I agree with the OP. With the economy in the tank, this is the perfect opportunity to run with a true conservative. Instead they’re plopping for Mitt the Cameleon. But this is rational: modern conservatives really aren’t interested in weighing policy options, so much as posturing from the gut and whining. So the Mittster is win-win.
No it hasn’t. Mitt is favored to be nominated and the evangelicals are unlikely to pull it together to block him. The very most they might manage would be to get Huckabee into the VP slot, though I’d put my money on Marco Rubio. The debt can be rolled over indefinitely, until the moment that Roe v. Wade is overturned by the Supremes. But I suspect that won’t ever happen.
Huh? Reagan sure as heck was: he practically invented the the New Right. And Bush I sure knew how to pander: he flipped flopped from pro-choice to anti-abortion because he knew that it was necessary to vacuum up the rubes. And Bush II was billed as evangelically edgy because he mentioned Jesus in a presidential debate.
What I think is both humorous and interesting is that the Republican party kept pandering to the Tea Party Crazies and their “We don’t have to compromise, we can win and govern America on our principles!” philosophy pretty hard since the last election. They fucked over the entire government and a good portion of the country trying to stop Obama at every step on some half-baked scheme to take over the country and “save” it with their philosophy.
And yet the keynote darlings of that movement aren’t flying even in such limited market nigh on “fixed” caucuses and polls in their own damned party.
I think they’re waking up to the fact that those positions are not sweeping America, they’re not as popular as they convinced themselves they were, and they’re not going to carry them into the White House.
Um no. As I said Republicans have to pair with varying degrees of ignorant backwards people to win elections, that isn’t the same as actually nominating them. Reagan was not an evangelical Christian President by any means, have you ever read the man’s bio? He’s a freaking Hollywood actor.
Realistically his predecessor is probably the most genuinely religious President we’ve had in my lifetime, Democrat or Republican.
I don’t agree, but if you accept the premise that Obama is harming the country, then conservatives are justified in putting the goal of getting him out of office ahead of the goal of getting a pure conservative elected. They may have decided that while Romney isn’t the “best” candidate, he’s the one most likely to defeat Obama.
I see we’re speaking at cross-purposes, or maybe I just misunderstood your claim. To be clear: Reagan was the first President in modern times to successfully harvest the Evangelical market. Since then, they’ve been a big part of the Republican base. He wasn’t “Forced to”, do anything: he innovated.
I’m not sure whether you would disagree with that, but for the heck of it I’ll link to the wiki article on the Moral Majority, not coincidentally founded in 1979 before it disbanded shortly after the end the Reagan Presidency. It wouldn’t say it was a front group for Reagan, but it pushed the gipper in a big way. Moral Majority - Wikipedia
People here seem to think that Obama’s election is a sure thing. Not so. In fact I’d give 50-50 odds to Romney if he’s nominated. And if the Republican House successfully blocks extension of the payroll tax cut after Feb 28 and no further stimulus is enacted, I’d raise the odds to 70-30 in the GOP’s favor. Economic sabotage is a viable Republican strategy, though the pros seem to think that it’s critical to keep their fingerprints off the murder weapon. I’m uncertain on that last point. Furthermore if the economy slides into outright recession even Newt Gingrich could be successfully framed as the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being ever known. Never mind that the financial crisis occurred during a Republican administration and that Republicans in the Senate filibustered standard textbook approaches to addressing liquidity traps. That won’t matter.
That won’t matter, not because of voter apathy, but because journalistic practices demand that every malformed development in Washington be reported as the product of both sides.
Personally I think the Republicans are ignoring the uncertainties of this strategy. Maybe it’s because I’ve recently read a book about the 1948 election. Truman was very unpopular and most people and virtually all Republicans were certain he would lose the election. But the Republicans weren’t paying attention to the polls that said the Republican-led Congress was even less popular - their assumption was that as long as people didn’t like Truman, they’d have to vote for Dewey by default. This looks pretty similar to what we’re seeing now.
Truman was able to figure out a strategy based on this. He spend the weeks before the election going around and deflecting unpopularity for his administration on to Congress. He sold the message that whatever problems had occurred were despite him not because of him. And it worked - people ended up voting against the party in Congress as much as for Truman and Truman was not only re-elected by a wide margin but got Democratic majorities in both houses in Congress.
