Tag Archives: 2012 American presidential election

Obama’s not-so-secret weapon

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Bill Clinton is fully in his element as the star of the show:

If there has been one enduring lesson from his career, it is that the Big Dog is resilient. He can be disgraced, impeached, defeated — but he comes back. The full spectacle of this has been on riveting, if raspy, display in the closing days of the presidential campaign.

Mr. Clinton, 66, has jumped into a hopscotch of battleground states in what — depending on his wife’s future plans — may or may not be his last campaign tour as a Super Surrogate. He is scheduled to appear, if not be heard, at four stops across Pennsylvania on Monday.

He also includes a fair amount in his speeches about Bill Clinton: his enthusiasm (higher than four years ago), his legacy (“I am the only living former president that ever gave you a budget surplus”) and, yes, his wife, the mention of whom brings big applause and the occasional “We love you, Hillary!” cry from the crowd.

Whoever wins Tuesday, the 2012 campaign has solidified (or restored) Mr. Clinton’s status as the hardest-working man in a game he loves and plays like no one else. “The master, Bill Clinton,” Mr. Obama called him on Saturday, hailing his predecessor as “a great president and a great friend.”

Unsaid, at least here, is that Mr. Clinton has also been a salvation to Mr. Obama. He gave what was widely considered the best speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., rocking a strong endorsement of the president while arguably conveying the re-election rationale better than Mr. Obama or his campaign has.

A sign of the end times?

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From the Boston Globe:

Pop star Katy Perry is sporting a skin-tight minidress with President Barack Obama’s campaign slogan ‘‘Forward’’ emblazoned across it at the president’s rally in Milwaukee.

Perry came on stage at Saturday’s event initially wearing a red, white and blue dress and holding a microphone shaped like the Statue of Liberty’s torch.

But after her first song, a cover of Al Green’s soul hit ‘‘Let’s Stay Together,’’ she tossed aside the dress to reveal the bright blue minidress.

Obama’s slogan ‘‘Forward’’ is also Wisconsin’s state motto.

Anticipating the election fallout

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Andrew Sullivan wonders if the delusional elements on the American right will come to their collective senses post-Tuesday:

Yesterday, I tried not to think about the election for a day. The off-grid-because-no-grid experience helped me see there was little use at this point in obsessing about the tiniest of details that will be washed away by whatever reality flushes out on Tuesday or thereafter.

But that flush will be instructive. The narrative in the GOP blogosphere is of imminent triumph, even landslide. All the independents are surging toward Romney, the swing states are trending Romney, and the total failure of Obama’s four years is so obvious you have to be a liar to believe that deficits have slightly declined on his watch, despite a collapse in revenues caused by the Great Recession. And so state after state is falling to Romney even as I type. Hinderaker – who still believes that George W Bush was a great president – sees one outlier poll in Pennsylvania as something that will be “sending chills down David Axelrod’s spine”. It’s one poll – and the only one that doesn’t give Obama a clear edge. The poll of polls puts Pennsylvania as 50 percent Obama, 45 percent Romney, and it’s been very stable. Minnesota? That’s also got Hinderaker atwitter: he thinks both Minnesota and Pennsylvania could both “very possibly end up in the red column.” All the polling suggests otherwise – but I guess they’re all rigged.

It’s not so much that the polls can’t be wrong — they can — but that the narrative Sullivan references above is so at odds with the overwhelming statistical consensus that, barring a very big surprise on Tuesday, truth will have to be reckoned with on the conservative end of our political spectrum. And it’ll be a long time in coming.

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Watching the polls

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Or more specifically, Nate Silver. The New York Times‘ resident stats wizard now has Barack Obama at an 85.1% chance of winning the election on Tuesday:

There are not really any recent precedents in which a candidate has led by something like 49 percent to 46 percent in the final polling average, as Mr. Obama does now in Ohio, and has wound up losing the state. That does not mean such misses cannot or will not occur: there have only been a few elections when we have had as much state polling data as we do now, which is why the model allows for the possibility of a 1980-type error based on how the national polls performed that year.

But the reasonably high level of confidence that the model expresses in Mr. Obama’s chances of winning Ohio and other states reflects the historical reality that the polling average normally does pretty well.

That brings us to Pennsylvania — where the forecast model puts Mr. Obama’s chances at better than 95 percent.

One poll of Pennsylvania on Saturday, from Susquehanna Polling and Research, showed a different result, with the two candidates tied at 47 percent. But in context, this is not such a great poll for Mr. Romney.

