Just what the title says. This election appears to have upended a lot of the stuff “everybody knows” about presidential races, and I wanted to discuss whether this conventional wisdom is dead, if Obama is an outlier, or if there is some other explanation. A few ideas to evaluate for starters:
“The first black President will be a conservative.”
This is low hanging fruit, obviously. This myth is BUSTED: Obama’s race was a turnoff for racists but not for conservatives in general, as some of them were willing to make a big break with the past to vote for him.
“To win, Democrats need to appeal to the South.”
While Obama won Virginia, North Carolina and Florida and competed in other states in the Southeast, I think this has been largely debunked as well. Obama never went on a hunting trip photo OP. I think he talked about a NASCAR sponsorship and got Junior Johnson’s endorsement, but I don’t think he ever said “Gentlemen, start your engines!” at a race. He largely appealed, I suppose, to transplanted Northerners and to black voters in the South - not to “NASCAR dads” and such.
“Americans prefer Governors for President.”
Generally I’m sure this is still true, but on the Democratic side, none of the Governors ever posed a serious challenge, and for the Republicans, Romney and Huckabee didn’t end up being very credible opposition for McCain.
Together, I believe this kills the idea that Democrats need to nominate Bill Clinton types every election. Gore and Kerry didn’t fit that mold, but if you talked politics with enough people. If John Edwards hadn’t fit that mold - too closely, as it turned out - by being young, Southern and handsome, nobody would’ve ever considered him as a Presidential hopeful.
“Republicans have greater party discipline.”
Dead forever? Maybe not. But the 11th commandment seemed to have fallen by the wayside this year when the GOP had a somewhat nasty primary season - although most of the nastiness was directed at Mitt Romney - and then social conservatives warred openly with fiscal conservatives and older conservative thinkers, some of whom ended up going for Obama and saying the party has lost its way. Meanwhile, Obama ran maybe the most disciplined campaign ever, which made up for his long primary fight. Speaking of which…
“The parties should continue stacking their primaries early so the nominee gains momentum and wraps it up.”
I maintain that the primary campaign against Clinton was rougher and more difficult for team Obama than the general against McCain - I know that’s a minority view - but I think most people agree that the endless slog through the primaries, which for the Democrats was actually much longer than the general campaign, made Obama a better candidate and left him with a vastly superior organization. McCain got “momentum” and had the nomination locked up in early March, and then disappeared from the news for months while Obama and Clinton battled it out. Clinching early didn’t help Kerry or Gore either, and I doubt it helped Bush.
“Young people don’t vote.”
They do, it turns out, if you get them excited and figure out how to reach them.
What do you think of these views, and of other bits of common knowledge that have been proved or haven’t survived this election?
It is busted but it took a rather remarkable person in the form of Obama to pull it off along with the Perfect Political Storm pulling down the Reps to make it happen. Two years ago I would have said you’d really need a Colin Powell type to be the first African-American president (at least one who stood a good chance).
The South is a hard sell for the Dems. Clearly they do not need the South but then they need to clean up elsewhere. For Reps they do not need to clean-up everywhere else but bank their South vote and manage to pull a few others. On the face of it the Reps have the easier task.
No opinion really. For my part I do not care if the candidate is/was a Governor, Senator, Representative or anything else. I’ll judge them on their merits. Of course many may use a Governorship as short-hand for experience/talent. I just do not know.
Reps have had greater party discipline. One of the “problems” with Dems is they tend to be more nuanced and less dogmatic. I see that as a virtue but it hurts them when trying to present a united front. Reps have a much easier time with the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” meme and are more likely to toe the line.
That said the cracks were there and till now the Reps were largely ignoring it. I do not think social conservatives and the fiscal conservatives were ever easy bed fellows. We are already seeing the war over the soul of the Republican party beginning as the two groups retrench. Whether they can ever get in bed together again I do not know. If they want to win they almost have to as a divided party will have trouble winning but I am unsure either will concede their points now. Have to wait and see on that.
