Which Candidate has a Base Problem?

That title is not meant to be read rhetorically or sarcastically. But the correct answer is "both of them". The thing, however, is that they are somewhat opposite problems.

The below is data compiled from Rasmussen Reports, consisting of over 7,000 likely voter interviews conducted within the past week. What I'm looking at is solely perceptions of the candidate among voters within his own party.



The topline numbers are not very different from one another. Obama's favorables among Democrats are 82:17, and McCain's among Republicans are 84:15. However, that conceals a lot of information about the strength of those perceptions.

A greater number of Democrats' -- about 8 percent -- have a very unfavorable view of Obama. These 8 percent are your PUMAs -- people that will probably not vote for Obama under any circumstances. Only 4 percent of Republicans feel that way about John McCain.

Obama would be thrilled, of course, if he could actually get his defection rate down to 8 percent: John Kerry lost 11 percent of Democrats to George W. Bush; Al Gore lost 11 percent to Bush and 2 to Nader; Bill Clinton lost 10 percent to Bob Dole and 5 percent to Ross Perot. In reality, Obama will probably lose almost all of the "very unfavorables" and perhaps half of the "somewhat unfavorables", which would produce a defection rate of 12-13 percent (not all of those necessarily to McCain). McCain's defection rate, by that calculus, would be 9-10 percent (not all of those necessarily to Obama).

But look, by contrast, at the enthusiasm gap between the two candidates. 56 percent of Democrats have a very favorable view of Barack Obama, while just 34 percent of Republicans have a very favorable view of John McCain. The thing that's a little bit scary for McCain is that this is after a likely voter screen has been applied, and so even after you get done filtering out those Republicans around the margins who weren't planning to vote in the first place, many of the remaining ones are still doing so for McCain somewhat grudgingly.

The good news for McCain is that if the election is close, the vast majority of these people should still wind up voting for him. That's what turnout operations are all about, and the GOP generally runs a pretty good one. Besides, 52 percent of Republicans have a very unfavorable view of Obama, as compared to 33 percent of Democrats who feel that way about McCain.

But if the election doesn't look like it's going to be close, there could be a snowball effect in which Republican turnout is quite low. If that is the case, the map could turn out to be very, very blue, and Republicans might lose a couple more Senate seats than are generally thought to be in play -- somewhere like Idaho, for instance, could be interesting -- and perhaps an extra dozen or half-dozen House seats on top of that.

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How (not) to win over Clinton supporters

Between the 18 million people who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primaries and the many others who supported her candidacy but didn't cast a ballot for her, it is safe to say that John McCain will win the votes of literally millions of Hillary Clinton supporters in the November election. Almost all of these people will have well-considered and perfectly rational reasons for voting for McCain. Perhaps they don't think that Obama has the experience to be President. Perhaps they tended to side more with John McCain on the issues to begin with, but voted for Clinton because they liked her personally. An exceptionally large cross-section of the American public liked either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Although there is a heavy degree of overlap between the two constituencies, there is a lot of room at the margins.

McCain, however, appears to be less interested in speaking to the millions of Clinton voters who fall somewhere between the cracks, and more interested in engaging the handful of crazies who dislike Barack Obama for wholly irrational reasons. Take Will Bower, the founder of a group called PUMA ("Party Unity My Ass"). On Saturday, Bower met with John McCain. On Wednesday, Bower attended Larry Sinclair's press conference, saw Sinclair literally accuse Obama of murder, saw Sinclair's lawyer wearing a kilt, saw Sinclair flee the room after the press conference because he was moments away from being arrested, and came away saying that Sinclair's story was "worth exploring". That means that McCain is either one or two degrees removed from the lunatic fringe, depending on what you think of Bower's state of mind.

Another of the people McCain met with, Paula Abeles, has a history of unethical and arguably racist behavior. Another was Harriet Christian, who gained her 15 minutes of notoriety by referring to Barack Obama as an "inadequate black man". Another is an author for the blog/conspiracist site No Quarter, which within the past week has accused of Obama of behavior ranging from having a liaison with Sinclair to promoting pedophilia through his Kids for Obama website.

