I’m tired of political scientists who look at historical economic data and say that Mitt Romney should be leading in the polls. I see a lot of this coming from people on the left, and I think it may have something to do with the left’s propensity to see history as unfolding in some kind of deterministic dialectical way. People on the right are much more inclined to give credit to the “great men in history” approach to understanding events. That’s why they fetishize Winston Churchill, for example.
I’m trying to think of the right kind of analogy to explain my dissatisfaction. Remember Mike Tyson at the end of his professional career, after he had suffered defeat, gone to jail for rape, and then decided to bite off a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear rather than continue to fight him man-to-man? At that point, Tyson had lost everyone’s sympathy and their trust. You wouldn’t expect the prognosticators to predict future victories, nor would you expect the judges to be unbiased against him. But what if you had him fight a featherweight fighter? What if you had him fight some guy you picked up off the street? In those cases, Tyson’s declining performance and erratic behavior would not be an indicator that he was about to lose. Not at all. Mitt Romney should not be ahead in the polls because he’s a featherweight. He’s no match for the president as a politician.
And, frankly, this is a highly unfair analogy because President Obama hasn’t behaved erratically or showed any signs of ring-rust. He hasn’t lost people’s trust. And the Republicans, now led by Mitt Romney, have done everything they can think of to prevent a robust economic recovery. Do the experts factor Republicans’ culpability for the economy into their equations? When was the last time a political party intentionally sabotaged the economy and the country’s credit rating during a period of high unemployment? Are the people supposed to be completely unaware of this record?
When has a party been so openly hostile to so much of the electorate? Over the last four years, the Republicans have waged a War on Women, who make up more than 50% of the electorate. They have vilified Latinos, who are the fastest growing demographic in the country. They’ve passed laws aimed mainly at disenfranchising blacks. They’ve waged a cultural war against gay rights. They’ve attacked Muslims’ right to build mosques and worship as they please. They’ve alienated the scientific community by denying that climate change is occurring. They’ve waged an unprecedented war on public sector employees and unions in general. That’s a lot of people who need to disregard the way they’ve been treated in order to cast a vote against Obama because of the economy. Forget the GDP or the unemployment rate, any party that alienates this many people should be behind in the polls.
How’s that for political science?
OK, but in that case, why isn’t Romney consistently trailing by 7 or 8 or 12 points? Why does he still have a shot at all?
Because McCain-Palin got 46% at a time when the world was literally falling apart.
And the historical average Republican popular vote percentage over the last ten elections (going back to ’72) is 49.4%.
In most of the states that matter, he is trailing badly. Remember, his national numbers are padded by a huge margins he enjoys in Appalachia and the Deep South.
But another thing is that you cannot forget the polling numbers of Kerry and Dukakis during the summer. Polls mean very little right now. What matters more is whether Mittens shows more potential than those to prior Bay State candidates to breakthrough with the general public. I’d say there are no signs of that whatsoever.
The candidates matter more than any other single thing.
Probably no one could have beaten Ike in 1952, and maybe not even in 1956. Why? Because he won World War Two and then ended the Korean War, that’s why.
A less handsome and charismatic candidate would have lost to Nixon in 1960.
A dozen bad things had to happen for Nixon to win in 1968. Does anyone think RFK would have lost to him?
A northern Democrat probably would have lost to Ford.
An early hostage release and Carter probably would beat Reagan.
Do you think Clinton would have blown a 16-point lead to Bush in 1988?
Someone even modestly better on the campaign trail than Gore would have won the election in 2000. The same is true for Kerry in 2004.
Presidential elections are better predicted by looking at the candidates and pure chance than at the economy. And, in this case, the economy is a mixed bag considering the Republicans’ behavior and proposals.
While my memory doesn’t quite reach back to ’51, your chronology is accurate to my recollections. However, Gore won the election in 2000. He was denied the win by an ideologically stacked activist court.
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Various years one can put in question marks: 1960 – 1968 – 1980. What will Romney and Neocon advisors discuss in Jerusalem?