Yes, we are talking about different things. I’m saying that just because the Republican establishment has to pander to certain groups to get mainstream appeal, that doesn’t mean we nominate people from those groups to the Presidency. This has really been true of the Republican party for as long as it has existed.
Even in the era of Lincoln, the Republican party was the party of commerce, manufacturing, industry, and trade. This meant that it lacked a certain ability to appeal to the common man. So the Republicans of that age adopted various policies in addition to their “core” philosophy, that had wider national appeal.
Abolitionists in the 1850s were extremists in that they were a small, vocal minority. Maybe 20% of the electorate in the North; Lincoln wasn’t an abolitionist and neither was the core of the Republican party. Lincoln was happy to get the abolitionist vote, though, and he courted it the same way politicians court votes from minority extremist groups they themselves don’t belong to: by pandering to them but without totally committing to their cause (lest they alienate everyone else.)
That’s exactly what Reagan and all the GOP Presidents and candidates since him have done.
Note what I actually said that you seemed to have a problem with:
I was not denying we had a fundamentalist Christian wing of our party, I was saying how many people from that faction have won nomination? The neoconservatives are a smaller wing of the party and they actually have won one nomination (in John McCain).
I think worst case scenario the economy grows at 1-2% between now and election day. That means it won’t be so bad that it makes Obama’s reelection impossible.
The reason I think people (including myself) suspect Obama gets reelected is the economy won’t be so bad that it by itself can unseat Obama. What that means is, while his opponent will have an advantage in that he can gain some voters by slamming the economy, he still needs to be a real candidate and run a real campaign.
Imagine Obama/Romney are football teams. With a weak economy it’s like Obama’s star running back is out hurt along with two of his starting offensive line. That means Romney has an advantage. But the game still has to be played, and Obama still has his quarterback, and if Romney is playing not to lose, playing conservative, I don’t think he’ll win. Basically to get away from the analogy, Obama is a hell of a fundraiser, campaigner, and politician. I don’t like the man as a President, but he’s a hell of a campaigner. With the weak economy I could see him getting beat, but not by someone who is afraid to get dirty and not by someone who isn’t at least a “good” campaigner. I think Romney is just mediocre in that regard and that will cost him.
Martin: Nice historical treatment, reasonable position. In my mind Reagan was “of” the Evangelical wing and he indeed actually moved the ball for them by nominating pretty conservative Supreme Court judges (eg Bork/Scalia). But you could counter me with O’Connor and the fact that he wasn’t that devout personally. I guess I’m questioning the extent to which your distinction (a valid and interesting one) makes that much of a difference. For example Lincoln may not have been 100% pro-abolitionist, but that didn’t stop the South from seceding from the union: they did so because they feared the policies of the administration, notwithstanding the hedging of its actual leader.
It’s hard to see much daylight between us for Bush I and Dole.
As for predictions, I have the Fair Model in mind, as well as some of the utilities designed by Nate Silver at the NY Times. Little Nemo: Fair’s simple model that was based mostly upon election year GDP growth predicted that Truman would win 50.9% of the vote. In actuality he won 52.4%. So all that stuff about running against Congress yada-yada amounts to a swing of 1.4%. Not much, really.
I got the 50-50 estimate by messing around with the NYTimes’ utility and assuming that Obama was a somewhat stronger candidate than Romney and that the economy would grow by 2.5%. Last fall, the Economist magazine projected 2012 US growth at 1.4% IIRC. But we’re in a recession, so extremely high GDP growth is also quite conceivable: recoveries can be like that as newly hired workers spend funds leading in turn to greater hiring – a virtuous circle. I don’t know how likely that is though: I hope to get my hands on a more detailed macroeconomic analysis when I can. The 70-30 figure was pulled from my posterior, but hey it’s my current call.
However. These economic models assume that both sides will be doing their best. So if the Republican Pros think it’s best to cave on the payroll tax, I can’t really disagree with them. Punting the issue for 2 months doesn’t seem too bad to me, strategically speaking. If nothing else it provides uncertainty to the economy.
