I tried to stay away from blogging about this election and for a long time -- up until the Republican National Convention in Tampa -- I succeeded. But as Sherman once said to Grant, "You could never stay home when armies are moving." And so there came a point in the cycle where I just couldn't help myself. I hope those of you who've subscribed and read these columns have found them interesting, if not always particularly connected with reality. (This is what I hope my friends think about me generally, if it comes to that.)
First, some housekeeping: I will once again be live-blogging the election returns as they come in this evening, though I don't think I'll be using the map gadget to do so since it stalls out my ability to update in anything like real-time. There will be many maps from which to choose, and all being orderly and well this evening, they will all look approximately the same from one moment to the next. That out of the way, let's consider together where things stand one last time, with our focus on a state that hasn't been getting a lot of street cred in the battle for tipping-point status, at least so far.
No matter how one feels about the competing narratives about the state of the race, it isn't being argued by any reasonably non-partisan pundit out there that the President doesn't at least have the polling momentum on his side in these last few days of the campaign. And that, it turns out, has presented a comparatively new and daunting obstacle to the prospects of Mr. Romney.
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Showing posts with label Romney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Romney. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Final Predictions, Part One
In my most recent post I observed that the state-level polling data seems to be lagging the actual condition of the race on the ground, and yesterday's and today's polling data has done nothing to disabuse me of that intuition. Survey USA has the President up in Colorado (without which Romney can't win), Marist has him up in Florida (without which Romney can't win), and PPP has him up in Ohio (without which Romney cannot win). With these new polls emphasizing the short shelf-life of any supposed insights, and allowing that the lid isn't exactly 'on' between now and Tuesday, it seems to me that the time is right to make a few predictions.
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Friday, November 2, 2012
Mitt Romney's Really, *Really* Bad Week
Seven days ago, the 2012 Presidential election was close -- to be sure closer than it should've been in the absence of the Denver debate -- with Barack Obama leading on the rail by a neck. He was up by about two points in Ohio and about three points in Nevada, with Iowa, Colorado and Virginia tied. Mr. Romney was narrowly ahead in Florida and North Carolina, but the dynamics of the race in these two places were suggesting to some pretty smart people (Nate Silver, among them) that things weren't really that close. Romney's path to electoral college victory was simple, if not enviable: Close the gap in Ohio, hold in North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, and Colorado. Doing so would have been an upset, but a mild one, mostly involving a gotcha pickup in the Buckeye state.
Seven days later the map isn't really all that different, or at least doesn't immediately *sound* all that different in laundry-list form like this: Mr. Romney is narrowly ahead in North Carolina and Colorado, with Florida and Virginia more-or-less tied, and Mr. Obama leading in Iowa and Nevada and Ohio. Why is it, then, that the state-of-the-race feels so completely different?
The easy answer is that the week Mr. Romney just had is one of the worst of his entire campaign -- and after London and 47%-gate, that's definitely saying something -- and the polls really haven't caught up yet. State-level polling is notoriously slow to respond to the changing realities on the ground, since polls have to be in the field over multiple days, then regressed, then scrutinized for math errors, then written-up, then published by the polling firm, and then re-published by political news sites, all before any of us get a chance to begin factoring them into our sense of where things stand. The data is often over a week old, and even some of that data will itself display a conspicuous lag, as individual respondents in the process of changing their mind will often exhibit more stubbornness about it than they really feel, just to avoid having to re-reverse themselves a day or two latter.
The slightly less easy answer, though, is that while the two lists of swing-state standings I've digested in the opening two paragraphs sound cosmetically similar, the new list actually describes an electoral map in positive *shambles* for Mr. Romney -- even before the effects of this past week can fully manifest there. The only way, then, to accurately report in real time on the question of just how much things have turned, is to begin with a recap of the seven days that Mr. Romney has just had. And oh my goodness, what a week it was.