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."The best models I’ve seen suggest four things that aren’t accounted for above:
Right now you’d have to say that the economy is fits in the neither-strong-nor-weak area. Unemployment is high, but the trend is very slightly better. It helps Obama, ironically, that unemployment is concentrated in groups that are solidly in his camp – minorities, especially African Americans, and those at the bottom of the pay scales. The unemployment rate for middle class non-minorities is actually in the normal range and some industries are showing leading indicators of coming mini-booms, especially high tech.
Given that this is not yet an economy election, though Romney is doing his best to follow Carvel’s classic “It’s the Economy, Stupid” dictum. The problem is that the Bush 1 economy was perceived (correctly or not) as much worse in 1992 than it is now, largely due to the trend issues.
So, we the economy won’t be the deciding factor, nor at the moment is there any severe national crisis such as the Iran Hostages or 9/11 that can decide an election. That means we have a classic matchup between a known incumbent with mid-level approval ratings (especially when you discount the distortion in ratings caused by the heavy disapproval from concentrated areas in KKK country) and a challenger who is a familiar name but not that well known. In this case the character of the challenger tends to be the deciding factor. A middling challenger will usually lose but not dramatically, a highly popular challenger can pull off an upset, a weak challenger will lost more decisively, and a wacko challenger will ultimately get creamed.
So, everything points to a decent sized Obama win since Romney will simply lose approval with each passing weak as people know him better. The unknowns are: 1) Can they find a new Romney handler to repair his image a la Rove and Bush before most of the undecideds start paying attending in September? I suspect this is a lost cause – Rove was paving the ground for Bush 8 years in advance. 2) Will the economy tank badly in the next 4 months? If so, advantage Romney, even if it is obvious to all watchers that the GOP Congress caused it. 3) Will there be a 9/11 type event? If so advantage is usually to the incumbent, unless they screw it up a la Bush and Katrina or, to a lesser extent, Obama and the Gulf oil spill. 4) Will the tidal wave of slush fund negative advertising upset the balance and hurt Obama? Usually this doesn’t work with a known incumbent, as images are already set. But we’ve never before seen it done with the magnitude that is expected this year.
I’m still optimistic that Obama will pull it off.
We also have low inflation and insanely now interest rates at the moment.
In any case, the economy matters. It’s important. If the economy were better, Romney would be fighting to win Louisiana instead of North Carolina.
But the single most important factor in this election is what people think and feel about Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Then there is the quality of their messaging and the merit and popularity of their proposals.
This is not a contest. It should, and still could be a total blowout.
Not the people who shot RFK, for sure.
AG
Exactly.
It certainly is. What possible analogy to sexual violence or imprisonment would you say exists in the President’s record over the last four years?
Why pick Tyson at all? If anything, isn’t the President more like Holyfield, a one-time phenom at every level of competition who takes some losses here or there, but keeps getting back up and soldiering on?
Openly hostile to much of the potential electorate, perhaps, but to that part of it that actually makes it to the polls?
Actual voters tend to be whiter, richer, more native born, and above all, older than the potential electorate. Everyone in your list of the people they’ve pissed off wasn’t voting for them anyways.
It’s 50% +1 in action. The game consists on working to shape 50% of whom. If the electorate in the fall matches that of the 2010 mid-terms, Romney wins comfortably.
A presidential election won’t look like a mid-term, more people come out for a presidential election no matter who’s on the ballot. Comparisons to 2010 are meaningless.
It’s not binary though. Romney’s chances are better, the more the electorate looks like 2010. Hence all the dog-whistling. And voter suppression.
Voter enthiusiams matters — if you’ve got a motivation advantage, subtracting a Democratic vote – by outright suppression, or by generating stay-homes — has the same impact as adding a GOP vote.
PRINCETON, NJ — Democrats are significantly less likely now (39%) than they were in the summers of 2004 and 2008 to say they are “more enthusiastic about voting than usual” in the coming presidential election. Republicans are more enthusiastic now than in 2008, and the same as in 2004. (Gallup)
Fox & Rush did their best to deny Mitt a win during the primary and since inevitability has crashed that party they have pretzel twisted themselves every which way they can, to lie Obama out and lie Mitt in.
And the sooner is hitting the later as people realize that Mitt and his followers are empty suits, they have no plans to materialize success, nothing their supporters can actually hang their hats on.
The nothingness is why he’s behind and all the lies in the world can’t hide that anymore.
