of automatic seats; to dilute the influence of activists and younger voters and heighten the sway of institutional leaders; or some combination of these. But does it matter? Like the Electoral College, they are an institution we are happiest honoring for irrelevance.

Summing Up:

I don't have any clear answers. Really, I wish I did. It'd be nice to come to a neat (if facile) conclusion, endorsing the popular vote, pledged delegates, or superdelegates as the ultimate and proper measure of the legitimacy of a candidate's claims. But there's been a lot of overheated rhetoric of late, a lot of false piety and righteous wrath, a lot of self-serving hypocrisy. I hope that, if you've made it through this excessively long screed, you'll take away a sense of complexity and irony, and greet such claims with the skepticism they deserve.

At the end of the day, only two outcomes are possible. Either the party (and the convention) will coalesce around a single candidate, or it will divide bitterly on the issue before conferring a narrow victory. No matter the weakness of the underlying logic, the former outcome will seem legitimate. No matter the persuasiveness of the claim, the latter will not. There is no single, fair measure of victory in the Democratic contest other than the one that matters - near-universal assent. It's tautological, of course, but there it is. That, I think, ought to give both campaigns pause, and remind the delegates to the convention that their ultimate purpose must be to forge a party united behind its nominee.

If you've enjoyed this, please share it with other readers by clicking the 'recommend this' link. You can find more analysis on my blog. As always, I welcome comments and corrections. Thanks to all who have contributed to the remarkably civil conversations that have ensued - and to Josh Marshall, for his commitment to continuously pushing the envelope of the possible on this site.

Michelle, Barack, and the Audacity of Struggle: Unsolicited Advice for the Obama Campaign

2008-02-14T22:12:00.000-05:00

There's been much bloviating in the blogosphere concerning a profile of Michelle Obama that ran in this morning's New York Times. The fuss has centered on the tone of the piece, perhaps best encapsulated in this passage:

Outspoken, strong-willed, funny, gutsy and sometimes sarcastic, Michelle Obama
is playing a pivotal role in her husband’s campaign...

I'll confess that I was unimpressed by the critics. This is a genre piece. The Times is in the habit of running treacley profiles of public figures new to the national stage, and they regularly verge on the hagiographic. That tendency is, in this piece, perhaps exaggerated by the fact that there's not much controversy in Michelle's public life, no two sides ready to offer contrasting opinions. That, alas, will resolve itself as the campaign progresses. So I read the piece, shrugged, and went on with my life.

Then, this afternoon, I received an e-mail from a friend who had read the piece. Let me quote it at some length:

[A middle-aged woman in New York who shall remain anonymous] claims that she voted for Obama because, a few days before the primary she was flipping through the channels looking for campaign coverage and happened on Michelle Obama speaking. What got her was that Mrs. Obama was talking about the difficulty of paying back student loans, rearing children when you have to have a full-time job, and her worry that her children will never be able to afford to buy a house in this market. These are the things [our unnamed woman] worries about all the time, and it occurred to her that these two are the only ones in the race who have had to deal with the real pressures of being middle-class in America.

Now my first reaction was a derisive snort. Only in Manhattan can you listen to a woman who holds a $212,000 job as a hospital executive talk about her life, and find in her a fellow, struggling member of the middle class. But then it struck me that she was absolutely right. Alone among the major candidates, the Obamas remember what it is to struggle financially. Their security is a recent thing, an artifact of Barack's sudden celebrity (and specifically, his book sales). They remember vividly what it's like when your costs exceed your income; when loan payments are due each month; when you lie awake at night, worried that your children may not share the same blessings you've enjoyed. That's the world the rest of us live in, too.

So I went back to the article, and decided that I'd identified the wrong quote as the nut graf:

Mrs. Obama’s nickname inside the campaign is “the closer” because she is skilled
at persuading undecided voters to sign pledge cards. But as a smooth orator, she
is also known as a connector, volunteering her own life lessons from
working-class roots and discussing her confrontation with a culture of low
expectations. She has been transparent about more mundane things, too, like
leaning on her mother for child care while she is on the road.

My first time through the piece, I read that with skepticism. Michelle Obama is the campaign's Closer? I thought. Isn't it Barack who's won the nation to his side through powerful oratory? Just what is it she's supposed to have figured out that he hasn't?

My second time through, I noticed the answer. What are presented here as two contrasting facets of Michelle's personality - her ability to sway undecided voters, and her willingness to connect with audiences by sharing her personal struggles - are, in fact, cause and effect.

Compare that with her husband's rhetoric. Barack's narrative is, if anything, more compelling than Michelle's; indeed, it's been the foundation of his candidacy. Yet when Barack talks about his personal history, he presents it as a direct instantiation of the American Dream. Every obstacle he's faced is transformed into another example of the possibilities of this great land, that one so disadvantaged could have come so far. This is moving. Indeed, it is inspirational. Uplifting. But somehow, to working Americans, it has remained largely unconvincing.

Even when he discusses the problems of America, he frames them in terms of moral uplift, and illustrates them with other people's lives. Barack talks about "families struggling paycheck to paycheck despite working as hard as they can," the need to "make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life," and his concern "that so many are in debt." Michelle talks about trying to care for her family when she needs to work, worrying that her daughters won't enjoy the same opportunities she has had, and taking years to pay off her student loans. And the campaign calls her The Closer.

There's something fundamental at play here. When working Americans say that Obama is long on promises and short on specifics, they don't mean that he hasn't posted enough essay-length policy proposals on his website. Let's face it: only TPM Cafe readers peruse those things, anyway. What they're saying is some version of: I find your speeches inspirational. I want to believe in the America that you describe, a land of opportunity in which all things are possible. But that vision keeps colliding with the hard realities of my own life. With the bills I can't pay, with the debt that keeps mounting, with the opportunities being foreclosed for my children. So prove to me that you understand that not all American Dreams come true, that you're familiar with the specific obstacles I face, and then maybe I'll trust you to try to make things better.

Michelle has found a way to answer that need, by inflecting her husband's uplifting vision with a hard-bitten sense of reality. The campaign needs to take advantage of her ability to connect with working Americans, particularly with women. It could start by airing a 30-second spot, in which she describes her struggles and concerns, and why she trusts her husband to make things better. It might also go beyond the boilerplate biography offered on the campaign website, and post clips of Michelle on the stump, transcripts of her speeches, and perhaps even blog entries. If they really believe she can convince undecided voters, and the evidence is suggestive, then they've got to do more to ensure that undecided voters hear her voice.