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Seven days later the map isn't really all that different, or at least doesn't immediately *sound* all that different in laundry-list form like this: Mr. Romney is narrowly ahead in North Carolina and Colorado, with Florida and Virginia more-or-less tied, and Mr. Obama leading in Iowa and Nevada and Ohio. Why is it, then, that the state-of-the-race feels so completely different?
The easy answer is that the week Mr. Romney just had is one of the worst of his entire campaign -- and after London and 47%-gate, that's definitely saying something -- and the polls really haven't caught up yet. State-level polling is notoriously slow to respond to the changing realities on the ground, since polls have to be in the field over multiple days, then regressed, then scrutinized for math errors, then written-up, then published by the polling firm, and then re-published by political news sites, all before any of us get a chance to begin factoring them into our sense of where things stand. The data is often over a week old, and even some of that data will itself display a conspicuous lag, as individual respondents in the process of changing their mind will often exhibit more stubbornness about it than they really feel, just to avoid having to re-reverse themselves a day or two latter.
The slightly less easy answer, though, is that while the two lists of swing-state standings I've digested in the opening two paragraphs sound cosmetically similar, the new list actually describes an electoral map in positive *shambles* for Mr. Romney -- even before the effects of this past week can fully manifest there. The only way, then, to accurately report in real time on the question of just how much things have turned, is to begin with a recap of the seven days that Mr. Romney has just had. And oh my goodness, what a week it was.
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Tuesday, October 30, 2012
The Sandy Surprise
In a country as big and messy as this one, nothing is to be as consistently expected in Presidential elections, as the unexpected. In 2008 it was the Lehmann meltdown which cost McCain any chance of winning. In 2004 it was the final Osama Bin Laden tape which, together with the Ohio Secretary of State's office, probably cost John Kerry the election. In 2000 it was... well, we all know what it was in 2000, now, don't we.
This year's "October Surprise" is of course a massive storm which has slammed into the northeastern United States just a week before election day -- with consequences ranging from major flooding in New York City, to power outages in eastern Ohio, to all but comically deep accumulations of snow in the middle- and lower Appalachian mountains. This is nothing to wax idle-pundit about, either: People have lost their lives in this storm and will continue to do so for several days -- though the impression that is slowly forming in this commentator's mind is that the chances for a Katrina-sized death toll (or corresponding embarrassment for the White House) are already effectively nil.
Allowing that the situation transcends our usual partisan gamesmanship, it is unavoidable human nature to wonder in print just exactly what effect the storm will have on the trajectory of the Presidential horse race -- with outlets ranging from the sublime to the sublimely ridiculous having already weighed in. The broad consensus seems to be that the storm cannot possibly help the President, given the suppressive effect it is sure to have on the turnout of poor and minority voters in such crucial states as Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. I hope you will therefore pardon me for taking a few paragraphs to weigh in with the contrary viewpoint that the storm can no longer harm the President's chances of reelection and will almost certainly help them instead, both directly and by hurting the candidacy of Mr. Romney.
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This year's "October Surprise" is of course a massive storm which has slammed into the northeastern United States just a week before election day -- with consequences ranging from major flooding in New York City, to power outages in eastern Ohio, to all but comically deep accumulations of snow in the middle- and lower Appalachian mountains. This is nothing to wax idle-pundit about, either: People have lost their lives in this storm and will continue to do so for several days -- though the impression that is slowly forming in this commentator's mind is that the chances for a Katrina-sized death toll (or corresponding embarrassment for the White House) are already effectively nil.
Allowing that the situation transcends our usual partisan gamesmanship, it is unavoidable human nature to wonder in print just exactly what effect the storm will have on the trajectory of the Presidential horse race -- with outlets ranging from the sublime to the sublimely ridiculous having already weighed in. The broad consensus seems to be that the storm cannot possibly help the President, given the suppressive effect it is sure to have on the turnout of poor and minority voters in such crucial states as Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. I hope you will therefore pardon me for taking a few paragraphs to weigh in with the contrary viewpoint that the storm can no longer harm the President's chances of reelection and will almost certainly help them instead, both directly and by hurting the candidacy of Mr. Romney.