Bingo!
I see a lot of this coming from people on the left, and I think it may have something to do with the left’s propensity to see history as unfolding in some kind of deterministic dialectical way.
You are reducing yourself to Versailles disease. Who are these “people on the left”? Nate Silver? Jon Chait? Jonathan Bernstein? Others? Silver is a stats geek. Chait and Bernstein are Versailles wankers, or wanna-be wankers. And if you listed the people you were talking about, one could better gauge why they are saying what they are saying.
Jon Walker rings a bell. Is anyone else turned off by his constant poll-watching? And somehow he always seems to see it as bad news for Obama; or how any lead could be obliterated at any moment. Typical Villager.
I hardly go there anymore. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I went there to read something that wasn’t written by David Dayen or Tbogg. I rarely even go there to read Kevin Gosztola’s stuff about Bradley Manning’s court case. He talks about most of that stuff on Twitter so I follow it there.
I’m pretty sympathetic to BooMan’s anti-determinism/pro-talent take on the race. Barack Obama is winning because Barack Obama is a vastly superior politician, and because the Republican Party has screwed itself.
However, there is a great deal to be said for the “It’s the economy, stupid” approach to presidential reelection campaigns. Where I think most of these people go wrong is in failing to account for the difference between a President who saw the economy go into a recession after he was elected, vs. one who was elected when the economy had already collapsed.
The political scientists all treat Reagan and FDR’s performance in their reelection campaigns as outliers, and will likely treat Obama’s that way as well. However, if you split the population of incumbent Presidents who ran for reelection with high unemployment in two, you find that Poppy Bush, Carter, and Hoover went one way, and Reagan and FDR went the other.
Whenever I see this argument from the left, invariably it’s offered as an explanation as to why PBHO isn’t mopping the floor with Romney in the polls. The economy and unemployment rate are suggested as the real factors holding the President down in public opinion.
President Obama has certainly lost people’s trust, whether or not he deserves to have done so. Wherever I look, I’m constantly faced either with people on the left who are voting for him in the next election only because the alternative would be more distasteful to them, or those outright vowing allegiance to voting some third party candidate–or yet again, the ever-popular option of sitting out the election altogether. And then there are those who hold the eye-pokingly-disgusting view that “both parties are the same.”
We’ve all seen it, and we keep seeing it. The question is how seriously to take these complaints. What I know, and what disturbs me heading into November, is how little prepared I was for these factors in the ‘010 elections. I was expecting losses, but had no idea how ugly it would actually turn out to be.
Guess I don’t get out that much.
You probably keep better-informed company than I do. Not much to work with out here.
Apparently I need to clarify my meaning in this statement. I am not saying that the “shellacking” of ‘010 was due to the economy. The factors I refer to are voter attitudes that drive down enthusiasm, that’s all.
‘010 was about a typical swing of the pendulum aggravated by Obamacare panic and the Teabaggers riding a wave of anti-Obama outrage, coupled with complacent Dem voters (and some disappointed ones, no doubt) staying at home and not voting.
Big enthusiasm on one side, widespread indifference on the other. Not the economy. That wasn’t my argument.
I hope to see an upswing in Dem enthusiasm this year. I’m pretty sure I’m seeing positive signs, just can’t tell what it adds up to yet. I don’t worry about the President’s reelection prospects, but I sure don’t relish the thought of a GOP-controlled Senate. For one thing, it means more photos of Mitch McConnel doing is toothless smile thing.
Still holding out hope that the GOP House is going to do the party some irrecoverable damage in the upcoming debt ceiling negotiations. I just hope they don’t ruin our credit rating while they’re at it.
I keep on asking…
last I checked, Willard’s lost five points with Latinos
and hasn’t made up any room with Women
SO, explain to me how he’s beating the President…
just don’t believe it
Dialectic is inherently not deterministic.
Well, there’s a topic. Should I go dust off my Marxist literature?
I suppose you’re right, supposing that what you really mean is that dialectical materialism is not deterministic. Marx believed the people could, through their actions, change history (within narrowly defined parameters).
