The Most Effective Campaign Commercial of All Time

For whatever reason the internet loves hyperbole -- particularly of the sort that ignores all but the last eighteen months in the sweep of human history. I had this pointed out to me in 2002 by a smart colleague at my workplace, recounting the tale of a student of his who had just uploaded an essay entitled "The Twenty Greatest Blu-Ray Movies of All Time," and who then refused to see the irony of same when my colleague patiently tried to point it out to him. We all do this, now: Things change so much faster than they used to that we forget how recent the distant-seeming stuff really is.

So forgive me while I chew some precious bandwidth to make the argument that Hillary Clinton's latest one-minute spot, "Captain Khan," is very probably -- and will very probably be remembered for a long time as -- the single most devastatingly effective political advertisement, ever.

But first do yourself the honor of watching it again, because it's worth it.

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Republicans are (Probably) in Bigger Trouble Than They Think

Election polling is, as ever, a good news / bad news proposition. The good news about following polling data in an election season is that there is always a great mass of data and there are always a great many stone-cold pros crunching that data and writing articles about it, as well as Nate Silver. But this volume of data and expert analysis happens also to be the bad news -- because the more stone-cold pros there are, the more likely their predictions are to diverge in meaningful ways. And never is this more true than when it comes to predicting so-called "wave elections," in which the mood of the electorate turns so decisively against one or the other of the two political parties that even the best models under-count the damage.

Worse, this kind of mistake is what statisticians refer to as a "systematic error": one in which the divergence between prediction and outcome only manifests in one tail of the probability distribution. For recent examples of this phenomenon, the United States has experienced "wave" elections in three consecutive midterms -- 2006, 2010, and 2014 -- and in all three of them the most trusted and professional pollsters and poll analysts, and Nate Silver, have all missed the victorious party's margin to the low side. But then this much is nearly tautological: Having failed to diagnose a wave, it would be impossible to then over-estimate its size, since missing a congressional margin to the high side would itself constitute the correct prediction of a wave.

So the bigger, more vexing question, then, is why pollsters and poll-analysts so often miss waves altogether -- and whether those explanations could proffer any guidance in predicting the outcome of this year's electoral horse race. Personally I believe that the explanations for un-diagnosed waves are mostly straightforward, and that they do, in fact, offer real promise that the Democrats could be positioned to do much better down-ballot than the punditry is currently predicting. Let's look at the factors that might substantiate this possibility.


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(With a Big Caveat,) Clinton Only Needs One More State

If the saying is true that a week is forever in politics, then it can be no coincidence if the inner circle of the Trump Campaign feels as though the past fortnight has been a double-eternity. Charging forth from his own, suitably(-?) raucous convention, Mr. Trump found himself in a flat-footed tie with Secretary Clinton, herself still reeling from the damaging final report of the FBI regarding her private e-mail server. He wasn't leading much of anywhere, but in the national tracking polls he'd pulled nose-to-nose with the once seemingly invincible Clinton juggernaut.

To say that things have not gone well for Mr. Trump in the fourteen days since is to say that matters have not recently gone well in Syria. Always the bombastic narcissist, Trump has responded to the conclusion of his biggest private show to date with a series of otherwise stupefying unforced errors -- the most well-known of which, his public feud with Khizr Khan, may not even effect the deepest or most lasting damage on his candidacy.

Consider just one twenty-four hour window from the past fourteen days, during which...

• In a Washington Post interview, Trump declined to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan against his primary challenger
• He reiterated that he hasn’t endorsed Sen. John McCain and said the onetime prisoner of war “has not done a good job for the vets”
• He slapped out at Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte, saying “she has given me zero support”
• He suggested that Americans should pull their 401(k) funds out of the stock market
• He said he’s “always wanted” to receive a Purple Heart but that having one gifted to him by a supporter was “much easier”
• He said that the handling of sexual harassment has “got to be up to the individual”
• He accused Khizr Khan of being “bothered” by his plan to keep terrorists out of the country, and said that he had no regrets about his clash with the family
• He appeared to feud with a crying baby during a rally
• He reiterated that “if the election is rigged, I would not be surprised”
• The sitting president of the United States publicly called Trump “unfit to serve” and urged Republicans to withdraw their support for him.
• Trump spokesman Katrina Pierson suggested that Obama and Clinton are to blame for the death of Humayan Khan, who died in 2004, despite the fact that neither were in the executive branch at the time
• An ally of Paul Manafort told John Harwood at CNBC that the campaign chairman is “mailing it in,” leaving the rest of the staff “suicidal.”
• Sitting GOP congressman Richard Hanna, HP head Meg Whitman and former Christie aide Maria Comella all said they plan to vote for Hillary Clinton
• The Washington Post released a transcript of its full interview with Trump, indicating among other things that he paused five times to watch TV coverage in the middle of the sit-down
• A GOP source told NBC’s Katy Tur that Reince Priebus is “apoplectic” over Trump’s refusal to endorse Ryan and is making calls to the campaign to express his “extreme displeasure”

All of this, understand, happened in just one news cycle out of the fourteen in question (hat-tip: Teagan Goddard's Political Wire).