But perhaps more importantly, Michelle offers an answer to the riddle that has puzzled the campaign over the past month - how to break through to the working-class voters who have been most skeptical of its message. It's not enough for Barack to sound more wonkish on the stump, to lard his speeches with specific proposals. He must show voters, in the immortal words of another candidate, that he feels their pain. Barack must demonstrate that he understands that opportunities are always counterpoised with dangers and that the difference between success and failure is sometimes marked not by effort but by happenstance. He must do more than acknowledge this academically. He must speak movingly of his own struggles, not as parables of possibility, but as vivid illustrations of just how hard it is out there. That he, too, worries about his daughters' future. That he's struggled with paying his debts and his bills. That he wants to make this country better because he knows, firsthand, how flawed it can be. The peculiar genius of America is not that we always succeed, it is that in the face of failure we continue to aspire to better things.

Michelle, it seems, is capable of framing her argument in such personal terms, in a manner that inspires the trust and empathy of her audience. Hillary's struggles have been legion (although they are not economic), and she has been strongest as a candidate when she has dared to disclose her own vulnerability. If Barack learns to do the same, if he becomes capable of linking his empathy for those who are struggling to his own trials and travails, then perhaps he, too, can earn the sobriquet of "Closer."

If you've enjoyed this, please share it with other readers by clicking the 'recommend this' link. You can find more analysis on my blog. As always, I welcome comments and corrections. And thanks to all who have contributed to the remarkably civil (and occasionally humorous) conversations that have ensued.

Polling Analysis: Looking Ahead to Wisconsin and Ohio

2008-02-14T14:16:00.000-05:00

One of the most frequently replayed arguments at TPM Cafe goes something like this:

ObamaLover27: Wow! New polls show a huge Obama lead!
Clinton4Ever: You can't
trust polls. They've been wrong before. Particularly polls from that
firm/state/day of the week.

I have to confess that these exchanges drive me nuts. Devoid of context, the topline polling figures (Obama X%, Clinton Y%) don't mean very much at all. The most useful feature of polling, particularly with substantial time still to elapse before an election, is the demographic trends and breakdowns. Pollsters, after all, are using a series of assumptions about the composition of the electorate in order to produce the horse-race numbers. Detailing those assumptions, and then discussing whether or not they're plausible, is a far better way to assess the validity or predictive utility of a given poll than: I dislike the result, therefore I dislike the poll.

So, as part of my continuing effort to explore the polling of Election 2008, I've decided to devote today's post to a detailed discussion of a recent spate of polls from a pair of key battleground states.

Wisconsin:

First, let's pay a visit to America's Dairyland. There have been three polls from Wisconsin during the month of February, and they don't quite add up. Let's take them apart, one at a time.

The first, from ARG, was taken on the two nights following Super Tuesday, and found Clinton leading 50-41%. I wish I knew what to make of that, but alas, ARG releases only the two questions it asks and the sample size, and not the composition of the sample or how it was selected, let alone its non-existent crosstabs. It's a datapoint, to be sure, but it's a week old, and from about the least reliable polling operation in America. So let's set it aside for the moment.

The headline of the second poll, from the Democratic firm PPP, trumpets the reverse result: Obama up, 50-39%. But not so fast. The write-up of the poll continues:

“Our poll shows that if there was standard turnout for the primary, Obama would
lead Clinton 46-42...But since we believe record numbers of young voters and
African Americans will turn out to support him, the weighted result gives Obama
a greater 50-39 advantage.”

Excuse me? In layman's terms, they're saying: "We polled people, and found Obama ahead 46-42. But since Obama did better than certain polls predicted in some other states, we tinkered with the results to inflate his margin." Fortunately, PPP gives us crosstabs, and some back-of-the-envelope math allows us to roughly quantify what they're saying. Their adjusted sample presumes that 12% of primary voters will be black. For context, in the 2004 primary, black voters were 6% of the Democratic electorate, roughly their proportion of the total population (and just 3% in 1992). To double their share of the primary electorate in a year when overall turnout may itself double, black voters would have to turn out at four times the rate of 2004. That, despite the fact that as a reliable segment of the Democratic base, their share of the vote has actually decreased in some states this year as less-reliable voters flood the polls. Am I the only one who sees a problem here? I suspect the youth voter numbers are similarly nuts, but can't prove it, because PPP doesn't provide enough information to allow for the calculation.

Fortunately for Obama-philes, there's yet another problem with the poll: it calculates that Republicans and independents will comprise just 23.5% of the voters. That may sound high, but in 2004, they accounted for fully 38% of the ballots cast. (In 1992, they were 47%, but let's not go there.) I'd hazzard a guess that this is what comes of gerrymandering your samples - artificially inflating the number of black and young voters may also inflate the percentage of Democratic voters, and thus depress independent and Republican turnout estimates. Adjusting partisan turnout to match 2004 gives Obama a 53-38% lead in the poll. So in conclusion, according to PPP, Obama is either locked in a tight race or poised for a blowout win. Great, huh?

Two more polls for you. One was taken by the Republican firm Strategic Vision from Feb 8-10, and it found Obama leading 45-41%. Alas, they tell us nothing about their sample, so we should assign that result roughly the same weight as the first two. The other was released this morning by Rasmussen Reports, and shows Obama leading 47-43%. Rasmussen is stingy with its demographic breakdowns - it charges a hefty premium to see them - so I don't know what to make of that result, either.

So is the Copper State a total cypher? Not quite. There is some value in the polling we've seen. The PPP survey suggests that Obama is running extremely strongly among independents and Republicans who are likely to vote in the Democratic primary, garnering 63% of the support from the members of each group. That's consistent with his extremely strong performance with crossover voters around the country. I suspect that Wisconsin may not be quite as close as these polls make out, but since they don't (or won't) tell me how they're projecting partisan turnout, I can't say for sure. It makes sense to wait for some more detailed polling before we assume that the cheeseheads are going to back Obama. For now, mark this one surprisingly close.

Ohio:

On to the Buckeye State. The Columbus Dispatch conducted a meticulous poll from Jan 23-31, which would be fascinating if it hadn't included John Edwards. Since it did, about all we can take away from the 42-19-18 Clinton-Obama-Edwards split is that this didn't start off as friendly territory for the midwestern senator.

