I’m with you so far. I’ve got some quibbles, e.g. I expect that many if not most of those ‘hard-pressed Democrats’ are blacks and Hispanics. But let’s just let that slide for the moment, unless it turns out to matter.
I think you’ve misunderstood. These aren’t exit polls, these are just your standard-issue polls of the population as a whole. They don’t have to turn out; they just have to pick up the phone when the pollster calls. And they certainly don’t have to have any affiliation with the GOP or any likelihood to vote in its primaries. These independents may or may not be ‘true independents’ (probably mostly not, because that’s a pretty small breed) but rather they’re people who call themselves independents for whatever reason.
I disagree. There’s still a certain amount of play left in the race in the homestretch, but the contours are set earlier, often to the extent that the race has been over before Labor Day. How much earlier varies. Kerry was doomed before the last of the confetti hit the ground at the GOP convention in 2004; the race was over, not just starting. By June 1984, there was nothing Mondale could have done to win in November.
This year, the GOP has been systematically alienating different groups. Hispanics, now women, and to a lesser but real extent young people. They will need to do really, really well among white males, or they’re scrod. And this will limit the upside of his white male support. He’ll still win that demographic handily, just not nearly as handily as he’ll need to.
1984 was a totally different political universe and even 2004 had much less of the current political schisms. More important, though, is that both races were against incumbent presidents.
Incumbent presidents are very hard to beat. Neither Mondale nor Kerry had as much money to spend as the Republicans: it’s a new thing in my generation that Democrats have had monetary parity or superiority. Reagan was Reagan and Bush II was still a war president and 9/11 was large in peoples’ memories. The only thing Democrats had in those elections were false hopes. Carter had huge foreign policy problems and Bush I had huge domestic economy issues. Both were likely losers ahead of time.
The way to bet based on those experiences is that Obama wins. He will have plenty of money, his foreign policy makes it a non-issue, and the economy is recovering. But the 2010 Congressional election was a game-changer in that one sector of the electorate, what Pew calls Staunch Republicans, increased their turnout over the 2008 presidential elections. I believe that’s unique. A charismatic candidate whom they could back whole-heartedly would do very, very well. Romney is obviously not that candidate. (Excuse me while I go out a grab a Martian.) On the other hand, the anti-Obama hatred among that group is like nothing I’ve seen since the left hated Nixon in 1972. But that group wasn’t organized and opted out of the election. The modern right is highly organized and Romney or not highly motivated and is disproportionately made up of factions that vote. That will keep it close.
If the right opts out, then it’s an Obama landslide. I can’t believe that will happen. Republicans will pull together, hold their noses, and work like fury to defeat Obama. On another hand, it might never come to enough and that might be apparent before the conventions. Since I’m running out of hands, I’m going to continue to wait for the conventions. In 2008 it was clear that McCain didn’t get enough of a push even though the polls showed him ahead for a bit after the convention. He shouldn’t have had a chance at all as the public sentiment was clearly tired of Bush. That it was that close shows that other factors were at work.
The Ohio Art Company, maker of the Etch A Sketch, closed today up 141%. It opened at $4 a share and closed at 9.65. Earlier in the day it was up 300% at $12.
Incumbency gives you a 2.7 point advantage in the popular vote, which is a lot but not overwhelming. The average spread since 1976 has been 3.6 points after all.
Combine the election year economy and incumbency and you’ve told most of the story. What’s left is residual effects. And those residual effects acted in favor of both Mondale and Kerry. They were far better candidates than conventional wisdom indicates. In other words after controlling for the economy and incumbency Mondale was up by 2.9 points and Kerry was up by 3.4 points.
Dukkakis and McGovern, OTOH, were weak candidates.
Your link doesn’t go to anything useful beyond Ray Fair’s website. But he’s been doing econometric analysis/predictions of presidential elections for a while. Econometrics has fallen out of favor with better methods becoming available. And Fair is not particularly accurate. In August 2004 (post convention) he predicted that Bush would get 57.5% of the two-party vote. He actually got 51.2%. Other than the obvious of getting Bush right as the winner, that’s egregious. And weirdly, his predictions for the 2008 election got worse and worse as the election drew closer even though the economy was much worse in 2008 than in 2006, although he certainly should be given credit for the advance forecasts. Nate Silver discusses some of his reservations in this column.