The effect of all this chaos on the political horse race is only just now beginning to register -- but as of this writing, Secretary Clinton has surged to a comfortable lead in the national poll of polls. Her biggest lead, according to Fox News (!), shows her up by ten points. Mr. Trump is in big and self-inflicted trouble, and it's beginning to take its toll on the firewall of support he's previously enjoyed even through what seemed to be his gravest missteps of the primary season. 

Thing is, the United States doesn't pick its President on the basis of a nationwide popular vote: it picks the winner according to the weighted outcomes of fifty-one individual contests at the state level (including the District of Colombia). And as has been reported on this site at various times, the state-level polling often lags the true picture of the election by several days, for various abstruse reasons. Even without a return to normalcy in the dynamics of the race and/or its media coverage, we probably won't have a clear sense of where the individual states are running for another few days, possibly a week. And the point of today's column is that this is very, very bad news for Trump and his supporters, indeed.

To see why, we turn to the excellent and highly underrated reporting of Dr. Andrew Tanenbaum at electoral-vote.com. An expat living in continental Europe, Dr. Tanenbaum has since 2004 chronicled the day-to-day fortunes of Presidential candidates by tabulating their respective standings in the electoral college in real time, tallied according to the most recent polling data available by state. Tanenbaum doesn't project anything from polling data or polling trends, which has the paradoxical effect of making his reporting much more reliable than at least one inexplicably more popular (and very often spectacularly wrong) colleague of his. Instead the tone of Tanenbaum's site is reserved, sometimes downright diminutive, but it more-or-less has to be if prognostication is to be expressly verboten in this fashion. Point being, those of us who read him every day take the rock-solid surety of the thing and the clamped-down rhetoric as the necessary halves of an important and under-represented corner of the political blogosphere: If Andy says it, you're never going to be embarrassed because you repeated it at a cocktail party. He has a lot of friends. He deserves them.

All of which brings us to a report appearing in his August 3rd edition, in which co-contributor Christopher Bates tabulated the safe states for each party in a "blue wall" and a "red wall," and then commented at some length on the dis-equal electoral vote tallies of the two resulting floors, and on the dynamics of the race in the few states that fell in neither secure camp. Here is a reprint of the graphic used by Bates to inform his commentary:

The "blue wall" column in this graphic shows exactly what the name would suggest: the complete list of states, with their electoral vote tallies, which have gone for the Democratic Party's candidate for President in no fewer than six consecutive election cycles. The Republican equivalent was divided by Bates into a "red wall" and a "pink wall," owing in part to a fairly sizable discontinuity in the Republican winning streaks of the two sub-groups.

But even adding the "red-" and "pink wall" together, the two subgroups of states only afford Mr. Trump a starting "floor" of 180 electoral votes, while the corresponding floor for Secretary Clinton is shown as 242 -- in a contest where it only takes 270 to actually win the damn thing. This is an enormous built-in advantage for Team Blue in the big contest, and it has been this way for some time -- independent of a self-destructive opponent. The graphic above would look exactly the same if Mrs. Clinton were running against Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Chris Christie or Jeb Bush.

Probably, not definitely, but probably, Mrs. Clinton would be correct to bank those 242 electoral votes against any rival. A case can be made that Pennsylvania might be more- or less competitive, given a certain specific Republican candidate; a similar case can be made regarding Wisconsin or Michigan or Oregon. But these are the arguments we hear from Republican strategists every four years, and somehow every four years the blue wall seems to hold. Remember, this is Andy Tanenbaum we're talking about here: he and Bates aren't calling anything for this November. They're merely stating the cold, hard fact that the Democrats have carried these 242 electoral votes through good election cycles and bad ones, in some cases over the span of much of our lifetimes.

It doesn't take your present reporter to note how close 242 is, to 270, or that a Democratic win in either one of Ohio or Florida -- all by itself -- would run Clinton's total over the top. So it may seem strange, in such circumstances, that the states I'd like to talk about here aren't Ohio or Florida, but Iowa and New Mexico and Colorado and New Hampshire.

And yes, that does seem strange, so do bear with me.

It happens that Iowa finds its way into the "swing state" category of Bates' table on the basis of one, single, solitary election: 2004 -- during which it flipped from Gore in 2000, to a Republican candidate whose name escapes me for the moment. I think he flew airplanes for the Texas National Guard for a while, if memory serves. Or maybe he didn't. But at all events, Iowa was one of just two states John Kerry failed to hold from the Al Gore coalition (the other being New Mexico), and for that reason Iowa is listed objectively as up for grabs. Except this is a state that hadn't gone for a Republican before that war-on-terror-soaked fiasco since Ronald Reagan. Notably, Iowans even chose Michael Dukakis over George H W Bush in 1988, a distinction shared by just nine other states and the District of Colombia.