That leaves us with three recent polls that show very similar results. The first, by SurveyUSA, was taken from Feb. 10-11, and found Clinton up 56-39%. The second was released today by the more-reliable Quinnipiac Polling Institute, and put Clinton's lead at a commanding 55-34%. The third, just out from Rasmussen Reports, puts Clinton ahead 51-37%. The polls share some common ground - two show Clinton leading almost 2-1 among white voters, and all three confirm that yet again, Obama is running best among men and voters under the age of 45, although in Ohio he's still losing both categories.

Let me throw out two reasons for caution concerning these early polling results. The first is my old hobby-horse, the Reverse Bradley/Wilder Effect. In a nutshell, it's the observation that Obama has invariably done better on election day among black voters than virtually any pre-election polls have predicted. In this case, the Q-Poll puts his margin at 64-17%, and SurveyUSA at 73-24% (Rasmussen didn't publicly announce its racial crosstabs). Those may sound like impressive percentages, but Obama has lately been taking roughly 9 out of 10 votes from the black community. In 2004, black voters were 14% of the Ohio Democratic primary electorate, so give the man a 3-point bump right there.

I'm also skeptical of some of the other projections. Consider that SurveyUSA finds the gender breakdown in Ohio likely to be 59-41; the Q-Poll doesn't give its breakdown, but we can infer from its numbers that a shocking two-thirds of its respondents were women. For a little context, that divide was just 52-48 in the 2004 Democratic primary. SurveyUSA projects the partisan breakdown between Democrats and Republicans/Independents will stand at 81-17 (compared to 72-28 in 2004). Now, these pollsters are in a bit of a bind. Earlier on, I ripped PPP for tinkering with its results to meet expectations; now I'm criticizing two other firms for releasing results that fail to gibe with expectations. But I'm not entirely inconsistent. I don't mind Qunnipiac and SurveyUSA telling us that they're projecting a huge surge among women voters, and an enormous decline in the percentage of independents. If that's what their polls show, maybe it will happen. I take issue with their trumpeting the top line results (Clinton ahead in Ohio!) without noting the extent to which they're an artifact of the demographic splits (Clinton ahead! Women to set turnout record! Independents vanish!) Let's recalculate those polls, assuming another 52-48 gender split: Q-Poll, 54-36%; SurveyUSA, 54-40%. Now, let's give Obama 3 points for his undercounted black vote, subtracting 1 from Clinton: Quinnipiac, 53-39%, SurveyUSA, 51-43%. Those numbers look about right to me. They give Clinton a robust, statistically-significant lead in Ohio, but not the twenty-point margin she's been hoping for. They're also roughly in line with Rasmussen, for whatever that's worth.
(A note of caution: here, and elsewhere, I've done some rough recalculation of polling figures for illustrative purposes. This is a useful tool for assessing the impact of the demographic composition of the sample, but it does not produce robust or predictive results. I don't have access to the raw data, and possess neither the training nor the experience necessary to re-weight samples, even if I did.)

Take Home Lessons:

So it looks like Wisconsin remains quite close, despite Obama's national momentum. The key for his campaign in that state will be drawing independents to the polls; if he can turn them out in percentages that rival prior primaries, he should win easily. For Clinton, the key to Wisconsin is white working-class voters, as it is pretty much everywhere else. Ohio is an interesting case. Here, Clinton needs to accomplish what she's failed to achieve almost anywhere else - she needs women voters to comprise an unusually high percentage of the electorate. Most states where that's happened, Clinton's been crushed; that's because it's generally been a straight function of exceptionally high black turnout, since black women vote at far higher rates than black men. In Ohio, Clinton needs to draw white women to the polls, and that will be challenging. Quinnipiac and SurveyUSA suggest she may be succeeding; the margin of her success will ride on that effort. If Obama wants to close the gap, he needs to turn out black voters, and continue to win virtually all of their votes. He also needs to make further inroads among white men; he hasn't done nearly as well with that constituency in Ohio as he has in recent states that he's won. That's an uphill struggle. If there's going to be an upset on March 4, these early polls suggest it won't be in Ohio.

If you've enjoyed this, please share it with other readers by clicking the 'recommend this' link. You can find more analysis on my blog. As always, I welcome comments and corrections. And thanks to all who have contributed to the remarkably civil and well-informed recent conversations - I've enjoyed the dialogue immensely, and learned a great deal.

Of Insurmountable Leads

2008-02-13T07:16:00.000-05:00

Josh asks:

[T]he gist of it was that both sides agree that it's highly unlikely that
Clinton can end up with more pledged delegates than Barack Obama. And the issue
now is how close she can keep the margin. If she can keep it within a couple
dozen delegates, he argued, it would be credible to try to make up the margin
with super delegates....Folks paying close attention are as likely to accurately
predict the outcomes as the folks in the campaign. So is this true? Is a pledged
delegate win for Clinton no longer a realistic possibility?

Now, sometimes I make mistakes. We all do. On Monday afternoon, I wrote:

The race for pledged delegates is effectively over, and Obama has won. Now,
they're only fighting over the margin of victory. They'll also squabble about
the legitimacy of caucuses. I give the national media until Wednesday before
these become the new story lines.

Looks like Fineman figured it out with 45 minutes left in Tuesday - I give him tons of credit.

The short answer is yes, Obama's lead in pledged delegates is now effectively insurmountable. One reason this very plain fact has been obscured is the way that networks have been counting pledged delegates - with a surfeit of caution, so that they won't have to retract their counts. Most years, that makes a lot of sense. This year, it's had the perverse effect of distorting the picture; we know within a few delegates what Obama's actual lead must be, but because we can't pin it down precisely in a bunch of states, the networks haven't been citing it. CBS, the best of the bunch, puts the current pledged delegate lead at 142, but that's a little high. (My best guess is that he'll emerge from tonight with a lead of around 44 more than he had, so his campaign will likely claim a lead of about 131).

Looking ahead at the remaining contests, we find that there are 1,075 pledged delegates yet to be awarded. To tie Obama, Hillary would have to win about 603 of them, or roughly 56%. But her task is actually a little steeper than that - current polls show her trailing in Hawaii, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. Let's award those states to Obama by a modest 55-45 margin, less than the polls predict. Now there are just 866 delegates up for grabs, Obama's lead is up to 152, and Hillary has to win 59% of the remaining delegates to tie him. But it's worse than it sounds. Even winning 60% of the popular vote the rest of the way won't do the trick, because of Obama's strength in majority-black districts. To win 59% of the delegates, she's got to take every state but the three named above (NC, HI, WI) by an average margin of better than 60-40. That includes contests like Texas, with its hybrid caucus-primary, and also states like Mississippi, Oregon, South Dakota and Wyoming. Can this happen? Not bloody likely. She'll be lucky, frankly, to win more than a few states outright - the remaining calendar is not terribly favorable.