But I wasn’t really intending to call the whole left “Marxist” in their leanings. And, in any case, the basic idea behind dialectical materialism is that there are greater forces in societal structure and economics that drive history. A particularly benevolent king or pope might stall the march of history for a generation or more, but eventually the logic of the dialectic will overwhelm them. It really downplays the role decision-makers have at crucial points in history. And, without subscribing to any kind of strictly Marxist thinking, the American left still tends to prefer to see history as a dialectic process than one in which it really matters what kind of leadership we had at a certain point in time.
To some degree, it’s just an argument about what setting you want to use to peer through the microscope. But it can break down into tautological thinking in a hurry. If you think things will be ultimately iron themselves out roughly the same way eventually no matter what anyone does, you have to account from the knot in history created by people like Confucius, Alexander the Great, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., or even Joseph Smith.
To bring this all back to earth, the election will be influenced by economic conditions, but it will influenced more by chance and the qualities of the candidates.
Even if the dialectic is more accurate in the long-term, it is definitely not more accurate in the short-term.
Well, I am not sure this is the place to have an intra-Marxisms (there’s an appropriate oxymoron) squabble. I guess I made the comment a) as a too-vague rebuttal to those who attribute to Marx a determinism he categorically didn’t have and b) as a too-vague rebuttal to Marxists who adopt a determinism that is not only contrary to Marx’s own method but, vastly worse, totally wrong, methodologically and historically.
Dialectic is an excellent tool with which to see events in processes rather than things in themselves. That’s how it’s been useful to me in any event, both to explain the past and to anticipate change.
Can I just suggest we all take a step back and consider the “artful” nature of “political science”? There have been approximately 55 presidential elections in this country’s entire history, from 1792 (which was probably more of an acclamation-like ascension the the throne for George Washington than a contested election) to Obama’s win in 2008. No scientist worthy of a high school degree would claim that a sample of such limited size can create a reliable forecast model — and that’s before taking into consideration the huge changes in society, culture, technology, laws, age spans, voting rights, demography, et al. that have taken place over the last 220 years.
All of these forecasting “experts” scour past results, pick and choose often coincidental data, and pretend to create some sort of determinative “model” that will, if it proves “accurate” the next time around, give them a (ideally, short-lived) media cachet and maybe a tingle up their own leg. Each election really does turn on its own, singular circumstances to reach an outcome, and anyone who relies on any kind of (or, worse, thinks s/he has the definitive) model to make a definitive pronouncement (or, really, anything beyond a hazardous guess) about the results of a vote based on the tastes of this country’s citizens — especially 3+ months in advance of that vote — should be required to either plunk half of his/her life savings down on a spin of the roulette wheel or spend a year attending Gamblers Anonymous meetings.
How’s that for a run-on sentence?
Hear, hear.
As a longtime devotee and practitioner of the run-on sentence, I salute you, sirrah or madame!
It’s a long sentence, but it’s not a run-on.
That’s what I see, too. Most folks of my political persuasion are completely mystified that Romney would even be within 15 points of Obama, the difference is so stark in Obama’s favor.
BTW, “political scientists” is an oxymoron.
2008 and 2012 are unique in that a major candidate is black.
Obama would be having FDR numbers if he were an upper class white from New York.
I get a little tired of those who shout racism all the time, but it IS an undeniable factor. Being blue collar, I hear it all the time. White collar bigots are more circumspect. In the board room, you won’t hear anything like, ” We’ve got to stop that N___ from getting reelected.” In the tool room, you will. Some think that means blue collar workers are more racist, but deep in my guts, I’m sure the real difference is just that blue collar workers are more OPENLY racist.
I think you’re right about the blue/white collar difference, but how do you explain 4 years ago if racism is so decisive?
The stench of Bush was sooo explosive. It has worn off after four years?
Then the Dems are not doing their job.
That, and “progressives” explicitly refused to do THEIR job. They spent 3 straight years lying about Obama “he’s gonna destroy Social Security!” “ACA is nothing but a giveaway to corporations!” “Obama is a republican!”….
Thus “progressives” spent years doing literally NOTHING but help republicans take over Congress in 2010. At which point things got worse.
It’s not “Dems” who are the problem. It’s all who have been anti-Obama. All, without exception.
Ranger11’s reply plus, I think the bigots didn’t really think Obama had a chance. They were complacent.
if Barack Obama were White…
Willard would be treated like the clown candidate he is.