If for the moment we assume away Karl Rove's magical anti-gay-marriage gambit and the senseless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq including Humayun Khan, the streak of Democratic victories in Iowa would stand at seven -- the same as Hawaii and New York. It seems reasonable to me to consider such a state a relatively safe bet for the good guys. I'll be happy to take a wager or two on the subject if anyone's interested.

This is a counterfactual, of course, and once one plays such games with the data there is no hard limit on where they can lead. But let's put it this way: To believe that Iowa is in play this year, you must believe that Mr. Trump is capable of appealing to a wider coalition of Iowans, or a narrower coalition in much deeper numbers, than were willing to cast their votes for either George Bush Senior, Bob Dole, John McCain, or Mitt Romney. Let me just repeat that last part: Mitt, freaking, Romney didn't win in Iowa. And Mitt Romney won 27% of the non-white vote in 2012.

Yes, Iowa is whiter than the country at large -- but so is Minnesota, and in both places the under-structure of that homogeneity is a smart and well-funded school system and a long tradition of deep commitments to Democratic-Party ideals, if not practices, on issues ranging from organized labor to agricultural subsidies. Maybe Iowa really is a swing state, but as someone who suffered and bled for John Kerry more than most (I was unemployed at the time), I just can't see it.

The other state that Mr. Kerry failed to hold, is New Mexico. And here the swing-state status is rendered even more dubious by the large and growing Hispanic population -- effectively none of whom are planning, even now, to cast ballots for Mr. Trump.  New Mexico didn't vote for Dukakis in 1988, but except for 2004 it has turned blue on every election night since, which would peg its counterfactual, John-Kerry-less streak at six, or the same as California and Connecticut. I'll be happy to take wagers from any Trump supporters on that one too, thank you very much.

Next door to the Land of Enchantment is the much more defensibly swingy state of Colorado, which in the last six elections has gone twice for Barack Obama, twice for George W. Bush, and once for- and once against Bill Clinton. On paper at least, it doesn't get any swingier than that. But these historic data points harbor an even bigger problem than the large and growing Hispanic population in the inter-mountain west, which is that Colorado is also home to a large and growing population of former Californians, most of whom owe their relocation to the wild successes of the American technology sector, and are therefore much more liberal. The dynamics of the race in The Centennial State have been sour for Mr. Trump almost from the beginning, and they have soured so dramatically in the past few polling cycles that the Clinton Campaign has quietly non-renewed their advertising buys in the state until further notice.

Across the country, if not the ideological spectrum, is the Granite State of New Hampshire, whose status in Bates' swing-state table is owed to the most heartbreaking and little-known fact of this entire column: The fact that it, and it alone in the Northeast, voted for George W. Bush in 2000. Without those four electoral votes, Bush would have lost to Al Gore despite all the shenanigans in Florida.

People love to say that a few hundred votes in Florida determined who would be President in 2000, but with all the controversy surrounding that state's count we may never confidently know for sure. What's much less in dispute is that Bush carried New Hampshire by fewer than 7,000 persons -- meaning that if 3,500 of them had reversed themselves, much of the unspeakable carnage and global heartbreak that has followed would never have happened. It is an idea not to be borne any longer, so let's leave it there by observing that, if we reverse New Hampshire's outcome in 2000, their streak of Democratic-Party victories would also stand at six. Again, wagers are welcomed and encouraged.

For any of these states to fall for Mr. Trump, a person would have to believe that one-time victories in some of them are better predictors than pulled advertising in others. This might be the conservative play in some parallel universe with an election that featured two grown-ups, but in this election it seems nothing short of willful. More specifically, considering these four states to be in play any more than Michigan or Wisconsin or Pennsylvania represents a stretch of sufficient proportions to raise equally valid questions about the predictability of the blue wall itself. In other words, I fail to see how one can confidently bank Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania for the Clinton team, and not include the four states I've listed here.

Okay. Assuming you've stayed with me this far, let's add Iowa, New Mexico, New Hampshire and Colorado to Secretary Clinton's blue wall, and see where that leaves things (courtesy of 270towin.com).

Cosmetically, at least at first, there's nothing terribly different about this map from any number of unresolved maps of the electoral college we've all been playing with on this site and others for the past dozen years, now. Some states are blue, some are red, and some -- five, to be exact -- are legitimately up for grabs: Nevada, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and of course Florida. At a glance, this is dog-bites-man stuff. 

But incline a little closer to the map and you'll notice something genuinely arresting about it: Unless you disagree wholescale with the arguments I've employed to get us to this point, Secretary Clinton stands exactly one state shy of being President. She can lose any four of the five gray states above, as long as she wins the fifth one, and she's over the top. This, you understand, is before we factor-in the structural problems Trump is encountering in such otherwise predictably red states as Mississippi and Georgia and Arizona. If he loses any of these, it's truly curtains. And Mrs. Clinton is currently ahead in Arizona, together with North Carolina, Florida, and New Hampshire. Even a nimble political pro -- even a Jeb Bush -- would be in seriously deep kimchi at this point. Remember, most of the data we have on where things stand at the state level has not fully accounted for the blizzard of self-devastation to rock the Trump Campaign over the past few days.