In that way, I think Fineman is underestimating the challenge she faces. It would take a comeback of truly epic proportions, and monumental routs in Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania, among other states, just to pull Hillary within a few dozen delegates. She'd have to start winning by Obama-like margins. But is there any reason to believe Obama won't take most of Mississippi's 33? Or that, having won every single county in neighboring Washington, he won't win in Oregon? The pledged delegate lead isn't going away, and it's going to be substantial - at least 50, and that's if everything starts to break Hillary's way.

That brings us to legitimacy. There's another argument Hillary's been deploying, to sway superdelegates to her side - she likes to say that she's ahead in the popular vote. On the afternoon following Super Tuesday, Hillary's popular vote lead in those contests stood at some 58,000 votes. In the two primaries held before then, Obama's net margin was 146,000. In five contests held since then, he's accumulated 619,000 more votes than Clinton. (I'm excluding caucuses in ME, NV, and IA, which would only add to Obama's margin.) So, overall, Obama now leads by some 707,000 popular votes. Clinton had been boasting about her popular vote lead by counting the two primaries that no one else does: in Michigan, she racked up 328,000 votes; in Florida, 288,000 more than her rival. The remarkable thing is that, after tonight, even that count falls short of Obama's total, and it's a lead she's not likely to regain.

So what's left? Well, there's her fraigle lead among the superdelegates. But even some prominent Hillary endorsers have, over the past week, indicated that they won't vote against a clear-cut lead in pledged delegates.Elaine Kamarck is the most prominent of the bunch; she made headlines by opining that superdelegates are, essentially, cowards, and will follow the will of the people. So Hillary's much-vaunted lead among the supers turns out to be contingent on her maintaining a lead or a very tight race among the pledged delegates - without that, she starts losing even the superdelegates she already has.

Let me add to that my suspicion that we're going to see a steady drumbeat of superdelegate endorsements for Obama between now and the March 4 primaries. As I've written before, the Obama campaign likes to deploy its endorsements strategically. Most of those we've seen over the past week have been clustered in the states due up next on the calendar. The Obama campaign has claimed to have 170 endorsements lined up, but no one else can count that high - a sign that he's been stockpiling again. Rolling out the endorsements now will add to his aura of inevitability, and help drive the news cycle during the weeks without elections. Hillary's lead here currently stands at roughly 90, but as supers wake up to the new math, she's unlikely to be able to persuade too many fence-sitters to cast their lot with her. Plus, every time Obama wins a state by a huge margin, the supers residing in that state feel substantial pressure to endorse.

A final thought on those supers. There are only between 300-350 left to endorse a candidate, depending on whose count you're using (the other 76 are UADs). If Hillary trails by at least 50 pledged delegates, and probably by 12-20 UADs, she'll have to win the votes of 150-175 of the remaining supers. Does anyone think she can do that?

So is it all over? Not quite. Here are three ways Hillary could pull this out:
1) Seat Michigan and Florida at the convention, or push for new caucuses in those states and win them really, really big.
2) Win on March 4 by such stunning margins that the Obama campaign crumples.
3) Persuade almost all the remaining superdelegates to endorse her.

If you find any of those scenarios even vaguely plausible, then you've got yourself a race. But if you're not persuaded, don't expect the remaining superdelegates to be, either. After March 4, when the last bit of uncertainty has been removed, look for the superdelegates to coalesce behind the presumptive nominee and end this thing.

Eight Thoughts on the Race

2008-02-11T16:46:00.000-05:00

Thoughts for Monday Afternoon:

1) Watching Edwards negotiate with his former rivals is a little bit like watching Alex Rodriguez opt-out of his contract. In both cases, there's only one plausible outcome. But simply announcing the decision destroys whatever leverage remains to pry loose concessions. So we'll watch this elaborate pas de trois unfold until it arrives at its inevitable coda.

2) The race for pledged delegates is effectively over, and Obama has won. Now, they're only fighting over the margin of victory. They'll also squabble about the legitimacy of caucuses. I give the national media until Wednesday before these become the new story lines.

3) Patti Solis Doyle's departure is an admission that the Clinton campaign isn't just struggling against Obama, it's also battling its own strategy. Solis Doyle wagered that Super Tuesday would seal victory; she invested her dwindling resources accordingly. Plouffe gambled that it would be a draw, and spread his resources down the calendar. It's dangerous for any campaign to believe its own hype.

4) It may be this week; it may be next; it may not be until March. But sooner or later, the Clinton campaign is going to have to face the reality that the Michigan and Florida delegations aren't going to be seated, and that they can't win the convention without them. When it does, we'll see a dramatic shift in strategy. The Clintons will join the DNC in pressing for caucuses (the formal name for any party-run election, no matter its mechanics). And when they do, Obama's not going to be able to stop them. If Obama can't pull off an upset in OH, TX or PA, it's likely that the campaign will come down to these final two contests. And ironic - the political advantage state leaders failed to achieve by moving their contests forward may well be theirs if they agree to reschedule them all the way at the end of the calendar.

5) The Democratic primary has shaped up, in large part, as a generational battle. The strong support for Obama among voters under 45 cuts across racial, gender, and class lines. Hillary's support among women over 45, and among all voters over the age of 65, is rock solid. It's been a close fight, but Obama is on the brink of victory. That sets up an even more interesting dynamic come November. The Republican candidate is vying to be the oldest man ever elected president; the (plausible) Democratic nominee is running on a message of change. Among the problems facing McCain: voters of his generation trend Democratic, as do women (who comprise larger percentages of the electorate in each successive age bracket). If this battle plays out again in the general, it may not be so close.

6) Will becoming the frontrunner help or hurt Obama? The Potomac Primaries offer an interesting test case. If he can prevail better than 60-40, it's probably a sign that Hillary's base is starting to get discouraged and stay home. But if his margin is smaller than the (incredibly flawed) polls presently predict, we may see Hillary trying to sell the comeback narrative again. Taking the overall lead among delegates is a similarly fraught achievement - its major benefits accrue only if Obama can retain that lead. Otherwise, the media may embrace a narrative of shifting momentum.