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Monday, April 12, 2010
2010 Is Not 1994. Unless it Is.
There's lots of talk these days about some early indications of a coming bloodbath for the Democratic Party in the 2010 midterm elections, and a lot of that talk--somewhat understandably--involves parallels to 1994, when the party lost control of both houses of congress in the aftermath of a contentious battle to reform the health care system in this country. Just as many things are different this time, however: from the dearth of Democratic retirements (at least so far), to the absence of a Somalia-like misstep by the President on the foreign-policy side (at least so far), to the fact of his election by a popular majority of the country--a counter example to what most people don't remember was the original cassus belli the extreme right-wing brought to their hatred of Bill Clinton: In a plurality-take-all system at the state level, he'd comfortably amassed 270+ electoral votes while over six in every ten people were industriously voting for someone else. Not this time.
Most of all, there is the glaring difference that the Democrats this time actually *passed* their health insurance reform effort, and (somewhat less importantly when it comes to electoral strategies, I'm afraid) the bill they passed is a far more politically conservative effort than the one they failed to pass in '94, anyway. Indeed the gist of the thing--increased access to care through the establishment of exchanges, individual mandates, and regulation of the industry's capacity to deny coverage--were also the main talking-points of the counter-proposal to Clintoncare that had been authored by The Heritage Foundation in '93. Having just passed a Heritage Foundation look-alike, then, it would seem unlikely that the Democratic Party could be routed in November of '10 for dragging the country too far to the left. The parallels to '94, as I've been arguing in various political aggregator fora for weeks, simply aren't there. The Democrats should be a in a far, far stronger position than they were in April of 1994. But here's the thing: Because of these differences, they should also be in a far stronger position than they are, too.
There's no point raging at the dying of any light, of course, and raging against one that has been raged against since before I was born by everyone and Will Rogers, is doubly un-productive. But the position in which the Democrats now find themselves is really nothing short of stupefying. Everywhere I look, in fact, I cannot help but feel the uneasy sense that the Democrats are in the process of once again snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The stimulus bill passed last spring (you remember, the one that was derided as socialist and profligate, yet consisted of over 50% tax cuts?) has begun to work after precisely the sort of time-lag predicted by professional economists, and the methodology behind it has been (once again) validated as a matter of settled paradigmatic fact, negating the willfully counterfactual drivel that has tumbled from the mouths of the Palinites regarding the supposedly ineffectual policies of the New Deal. That bill passed without a single a Republican vote, and now that they've spent a year poking holes in it on fallacious grounds as it continued to quietly do its work (while they dragged the health-care debate out to its maximum duration through Senate filibuster), the Republicans are brazenly now pivoting to a charge that the President has frittered-away time on a contentious health insurance fight instead of--get this!--concentrating on the economy.
The health insurance reform bill itself, meanwhile, does none of the things that were suggested it was going to do by the same people who called it socialist as well. And yet those people keep banging away about it as if they lived in a parallel universe. I recently found myself in a two-weeks-long flame war on Facebook with a friend-of-a-friend who insisted, over and over again, that the parallel to the '93 Heritage Foundation proposal was a delusional fantasy on my part, dismissing link after link as beneath his time to either read or counter-cite, on the basis of this bill's supposedly self-evident inconsistency with the guiding principles over at Heritage. And finally, when I found the link that truly settled the matter, he disappeared. There was no "well, it's not as similar as you make it out to be, Dave," no mealy-mouthed grumblings about how the circumstances were the difference, no faint about how Heritage was hoping their own bill wouldn't pass, or some-such: He just flat-out disappeared. There simply was no comeback. The bill we just got done passing, is, not, a socialist, takeover, of, the, health, care, system. Period. And still, in other venues, they keep at it.