OBTW: Obama isn’t that amazing a campaigner, statistically speaking. In 2008 he ran against an octogenarian with a patently unqualified vice presidential running mate. The economy gave the Democratic candidate 51.9% of the vote. Obama got 53.4%, beating the prediction by 1.5 percentage points. That’s respectable, but hardly stupendous. The largest mismatch in recent memory was Bush I vs. Dukakkis: Bush beat the economic prediction by 3.4 percentage points. Oddly enough Kerry beat Bush II by the same historically high figure, but that wasn’t enough to win the Presidency.
In general, mucking around with the residuals of the model overturns a lot of the conventional wisdom about various Presidential contests.
(I made up a spreadsheet a couple of years back based upon the Fair model. Errors entirely my own. Caveat lector.)
Did anyone use this model prior to the 1948 election and come up with a 50.9% prediction? Because let’s face it, it’s pretty easy to design a model that makes good predictions of outcomes that are already known. I don’t mean this to be snarky, you can develop real prediction models by looking at past events and determination what factors led to the outcomes. But at some point, you’ve got use it to make some real world blind predictions to find out if you’ve picked the genuine determining factors or just found some coincidental but irrelevant data points.
I’ve been playing the market my entire adult life, and if you’ve ever bought into a mutual fund, had a brokerage account, or basically ever been involved in any sort of market activity you have almost certainly had to sign documents in which the boilerplate “past performance is not a predictor of future performance.” What this is basically saying is, no matter what happened with a given equity in the past, there is no guarantee for the future.
Traditionally money managers had many statistical tools, formulas, models and what have you for analyzing a company’s past performance and then making predictions. Based on these predictions, money managers allocate their clients money and hope to secure the highest returns.
What we’ve actually found out since then, is that money managers actually do not typically outperform the market, meaning all those fees we paid for all those years actually weren’t money well spent. That is why there has been an explosion in index funds and other passively managed investment vehicles with expense ratios and management fees under 0.25%.
The relevance is this: Just like money managers created statistical models that were true for past results, you can pick any number of metrics and create a model that retroactively explains the winners of Presidential elections. I don’t particularly value these models for making future predictions. Sure, any general conclusions like “strong economy = good for sitting President” and “weak economy = bad for sitting President” probably have some predictive value. But models that assert they are capable of predicting specific percentages of the vote are questionable, and I also question how valuable they are when the models themselves have actually missed the mark by several percentage points. Most Presidential elections are within a few percentage points nationally, so if the model is off by that much then it isn’t really a very impressive predictor of national vote performance.
Finally, smart Presidential candidates don’t campaign for the national vote because that isn’t what gets them elected, so I question this “Fair Model” predicting the national vote as being a useful tool in analyzing how strong of a campaigner a candidate is. Obama was widely known for having a huge ground game in swing states, and that’s what actually gets people elected to the Presidency.
In every election since the 1964 election, the candidate who won the State of Ohio won the Presidency. You could thus create a simplified “model” from which one might conclude that the only thing needed to predict the winner of the Presidential election is to successfully predict the winner of the Ohio election. But in practice such a thing will break down.
There’s plenty to chat about with regards to the Fair model. If I understand you correctly, you are concerned with over-fitting. That’s not really a problem. Fair designed his fairly simple model in 1978, IIRC and has added at most one tweak since then. He adopted a conservative modeling approach because, yes, he was concerned with over-fitting and besides this exercise is almost a hobby: his bread and butter is macroeconomics. That said, Fair has published a book on the subject and uses the dataset when teaching econometrics. Anyway, he has racked up a number of out-of-sample predictions since ~1978.
In fact, there are almost certainly better specifications out there (eg use income rather than GDP), but those are susceptible to charges of over-fitting. Some are probably preferable, used judiciously, but the data isn’t as conveniently available online (unless it is: counter-cites are welcome!). The go-to guy on this topic is Nate Silver of the NYT. ETA: Also Larry Bartels.
Also, Fair uses data extending back to the 1916.
Least Original User Name Ever: Fair maintains that basically everything other than the economy and incumbency gets you a 3-6% swing. The standard deviation of the error in the model is 2.1 percentage points, so about 2/3 of the time one side or another might get at most a 4.2 point swing. Admittedly these are within-sample errors: Nemo and Martin might want to look at the out-of-sample ones.