Points can be made on both sides of this. Not really sure myself so no opinion yet.
Well, they historically have not. Again it took a Perfect Storm of circumstances and an amazingly charismatic and eloquent guy to get behind for the young vote to come out. Can they be counted on in future elections? Hard to say…we need several election years behind us before we can say. In general my guess is the buzz will wear off and the young ones will return to Nintendo on election days. I hope not…guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Do you have a cite for that? I didn’t think youth voter turnout was much higher than in previous years. What changed was that Obama got most of the youth vote…it didn’t split as much as in previous elections. From this Politico story:
Youth turnout this year was the second or third highest in history; unfortunately, turnout in other groups was up as well, so if you only look at fractions of the electorate, you’re not going to see much difference.
A lot of people would have, that’s the point - and they were saying the same thing about the first female president. The idea, somewhat snobbishly, was that Democrats would be willing to look past a candidate’s race or gender and Republicans wouldn’t so only a conservative black man or woman would be able to get enough votes to win.
In general I think this disproves the idea that people will accept an unfamiliar-looking candidate only if he or she espouses conservative ideas.
But the Democrats have the same lock on the Northeast and Pacific coast, and there are far more electoral votes there.
My phrasing was probably unclear. I meant that Obama won without pandering to “traditional” (or “stereotyped”) Southern demographics. While black voters turned out more strongly for him than Gore and Kerry, I think it’s possible other Democrats could use this formula instead of pretending they are regular hunters.
They have in the past, but not this time. Doesn’t mean it’ll never happen again, but I thought it was worth noting in this case.
I’d say autz is correct. And that’s an interesting cite, Captain Amazing. Maybe it would be better to say that Obama generated a lot of enthusiasm among new young voters, but young voters overall may not have turned out in huge numbers. I’d like to see a raw total of how many of them there were this time out, but I don’t see one yet.
I do not think a lot of Republican voters looked past race at all. They vote Republican…period (look at the last election…Obama made some minor gains but not a lot at all there). On the other hand a large portion of black, traditionally Democratic voters would very likely pull the lever for a Republican black candidate because he is black.
The numbers simply looked easier to achieve with a black Republican candidate.
Has conventional wisdom *really *changed? Or was this just a fluke of an election and things will revert to the way they were in 4 or 8 years?
My fear is that the Obama victory, while incredibly promising, was only possible due to the “perfect storm” of circumstances : An extremely unpopular and embarrassing administration, 2 unpopular wars, an economy literally falling apart right before our eyes. Couple that with a dynamic, inspirational Democratic leader who ran a stellar campaign offering solutions to these problems against a not-so dynamic elderly Republican candidate who chose a train wreck of a running mate and ran a disjointed, erratic and confusing campaign. I hope that Obama’s victory signifies a permanent change, but I’m not yet convinced of that.
That’s also an open question, and I don’t mean to overlook it. My personal view is that there’s nothing left to “revert” to. Whether or not the Democrats win in North Carolina, Indiana, Montana or any similar states in the next election I think they’ve made inroads that won’t go away just because Obama isn’t the candidate. Part of Obama’s success in my view isn’t that he magically won over loads of people, it’s that he recognized trends that would be favorable to him, for example demographic trends in North Carolina and Virginia. To me, it looks like the GOP’s first idea is to respond to this by “getting back to basics,” which does not take those things into account. Eventually they’ll need to adjust.
Clearly you missed the Ralph Stanley ads. Guess those weren’t running in New York.
I think it is a strategic mistake for Democrats to take John Kerry’s “We can win without the South” approach. More than that, I think it is a moral mistake. The Democrats are and should be a national party. That is a message that Howard Dean has been sending for years, and one which Obama has endorsed: there should be no red states and blue states, but just the United States.
