Hard Support vs. Soft Support

On Friday, Nate highlighted a significant element in the crosstabs of the Newsweek poll: the difference in hard support versus soft support for each candidate, and what that implies about the task at hand for each campaign in the general election. I want to follow on and amplify that point with more data from Pew from its large late-June survey of 2,004 voters.

The Newsweek poll showed that 61% to 39% of Obama’s support was hard vs. soft and that the mirror image was true for McCain. Applied to the whole electorate, the Newsweek poll showed:

27% hard support Obama
17% soft support Obama
15% totally undecided
25% soft support McCain
16% hard support McCain

Pew’s numbers are strikingly similar. From its June 2008 poll (June 18-29, 2,004 participants):

28% hard support Obama
20% soft support Obama
12% totally undecided
26% soft support McCain
14% hard support McCain

According to Pew’s findings, 58% of the electorate is undecided or soft support (potentially peel-able). To get to a 50%-50% tie with Obama, McCain would need to win 36/58ths of this group, or roughly 62%. I agree with Nate both that this is probably a Republican-shaded group on the whole, and also with his speculation that McCain’s and Obama’s respective ceilings are probably 60% and 50%. 60% for McCain in no small part because 35% of that middle group consists of decided (but soft) Obama supporters and certainly Obama will win some of the truly undecided even if McCain winds up taking the lion’s share. Obama’s ceiling at 50% seems reasonable because splitting that middle group 50-50 means Obama wins by 14 in the Pew poll.

With Pew showing McCain needing 62% of that group to get tied, poll findings like these (non-state specific as they are) indicate McCain either needs to introduce a game-changer that fundamentally undermines the Obama voter commitment level or he needs to almost perfectly maximize his messaging to grab nearly everyone gettable within this group.

Keep in mind, this is before the ground organization edge and additional voter registration boost is factored in.

The distressing news for McCain in these numbers is that Obama and McCain pull an identical 82% of their respective bases and that the poll shows independents evenly split. There isn’t an obvious untapped well of voters McCain’s camp simply needs to target with its message. Any argument of “McCain just needs to reach out to X” is balanced by a corresponding “Obama just needs to shore up support with X.” Nothing is glaringly unaligned in these numbers. There are just more Democratic voters in 2008.

Historically, Pew compares the 2008 hard/soft support data to its past summer polling in presidential years:



The two most noticeable elements in Pew’s recent historical data are (1) pre-convention support for Obama in 2008 essentially equal to post-convention support for Kerry in 2004; and (2) the hard Bush support in 2000 and especially 2004 looks like the Republican outlier, as McCain’s numbers appear to revert to match the hard support inspired by previous Republican nominees.

In 2004, the Democratic convention took place July 26-29; Pew conducted its 2004 poll in August and before the Republican convention August 30-Sept 2. With a convention still in front of him that Obama hopes will inure to his benefit in terms of party unity, there’s reason for optimism that Obama will edge past Kerry’s hard/overall support numbers after the convention has passed. There is also risk – as soon as Obama picks Not Hillary Clinton as his VP, that unity gets its stiffest test since the primaries ended.

As for the second point, George W. Bush’s hard/soft support numbers remind us that McCain’s support is not the outlier at this stage of the game (he just has a proportionally much smaller base). Bush seems to be the outlier. Republicans loved him exponentially more than they have loved their other recent nominees. Inspired Republicans felt thrilled to have found a nearly perfect ideological match. Republicans worshipped that guy. Mired as we are in the great conservative walkback revisionist mythology that insists George W. Bush was “not a true conservative” and certainly “not the apotheosis of conservative evolutionary ideological perfection,” it’s inconvenient to notice that Republican base values only four short years ago tracked closely with hard support for Bush. Just look at the numbers. These days, little old ladies are banished from McCain town halls for daring to associate the nominee with the president in his own party.

In terms of base enthusiasm, what separates George W. Bush from his father, from Dole, and from McCain is that only the younger Bush was a hero to evangelicals. Evangelical Christians remain the organizing engine of the Republican Party, and they typically don’t get the credit they deserve for winning the race for Bush in 2004 (usually pundits like to frame the outcome as "John Kerry lost," despite unprecedented Democratic turnout). McCain’s current level of milquetoast support from that group is a major obstacle to him winning in an environment where Democrats are both more numerous and significantly harder in their support for Obama.