And the caveat suggested in the title? It's not the one you're probably expecting. Yes, all of this can change on a dime: Hillary Clinton could be caught in some fresh firestorm of mendacity tomorrow. A bunch of nitwits could fly a plane into the side of a building in the name of a God who teaches us to be nice to everybody. Markets could crash or Boris Johnson could move to Poughkeepsie. But that caveat is both implicit and peremptory: The whole point of an electoral college map in August is to see where things would stand today, if the election were today, and to use that information as a proxy for theorizing about how things might proceed between now and November 8th. The big day is still a ways off, much can happen in-between, and these things needn't be said.

The caveat referenced in the title is that, for all his self-destructive behavior, Mr. Trump doesn't seem to be hurting the GOP's chances down the ticket very much. Tanenbaum has a running tally of where things stand in the Senate, and the headline that inspired the present column from yours truly was that, if the election were today, the Republicans would hold the Senate majority and it wouldn't even be terribly competitive. And the thing is, this is the result of a conscious and I believe ill-advised decision by Secretary Clinton: to reach out to Republican candidates in pursuit of their support.  

Calm down. I'm not about to go on one of those un-moored Bernie-Brothers' rants about how Secretary Clinton is effectively campaigning as a moderate Republican. She is, and as Democrats we're stuck with that much. We got some real movement out of her on some key issues, and whether she means it or not is academic at this point because she's the nominee. (For a more in-depth consideration of why it might make sense to vote for her anyway, see my most-recent previous column.)

The error in judgement here, it seems to me, is in her apparent expectation that the Republicans who benefit from this outreach will perceive some sort of indebtedness to her come January, and that with this indebtedness to her credit Mrs. Clinton herself may look forward to more substantive and collegial legislative success in her Administration. Nobody has said this, exactly, but it does seem to fit hand-in-glove with Clinton's curious gaffe a few weeks ago in which she praised Nancy Reagan for having raised awareness about AIDS -- despite the fact that Nancy Reagan not only did nothing of the kind, she did the very opposite. Only a politician who thinks she can woo the other side into voting her agenda would make that sort of gaffe.

As strategic expectations go, this one is beyond baffling and into the realm of the delusional: Nobody, but nobody, in the Republican Party is going to take any position toward a President Hillary Clinton that isn't cravenly antagonistic, and for all her supposed political acumen she really ought to know as much by now. It's not that elected Republicans are all monsters (well, perhaps it's not just that elected Republicans are all monsters), as much as that the echo-chamber media outlets favored by their constituents will see a Clinton Presidency as a ratings bonanza, and will fan their viewers into the same sort of full-throated acrimony that can only be secured by someone who isn't just Barack Obama's third term, isn't just a Clinton, but a WOMAN, to boot. No doubt some of the Republicans who benefit from Clinton's non-confrontational approach will feel deep remorse at having to assassinate the character of their benefactor from the House- and Senate floors, but assassinate it they will. They'll simply have no choice if they don't want to get Cantored.

In such a context, the only sensible strategy is to do the exact opposite of what Mrs. Clinton has been doing: to run up the score as much as possible. To wallpaper the airwaves with campaign ads that morph Republican House- and Senate candidates into Donald Trump, and blend their most odious statements back and forth until the persuadable voters among us can barely tell the difference. Only by defeating Republicans, instead of trying to curry their indebtedness, can Secretary Clinton realistically expect a successful Presidency. Only with Democratic support in Congress can she realistically expect to accomplish anything but four more years of stalemate.

And on that particular proposition, I'm afraid I won't be taking any wagers.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...

This Just In - New Hampshire Was an Upset. Not.

This morning Politico has a story, which electoral-vote.com has blurbed on its site, about the ten biggest upsets in the 2008 election cycle, of which the second one on the list is Hillary Clinton's victory in the New Hampshire primary. Many of the rest of the upsets on the list really are upsets (Huckabee in the Iowa caucus, Hagen in the NC senate race, and Obama taking Indiana's electoral votes, to pick three random but illustrative examples), but to call the New Hampshire primary result an "upset win" for Mrs. Clinton is an act of punditorial malpractice that is wholly unbecoming of the normally sharp cookies at Politico. Clinton's win in New Hampshire should have been predicted by nearly everyone who saw those Obama +6 polls, and there's a very simple explanation for that win, and it's potentially troublesome for progressives like your intrepid columnist to ponder.

Despite all the very impressive, color-coded trend analysis suggesting a relatively easy Obama victory, the reason Clinton won the New Hampshire primary is that, by the time of Obama's big win in Iowa, many swing-Democrats in New Hampshire had already voted. Simple as that. No upset to it: She won by fewer than 8,000 of over 200,000 votes cast, a margin that would have left her desperately explaining-away an unexpectedly close finish, had she not already lost in Iowa, and by the time Obama won in Iowa Clinton had already amassed that winning margin in New Hampshire from absentee ballots--cast at a time during which this accomplishment didn't count as an upset because she was still the frontrunner.