All Willard has to offer is that he’s a rich White man.
period.
these are the mofos who cling to WHITENESS over the candidate who CLEARLY is on their economic side.
when WHITENESS is that important to you..
fuck you
Obama would be having FDR numbers if he were an upper class white from New York.
He appointed one of those as his TreasSec, and how is that working out for him? First, you are wrong. The economy is not better for many people. And given our electoral system, there isn’t a 3rd or 4th choice to vote for if you think the guy currently in office isn’t doing good enough. If Willard is leading the week or two after Labor Day, then I might start to worry.
Didn’t say the economy was better. The upper class white guy from New York is a reference to Roosevelt. Things weren’t a whole lot better in 1936 according to anecdotal evidence. Maybe the numbers look better, maybe not, but people knew the Depression was still on. Still, they trusted Roosevelt. They believed he was working to help them. And a lot of that is tied up in race and class. That’s not logical, but it’s true. People don’t want a guy like themselves to lead them, not when the road is dark and dangerous. They want someone they perceive as better than themselves. For many white people that excludes anyone non-white. Not saying it’s right. Just saying it’s true. A lot of people prefer a white idiot to an intelligent black man. Or else why would we be seeing those billboards with Bush’s face and the caption “Miss me yet?”
FDR projected the image of the benevolent Lord of the manor, the father figure that people hoped would “make things right again.” Romney projects the image of Gordon Gekko. What image does Obama project? I think that’s in the eye of the beholder. To me, I see a college professor, intelligent and cool, but a little detached from the gritty world I was born into and tried so hard to escape. Since I enjoyed college, that’s a mostly positive image. What image do you see? I’m very curious. That goes for all of you.
Maybe I should make this a diary.
Yes, they believed Roosevelt was working to help them.
How many believe that about Obama?
By the way, did you read the recent articles on his HAMP program? The one Congress passed early in his term to help homeowners? Turns out the Obama administration in fact set it up – as his critics on the left have long suspected – to help the mortgage makers not the homeowners.
People who voted for Obama have figured this out about Obama, even if they don’t have all the details. Yeah, we’ll vote for him again because Romney is worse, but no way in hell is he fighting for us.
I dunno, I think he’s fighting for me more than any recent president since LBJ although sending my ass to Vietnam in my late teens and early twenties wouldn’t have been a great tradeoff. Bottom line is two-party system there are two choices.
Well, there are a few differences — setting aside FDR’s massive majorities in Congress.
1.) The socialists and communists had actual power, and there was massive overlap between the unions and said socialists. They wanted blood, and unlike today’s unions, they had a lot more public support and were more radical.
2.) FDR came from the same banker class, and didn’t need to convince anyone there that he understood their concerns.
3.) The rich were fearful for both their money and their lives, and were more than willing to settle with the huge taxes on their wealth. The original proposal Congress dealt with was not a huge tax increase, it was a proposal to set a maximum amount of income! IE, 100% taxation once your income reached a certain point.
4.) No mass media for them to overpower FDR’s message.
So in this context, I know the president is dealing with different people, more sociopaths, and more who simply have nothing to fear. FDR had weapons to strike fear in their hearts, Obama can simply only play defense. He said as much in one of his first interviews as president as to what’s really going on:
“It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger. You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk [to] them, ease that finger off the trigger.”
Maybe he should have said, “Bring it on, assholes.” Would you have? Would I have? I don’t know, I wasn’t in that position.
Do you mean HARP? I just closed on a HARP Refi Thursday. I might rescind it. I don’t like some of the clauses. It legalizes MERS, which is probably inevitable. However, it also states that the mortgage is governed by federal law and the law of the state of South Dakota. Illinois where I live and the property exists is not mentioned. I remember our Attorney-General stopped Citibank from imposing a junk fee on us before. Now she will have no power. There is also a clause authorizing a fee for making payments. ??? Shades of Chase!
It is interest rate that falls under South Dakota law. Since the rate is fixed, I suppose that usury law is the only consideration and I don’t think anyone is going to call 4.25% usury.
Upon re-reading, the fee for making a payment only applies after the grace period has expired. Pretty standard.