7) When does the Clinton campaign think about folding up its tent and caling it a day? Would it take Obama accruing more than 2,025 delegates - improbable for months to come? How about a loss in Ohio, Texas, or Pennsylvania? How damaging will it be to her prospects that people are even voicing the question?

8) After Wisconsin, we hit a long, empty stretch. For the first time, Obama will feel the heat of national media scrutiny that he imagines he's already endured. How well will he hold up? Can he maintain his momentum?

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Convention Math: Who leads the superdelegate chase this morning?

2008-02-11T13:28:00.000-05:00

As the dust settles on the weekend's electoral battles, media organizations and amateurs alike are trying to get a fix on the delegate count. CBS News is out with a startling claim - it's Obama by a nose. The New York Times, meanwhile, shows Clinton by 171. So who's actually in control on this sunny Monday morning? Well, that depends how you count.

Superdelegates: This is where there's the greatest room for fudging the numbers. CBS is basing its story on a fresh survey of the superdelegates,which found 137 supporting Obama, and 211 for Hillary. There's reason to be skeptical of both those numbers. DemConWatch, the blog that's tracking publicly announced endorsements, puts the current totals at 128 to 223. Other media organizations have different totals, ranging upward to the AP's 156 to 243. And, of course, there's the Obama campaign's own claim from last week to a total of 170. Not to mention, it's a moving target - the tragic passing of Rep. Tom Lantos (a tireless champion of freedom) should remind us that neither the total number of superdelegates nor their names is etched in stone.

The Ruling: The problem here is that everyone's measuring something different. The media groups are conducting surveys, and the responses they generate depend on who answers their phone, and just how hard the reporters press for commitments. So the AP tally is a fine indication of which way 37 supers who haven't publicly announced their preferences are currently leaning (they split 28-19 in favor of Obama). That speculative trend is well worth noting, but let's not mistake it for the hard currency of actual, public endorsements. Until these folks announce their support, let's leave the tally at 128-223.

Pledged Delegates: After the chaos and uncertainty of counting superdelegates, tallying the pledged delegates should be easy, right? Well, maybe not. Here are three key disputes separating some major tallies:

1) How do you count caucuses? Voters at precinct caucuses elect delegates to county or congressional district caucuses, who elect delegates to the state convention, who elect delegates to the DNC. At every stage of that process, there's room for slippage - not everyone's going to show up, folks may change their votes, and candidates in the earliest caucus state subsequently dropped out. The New York Times, in its effort to produce an iron-clad count, excludes caucus states entirely until they hold their state conventions. That position is a reductio ad absurdum of its generally cautious approach to reporting totals. Most organizations count the caucus delegates by projecting the results of the state conventions.

The Ruling: For heaven's sake, count the delegates. We know that things may change - bear in mind, even pledged delegates are (almost all) perfectly free to change their minds when they show up in Denver. We're looking for a snapshot that gives us the most accurate impression of where things stand right now. Excluding the caucus states makes that a hopeless project.

2) How do you deal with incomplete returns? This one is a little trickier. CBS, for example, is showing only 14 delegates for Obama from yesterday's Maine caucuses, perhaps because only 99% of precincts have reported. The AP shows 15, awarding the final delegate to the man who is now statistically certain to win it. This one's not hard to settle - the Maine Democrats award the final delegate to Obama, too. But I wouldn't care to hazzard a guess about New Mexico, or to say for certain that the allocations in LA won't change when the votes of independents are tallied. A dozen little disputes produce a range of numbers:
CNN - 986/924; CBS - 997/920; AP - 952/893.

The Ruling: Here, I'm inclined to embrace the maximal interpretations, even at the risk that we'll have to adjust the results by a delegate or two when all is said and done. It seems fusty to leave 20 delegates from Washington unallocated, when they're virtually certain to split 11-9 for Clinton (although three counts do exactly that). Better to have a snapshot of where the race almost certainly stands at the moment than to produce a result - like that of the NYTimes - which is woefully disconnected from reality. So we'll go with CBS - 997/920. But I'd note that the spreads, as opposed to the tallies, aren't all that different: 62, 77, 59.

Unpledged Add-on Delegates: Yes, I'm back to the UADs again. No major media organization or website is tracking the 76 UADs who will be selected by state committees, conventions, or delegations. There are two ways to count them: you can award them to the candidate who carried each state, or award only those who will be chosen by a group known to be pledged to a given candidate.

The Ruling: Here, for once, I'd favor a more minimal approach. We really don't know how state party committees are likely to act; they're not bound to follow the results of primaries or caucuses, and their composition is often unreflective of the primary electorate as a whole. We know, for example, that in several states the key institutional players favored a different candidate than the one who prevailed at the ballot box; will they be able to resist the temptation to award the UADs in a contrary fashion, or to hand the slot to a 'neutral' party elder as a compromise? By my count, the UADs to be awarded by conventions and delegations stand at 15-7 in favor of Obama.

Totaling it up:
So I'd say that a fair count this morning puts Obama at 1,140 and Hillary at 1,150. So you could say it's Hillary by a hair. But it'd be more accurate to say that the two are, for the moment, effectively tied. A ten-delegate gap, given the complexity of counting, is too close to call.
What's not really in doubt is that Obama will gain enough delegates on Tuesday to surge into the lead. My guess would be that he won't release too many superdelegate endorsements in the next 48 hours. He'd rather claim the lead in most of these counts by winning elections, given his rhetorical posture on the legitimacy of superdelegates. To do so (assuming networks don't re-count their supers or resolve a large number of pending results) he'll need:
ABC: 18 delegates to take the lead
AP: 28 delegates
CNN: 27 delegates
CBS: 3 delegates ahead already
Given the projected size of his margins in the Potomac Primaries, he should easily clear all of those hurdles. And, since superdelegates in the last week or two have been breaking for Obama, and he seems poised to claim a majority of the unallocated delegates from previously held contests, it's even possible that one or more networks will follow CBS's lead in announcing Obama ahead before then. After all, networks hate to the be the last to a story. One way or the other, by Wednesday morning, everyone but the New York Times will show Obama firmly in the lead. And that's both a triumph and a major headache for a campaign that will be looking ahead at Ohio and Texas (and Vermont and Rhode Island), and the very real probability that their (overall) lead will vanish as quickly as it appeared, allowing Hillary to regain momentum.

Three (Unanswered) Questions for the Campaign

2008-02-10T16:14:00.000-05:00

In the aftermath of Obama's Saturday sweep, and with a tough February still lying ahead for the Clinton campaign, here are three questions that may help decide the outcome of the race:

1) Whither Washington?