The polling firm has had a very strong Republican lean this cycle — about five percentage points relative to the consensus, a much larger lean than firms like Rasmussen Reports and Public Policy Polling that are often criticized for having partisan results. Susquehanna is the only pollster to have shown Mr. Romney ahead in Pennsylvania at any point in the race, as they did on one occasion in February and another in October (Mr. Romney led by four points in their previous poll of the state). Perhaps they will be proven right, but it is usually a bad bet to bank on the one poll rather than the many.

Still, Mr. Romney’s campaign is making a late play for Pennsylvania with advertising dollars and a visit there on Sunday.

That is probably a reasonable strategy, even though Mr. Romney’s chances of pulling out a victory in Pennsylvania are slim. What makes it reasonable is that Mr. Romney’s alternative paths to an Electoral College victory are not looking all that much stronger.

An unconventional endorsement, and an eye-opening one

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Today, Michael Bloomberg sprung a November surprise with his “endorsement” of Barack Obama. But it wasn’t exactly…wholehearted. Here’s a segment:

In 2008, Obama ran as a pragmatic problem-solver and consensus-builder. But as president, he devoted little time and effort to developing and sustaining a coalition of centrists, which doomed hope for any real progress on illegal guns, immigration, tax reform, job creation and deficit reduction. And rather than uniting the country around a message of shared sacrifice, he engaged in partisan attacks and has embraced a divisive populist agenda focused more on redistributing income than creating it.

Hm. But that still wasn’t as much of an eye-opener as this one by Likud-maniac Alan Dershowitz:

With regards to Iran, which poses the most immediate threat to the security of the United States and its allies, most especially Israel, the policy of the Obama administration is crystal clear: It has taken containment off the table and kept the military option on the table. Everyone hopes that the military option will not have to be employed, since it would entail considerable loss of life, especially among Israeli civilians who would be targeted by Hezbollah rockets fired in retaliation against any attack on Iran.

But the best way to avoid the need for military action is for the Iranian mullahs to believe that the United States will never allow them to develop nuclear weapons. If they believe that reality then the pain of the sanctions will pressure them to give up their nuclear ambitions. President Obama has clearly stated that he is not bluffing when he says that his administration will never allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons. A secondterm president generally has more credibility than a firstterm president when it comes to threatening military action.

The Obama administration has strongly supported Israel’s security by helping to construct the Iron Dome anti-rocket system, by backing Israel’s responses to rocket attacks from Gaza and by coordinating closely with its military.

When it comes to reenergizing the moribund peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, Romney has said that he would do nothing other than kick the can down the road.

President Obama, on the other hand, would almost certainly try to bring the parties together to achieve a two-state solution that guaranteed Israel’s security while allowing the Palestinians to govern themselves.

So much for Obama throwing Israel “under the bus.”

Nate Silver vs. the Mittmentum Mountaineers

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As Election Day approaches and the nation continues to whip itself into a collective frenzy, there sometimes seems to be only one guy in all of our national media who hasn’t succumbed to the wild swing of emotions that has captured everyone else.

Nate Silver, of the New York Times‘ FiveThirtyEight blog, has been posting daily with updates from swing-state polls. And even while most of the media have gleefully jumped aboard the “momentum is shifting to Mitt Romney” train, Silver has calmly continued to insist on using real data, instead of relying on phantasmic predilections of victory based on rally turnouts in random Ohio towns. This latter course is essentially what national campaign reporters, always desperate for a more sensational story, have been doing, and it’s quite possible that the collective content of their coverage actually will help make the race closer. But if that happens, it will be due, ironically enough, to their own misreading (or woeful ignorance) of existing polls, not because they were right in the first place.

According to Silver, as of yesterday Barack Obama was leading in Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, was leading in Florida and North Carolina. If the races end up exactly that way in the end (see interactive map here), Obama will win with 303 electoral votes to Mitt Romney’s 235, easily surpassing the requisite 270 to win reelection. In fact, Obama could even lose the three additional states in which Nate Silver’s model gives him the smallest leads: Colorado (58% probability of winning), Virginia (60%), and New Hampshire (70%). (Remember, these figures represent the likelihood that Obama will win these states, not the percentage he’s receiving in head-to-head polls. Example: Obama is expected to win 58% of the actual vote in Massachusetts, but Silver estimates his probability of winning the state at 100% because there is virtually no possibility that the polls will shift significantly enough before the election to cause him to lose there.) In other words, even if Romney took those three states — Colorado, Virginia, and New Hampshire — as well as Florida and North Carolina, the final electoral vote count would nevertheless give 277 to Obama and 261 to Romney, thereby granting the president a second term. The media may be intent on creating a wild photo-finish, but Silver’s analysis suggests Obama’s still in a fairly good spot.