So the only exception is having MERS as “mortgagee”, a direct quote.
I don’t know many people on the left who think Romney should be leading.
While they’re not terribly numerous, there have been a significant number of loud voices of the left who have been declaring since 2009 that Obama was doomed doomed doomed because the stimulus plan was inadequate, and who’ve spent the last three years expressing great glee at pointing to every example of economic bad news as proof that the Republicans will win.
Surely, you noticed the people declaring that the 2010 elections just proved that the Democrats can’t win elections with the economy bad.
I actually do think Obama is going to lose, but I’m not going to trumpet it from the rooftops as I’d rather he not lose and put off the reckoning until 2016.
Whoo — you sure pushed my buttons on that one. These pundits and their “historical analysis” have pissed me off for longer than I can even remember. It’s the source of “Candidate X has to xxxx before October if ….” as if they have any idea what he has to do, unless you really believe that history repeats itself in every tedious detail. But it makes the professional vapid yappers think they seem smart, and they know nobody will seriously look back at how their stupid predictions didn’t work again.
More poisonously, this kind of blabber, when on influential media, takes on the power to set the agenda: “X has to stay away from the (issue x) if he’s to win in the x part of the country/demographics”. And political consultants being for the most part dim and chickenshit, push for that direction. Kind of like in the early days of computers, you bought IBM because nobody could blame you if the IBM didn’t work — it was the respectable, cautious choice.
Why you think this is a lefty thing I don’t know. It’s endemic to media across the board for two good reasons (according to their priorities): it keeps them in the mainstream, and it won’t make anybody mad. Simple as that.
And candidates pay good money to these “consultants”. Money they could better spend on radio/TV ads.
+cough+ Mark Penn +cough+
Well, there ARE a lot of consistently wrong political consultants who get too much attention. Consider that Rove actually lost the most important election of his career – Bush/Gore – and has made many wrong predictions since but yet still is considered some kind of campaign genius.
But let’s not lump all the predictive models in together. Some have value. It’s probable that those who follow campaign politics the closest overstate the value of campaign strategies in determining the outcome – that’s a normal human trait.
One anecdote worth noting is that in mid-August 2008 Nate Silver put up an interesting post in which, taking into account the known factors from past elections and the timing of the upcoming party conventions, he forecasted the probable polling results, week-by-week, for McCain and Obama leading up to the election.
His forecast was dead on. Note that he didn’t claim this was a prediction – his point merely was that “if you take past data and paste it on to our current situation here is what you’d expect”. But it worked out exactly that way.
At the time he made the post almost no one had heard of Sarah Palin. The huge market crash was still a month away. The Denver convention speech, the debates, the SNL routines, the proposal to suspend the campaigns by McCain – all these things weren’t even imagined. The GOTV effort and 3rd party ads had barely started. Yet, the week-to-week polling results matched his prediction based on past data.
The past data predicted that there would be a convention bounce for each candidate and then the trend would favor the candidate for the party-out-of-power based primarily on economic factors.
So it is in fact worth considering whether all those campaign strategies actually have that much effect at all.
Eppur si muove
This all does bring to mind the question; has this country been running on the energy, creativity and brute strength of just 50% of its population all along? Who are these people who turn their backs on Obama’s policies? Are they actual contributors to this society or just old fashioned suckers?
I heard “there’s one born every minute” 😉
I agree! Why does the GOP get to throw into the mix this kind of wild card? Last time the nitwit from Alaska, this time the glamor boy 1%er. What if they win? Who would really govern? Oh, that’s right – Cheney and Rove.
that’s why I’ve long thought and argued that fear and loathing of rightwingnuttery will be the single largest factor in the republican defeats this fall.
Even those that I know that are the most disappointed in BHO at this point (often feeling betrayed) fully intend to vote for him again considering the alternative.
Now that political polarization is about as thorough as that to be found in your refrigerator magnet, I’d say that this election is best seen as one between which side can generate the most fear and loathing of the opposition. The only difference is, as always, the facts speak for themselves, which is why Romney/repubs prefer to avoid them. It’s the difference between the ways and means their ideological cousins the nazis employed decades ago, and educating people as to who and what they are, and represent — only the 1%.
The truth is an existential threat to their political existence.