It’s awareness that these evangelicals are still the pumping heart of the Republican organizing infrastructure that motivates my belief McCain ought to seriously consider Mike Huckabee as his VP. (Nate has offered Republican VP speculation here.) Huckabee may have a few gaffes here and there, and he may be wildly out of the American mainstream for some of his views once those views reach sunlight, but I simply don’t think those views are going to capture enough voter attention nor be meaningfully damaging enough (as merely the VP) to outweigh the benefits Huckabee would bring the ticket. If McCain isn’t able to get any oxygen in the narrative (good or bad), how much scrutiny will his VP choice really get? Would a perceived base pander pick truly hurt McCain with the undecideds in a way that has any staying power?

Importantly, Huckabee has the virtue of coming across as empathetic. No matter how ungenerous his policies might actually be if and when implemented, he has a way of leaving the impression on viewers of a man who cares. He passes the likability test.

As for political skill, Huckabee seems to understand deference to the top of the ticket. He was far and away the most telegenic communicator among the Republican hopefuls during the primary (and certainly hands down the best on Nate’s list), and it’s certainly the simplest and most direct way for McCain to lock down the support and enthusiasm of that desperately-needed evangelical organizing engine. McCain’s age would probably inspire the evangelicals to view Huckabee’s heir apparent spot in line as an object in the mirror closer than it may appear. As base Republican enthusiasm for McCain would rise, the deliberate Obama effort to encroach on evangelical voter territory that has long been Republican by acclaim may find frustration.

Huckabee has plenty of drawbacks as the choice and it's easy to pick him apart as a bad choice for the ticket. The problem is, it's easy to do that with any Republican VP choice since nobody brings everything, and McCain has to pick someone.

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This Post is Already Written

Here's the new Newsweek poll; it shows Obama ahead 44-41. Their last poll, somewhat famously, had shown Obama ahead by 15.

Here's what I wrote three weeks ago. Just plug in 'Newsweek' where you see 'LA Times / Bloomberg' and we should be good to go.

I don't have a big problem with the details of the McCain campaign's pushback on yesterday's LA Times / Bloomberg poll, which had shown Barack Obama ahead by 12 points. In contrast to some of the memos that the press was treated to from the desk of Mark Penn, the McCain team's argument is relatively even-tempered and even-handed, fully acknowledging that their candidate does have a deficit to make up in the polls, if not the double digit margin implied by the LAT.

At the end of the day, what this really boils down to is an academic argument about whether one should weight polls by party identification, which is perhaps the most controversial subject in polling and one without any wrong answers. My take, for what it's worth, is that weighting by party ID may increase the precision of any one individual poll, but reduce the accuracy, particularly if you are able to look at several different polls at once.



My question, however, is just who is the audience is for this critique? It's June, and the election is in November. While the overall volume of polling data does give us some hints about what is more or less likely to occur in November, who the hell cares if McCain is down in any one particular poll? If he's down by 3, it's because he's down by 3, and if he's down by 11, it's because he's down by 11. The polling is simply a manifestation of that reality and not its cause.

Moreover, it is not clear to me that this is a spin war worth winning. If the media believes that Barack Obama is ahead by 5 points, then if a new poll comes out next week showing him ahead by 3, it will not get any attention. But if the media believes that Obama is ahead by 12 points, that same poll would create the perception of McCain momentum, and perhaps trigger a couple of days' worth of bad press for Obama as whatever had been going on over the past couple of days of the campaign would be taken as the cause for his polling decline. It might lead to harsher treatment of Obama's decision (flip-flop?) on campaign finance, for instance, or if Iran had been the subject of the week, as evidence that Obama wasn't resonating with voters on foreign policy.

McCain's campaign is absolutely right that the media ought not to focus too much on any one particular poll. But there are times later on when it's going to want them to do just that.

EDIT: That said, the differences aren't completely about party ID, since Obama lost significant ground in this poll among independents.

Here's something interesting from the cross-tabs, though: 61 percent of Obama's support is 'hard' and 39 percent is 'soft'. McCain's numbers are the precise opposite -- 39 percent of his support is hard and 61 percent is soft. So we could describe the electorate like this:

27 Hard Obama
17 Soft Obama
15 Totally Undecided
25 Soft McCain
16 Hard McCain

So Obama has roughly an 11-point advantage among hard supporters, which corresponds to the Democrats' edge in party ID.