There is too much risk to McCain that one of these people will become even more unhinged, and do or say something that gives him guilt by association problems. This really isn't that far removed from meeting with the "9/11 trUthers for Johnny MAC!" Facebook group. And to what benefit? So that you can be accused of pandering by Michelle Malkin? News flash: these people are not swing voters. Will Bower founded a group named Party Unity My Ass. He is not going to vote for Barack Obama. Paul Abeles is probably a racist. She is not going to vote for Barack Obama. Harriet Christian's vote is in the bag, Senator McCain. You do not need to win her over.

So what can McCain do to speak to the overwhelming majority of former Clinton supporters who are not batshit crazy? I think the communication has to be more implicit -- in fact, almost subliminal. The McCain campaign has actually been close to doing this a couple of times, although the execution in both cases was clumsy. The first time was during McCain's "green background" speech on June 3rd when he repeatedly used the phrase "That's not change you can believe in!", which explicitly echoed a phrase used by Hillary Clinton during the Texas Primary debate (Clinton's coda, "That's change you can Xerox", was not received well by the audience). The second was yesterday, when the McCain campaign accused the Obama campaign of "frat house" behavior for insisting that they be allowed to join McCain conference calls -- though the reference seemed out-of-context here, the phrasing was very Wolfsonesque.

As I said, these are ineffective examples of what might be an effective strategy for McCain. But the point is that Clinton spent 18 months fighting Barack Obama for the nomination, and there are a lot of lessons that can be drawn from that. Some subset of those things her campaign did and said that were effective back then are probably also going to be among the most effective ways now to dog-whistle to her supporters.

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A Refinement to the Adjustment, Part II

The principal criticism of the Trend Adjustment that I introduced on Saturday is that it assumed that the trend was uniform across all states. Even if we can demonstrate that Barack Obama has gained, say, 3 points in his polling on average, and even if that average was taken across a fairly robust group of state and national polls, it might not hold that the bounce would be felt the same in Utah as it might be in Massachusetts.

I agree entirely with this criticism in theory. I would also argue that it is probably better to assume a uniform trend than no trend at all. The polling has become dense enough (particuarly if we include national polls) that we're getting a pretty fair mix of state and national polls in any given week. It is unlikely that Obama could improve his position in say 10 out of 12 state polls, and 5 out of 6 national polls, without his also being likely to have improved his position in other states that weren't polled during this period.

Nevertheless, it would clearly be best if we could have our cake and eat it too: adjust for the most recent trends (in a somewhat cautious way) without having to take some of the state-by-state specificity out of our model. I think I've developed a reasonable way to accomplsih that.

The basic way that we developed the trend estimator was to express each polling result as a combination of two dummy variables, one representing the state/pollster combination (e.g. "Quinnipac-Florida" or "Zogby-Delaware") and the other the week in which the poll was conducted. Each poll in our database can thus can be expressed in the form of a regression equation:



...'Margin' represents the polling result (Obama's total less McCain's), whereas the squiggly little 'e' you see is a term denoting the residual error/uncertainty. Technically speaking, there are coefficient terms on the two dummy variables, though over the long run, these coefficients will by definition equal one. Likewise, the error term will definitionally equal zero over the long run. However, just because the coefficients equal one on average does not mean that they do so in every single case. Another way to express our regression would be to embed the uncertainty term in the time-trend dummy, as follows:



In this equation, m represents a multiplier on the weekly trend variable. It is trivial to solve for m.



In a state which is more impacted by a time-defendant trend, m will be greater than one. In a state that is less impacted by the trend, it will be less than one.

Once we have a derived an m for each poll in our database, we can then regress it against a series of demographic variables in the state where the poll was conducted to see whether there is any pattern to the residuals. Since our particular concern is with recent trends, we weight recent polls much more heavily when conducting this analysis. (A couple of technical notes: we discard any cases in which the pollster has polled the state just once, as m will always be one in these cases. Also, we discard cases where the weekly dummy is a very small number -- anything less than one, in fact -- as this can produce very large, highly erratic values of m).

The demographic regression that I perform on m includes relatively few variables. This is because there aren't all that many useful data points to work with -- we need very recent polls, and for those polls to have been conducted in a state that the pollster surveyed previously -- so there is more risk of overfitting the model. The particular variables we include are a state's partisan ID index, its Kerry vote share in 2004, its black population, its Hispanic population, its average per capita income, its percentage of senior citizens, and its percentage of evangelicals. With the exception of the Kerry and 'partisan' variables, which are too fundamental to the model to be excluded, these variables have the virtue of not being strongly intercorrelated with one another.