The difficulty this poses for progressives comes in the form of implications for future electoral scenarios in which a bad-guy (like McCain) carries an early lead into the last few days before an election, and then stumbles in his handling of a crisis (like the Lehman meltdown) after it's already too late for persuadable voters to change their minds about him. Our love affair with early voting, in other words, carries an enormous sting in its tail: the potential to disenfranchise people who cast their ballots before a crucial piece of information is made known.

All of us writing and reading this column love early voting because it reduces the likelihood of Republican funnybusiness on election day; Democrats by the very nature of their ideology tend to be found in more densely populated areas with comparatively few polling places, comparatively understaffed by comparatively undertrained and undercompetent poll workers. This makes Democratic voters a much easier target for the fat-white-guys, mostly off-duty cops and firemen, to cage through intimidation at the precinct level, combined with stalling tactics accomplished through under-populating these precincts with machines, at the state level. In case you missed it, there's no great mystery in the story of how John Kerry lost Ohio in 2004: It was stolen from him by a Republican secretary of state.

But for all its high ethics of increased voter participation and decreased likelihood of shenanigans, the consequences of early voting have not been fully considered by the left--and indeed probably won't be until a scenario unfolds in which the "wrong" candidate wins due to insurmountable early momentum. When that happens (but almost certainly not until), it will occur to rather a great many more people than it has so far that early voting is, by its very nature, unconstitutional. Don't get me wrong, it was great for us in 2008--but at the end of the day it's still unconstitutional. And when the day comes that it goes badly for us, we'll have only ourselves to blame for failing to recognize it in advance.

As an example of just how badly things can go, consider the most recent election for City Commission in the sleepy little community of Lake Wales, Florida, wherein a certain John Paul Rogers enlisted the support of a prominent member of the African-American community to canvass that area of town for absentee ballots--only to have it emerge later that he was a former Grand Dragon of the Ku Kulx Klan. Mr. Rogers' election is presently being challenged in court by a local resident, but his resources are limited, and without conclusive evidence of massive administrative malfeasance by the city it is unlikely that a court packed with judicial conservatives will side in favor of the appellant.

The Help America Vote Act, passed shortly after the 2000 Presidential election cycle, was (in the manner of so many ostensibly beneficial changes to the law in this country's recent past) a boon to the manufacturers of a handful of esoteric products or services--in this case touch-screen voting machines. And the passages in that legislation that spoke to streamlining the processes by which a state may allow early voting were, as it happens, just enough to engender Democratic support for what was in point of fact a pretty lousy piece of law. As with so many other examples of legislative bait-and-switch from the political right, the benefit to the middle class was front-loaded and obvious, while the benefit to the wealthiest among us was far less evident and far more substantial. I get to drive 100 or so people to the polls in 2008; the CEO of Diebold gets a blank check with which to black-box any close election in a Republican-governed state, forever.

But the real tragedy of early voting is that it has so efficiently placated the political left in this country into ignoring the far greater outrage in how we conduct our elections: the fact that election day itself is not a national holiday, and that, as such, not everyone can vote because not everyone can get enough time off to do so. Early voting is an effective treatment of this problem, but not a cure. The cure is to hold national elections on Veteran's Day--a recommendation explicitly called for by former Presidents Carter and Ford as part of their comprehensive review of American voting procedures, carried out after the debacle in 2000.

Representative democracy always moves slowly, and always doubly so in a country as big and self-divided as ours. It took a fiasco like Florida'00 to bring our Senators and Congressmen to the point of assessing how easy or hard it was for ordinary people to register their preferences for candidates, and to try to fix it. Now, sadly, it will take a scandal of Lehman/Paulson proportions--timed for just the perfect moment in late October--for those same Senators and Congressmen to get it right.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida

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The Ten Myths of Election 2008

Most of us aren't thinking as much about the election anymore as we are about turkey, presents, and a certain presumptive nominee for Secretary of State. And that's too bad, because now that we have a little more distance from the thing, it's a lot easier to come to a few sober--if not necessarily popular--assessments of what really happened over the past year and a half. Here, then, are the Key Grip's assortment of the ten biggest misunderstandings, misapprehensions, misinterpretations, and outright misses of the 2008 Presidential election cycle. If I've done my job, at least one of these will make you mad; that is, after all, what I do best.

10. It was John McCain's money disadvantage that sank him in close states. The shame of this one is that it sounds the death-knell for public financing of election campaigns, but the truth of the matter is significantly more complicated and has a great deal more to do with McCain's inability to take the ground war seriously. The intrepid young (?) journalists at fivethirtyeight.com spent a significant amount of time and personal treasure criss-crossing the country in the final four months of the campaign, and in stop after stop--battleground after battleground--they found Obama field offices in the least likely of places, bursting at the seams and open well after dinner, while the McCain field operation in the same places was either empty of volunteers or entirely non-existent.