Yesterday, Democratic voters in Washington State gave Obama a decisive victory, as better than two-thirds caucused in his corner. It was a blowout win, and added to Obama's mounting edge in pledged delegates. But on Tuesday, February 19, they'll do it again. In one of the odder twists to a very strange cycle, Washington will hold its non-binding primary even though it has already allocated all of its delegates. Polling that succesfully pegged the outcome of the caucuses puts Obama's lead among primary voters at a much narrower 50-45%, close enough that the outcome is in doubt. That's because the caucus-goers were younger, more diverse, more affluent, better-educated, and more liberal than the primary electorate.

So who cares? Hillary can win in a rout, and not be any better off for it. Well, not so fast. The fight for superdelegates is increasingly being framed as an argument for legitimacy. Once it became clear to the Clinton campaign that caucuses were unlikely to favor her candidacy, she turned on them with a vengeance, correctly pointing out that they effectively limit participation, draw from a sample of voters that's non-representative of the primary electorate, and tend to tilt toward the more affluent and better-educated. Those arguments can't change the allocation of delegates, but they can play a crucial role in the battle of perceptions. The Clinton campaign is claiming, in essence, that caucus-state victories don't really count. A win, or even a close fight, in Washington State would serve to underscore that argument. It's the first controlled experiment this primary season - run the election both ways, and line the outcomes up side-by-side. Never mind that Hillary had no problem with caucuses when she thought her institutional support would give her an edge, or that she's challenging the rules halfway through the fight. If she can undermine the legitimacy of caucuses, she can use that to argue that Obama's edge among pledged delegates isn't what it seems - and that her lead among delegates awarded in primary states is the one that matters. And that just might sway some superdelegates.

2) Hillary: More like Rudy or Huckabee?

I'm sure that for the Clinton camp, that's a Hobson's choice. But it's an interesting question. Pundits have already made the analogy to Giuliani. Both candidates, looking at a long stretch of contests with unfavorable demographics, chose to spend heavily and contest them on the ground, while publicly protesting that they weren't really trying to win. Instead, they claimed, they were waiting for the contests in larger, more representative states: Florida for Rudy; Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania for Clinton. For Rudy, the strategy proved disasterous - battered by loss after loss, his campaign ceased to look viable to his core voters in his keystone state, and they abandoned him in droves.

But there's another analogue to be found in the Republican race: Mike Huckabee. Hillary, it's increasingly clear, simply can't win a majority of the pledged delegates. In some years, that might be fatal to her chances. But even though Mike Huckabee has no realistic shot at the Republican nomination, a situation far bleaker than the one facing Hillary, he continues to rack up triumphs in states that feature favorable demographics. That's because his core constituencies find the presumptive nominee tough to stomach, and continue to identify both with the candidate and with his message. Hillary is hoping for a similar result - that women, white ethnic voters and the elderly will ignore Obama's edge among pledged delegates and her long string of losses, and vote their hearts. If they do, she can keep the pledged delegate gap small enough to have a shot at winning the convention on the strength of the superdelegate vote.

3) What to make of the Hillary fundraising surge?

It may be the most under-reported story of the week. Since Hillary went public with her fundraising woes and began to make public appeals for help, she's raised more than $10 million from over 100,000 voters. Critics will assail those numbers. Some have voiced open skepticism about the $5 million she loaned her campaign - was it all a ploy for sympathy? Others sneared at yet another show of vulnerability. Obama backers were quick to point out that even this surge leaves her far behind in the race for funds and donors.

But there's more to this story. There's no question that $10 million gives Clinton enough to stay competitive for weeks to come, and the surge in funds shows no sign of abating. The money itself, however, is the least of it. It's a remarkable transformation for a campaign that had relied on institutional endorsements, big-time bundlers, and Washington insiders. Hillary humbled herself, admitted she needed help, and turned to the public. She was met with an overwhelming response. It suggests, once again, that pundits and prognosticators ignore the intensity of the sympathy for Hillary, particularly among women, at their peril. When she's willing to look vulnerable, when she confesses that she can't do it alone, when she tries to build a movement, and most of all, when she returns to her basic narrative of a woman struggling to break through in a man's world, Hillary becomes a tremendously appealing candidate. Her greatest appeal turns out to lie in her struggles - with her husband, with sexism - because these struggles enable ordinary Americans to identify with her. That's why she cleans up among the most economically disadvantaged Americans, among working women, and in rustbelt cities. And, despite his initial obtuseness, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe came to understand this. His aggressive and juvenile fundraising challenge targeting Hillary succeeded in outraising her, but it was a pyrrhic victory. Obama had been outraising her three-to-one beforehand. But Plouffe made it into a contest, a direct challenge to Hillary and her supporters. And, as they have throughout the past month, Hillary's supporters came to her aid precisely when she seemed most vulnerable. Without the Plouffe challenge, Hillary's breakthrough might never have happened. He caught on, after a couple of days, and hasn't released his fundraising totals since. Why spur Hillary's backers to unprecedented levels of support when you're already getting all the money you need?

So has Hillary, at last, managed to transform her campaign into a movement? There are signs she's beginning to understand this dynamic. She's been harping on the Shuster/MSNBC gaffe because it underlines the difficulty that women face running for elective office - a gendered double standard that's all-too-familiar to women of her generation. She's stopped attacking Obama; you can't go on the offensive at the same time you're highlighting your ability to empathize. She's amped up her economic message, in an attempt to transform her campaign into a struggle on behalf of those left behind in a changing economy, glomming on to the Edwards message. Will it be enough? Has her campaign turned a corner? We'll see. In the past, as she rebounded, she again lowered her mask, reverting to carefully-controlled form. How she handles February will likely determine the outcome of her candidacy - and, win or lose, where the Democratic Party goes from here.

If you find this worthwhile, please click the 'recommend this' link, so that other readers can share it. More election and polling analysis is available on my blog (click my name). And, as always, I welcome your comments and corrections.

Reading the Returns: Election Night Analysis

2008-02-10T01:17:00.000-05:00

By now, everyone's seen the results. As expected, Obama swept today's Democratic contests, winning in Washington, Nebraska, and Louisana. Less anticipated was his margin of victory. In the caucus states, he won better than 2/3 of the votes; in Louisiana, by double-digits.

So how do we make sense of those margins, and attempt to figure out their significance? Three ways spring to mind.