As it turns out, there are some patterns in where Obama's bounce is showing up. It is coming in states where Democrats have a strong party identification advantage (no surprise), and seems to be especially strong in states where many voters are registered as Democrats, but where John Kerry did not perform well in 2004. This particularly describes states like West Virginia and Arkansas, where Obama's numbers have improved significantly, and where (assuredly not coincidentally) Hillary Clinton also performed well. The other observable trend is that Obama's bounce has been larger in states where there are not a lot of African-American voters, simply because there are few marginal gains for him to make among that demographic. It will probably always be the case in this election that states with lots of African-American voters will be less responsive to trends in the polling numbers.

This demographic regression allows us to estimate a unique value of m for each state. I cap the values of m at 0.0 and 2.0, respectively. The average value of m will not necessarily be 1.0, as it could be the case that particular kinds of states are especially predisposed to a bounce, and those states have also been polled more frequently (in fact, this does appear to have been the case to a small degree over the past couple weeks). The present m values for some representative states are as follows:

Kentucky       1.98
Arkansas       1.93
Massachusetts  1.76
Oklahoma       1.66
New York       1.37
Michigan       1.05
North Carolina 1.01
California     0.97
Pennsylvania   0.93
Florida        0.71
Nevada         0.70
Ohio           0.54
Arizona        0.29
Utah           0.00

In adjusting our polling numbers, we take the trend from our LOESS estimator and multiply it by m. For example, say that our LOESS curve estimates that Barack Obama is polling 3 points stronger now on average than he was three weeks ago. If we take a 3-week old poll from Kentucky, we will adjust it upward (toward Obama) by (3 x 1.98) = 5.94 points. In California, we will adjust it by (3 x 0.97) = 2.91 points. And in Arizona, we would adjust it by only 0.87 points.

Taking into account the sensitivity of individual states to time trends produces a slightly less impressive result for Obama than we had been figuring on over the weekend, as his bounce seems to be most profound in states where he was already well ahead (like Massachusetts), or where he is probably too far behind to catch up (like Oklahoma). Still, we have seen at least some bounce for Obama across a large and relatively diverse array of states, and can expect to see that trend manifested in other states where new polls will come out unless his bounce begins to recede nationally.

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World's Simplest Election Projection

My latest ZohoSheet project. This will give you a simple popular vote projection for November based on (i) a candidate's support from each party and (ii) turnout rates.



A couple of notes: the party ID values you see here are based on a combination of three recent surveys: Gallup, Rasmussen , and Pew. All three show the Democrats with between a 9 and 10 point partisan edge on the Republicans, although the surveys differ somewhat in how many independents they identify.

I recommend that you not play with the party ID numbers, since those numbers move glacially and are at least somewhat exogenous to the political contest in any given year. Instead, you can manipulate the turnout rates. I have Democrats and Republicans each turning out at 62 percent, with independent turnout being slightly lower. I believe this is roughly what the turnout rates looked like in 2004, although I can't find any hard evidence on that.

The other numbers you see in the worksheet, while not coming from anywhere in particular, are not entirely arbitrary either. Fundamentally, it is very challenging for McCain to be working from this deficit in partisan ID.

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Can Nader help Obama?

CNN's new national poll ran versions both with and without third-party candidates. Obama performs one point better in the version with third-party candidates than without, leading McCain by 4 points rather than 3.

This would not be surprising if most of the third party vote were going to Bob Barr. But in fact, it's Ralph Nader who is picking up most of those votes. He polls at 6 percent in this survey to Barr's 2 percent.

                 Obama  McCain  Nader  Barr   D/K
No Third Party     49     46      --    --     5
w/Third Party      47     43       6     2     2
Change             -2     -3      +6    +2    -3

The conventional wisdom, of course, is that Nader takes votes away from the Democrat. Indeed, I suspect that most of his 6 percent comes from Democratic voters. But I suspect that it's coming from a particular kind of Democratic voter: disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters. Some of those folks are not yet ready to "endorse" Barack Obama. But they might also have significant reservations about voting for John McCain. Ralph Nader (and Bob Barr) provide for something of a soft landing. Even Larry C. Johnson, the seemingly chemically imbalanced former CIA agent behind the anti-Obama conspiracist website No Quarter, yesterday told his truthers that he would be voting for Bob Barr.