All of this should make for some pretty strong Democratic bargaining leverage with the American people. Nobody likes it when a political movement turns shrill, and people especially don't like it when that negativism is inconsistent with the reality on the ground. Just ask Newt Gingerich, who predicted a sixty-seat Republican majority in the House after the Monica Lewinsky matter, and whose bitter slash-and-burn strategy about a matter that most people honestly didn't care about one way or the other very nearly lost the Republicans their control of the body, and did eventually cost him the Speakership.
So why isn't this 1998 all over again, instead of continuing--alarmingly--to poll like 1994? The equalizing factor is the same one it always is: While Democrats at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue have been making policy and presuming the self-evidence of the lies being told by the other side, what they haven't been doing nearly as good a job of, is MESSAGING.
Tell some of the most incendiary trolls in political news sites that the stimulus was over 50% tax-cuts, and they scream denials back at you... until you post a link that proves it, and then they abruptly vanish for days at a time, and come back wanting to talk about something else. Tell some blow-hard facebook nobody who's used to spitting-out Glenn Beck nonsense that the Heritage Foundation proposed something not unlike what we just passed, and he embarrasses himself insisting that it isn't true until you've blugeoned him with so many references that he finally reads one of them... and abruptly vanishes, too. But in order for this to happen, you have to actually do some of this telling.
The elected Democrats in Washington, it would seem, are in the process of instead making the same mistake they always make when they're in power. They assume that the absurdity of the things being said about them is its own counter-argument, and they don't respond aggressively enough. George McGovern spoke about it not too long ago. The '72 Nixon campaign was saying things about McGovern that were so outrageous that the Democrats feared the charge of "stooping to their level" by responding, and chose not to. As a result of which (with a little bit of help from Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, of course), they got clobbered.
And this, folks, this is the alarming parallel to both 1972 and 1994. There are far too many smart people on the left who are assuming that the passage of the main component of their legislative agenda, and the absence of a plague of locusts descening instantly aftwerward, will serve as a de facto response to the gibberish nonsense still being spewed out by the Republicans. And in this country, as Democrats should know only too well, there is no such thing as a de facto response to gibberish nonsense. If Democrats continue to make the same mistake now that the health insurance reform bill has passed, they're going to have huge swathes of the country going to the polls in November believing that it's a socialist takeover of health-care, even though it already isn't, and they're going to get clobbered by the same boring, lying liars who've done it so many times before.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Most of all, there is the glaring difference that the Democrats this time actually *passed* their health insurance reform effort, and (somewhat less importantly when it comes to electoral strategies, I'm afraid) the bill they passed is a far more politically conservative effort than the one they failed to pass in '94, anyway. Indeed the gist of the thing--increased access to care through the establishment of exchanges, individual mandates, and regulation of the industry's capacity to deny coverage--were also the main talking-points of the counter-proposal to Clintoncare that had been authored by The Heritage Foundation in '93. Having just passed a Heritage Foundation look-alike, then, it would seem unlikely that the Democratic Party could be routed in November of '10 for dragging the country too far to the left. The parallels to '94, as I've been arguing in various political aggregator fora for weeks, simply aren't there. The Democrats should be a in a far, far stronger position than they were in April of 1994. But here's the thing: Because of these differences, they should also be in a far stronger position than they are, too.
There's no point raging at the dying of any light, of course, and raging against one that has been raged against since before I was born by everyone and Will Rogers, is doubly un-productive. But the position in which the Democrats now find themselves is really nothing short of stupefying. Everywhere I look, in fact, I cannot help but feel the uneasy sense that the Democrats are in the process of once again snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The stimulus bill passed last spring (you remember, the one that was derided as socialist and profligate, yet consisted of over 50% tax cuts?) has begun to work after precisely the sort of time-lag predicted by professional economists, and the methodology behind it has been (once again) validated as a matter of settled paradigmatic fact, negating the willfully counterfactual drivel that has tumbled from the mouths of the Palinites regarding the supposedly ineffectual policies of the New Deal. That bill passed without a single a Republican vote, and now that they've spent a year poking holes in it on fallacious grounds as it continued to quietly do its work (while they dragged the health-care debate out to its maximum duration through Senate filibuster), the Republicans are brazenly now pivoting to a charge that the President has frittered-away time on a contentious health insurance fight instead of--get this!--concentrating on the economy.