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Mittmentum’s got it backwards

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Brendan Nyhan at the Columbia Journalism Review gets it right where most of the presidential campaign reporters have not:

The notion that Romney still had “momentum” weeks after his early October gains in the polls has now been debunkedbynumerouscommentatorsandacademics. And while that pushback is increasingly reflected in campaign-trail accounts, it is worth taking a closer look at why coverage of Romney’s “momentum” went wrong and what it tells us about the weaknesses of campaign journalism.

First, few reporters are knowledgeable about statistics or quantitative analysis. It is admittedly difficult to parse all the polls that are released at the national and state levels, but that’s why reporters should draw on the high-quality polling aggregation models being updated daily by Stanford’s Simon Jackman at HuffPost Pollster and Emory’s Drew Linzer at Votamatic. Relying on the best polling averages is especially important given the human tendency to find patterns consistent with our expectations, which may lead journalists to pay attention to—and cover—those survey results that are consistent with the Romney “momentum” narrative.

Likewise, journalists may be misled by the analogy to momentum during primary campaigns. As we saw during the Republican nomination contest, preferences among candidates can swing dramatically as voters seek to avoid wasting their vote by shifting to the candidate who seems most competitive. But the logic of strategic voting is not relevant to general elections that are dominated by the two major parties. In these cases, “momentum” is a largely meaningless term. Events like conventions and debates can cause brief movements in the polls, but the public’s preferences tend to stabilize relatively quickly after such shifts, which may even fade over time rather than growing in the sense that “momentum” implies.

A third factor is the role of incentives. The New Republic’s Alec MacGillis antagonizedseveral of his colleagues in the political press with a column attributing what he considered the exaggerated coverage of Romney’s “trajectory” (i.e., momentum) to the media’s desire for a compelling narrative. The media bias debate has taught us that arguments over journalists’ conscious intentions are unproductive, but professional and commercial incentives do exist for journalists to emphasize the drama of a race. By whatever conscious or unconscious means, these may increase journalists’ susceptibility to a “momentum” narrative despite its tenuous basis in fact.

Finally, there’s the way that journalists cover the horse race. Traditionally, campaign reporters attend campaign events and seek to infer which campaign is winning, which is losing, and why. (Dickerson’s case that “Romney is peaking at the right time,” which acknowledges the tie in the polls, is based on enthusiastic crowds at his rallies.) Even though Obama remains in a stronger position in the Electoral College, his post-Oct. 3 strategy looks to journalists like the approach of a losing campaign, whereas Romney and his campaign aides are not just trying to convince reporters that they are surging but acting like it. When these campaign optics seem not to line up with the publicly available numbers, journalists too often discount the data, assuming that the campaigns must know something from their private polling that the media doesn’t.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the alert.

In a shocker, the New York Times shows its hand: Obama for President

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This endorsement couldn’t be less surprising:

Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, has gotten this far with a guile that allows him to say whatever he thinks an audience wants to hear. But he has tied himself to the ultraconservative forces that control the Republican Party and embraced their policies, including reckless budget cuts and 30-year-old, discredited trickle-down ideas. Voters may still be confused about Mr. Romney’s true identity, but they know the Republican Party, and a Romney administration would reflect its agenda. Mr. Romney’s choice of Representative Paul Ryan as his running mate says volumes about that.

We have criticized individual policy choices that Mr. Obama has made over the last four years, and have been impatient with his unwillingness to throw himself into the political fight. But he has shaken off the hesitancy that cost him the first debate, and he approaches the election clearly ready for the partisan battles that would follow his victory.

We are confident he would challenge the Republicans in the “fiscal cliff” battle even if it meant calling their bluff, letting the Bush tax cuts expire and forcing them to confront the budget sequester they created. Electing Mr. Romney would eliminate any hope of deficit reduction that included increased revenues.

In the poisonous atmosphere of this campaign, it may be easy to overlook Mr. Obama’s many important achievements, including carrying out the economic stimulus, saving the auto industry, improving fuel efficiency standards, and making two very fine Supreme Court appointments.

An election nightmare approacheth?