I simply don’t believe that the effectiveness of a candidate can be parsed out to the percent by an econometric model. Heck, he admits that his equations have a 2 percentage point margin of error, which is how he terms his 2000 prediction of too close to call a success.
What does he say for this year?
I’ve been saying exactly that and all I do is stick my head out the window.
Errors in economic forecasts lead to errors in the projected popular vote. But I’m not using economic forecasts – I’m using the actual economic data. And when that is used, the within sample 2004 error is only 3.4 points. (Ideally, I would run Fair’s regression using all data but 2004 to calculate the out of sample error, but I doubt whether there would be much qualitative difference, as the errors have not exploded over time).
Oh, neither do I. I believe that “Everything other than the economy and incumbency” can be parsed out though. So in 2004 Kerry beat the model by 3.4 points. That could have been due to Kerry’s awesomeness, GWBush’s lameness, an unpopular war, anything other than the economy or incumbency or most likely a combination of the preceding. What you don’t want to do though is just look at the electoral spread – you want to control for incumbency and the economy in some way. [1]
Anyway, if you want to forecast the 2012 results, there are better models, though I wouldn’t say that Fair’s is bad. Fair doesn’t include approval ratings for example, because he’s trying to ascertain the effect of the economy on elections rather than building an optimal forecast framework. For the latter, see Nate Silver and maybe intrade.
[1] There are subtle issues that I’m ignoring. These include specification error and (worse) varying parameters over time. The regression covers 1916-2008. I’m surprised the variance of the residuals has not varied systematically over time.
Oh, yeah, Mr. Potato Head (the toy you can change to look like whatever you want by swapping out features) would be just the metaphor you want to represent your guy… :rolleyes:
I don’t think it will take much of an effort at all to make this stick. The meme is already out there and it is looking for a catchphrase or mascot and this may be it.
I don’t think so. Considering the context, I think you are reading this in the light most favorable to Romney.
People were not voting for Clinton because they disliked Obama, we were swamped with a deluge of great candidates and people had different preferences. That is not the case here.
In advertizing puffery, e.g. “This is the greatest product ever”, is perfectly acceptable and I think most of the people who defend Romney on the Etch a sketch comment are thinking along those lines. Tell any story to get elected.
But in this case, I think there are deeper problems. It goes to Romney’s character and honesty. And it insults the intelligence of the voting public. In six+ months time they are expected to forget what Mitt has been saying for the last year and accept uncritically what will be spoon-fed to them between the convention and election??
The campaign can pooh-pooh the whole thing, but we now know what the plan has been all along. And it’s dishonest and cynical in the extreme.
The thing is, I’m pretty sure everybody knew this was the plan all along. Or at least people paying attention. I remember a sketch on SNL form when Bush the Younger was running for president. bush the Elder was telling him how to run to the right in the primaries then dance back to the middle in the general election. The only difference this time is that Obama can have a commercial with primary Romney saying one thing, then a cut to PR guy saying Etch a Sketch, then cut to general election Romney saying something different.
It’s a difference, but it’s not the only one. The existence of the Web has meant that average folks like us can verify that they were saying one thing at one time, and a very different thing later on, and can do it in five minutes at our computer. We used to be able to do this sort of thing, but it would have involved tedious hours over microfilm and microfiche at the library, so nobody ever did it.
Now, you’ve really got to be who you are the whole time. That presents particular problems for Mitt, because there’s really no ‘who you are’ down there, as best as anyone can tell.
Staples does sell the “That was easy” button, and I know for a fact the Obama campaign has an order for 5000 of these gadgets lined up to ship in November.
Mostly candidates doing that do it by emphasizing different things, not contradicting themselves. And Romney’s soundbite, as it were, is that he’s done it already, so he doesn’t get a pass. Bush swung to the center, but he didn’t start out from the center before the primaries, and he wasn’t running against anyone on his right.