McCain lost Indiana by a hair's breadth and Nevada by an eye-popping twelve points, and both of those results were largely attributable to the massive turnout advantage brought to bear on the situation by Team Blue. If recent election cycles have proven anything, you can't win toss-up states without a solid ground operation, and the McCain people (like the Clinton people before them) seemed pathologically incapable of taking the Obama organization seriously enough to answer it--despite the fact that most of the hardest work could've been carried out by volunteers.

9. A Republican couldn't possibly win in 2008. This country has a long and storied history of holding its nose and electing people that it either doesn't want, or who come from a party that it doesn't want. The most recent example is George H. W. Bush in 1988 -- whom absolutely nobody in this country was thrilled to have as our forty-first President but who, owing to the swift and precipitous collapse of the Dukakis campaign, found himself backing into the top job on account of being the last man standing. The better example, though somewhat less modern, is the time-worn story of Harry Truman (a man whose disapproval ratings were for a time even higher than Nixon's were in August of '74) coming from nowhere to beat Thomas Dewey for a full term in the Oval Office in November of 1948. To suggest that, post Bush, post Katrina, post Iraq, there was no way any Republican could've carried 270 votes is to ignore whole swathes of America's singularly peculiar political history. McCain--or possibly someone else--most assuredly could have won.

8. Mr. Obama's agenda will prove difficult to secure in such a center-right country. America is not a center-right country. What America is, rather, is a country that wants a Head of State as much as or more than it wants a Head of Government--and thus it routinely elects people who talk in short sentences, press the same hot-buttons all day, and aren't quite up to the messy job of governance (Reagan, Bush I, Bush II) if those people can also manage to run an entire campaign without looking weak, indecisive, palpably dishonest, or unable to hit big-league pitching (Dukakis, Kerry, Gore, McGovern). The fact that most of the people who've passed this metric in recent times have been Republicans is a semi-accident of the Republican party's far deeper stable of individuals willing to be stupid about governance in favor of a carefully crafted leadership image. When Democrats advance people who are in fact capable of looking the part of a strong leader, it doesn't even matter if they are Catholic, a philanderer, talk with a funny Massachusetts accent, and their father was a war profiteer with borderline antisemitic German sympathies and contacts.

7. Barack Obama was inevitable. This is partly a reprise of number 9, above, but the specific question of Mr. Obama's supposed cult of personality bears an independent thought or two, precisely because it so willfully disregards the facts surrounding his ascendancy. In early 2004, Mr. Obama was, at best, the second-most popular candidate in the Illinois Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. Then the Democratic frontrunner, Blair Hull, was forced to withdraw when he became embroiled in a domestic abuse scandal and Obama raced in to fill the vacuum. Obama's presumptive opponent in the general election for the seat, Jack Ryan, was also forced to withdraw after damaging information about his child custody battle with an ex-wife in California was released to the press. With no one else to run, the Illinois Republican party turned to Alan Keyes, a man so extremist in his conservatism that he no longer even considers himself a member of the Republican party because it's--wait for this one--too moderate.

With his inevitable trouncing of Keyes (and the stirring keynote address he'd given at that summer's Democratic National Convention), Obama became a national figure overnight and shortly thereafter he began to organize himself toward a run for the Presidency. But fate had one more blessing to bestow on the supposedly methodical-genius Obama, and this particular blessing would come from the least likely of sources: The Republican-controlled state legislatures of Michigan and Florida, both of whom ignored national agreements to schedule their primaries after the "first four" of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. Instead those two delegate-rich states scheduled their primaries "too early," and in consequence were (temporarily) disenfranchised by the Democratic Party.

Had these two states held primaries on Super Tuesday, the President-elect wouldn't necessarily be Hillary Clinton right now, but it certainly wouldn't have been Barack Obama, because Clinton would've clobbered him so forcefully in the Super Tuesday primaries that he'd never have been able to recover. Take nothing away from David Plouffe's brilliant general election campaign, please, but the cold hard fact is that it took an unusual haul of artfully timed serendipity just to get Mr. Obama into that position in the first place.

Moreover, on the day the Lehman failure precipitated the first big crash on Wall Street (and John McCain uttered his now infamous gaffe about the fundamentals of our economy being strong), Mr. Obama wasn't ahead by six or eight points, he was trailing by three. Much of that was convention bounce, but still: The notion that Obama and his people deserve the credit, the whole credit, and nothing but the credit for their victory two weeks ago is about as far from the reality of the election we've just had as anything I've yet heard. Would Mr. Obama still have won without this enormous assist from the Citigroups and Lehmans of the world? Perhaps. But it certainly wouldn't have been a 365-electoral-vote wave, the way it was.

6. Obama's decision to pick Joe Biden was designed to bolster his foreign policy credential. Rightly or otherwise, Barack Obama and his campaign never much worried about the prospect of a foreign policy debate in the general election campaign. If the Republicans had tried to turn this into another referendum on security, Mr. Obama (as the fall cycle has proven) was capable of pivoting the discussion to his advantage in a variety of ways, without the help of Joe Biden.