The health insurance reform bill itself, meanwhile, does none of the things that were suggested it was going to do by the same people who called it socialist as well. And yet those people keep banging away about it as if they lived in a parallel universe. I recently found myself in a two-weeks-long flame war on Facebook with a friend-of-a-friend who insisted, over and over again, that the parallel to the '93 Heritage Foundation proposal was a delusional fantasy on my part, dismissing link after link as beneath his time to either read or counter-cite, on the basis of this bill's supposedly self-evident inconsistency with the guiding principles over at Heritage. And finally, when I found the link that truly settled the matter, he disappeared. There was no "well, it's not as similar as you make it out to be, Dave," no mealy-mouthed grumblings about how the circumstances were the difference, no faint about how Heritage was hoping their own bill wouldn't pass, or some-such: He just flat-out disappeared. There simply was no comeback. The bill we just got done passing, is, not, a socialist, takeover, of, the, health, care, system. Period. And still, in other venues, they keep at it.
All of this should make for some pretty strong Democratic bargaining leverage with the American people. Nobody likes it when a political movement turns shrill, and people especially don't like it when that negativism is inconsistent with the reality on the ground. Just ask Newt Gingerich, who predicted a sixty-seat Republican majority in the House after the Monica Lewinsky matter, and whose bitter slash-and-burn strategy about a matter that most people honestly didn't care about one way or the other very nearly lost the Republicans their control of the body, and did eventually cost him the Speakership.
So why isn't this 1998 all over again, instead of continuing--alarmingly--to poll like 1994? The equalizing factor is the same one it always is: While Democrats at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue have been making policy and presuming the self-evidence of the lies being told by the other side, what they haven't been doing nearly as good a job of, is MESSAGING.
Tell some of the most incendiary trolls in political news sites that the stimulus was over 50% tax-cuts, and they scream denials back at you... until you post a link that proves it, and then they abruptly vanish for days at a time, and come back wanting to talk about something else. Tell some blow-hard facebook nobody who's used to spitting-out Glenn Beck nonsense that the Heritage Foundation proposed something not unlike what we just passed, and he embarrasses himself insisting that it isn't true until you've blugeoned him with so many references that he finally reads one of them... and abruptly vanishes, too. But in order for this to happen, you have to actually do some of this telling.
The elected Democrats in Washington, it would seem, are in the process of instead making the same mistake they always make when they're in power. They assume that the absurdity of the things being said about them is its own counter-argument, and they don't respond aggressively enough. George McGovern spoke about it not too long ago. The '72 Nixon campaign was saying things about McGovern that were so outrageous that the Democrats feared the charge of "stooping to their level" by responding, and chose not to. As a result of which (with a little bit of help from Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, of course), they got clobbered.
And this, folks, this is the alarming parallel to both 1972 and 1994. There are far too many smart people on the left who are assuming that the passage of the main component of their legislative agenda, and the absence of a plague of locusts descening instantly aftwerward, will serve as a de facto response to the gibberish nonsense still being spewed out by the Republicans. And in this country, as Democrats should know only too well, there is no such thing as a de facto response to gibberish nonsense. If Democrats continue to make the same mistake now that the health insurance reform bill has passed, they're going to have huge swathes of the country going to the polls in November believing that it's a socialist takeover of health-care, even though it already isn't, and they're going to get clobbered by the same boring, lying liars who've done it so many times before.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
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