1) Polling:

Washington State: Only one polling firm released results from Washington in February: SurveyUSA. It found Obama ahead among likely caucus-goers 63-33. So score one for the much-battered reputation of the robo-polling firm, and mark these results 'as expected.'
Nebraska and Louisiana: I'm not aware of recent polling in either of these states.

2) Internal expectations:

Obama Campaign: An internal campaign spreadsheet that was leaked to Bloomberg News gives us a rare view of what the campaign itself expected. The first of the projected scenarios had Obama winning 60-40 in WA and NE, and 54-46 in Louisiana. At this hour, Obama's actual margins in all three states exceed those counts (although in Louisiana, due to Hillary falling short). That scenario had Obama winning the pledged delegate count 95-63 tonight, and 1,647 to 1,580 overall. We'll see how that works out - one projection has him winning Nebraska delegates 14-10, while CNN puts him at 15-9, just like the spreadsheet. In WA and LA, the situation is still too confused to hazard a guess. But with the margins bigger than he expected, you've gotta believe that David Plouffe is going to be a happy man tonight.

Clinton Campaign: The first rule of expectations management is that it's better to be pleasantly surprised than suddenly dissappointed. If that applies to the Obama camp's internal projections (a good reason to take them with a grain of salt) it applies as well to the Clinton camp's memorandum to reporters as well. To quote:

The Obama campaign has dramatically outspent our campaign in these three states,
saturating the airwaves...we will continue to compete in [February states] and
hope to secure as many delegates as we can...

That about sums it up. The name of the game for the Clinton camp was to keep these races close enough to amass some delegates. We'll have to wait till morning (at the earliest) before we get reliable delegate counts. But when expectations start that low, it's tough to be dissappointed.

Edwards campaign: Yes, you read that correctly. In the big surprise of the evening, the moribund campaign of John Edwards roared back to life. Well, not really. But confounding expectations, it seems that thousands of (white?) Louisiana voters who were left to choose between a black man and a woman chose...neither. He didn't break the 15% threshold, so he won't walk away with any delegates, but I think we can faily say that he exceeded expectations. For Edwards, it must be a tantalizing reminder of what might have been. And for the remaining two contenders, it's a troubling indicator for November.

3) Exit Polls: Alas, caucus states don't get much love from the consortium, so we're stuck with the exits from Louisiana. Here, there's plenty for both camps to enjoy:

Obama campaign: There have to be some smiles in Illinois tonight. Obama won among both men and women, among voters in every age cohort up to 65, among religious voters (and ran almost even among the more religious Catholics), with those earning less and more than $50k, and among both Democrats and Independents. But there was plenty to frown about, to, including this statistic that's likely to get some play: 35% of primary voters said they would not be satisfied if Obama wins the nomination. (But then again, 12% of them voted for Obama - so much for polling.)

Clinton campaign: If the tally from Louisiana was discouraging, the exit poll bodes well for Clinton's chances, particularly in the crucial states of Ohio and Pennsylvania. White voters supported Clinton (70-26) by margins almost as large as blacks went for Obama (82-18). She won Catholics, including 73% of white Catholics. Voters thought she "cares about people," has "experience" and "electability" - she lost out only on "can bring change." The poorer the voter, the gloomier about their personal economic future and the nation's, the better Hillary did. And she brought home her bedrock supporters - 63% of voters over the age of 65 cast their ballots for Clinton. If she can replicate those margins in states with different demographic compositions, she can win in a landslide.

So there you have it. On the whole, the evening went about as expected. Three dramatic wins for Obama, whose lead among pledged delegates continues to mount. Clinton can take solace in the thought that the national media expected these wins, and so is unlikely to play them to her disadvantage, and that the biggest prizes left on the calendar are rust-belt states full of aging, white-ethnic voters.

If you find this worthwhile, please click the 'recommend this' link, so that other readers can share it. More election and polling analysis is available on my blog (click my name). And, as always, I welcome your comments and corrections.

Convention Math: Obama wins three more UADs, narrows superdelegate gap

2008-02-09T23:37:00.000-05:00

Loyal readers are already familiar with my effort to count the forgotten supderdelegates - the 76 Unpledged Add-On Delegates (UADs) to the Democratic Nationa Convention. To recap: 720 superdelegates get to go to Denver by virtue of the party or governmental offices they hold. The forgotten 76 are handed out to the states in proportion to the number of DNC members in each state, and (s)elected by state committees, conventions, or delegations. In this incredibly tight contest, it's naive to believe that any candidate whose supporters comprise a majority of the body that selects the UADs will select anyone not (unofficially, but no less firmly) pledged to support them.

Counting UADs is hard, because like delegates from caucus states, we don't know who they'll be, only how they're likely to vote in Denver. Further complicating the picture is the diverse array of selection processes. So in this count, I'm only including delegates who we know, pretty much for sure, are going to back a given candidate. Though February 5, the count stood at:
Obama: 11
Clinton: 7

Tonight's results bring a further advantage for Obama, whose lead is based upon his dominance of caucus states, on show again this evening.

Clinton Obama Undetermined
WA: 0 2 0
NE: 0 1 0
LA: 0 0 0

Your new totals:
Obama: 14
Clinton: 7

We'll keep a running tally here every election night, until one of the more reputable bodies tracking delegates notices that they're excluding more than twenty delegates who, by any right, ought to be counted.

If you find this worthwhile, please click the 'recommend this' link, so that other readers can share it. More election and polling analysis is available on my blog (click my name). And, as always, I welcome your comments and corrections.

How Gallup Got It Wrong

2008-02-07T22:09:00.000-05:00

I've seen a lot of indignant comments about TPM's pro-Obama bias, because it didn't flog the Gallup results yesterday that showed Clinton up, 52-39. I blogged about that poll, explaining that to the extent we look to tracking polls as predictors of voter sentiment, a poll that showed a thirteen point gap in the three days ending Tuesday at the same time voters divided their votes evenly was clearly flawed.

I also asked the guru of polling, Mark Blumenthal, for an explanation. He put forward a bunch of theories, and followed up with an extensive discussion this morning. Mark is on a righteous crusade to get pollsters to abide by the professional code of conduct to which they ostensibly subscribe, and to disclose their data and not just a summary of their results. So in addition to putting forward his own theories, he pressed Gallup for answers.

Gallup apparently delayed their usual early-afternoon release to crunch the numbers. And just now, Gallup has spoken. Their explanation boils down to this. They call 1,000 adults every night. About 200 of them say they're unlikely to vote, so they screen them out. The remaining 800 describe themselves as at least a little likely to vote (or that they have voted) in either the Democratic or Republican races. In other words, their sample includes 80% of American adults. But even in this seminal year, only about 30% are actually voting. And therein lies the problem.