I’m having difficulty parsing this. Self-identified conservatives are voting for another self-identified conservative, and this is an example of voters voting for a candidate who doesn’t believe as they do??
What, specifically, does Romney claim to believe in/stand for that you believe goes against what self-identified conservatives believe in? Is it because he’s not preaching about family values and quoting the Bible?
I don’t think anyone is doubting some college professor can create a statistical model that works within a margin of error. I’m just saying that model isn’t necessarily a fit tool to answer debate questions like “will Obama’s personal talents as a campaigner make him too difficult for a weaker campaigner like Romney to defeat him?” Especially since the model you’re talking about appears to only predict national popular vote, which doesn’t determine the winner of the Presidency.
Additional, the margin of error for these models is too big for us to just go to them as the end-all-be-all when making wild assertions about who is going to win the Presidency. From reading over the paper it looks like the Fair model has been off by as much as 10% before (I’m just skimming it at the moments so I may be misunderstanding pg. 14 of the document) and is normally within around 2 percentage points.
But here is the thing, the reality is most of the voters are not at play. Presidents are chosen by the small percentage of voters in the small number of states where swing votes can determine the overall State election. Romney and Obama aren’t fighting for 80% of the vote they’re going to be fighting for 20% of the vote, that’s where the brunt of what may prove to be a $2bn+ election cycle is going to be focused. So a comment like this:
Is basically incorrect in its analysis. I’m not contesting the 1.4% number, I’m not saying I necessarily accept it, but I’d have to do a lot of research to definitively refute or accept the number and the model that produced it. What I am saying is to categorize 1.4% as “not much” in a Presidential election is not an accurate way to look at Presidential elections. If you gain 1.4% more of the vote and most of that 1.4% come in important, closely contested states with large EV numbers that can be the difference between a landslide victory in the EC and a stunning defeat.
In 2008 Obama beat McCain 365-173 in the EV and 66,862,039 to 58,319,442. But, if McCain had taken 1,162,161 more votes, and Obama 1,162,161 less votes, in key states, then McCain would have won the election (271-267). 1,162,161 is less than 1% of the 125m votes cast in 2008.
That’s just a demographic breakdown. It says nothing about voter participation.
Without the high partication rate among evangelicals, you wouldn’t win very many general elections.
Reagan and Bush Jr.
Dole and McCain lost.
If Rick Perry hadn’t turned out to be such a dud, Romeny wouldn’t be as presumptive as he is today. Believe it.
Why doesn’t Gingrich count?
In this case, “everyone” means evangelical Christians.
I didn’t say that the Democrats are courting you. I said that the Republicans are laeving you behind. You might run after them, (after all, who else are you going to vote for?) but they are moving away from voters like you and towards voters like Michele Bachman.
I think the hard core conservatives have been doing a pretty good job of purging their ranks of moderates so that folks like you have to choose between the Rick Santorum’s of the world and the Barack Obama’s of the world.
Well, that’s what I said, first you relied on the racists but that doesn’t work anymore so now its the fundamentalist Christians.
Chris Christie is a conservative? Pro Choice (until the end of the first trimester), pro-gay rights (relatively speaking), pro-environment, green energy advocate? Chris Christie’s abrasive behviour might survive NJ politics but its not likely to survive national scrutiny.
And that is part of why McCain lost. And its certainly a large part of why Bush won in 2004.
He was more than pairing with them. He was courting them. Talking their talk, walking their walk.
There is a difference between Christian and Christian conservative.
Who the heck thinks that?
The media has gotten to believi9ng that one side’s fantasy is the equivalent of the other side’s fact.
From your lips to God’s ears. If Obama can run against the Republican congress then he might be able to withstand Romney running against the economy but he has lost a lot of support on the left and people don’t necessarily believe his recently found courage will last beyond the election.
Noone really believes Romney is a conservative. He is certainly not the sort of reliable conservative that Santorum is. He is certainly not the sort of free market fundamentalist that Ron Paul is.
Romney has been fairly liberal (for a Republican) on things like abortion and universal health care.
I don’t think the sorts of Conservatives you’re referring to HAVE jumped on the bandwagon and rallied around Romney. The votes Romney’s getting are from a different brand of conservatism.