Strategically, if Democrats start thinking “Here’s our territory, and there’s the Republican territory, and let’s not even bother with Republican territory because ours is bigger,” they are setting themselves up for failure for several reasons:
Firstly, that is defensive thinking. The minute you write off the South, it frees Republicans from having to defend so-called “red states” and they can devote all of their resources to picking off a handful of “blue states” (just enough to flip the Electoral College). That was Kerry’s mistake. Let’s not make it again.
Secondly, the poulation is shifting southward, so the South stands to pick up electoral votes in the 2010 census at the same time Northern industrial states will be losing electoral votes.
Thirdly, it assumes Republicans will be standing pat. Expect Republicans to shift and modify their message to increase their swing state appeal between now and 2012. If Democrats get cocky, they are in trouble.
The Republicans have stupidly turned themselves into a regional party. Let’s not follow them down that path. Let’s try to unite the country rather than trying to divide it into camps.
Obama didn’t take that approach, though, and he won North Carolina and Virginia while Kerry didn’t. He laid the groundwork for future campaigns in the process. Again, I’m not talking about writing off the South. I don’t know how a candidate who won in those states and threatened to take Georgia could be accused of doing so. I’m saying he didn’t pander to NASCAR dads and worked with demographics in the region rather than pandering to the South as if they were all rednecks.
If anything, this election went the opposite way: the Democrats reached out into new territory and the GOP didn’t. Obama flipped nine Bush states (PA FL VA CO IA NV NC NH) while surrendering no Kerry states.
And again- it’s not a mistake Obama made.
You keep addressing me as a fellow traveler, but I’m not a Democrat. You’re correct about what you’re saying, though. I haven’t suggested Democrats ignore the South. What I’m saying is that they do not have to water down the message the way some people have suggested in order to win some states in the South. And after four straight terms by a former Southern governor, it’s clear that Democrats can get a fair number of Southerners to vote for someone who is a non-Southerner.
I really tend to doubt that. In my mind a better way to phrase that is that some black voters would vote for a black Republican candidate, especially if he came off as at least a moderate ( I doubt crazy-ass Alan Keyes would siphon off much of the black vote in a general election at all ). But 20-25% of the black vote instead of the traditional 10% or less Republicans usually get, might be enough.
ETA: Or would of - even that assumption may not be safe anymore, now that the “making history” argument is gone.
Nitpick: He flipped OH, not PA. PA was already Dem in 2004.
I’m still not convinced the protracted primary season was actually an advantage for Obama. It looks to me like McCain had posession of the ball when he clinched the nomination, but that he fumbled big-time. He had the advantage; he just (for whatever reason) didn’t use it.
It was an advantage for Obama, because he used it to his advantage, because he showed doubters that he could win white votes as well as black votes, and because he built up his political machine during the primary season, then used it again during the election.
If the Repubs had gone through a long primary season, with McCain narrowly winning in the end as Obama did, I don’t think McCain would have gained similar advantages from it.
I responded (above) shortly after listening to a Rush Limbaugh segment which left me feeling hopeless and depressed. But now that I’ve recovered from my Rush-induced despair and have reflected on the OP, I’ve changed my tune: Conventional Wisdom is out the window forever. Especially this one:
Sarah Palin has forever changed my perspective of this office as my personal stereotype-- that United States Governors must be competent and intelligent (tho often corrupt)–has been turned upside down. ANd since Conventional Wisdom is largely based on stereotypes, I think ‘conventional wisdom’ is forever changed.
What this election has taught many people is :dont trust stereotypes. In spite of their “executive experience”, governors might be dopey hypocritical nitwits. In spite of his race, his upbringing and his name, the majority of Americans chose Barack Obama to lead them thru one of the most critical times in history. I think the new conventional wisdom is that anything is possible.
You’re correct about what you’re saying, though. I haven’t suggested Democrats ignore the South. What I’m saying is that they do not have to water down the message the way some people have suggested in order to win some states in the South. And after four straight terms by a former Southern governor, it’s clear that Democrats can get a fair number of Southerners to vote for someone who is a non-Southerner.