Gallup went back and ran the numbers for the five days between John Edwards withdrawal and Super Tuesday. Among those who characterized themselves as highly likely to vote, about 50% of the total sample (thus still too high), Obama drew 48% and Clinton 45% - a statistical tie. Now there may have been more than that at work here - Mark's other questions remain unanswered, as does my biggest (what's the gender and racial composition of the sample, and does it vary night by night?) But it goes a long way to explaining the discrepancy.

I'd argue that it provides a good reason for Gallup to use a tighter screen in the future. Gallup says "a broad sample of over 80% of American adults would not be expected to match the actual voting patterns" which to me, is a very good argument for not using such a sample. But it should also provide us all with reason for caution. National tracking polls, it's worth remembering, are useful indicators of trends. Gallup picked up, succesfully, that Clinton had stopped the Obama surge by about Sunday. (And both Gallup and Rasmussen show Obama getting a post-Feb 5 bump). But they are absolutely lousy indicators, at least until they change their voter models, of how the electorate will actually vote.

Obama Closes the Superdelegate Gap?

2008-02-07T17:14:00.000-05:00

Ben Smith of the Politico has some posts up today with major convention implications. He's put up a spreadsheet that Bloomberg News obtained, apparently an internal Obama campaign worksheet that attempts to project where the race is headed. It's of prurient interest, but most of its scenarios are fairly conservative, and there's not much news in it.

The big deal, though, is in a few boxes at the bottom. Obama's campaign lists the current superdelegate tally as 159-209. That's 40-50 more than any public tally I've seen. And it gets more interesting - Ben queried the Obama camp, and discovered that they're now claiming the backing of 170 superdelegates.

A word of caution. They haven't substantiated that with lists of names - as of this morning, only 113 endorsements had been publicly announced. And its perfectly plausible that Hillary has her own internal tally which also shows her doing better than the major media organizations project. But given that this spreadsheet, on the whole, is fairly conservative, and it does the Obama camp no good to delude itself as to how many delegates are going for Hillary, I'd say its prima facie evidence that Obama has finally closed the superdelegate gap. If he's really trailing by just 40, and his Super Tuesday projections hold up, then the overall gap is now in the single digits. And that would be huge news.

(And, for readers just joining me, I discussed this morning why the gap is at least four delegates smaller than any current count.)

Convention Math: Adding up the Unpledged Add-On Delegates (UADs)

2008-02-07T13:32:00.000-05:00

So by now, we're all familiar with the rudiments of the delegate selection process. We ordinary folk go to the polls or the precinct caucuses (or in Texas, both) and cast our votes. Those are tallied, and eventually used to determine all of the pledged delegates, of whom there are 3,253. Then there are the superdelegates, the party bigwigs who get their tickets to Detroit no matter what, of whom there are 796. And that's the end of the story.

But it turns out that not all superdelegates are the same. For 720 of them, the process works pretty much as you'd expect - they hold public office, a seat on the DNC, or have held an important position in the past. We know who they are, we're tracking their endorsements, and we're tallying their support.

But then there are the 76 Unpledged Add-on Delegates, the ones I'll call UADs for short. These aren't necessarily party bigwigs. In fact, we don't know who they are at all, because they haven't even been selected yet. But as a block with 76 votes, there as important as any midsized state. And if we look closely, we can already figure out how more than half of them are going to vote.

Here's how it works. Every state is eligible to receive one UAD for every four DNC members it possesses (except for DC, which is stuck with just 2). Since the party chair and vice-chair of every state serve on the DNC, and the rules stipulate that the total be rounded up to the nearest integer, that means every state gets at least one UAD. Some get more. Illinois gets three, for example, and California has five. And it's up to the state parties to decide how to select these delegates. In the past, they've typically been awarded as plums to political insiders. Since they're not distributed until late in the process, they've never had an impact on determining the nominee. But this year, that's going to change.

States have adopted a wide range of methods for selecting UADs. Those include a vote of the state party committee; a vote of the entire state convention; a vote of the entire delegation to the DNC; or, in some cases, a vote of one of those bodies that's a sham, because the state chair only presents the nominees he wants to serve. Because the methods vary widely, it's not always possible to figure out which way these delegates will lean. But in most cases, we can be fairly certain. Although these delegates are formally unpledged, I can guarantee that any candidate who controls a majority of the body which awards them will ensure that the slots are reserved for their own supporters. That's right - there's nothing proportional about it. For UADs, the system is winner take all. And that allows us to start to compile a tally.

Here's a quick rundown of states that have already voted:
Clinton Obama Undetermined
Iowa: 0 0 1
NH: 0 0 1
NV: 1 0 0
SC: 0 0 1
AL: 0 0 1
AK: 0 1 0
AR: 1 0 0
AZ: 0 0 1
CA: 5 0 0
CO: 0 1 0
CT: 0 0 1
DE: 0 1 0
GA: 0 0 2
ID: 0 1 0
IL: 0 3 0
KS: 0 1 0
MA: 0 0 2
MN: 0 2 0
MO: 0 0 2
ND: 0 0 1
NM: 0 0 1
NJ: 0 0 2
NY: 0 0 4
OK: 0 0 1
TN: 0 0 2
UT: 0 1 0

Total: 7 11 23

Those aren't enormous numbers, but I'll continue to track this, and I suspect the tallies will mount with time. For now, the result is a four delegate advantage for Obama that's not acknowledged in any tally of which I'm aware.

Now, a few words to forestall howls of outrage in the comments section. The most common method of selecting UADs in caucus states is a vote at the state convention; the most common method in primary states is a vote of the state committee. That confers certain advantages on a candidate who runs strongly in caucuses - in this case, Obama. He's already got the votes he needs to secure those UADs. Now it's likely that the state committees that meet in states that one candidate carried will choose delegates who will back that candidate - but we don't actually know that. A few examples. Hillary is almost certain to carry the four UADs from NY. But in Massachusetts, Obama still has the backing of a significant number of institutional players, even though he lost the primary. Similarly, Hillary has lots of endorsements in SC. So where the majority of people who will choose these delegates haven't publicly committed to supporting a particular candidate, I've left the delegates in the undecided column.

One other note: I'm sure I got things wrong! Please use the comments section to point out the error of my ways.