This myth is particularly frustrating to me because it's such an insult to Joe Biden: The idea that Obama would never have "risked" picking such a rambunctious and talkity partner if his own weak resume on foreign policy hadn't forced his hand, completely misses the point of the Joe Biden selection. Biden is middle-class through and through, and just the sort of public figure against whom charges of Massachusetts elitism were just never going to stick. He raised Obama's stature not so much with foreign policy voters (is there any such thing?) as with Catholics, working-class voters in Ohio, the Jewish vote in Florida, and anybody who worried that an Obama Administration would be distant and aloof. Say what you will about Joe Biden, he's not distant and aloof.

5. John McCain's biggest mistake was choosing Sarah Palin. This one is actually half-right: It was a huge mistake to pick Sarah Palin, and this very column said so at the time. With the combination of her youth, inexperience, and manifest unreadiness, Palin's selection to be McCain's running-mate opened the door to renewed consideration of McCain's age, judgment and temperament. But as poor a choice as she was--and in the end she certainly damaged her benefactor more than she helped--the question that such analysis begs is, who else? Mr. McCain's very strength as a candidate, his very appeal in the first place, was that he could pitch himself as the country's premier independent: a politician without a brand. It's a marketing strategy that makes for great theater (even when it's mostly a bald-faced lie), but it does raise some serious problems when it comes to picking someone to balance the ticket.

Had McCain chosen, say, Joe Lieberman, then the evangelical right--without whom McCain couldn't possibly prevail--would've stayed home. Had McCain chosen one of his prominent opponents in the primary campaign (say, Mitt Romney), the evangelical right would've revolted against that choice, too, with the added drawback that Mr. McCain himself didn't like any of his prominent opponents in the primary campaign. Had he picked a candidate who was suitable to the evangelical right and also not Sarah Palin (say, Haley Barbour), he would've alienated the swing voters in the middle even faster than Palin herself ultimately did. What Mr. McCain needed was a devout culture warrior, pro-life to the extreme, who liked to hunt and fish and generally kill other living things while talking about being pro-life, and yet who still carried at least the longshot prospect of consolidating his claim on the persuadable independents-- especially women. In 2008, there was exactly one person who came even close to fitting that description, and he picked her.

4. The PUMAs were McCain's best path to victory. File this one as a counterpoint to (5), perhaps, but the idea that there were legions of disaffected Hillary voters out there, prepared to cross over and vote McCain, was even at the time so fanciful as to seem downright comic. PUMAs were never going to cross over in force and vote for McCain, and there's more than one pretty good reason why.

To begin with there is the small problem that a great many of those supposed PUMAs were actually Republicans who'd been recruited by the hate-wing radio crowd to pretend they were Hillary supporters, in the hope of sowing dissension in the Democratic party. The more these people did exactly what Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter were telling them to, by logging in to comment fields in the blogosphere and droning on and on about how pissed they were that Hillary was getting such a raw deal, the harder it became for the senior McCain campaign staff to discern that they were, in point of fact, liars from within their own party who never had any intention of voting for Hillary in the first place. If there is one great untold story left among the debris of the losing side in this great contest, it is the as-yet unspoken admission that the campaign literally head-faked itself on this question, picking a woman to appeal to a constituency that they themselves had conjured out of nothing.

Add to this the small problem that there wasn't a Democrat left on Planet Earth who was prepared to commit the same sort of ritual seppuku in the voting booth that had denied a clean win to Al Gore in Florida back in 2000. Mr. Bush saw to that. By the time of the Lehman meltdown, the Democratic party was as united behind its own brand as it has been in my lifetime by a margin too wide to measure, and no woman on earth would have made any difference in partisan-base support for the Democratic ticket--not even Hillary Clinton herself.

3. Defeating Barack Obama would've resulted only from making him look scary and different. The Lee Atwater / Karl Rove / Steve Schmidt playbook is to convince persuadable voters that the guy they wish they could vote for is unacceptable on sweeping character grounds, then move in for the kill on a specific question of policy. You show your opponent riding in a tank, and then you follow that up with the Willie Horton ad. You stand passive while a 527 accuses him of lying about his purple hearts, and then you hit him on his right flank over his voting record about Iraq. This technique is referred to as "stripping the bark off" the opposition, but the most important aspect of it is the timing of the two approaches: You can't call someone a tank-riding, unpatriotic, weak-kneed liberal if you've already endeavored to engage him on policy grounds, and you certainly can't do it if the general public has already gotten to know the other guy and come to respect him.

It's no accident that the McCain candidacy enjoyed its strongest polling during the weeks immediately following the Paris Hilton ad--the tactic was pure Atwater and it worked. Many people were still making up their minds about Barack Obama, and here was a concise, not entirely groundless, almost funny TV commercial to assist in making the final judgment on character.