By the time the Obama campaign has finished saturating the airwaves in November, it will probably have succeeded in convincing almost all of its base that John McCain is an unacceptable alternative. As some of those voters might still not be ready to vote for Obama, the presence of Nader's name on the ballot might be as helpful to Obama as it is harmful.

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Some signs of a unity bounce

It's very early, but both of the national tracking polls are showing results that are consistent with the notion of a "unity bounce" for Barack Obama.

Rasmussen:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows what may be the beginning of a bounce for Barack Obama. Obama now attracts 45% of the vote while John McCain earns 40%. That five-point lead for Obama is up from a two-point advantage over the past couple of days. Before that, for much of last week, McCain had enjoyed a slight edge.

Gallup:

The latest results include two nights of interviewing since Obama declared victory over Hillary Clinton on Tuesday night in the Democratic delegate contest. Although Wednesday night's interviewing showed no immediate bounce in national support for Obama versus McCain, Thursday night's results were quite favorable to Obama. It will be important to see if Obama can maintain this support over the coming days.

We don't know that this is triggered by Clinton-supporting Democrats coming back into the fold. It could just have easily be independent voters who are caught up in the excitement of the past couple days, or were turned off by John McCain's awful speech. Both of those phenomena are likely to be more transient than a true unity bounce. Naturally, it could also just be statistical noise.

But as someone who has been pitching the notion of a unity bounce for a long time, my expectation is that some of this is going to stick in the near-to-medium terms.

There's also a chance -- I wouldn't call it probable, but it's distinctly possible -- that Obama is going to gain several points over the next couple of weeks and essentially never give them back. When I saw Mitt Romney on Morning Joe the other day and he was really lowballing expectations for McCain (e.g. "it's amazing that we're tied"), I got the impression that this is something the Republicans stay up late worrying about.

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Now It Matters

There's an old customer service adage that 20 percent of your customers create 80 percent of your problems. That needs to be remembered when contemplating the Clinton protesters who were chanting "Denver! Denver!" at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel yesterday, or hanging out with Larry Sinclair outside of it. These people do not represent the way that the majority of Clinton's supporters feel. They should probably not even be thought of as swing voters. Most of them are either extremely loyal to Clinton, which means that they'll support Obama once Clinton endorses him, or extremely anti-Obama, which means that as much as they might threaten not to vote for Obama unless he does so-and-so, most of them were never going to vote for him in the first place.

But what about the other 80 percent of Clinton's supporters? I have long held the opinion that the length of the Democratic primary campaign alone was not damaging to the Democrats. In fact, I think it has probably been helpful. Obama's campaign team will have gone through the equivalent of eight or nine fire drills for the general election, corresponding to the big dates of voting on the Democratic calendar. That's highly useful experience, particularly against an opponent in John McCain who had an extremely abbreviated primary season, essentially going from underdog to presumptive nominee in the span of about three weeks.

But I do think that the way that the Democratic campaign ends matters. Obama is going to have a rough go of things if a perception sets in amongst the silent majority of Clinton supporters that he stole the nomination from their girl. Clinton is categorically not going to win the Democratic nomination. It is too late for her campaign to do or say anything that might change that equation. But the tone of her campaign from this point forward could have a significant impact on Obama's chances in November. In particular, argumentation that Obama is an illegitimate nominee could be hard to walk back later.

It is interesting to consider this in light of yesterday's decision on Michigan. Chuck Todd writes that Obama actually had the votes on the Rules & Bylaws Committee to earn an even delegate split out of Michigan. But instead, he deferred to Carl Levin's 69-59 plan. How come? Because the delegate margin isn't close enough to matter, and giving Clinton some kind of a "win" in Michigan will help to undercut the perception that delegate shenanigans caused the nomination to be stolen from her.

It might be asked: why not instead sign off Clinton the 73-55 delegate split that her campaign desired? It's only a difference of a few delegates.

Well, if you did that, you'd be reflecting the Clinton/uncommitted preference from the unsanctioned primary. Which means that you'd be tending to legitimate the results of that primary. Which means that Clinton would have had a stronger claim for including Michigan in her popular vote count. And the popular vote count is different way that Clinton has tended to imply that Obama's nomination is not legitimate. If Clinton hadn't pushed the popular vote meme so noisily, in other words, Obama would probably have given her those four extra delegates.

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