Unfortunately, there’s more truth in this than I’d like to admit.
DAVID BROOKS, Columnist, New York Times: Yes, there are some similarities. I’d be worried if I were Barack Obama in Indiana. He’s got a very slim lead, according to the polls. And if there’s one pattern we’ve seen in week after week, primary after primary, it’s that Hillary does well among the late-deciders. And so he’s got to work hard.
Having said that, I have a little different read on the demography. I think the campaigning has scarcely mattered. In race after race, among Catholics, among white men, among older women, the demography is king.
They’ve drawn essentially the same results from the same demographic groups in state after state. The one exception is Wisconsin. I think, in places like Maryland and Virginia, you have these extraordinarily affluent electorates where Obama did well.
But if you look at California, you look in New Hampshire, you look in Pennsylvania, if you’re looking at the white working class, high school-educated voters, she does very well.
And what strikes me about this whole race is the campaigns scarcely matter. They can do well in debates; they can do bad in debates; they can have gaffes. They don’t really affect their own people.
And Barack Obama spent weeks trying to dislodge white working-class voters away from Hillary Clinton, changed his whole campaign style, ran all these ads, appeared on countless factory floors, ate a lot of fatty foods, didn’t do anything for him.
So he’s got to find some way to actually change the dynamic of the campaign. So far, demography is king and the campaigning and the politics hasn’t really affected things.
You can figure out how all the remaining contests will turn out by looking at this map.
Michigan is deceptively blue there, but it’s pretty obvious that the only thing left to solve in the primary is who wins Indiana.
Obama may not be dislodging members of these core demographics from their support for Hillary. He is getting other voters involved in the process. In addition, some of Hillary’s tactics have alienated some of her supporters from voting for her, even if they are not turning to Obama.
Good point, he is getting people out and interested.
It would help if your map had a key. Then we could see that Hillary won Missouri.
If Obama wins Indiana he does it by winning big in Indianapolis and in the Chicagoland area. Maybe Bloomington. The rest of the state is demographically Hillary’s as far as I can tell.
If Obama wants to cut into Hillary’s “people” he needs to work on white women. He really hasn’t tried very hard with them so far. Most of his white working class outreach seems to be aimed at men. I don’t believe that low income white women see Hillary as a role model or care that she’s the first woman who could possibly be president. I think they remember that they were doing much better in the Clinton years and they want it back. Some outreach among them would be good. And even if it doesn’t get him primary votes it will help the transition to the GE.
it’s good advice, but what kind of outreach to envision?
I think they remember that they were doing much better in the Clinton years and they want it back. Some outreach among them would be good. And even if it doesn’t get him primary votes it will help the transition to the GE.
That has been my concern that as the economy soured, nostalgia for the Clintons would be in their favor.
Obama will be the nominee, even as it appears the media has turned against him. Clinton remains in an open coffin.
I agree that Indiana will probably end up looking a good deal more like Missouri than like a blue-to-green, east-to-west gradient. But I think it will be a few points looser than MO’s 11,000 vote margin, and it could break either way.
I think this part of that analysis is misguided:
I think changing his campaign style was necessary, on balance. Yes it was a risk, and it did some damage, but 6 weeks with no other contests to sustain the narrative mandated a more down-to-earth approach.
But the point is: his new style and blanketing ad and gladhanding efforts didn’t happen in a vacuum. Wright and Bitter happened along the way. And yes they were largely his own fault. But there’s absolutely no way to forecast the exact same result if they had not occurred. I maintain he would have made more significant inroads. Philly and suburban turnout could have been 5-10% higher; his core Pittsburgh margin could have been 5 points higher; his Lackawanna loss could have been 5 points lower than the 74-26 shellacking he got! Despite polling that showed neither of them having much effect, they both unquestionably blew up the existing narrative. to me, that was all that was necessary for him to perform as poorly as he did.
There’s something about Michigan that no one has figured out. There is a huge–HUGE–Arab population in Dearborn that has been barely mobilized. The candidate’s middle name will take Michigan.
Last election DeVos spent millions of his own money. From the media and the polls, it looked like he had a chance. Granholm was up against the Bush economy. And yet she did just fine. Michael Moore’s laid off auto workers aren’t stupid, either.
As far as Indiana, it’s vital. It will end the blood-letting. What (besides money and calls) can we do? Perhaps pressuring supers to declare prior to the primary?
This is sort of related. I have been noticing that prior to the primary HRC hits Obama with an ad on national security. If I were him, I would start playing an ad on national security preemptively.
I am always surprised to find David Brooks having anything interesting to say. I admit it happens now and then — a stopped clock is right twice a day — but as usual, I don’t find he’s saying anything interesting here. Demographics is always a major factor, that’s a given. But the idea that campaigning didn’t change anything? Then I guess there’s no point in sending campaign contributions, is there? And that’s one of the many areas where Obama has a great adavntage over Mrs. Clinton.
Look, Boo, the Tribune is one of the very best blogs in the blogosphere. If I have time to read one blog, it will be this one. But since the PA primary ended, I have felt that — well, let’s put it this way — you need a good night’s sleep.
We always knew that a Hillary victory in PA would inaugurate the spinfest to end all spinfests. It’s been going on for several days a now and I’m afraid it’s working on you, at least to some extent.
I know you thought Obama might actually pull off an upset in PA. A more realistic hope would have been a loss of about 4-5 points. The actual figure was 9.2 (spun as “double-digit”). No big difference. As everybody knows, Hillary started with a projected lead of about 25% . I don’t think the Obama campaign ever expected to actually win.
The only real practical gain of Hillary’s pyrrhic victory was with the spin factor. The people Hillary needs to convince are the SDs. The paradoxical result of all this is that there is now a PERCEPTION among the public that she has a better argument with the SDs, when in fact the actual SDs aren’t budging. They know she’s achieved nothing.
We’ve heard about how she raised well over 10 million in the 24 hrs after the victory. Wonderful. She was 15 million in the hole. Meanwhile, Obama remains far ahead in contributions, and picked up three more SDs to her one. I’m sure he picked up plenty of new $$ as well, though I can’t find any figure on that.
I think what we need most of all now is a sense of proportion. This race is not only about Obama and the Clintons. It is also very much about the viability of Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy. Yesterday I happened to come across a magazine from 2005 in which there was an article on that subject,. At that time it was just emerging in public consciousness.Obama is not even mentioned in the article, yet I think it is extremelyrelevant to the present moment. I recommend ieveryone read it. It is available on line here:
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=howards_beginning
Somehow, Pennsylvania — a state that has been largely ignored in presidential politics for the last 25 years — has suddenly become the model demographic for this election. True, PA shows up Obama’s weaknesses. Has there ever been a candidate without ANY weaknesses?
All of a sudden we’re talking about Catholic voters. What about the Catholic voters of Wisconsin? Of Illinois? Of New Mexico? All very Catholic states.
In any election, we have to expect that a significant number of voters will not vote for our candidate. Of course we try to reduce this number to a minimum, but there will always be lots of people who will not support our favorite. These people will always have demographic features of some sort, and we can make generalizations about them. I just don’t think the genralizations now being made are necessarily the correct ones. There’s a lot of spin going on.
Here is an article that addresses this subject in far greater depth and with much more objectivity than David Brooks does:
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/04/24/obama_and_the_critical_indiana.html