About 43 percent if the country are hard supporters for one or the other candidate, while the other 57 percent are up for grabs to some extent or another.

McCain ties Obama when he wins 60 percent of those up-for-grabs voters. This is not quite the same thing as winning 60 percent of undecideds, since some of those people are decided (and decided for Obama) -- but their minds aren't completely made up. So it's going to be difficult for McCain to get much more than 60 percent of this group. On the other hand, this universe of 'soft' supporters probably intrinsically tilts Republican, since across a large number of indicators, a higher percentage of Republicans are dissatisfied with their nominee and their party. So it's going to be hard for Obama to get much more than 50 percent of this group. When the soft support is split 50/50, Obama leads by 11.

What I think you're going to see is the national numbers continue to swing around between those two poles -- as they have pretty much all year with the exception of Jeremiah Wright v1.0.

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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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Are Undecideds leaning Clinton in Pennsylvania?

Below is a chart of all reasonably current polls in Pennsylvania. On one axis, I've plotted Clinton's lead in each poll, and on the other, the number of undecided voters in that poll.



As you can see, there is a strong, if not overwhelming relationship between these two things: Obama tends to do better where there are more undecideds, and Clinton tends to do better where there are fewer. The relationship is statistically significant at the 95 percent level.

If we trace the regression line such that it crosses the y-axis -- meaning, there are zero undecideds -- we'd project a Clinton win by 16 points.

Is this a valid way to look at the polls? I have no idea. But we can run a gut-check of sorts. The average of these 14 polls is: Clinton 48.3, Obama 40.9, Undecided 10.0. For Clinton to win by 16 points on election day, that would imply results of Clinton 57.5, Obama 41.5, assuming that 1 percent of the vote goes to minor candidates.

In order for that to occur, Clinton would need to pick up 9.2 points from undecided voters, to Obama's 0.6. In other words, she'd have to win nearly every undecided voter. Even when elections break at the end -- they don't break that strongly. Maybe Clinton could win 2 out of 3 undecided voters (which would imply a victory margin of about 10 points), but not 9 out of 10.

So -- I wouldn't take these numbers all that seriously. At the same time, I think there is a case to be made that Clinton has a couple extra points worth of cushion in her Pennsylvania numbers versus what the polling averages currently imply.

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The Clinton Voters who won't vote for Obama, Part II

No general election polls today, but Rasmussen finds Obama up 56-33 in the North Carolina primary. The arguably more interesting finding is that 56% of Clinton voters report they are not likely to vote for Barack Obama in the general election. As Rasmussen reports, "A month ago, 45% of Clinton voters said they were not likely to vote for Obama against McCain."

So should this trend be troubling for Obama?

It's not good news, certainly. There are some Clinton supporters who won't vote for Obama in the general election -- and there are also some Obama supporters who won't vote for Clinton in the general election. However, there is no evidence from this poll that their numbers are increasing.

Let's do some simple math. A month ago, 40% of North Carolina voters supported Clinton in the primaries, according to Rasmussen, and 45% of those voters said they wouldn't vote for Obama in the general election. That means that 18% of likely primary voters in North Carolina both intended to vote for Clinton in the primaries and intended to vote for McCain in the general election:

40% x 45% = 18%

Now? 56% of Clinton's supporters say they won't vote for Obama in November. But -- and this is the important point -- the percentage of Clinton supporters has gone down, from 40% to 33%. If we multiply 33% by 56% we get...

33% x 56% = 18%

...we get 18%! (Technically 18.48%). In other words, exactly the same fraction of the electorate are Type 3 voters (Clinton-McCain-Obama) as we had before.

Here's the general rule to keep in mind: when a candidate is gaining support, their support tends to be soft. That means the candidate has a lot of newly-minted support, fresh out of the oven, and such support inherently tends to be soft. Conversely, when a candidate is losing support, their support tends to be hard. Clinton now has the support of only 33% of North Carolina primary voters. But those people who are left in her camp are hard-core; all the soft support, the swing support in the state, has swung over to Obama. And it's not surprising that her remaining supporters have strong preferences for Clinton over Obama -- enough so that many of them insert McCain's name somewhere between the two Democrats.

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