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John Heilemann thinks there’s a decent chance we may be headed for some major turbulence after November 6th. He presents four possible situations in which the closing of the polls does not end the election. His fourth (and one that has been gaining traction, mostly by media types who seem to be secretly wishing it):

4. The Tie-Goes-to-the-Romney Scenario

Now we come to the most nightmarish possibility of all: Obama ekes out a popular-vote victory but he and Romney are deadlocked, 269-269, in terms of electoral votes. Sounds crazy, right? Yeah, of course, but all it would require is the following (entirely credible) chain of results: Romney wins the southern battleground trio and Ohio, Obama holds on to Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, and Wisconsin but loses in New Hampshire. What would happen then? The election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where the Constitution ordains that every state receive one vote as determined by the party makeup of its congressional delegation. Today, that would likely mean 32 Republican votes and 18 Democratic ones, a composition unlikely to change on November 6—and hence, voilà, President Romney.

To be crystalline, this would not be a nightmare because Romney would prevail. It would be a nightmare because he’d prevail in opposition to the popular vote and outside of the Electoral College—through an unprecedented process in which Idaho and Wyoming would have a weight equal to New York and California. For millions of Americans, and not just partisan extremists, it would call into question our entire system of selecting the dude in charge, and make the U.S. look like a superrich banana republic around the world. To be honest, though, it would only be barely worse than Scenarios 1, 2, and 3 in terms of rending the nation asunder. Which is why, on Election Night, you won’t find me rooting for either candidate but for clarity: a solid, sustainable victory for Obama or Romney in the popular and electoral votes—52-48, say, and north of 300 EVs to … whomever.

Which I know is probably a fantasy, but, hey, a boy can dream.

The most bizarre part of this possibility is the fact that Joe Biden would then be selected by the (almost certainly) Democratic-majority Senate to the vice presidency, creating a split executive branch. Even stranger still, unless I’m misreading the Twelfth Amendment, the appointment of both the president and the vice president must take place with a “quorum” of two-thirds of the states present and voting (but only a simple majority vote by those present is required for the election to become official). But if the state of the nation, following such a polarizing Election Day result, is truly as explosive as Heilemann fears, doesn’t that mean there would be a significant danger that the representatives of Democratic states would all refuse to show up en masse, thus just barely denying the likely 32 Republican states from establishing a quorum and, therefore, electing a president? What then?

The Obama I remember

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It’s the same one Andrew Sullivan remembers (in response to a Peggy Noonan column blaming the president for the rabid partisanship that characterizes Washington today):

Funny how the first group of non-pols that Obama sat down with were leading conservative writers, like Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer (the liberals came second); that he asked Rick Warren to give the invocation at his Inauguration; that his stimulus was a third tax cuts (the only big tax cuts Republicans have ever voted against in my memory); that his healthcare reform was not single-payer, but one modeled on Mitt Romney’s moderate version in Massachusetts; that he has given Israel more military and technological support than any previous president; that his foreign policy is now praised by his opponent; that he killed bin Laden; and gave a speech urging freedom in the Arab world in his first few months, and that popular democratic revolutions broke out in Iran, Egypt, Tunisia and Libya on his watch. Funny also how one of the first things Obama did was to extend the Bush tax cuts – such an obvious partisan move designed to shut Republican ideas out of his agenda…

More to the point, the set of actions I have outlined above could quite easily have been George W. Bush’s agenda (or David Cameron’s, if he were on the right of his own party). There was plenty of compromise by Obama from the beginning, both symbolically and substantively. But a Republican decision was made that, even in the worst recession since the 1930s (whose impact on unemployment was devastating) not a single Republican House vote would go for the stimulus. It shocked me at the time, coming so soon after such a big election. I was naive enough to think that an emergency action that prevented a second Great Depression was something the opposition party might have supported, after losing an election badly to a newly elected president in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. I naively believed that just as a group of Democrats had supported Ronald Reagan’s massive tax cut because they thought he had a mandate for one, a group of House Republicans might put country before party and give the man who ran on bipartisanship a chance.

Instead, they set out from Day One to destroy him, because they knew that if his moderation and modern cultural identity succeeded, their reactionary radicalism would be sidelined for good. And Rove’s method is always to see what your party’s own worst flaw is among the public and, with a straight face, accuse your opponent of it.

You know what we’re fighting in this election? That cumulative, snow-balling, post-modern, cynical faction of deceit and partisan amnesia. If we are to get past the Cold Civil War we are in, the defeat of the rigidly ideological and theiological GOP is vital.

Amen, brother. Obama’s greatest mistake was to harbor any illusions whatsoever that the Republican Party was even remotely interested in governing the country like a responsible group of elected representatives.