The problem wasn't so much with the ad itself (though of course anyone reading these words would rather live in a country where such tactics didn't work), as with the fact that the attack was leveled immediately prior to the conventions. Mr. Obama neutralized the effects of that commercial by winning back the persuadable character voters at his own convention, after which news of Mr. McCain's choice of running-mate had the unintended effect of blotting out any consideration of anyone else's suitability for high office for the weeks afterward. By the time Sarah Palin herself was standing on an airport runway before a microphone, saying "The American people have a right to know who the real Barack Obama is," the American people already felt they knew who the real Barack Obama is--he had passed the "living-room test" and become someone we were used to thinking of as one of our own. In consequence, instead of asking the question Ms. Palin wanted us to ask, we turned their attentions to the question of just who this interloping stranger was, leveling such nasty innuendo.

2. The Obama campaign won by widening the playing field. Again, this is certainly at least half-true: You weren't going to win an election for President in 2008 by defending all the states that John Kerry had won, and not winning any others. But just below the surface of this inescapable reality lies a Machiavellian bait-and-switch so deft and so brilliant that I find it personally frustrating to have seen so little written about it: Barack Obama and Joe Biden never seriously contested the states in which the Democratic party had always been believed to make or break its fortunes every four years. From Arkansas to West Virginia, along a roughly arrow-shaped swathe of the country on the south side of the Ohio river basin, Messrs. Obama and Biden never spent serious ad money, never made serious campaign appearances, never hedged their electoral bets, and in consequence never stood a chance.

The brilliance of this wasn't in the money that it saved--heaven knows there was plenty of money--but in the agenda that it allowed them to ignore. Democrats and independents in Arkansas and Louisiana and Tennessee and Kentucky and West Virginia had for a generation been thought of as the ideological key to victory for Team Blue (think of a certain Governor from Arkansas or, more recently, a certain first-term senator from North Carolina).

By attempting to build a coalition around the voters in these states, the Democratic party consistently presented itself as a "donkey designed by committee," with no clear sense of what its priorities were or how best to respond to the venomous attacks that were being launched from within its own power band. By running on a platform that carried broad appeal in other parts of the country--one might even say, a platform that carried broad appeal only in other parts of the country--the Democratic ticket of 2008 accomplished something that the Democratic tickets of 1988 and 2000 and 2004 could not: They cabined-off the influence of the upland South. Make no mistake, it was a brilliant campaign on so many levels as to leave them too numerous to count here, but a fifty-state strategy it manifestly was not.

1. Elections are won and lost using time-tested formulas. Here at last we come to what I believe is the core lesson from this campaign season: Successful election campaigns aren't one-size-fits-all. In 2004 if you were a Republican who wanted a (second?) term as President, you ran a security-conscious, character-assassinating, slash-and-burn election campaign designed to paint your opponent as a mealy-mouthed fumbler who can't be trusted to stick to his word in a pinch, and you won. In 2008, you try the same set of tactics, orchestrated by many of the same senior campaign staff, and you lose.

Now, on one level this observation is a tautology. People realize that each election presents both candidates with a different set of challenges and a different set of opportunities. (Imagine a Bush v. Gore election in the middle of the sort of financial crisis we've just had, and you've pretty well proved this point to yourself on a sample of one.) But electoral strategies also succeed or fail owing in large measure to the personality of the candidate him- or herself, too--and this would seem to be far less obvious to at least the people who were running John McCain's campaign, if not Hillary Clinton's.

Mrs. Clinton, lest we forget, ran the bulk of her primary campaign on the platform that Mr. Obama couldn't grasp the bitter realities of a permanent Democratic minority on the electoral map-- offering herself as the only candidate who knew to play for John Kerry's 252 plus one or the other of Ohio and Florida. This strategy would've served Clinton better than it served Kerry, for sure, but it also would have freed McCain from the majority of the downside consequences of his funding disadvantage. The 527's would've descended on Ohio and Florida with a gusto that makes the Swift Boat campaign look vague and indecisive by comparison, after which Clinton would've had a very difficult time defining herself in the eyes of the blue-collar Ohio independents as anything other than the gal with her fingerprints all over the Whitewater billing records.

Meanwhile, the same John McCain who once decried the polarizing influence of the evangelical opinion leaders in his own party could be heard approving television commercials in which Barack Obama was accused of trying to teach sex education to kindergarteners and fighting to prevent post-natal care for the surviving babies of botched abortions. Not only did these attacks ring hollow with an electorate that had already come to know and respect Obama, but the backlash of such a character reversal redounded mercilessly to McCain's own detriment. McCain -- perceived until this election as a principled centrist who would tell it like it is, regardless of hiw it was -- had been coached by Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis into campaigning like just another Bush, at the one time in history when presenting one's self as just another Bush would prove singularly devastating for one's electoral fortunes.

Much will be written and said about this election for years to come. It may, indeed, become the sort of watershed that people have already suggested, thus heaping even more expectation onto the shoulders of a certain skinny kid from Chicago. But out of the shadows of all these crazy and surprisingly durable myths about how the race was run and why it turned out the way it did, the one inescapable truth that has already crystallized is that John McCain lost this thing every bit as much as Barack Obama won it. ...And that McCain lost it, in the end, when he lost himself.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...