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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Today's Polls, 7/5

I've been moving at about half-speed for a number of reasons, but there are a couple of polls that have trickled in this weekend. In Rhode Island, Obama leads by 24 according to Rasmussen's first poll of the state. No surprise there. But in Georgia, InsiderAdvantage has John McCain ahead by only 2 points, 46-44, with 4 percent of the vote going to Bob Barr. This is consistent with an InsiderAdvantage poll released two weeks ago that had McCain ahead by 1. But it's inconsistent with other polling of the state, all of which has shown the state within a fairly narrow, 8-10 point range.

I can't scrutinize the internals on the InsiderAdvantage poll because they haven't provided them. Nor for that matter did Rasmussen (which showed McCain with a 10-point lead) break its results down by race. But here is a little bit of a hint -- Rasmussen had Obama trailing 65-32 among Georgians who attend church weekly, and since African-Americans are quite churchgoing in the South, that must mean that he's getting absolutely clobbered with the white persons in this category. There are probably fewer true swing voters in Georgia than in almost any other state, and while Obama has a floor on his numbers that is better than the Democrats have done recently, he probably also has a ceiling.

The Obama campaign's argument, of course, is that it doesn't need swing voters: it just needs to turn out the black vote. But it's not clear that there's a ton of room for improvement. In 2004, African-Americans made up 27.2 percent of Georgia's voting-age citizen population, versus 27.4 percent of its registered voters, and 27.6 percent of people who actually voted (all this data is taken from the US Census Bureau -- exit polling showed a slightly lower share of African-Americans voting in Georgia, about 25 percent).

Georgia is unusual for having not only a substantial black population, but also an especially well-educated and upwardly-mobile black population, and it is entirely plausible that African-Americans voters will turn out in greater proportion than their white counterparts. But I don't see Obama improving his standing with white evangelicals enough to win. Both foreign policy conservatives and fiscal conservatives can probably find enough to like about Obama to consider voting for him. But for religious conservatives, who are voting on a series of issues on which less nuance is possible, I'm not sure that's the case. Sure, you can be for publicly-financed faith-based initiatives and also for gay marriage remaining legal in California, but I don't think the two things cancel out in the same way that you can moderate your position on NAFTA or be hawkish on some elements of national security.

The 50-state Strategy, as well as the nation's changing demographics and the problems in Iraq and with the economy, are slowly beginning to neutralize these issues even in the Deep South, which is why Obama might lose Georgia by 6 or 8 or 10 points rather than John Kerry's 16. Even so, Southern religious conservatives remain the voters that Republicans are most used to reaching out to -- including McCain's chief strategist, who used to do work with the Jesse Helms campaign. Change is inevitable, but it's going to hit Virginia before it hits the Carolinas, and the Carolinas before it hits Georgia.

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Today's Polls, 7/1

Tom Schaller argues in the New York Times that Barack Obama should abandon the South, or at least the South outside of Florida and Virginia. I don't agree with the entirety of Schaller's reasoning. In particular, while I see the same inverse correlation that Schaller does -- the greater the number of black voters in a Southern state, the fewer white voters tend to vote for the Democrat -- I don't necessarily see a causation. Our regression model seems to do a pretty good job of explaining the Southern vote without any reference to some sort of racial interaction effects, by focusing instead on things like the number of white evangelicals in the state and income levels.

Nevertheless, I do tend to agree with Schaller's conclusion: the South (again excluding Florida and Virginia) is fairly likely to disappoint the Democrats again. We have a number of polls today to back that up.



Let's focus first on the results in Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina. Obama did get a bounce from Strategic Vision's last poll of Georgia, where he had previously trailed by 14 points. But he remains 8 points behind, and while Bob Barr is pulling 3 percent of the vote away from McCain in Georgia, it doesn't appear to me that Barr will have the resources to improve that number significantly. In North Carolina, Obama has been stuck at 3-5 points behind John McCain for quite a long time; the PPP poll today confirms that conclusion. And in Louisiana, Southern Media & Opinion Research has Obama 16 points behind, just as it did in April.

It seems to me that Obama's numbers in states like North Carolina and Georgia are liable to come in within a relatively narrow range. He'll do better than a Democrat like John Kerry did there, with substantial support from blacks (although Schaller is right that African-American turnout has not been particularly low), students, information-sector workers, and new migrants to the region -- as PPP notes, Obama is leading by 6 points among people who have moved to North Carolina from outside the state, but trails by 13 among people who were born and raised there. But where Obama is disliked in the South, he tends to be disliked a lot; his "very unfavorables" tend to be pretty high in the region. There just aren't that many swing voters in the South, and the Democrats are left watching the paint dry and the demographics gradually become more favorable to them in states like North Carolina and Georgia. North Carolina could be 2012's Virginia, and Georgia could be 2016's, but it's probably too soon for a non-Southern Democrat to be winning states in the interior of the region.

Florida, however, remains its own demographic entity, and there an Obama win is more plausible. PPP has him leading by 2 there -- a big move upward from their only previous poll of the state, which had Obama 11 points behind in March -- although Strategic Vision has him trailing by 6. The fact is that Florida remains something like Obama's Plan C or Plan D for winning the election, but any state with 27 electoral votes and where the polling appears to be this volatile will need to be closely monitored.

And once we move entirely outside of the South, Obama appears to be doing quite well. SurveyUSA now has him 20 points ahead in New York -- up from 10 points before -- and he's holding onto a 5-point advantage in both major national tracking polls. From everything we can tell, Obama's post-primary bounce has plateaued, but not peaked, though it does appear to be concentrated in particular regions, some of which (like the Rust Belt states of Ohio and Michigan) have been quite helpful to Obama, and others of which (like New York and California) are fairly superfluous.

Finally, one quick methodological aside: the Strategic Vision polls were "leaked" today by Political Wire with a limited number of details. I have filled in my guesstimates of survey dates and sample sizes based on their typical patterns, but we will correct those tomorrow as needed.

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Clinton and Education Levels

Pursuant to the tease I put out this morning, I've been doing some further investigation into the regression model, and identified a variable that has some pretty interesting effects: a state's educational level, as measured by the average number of years of completed schooling per adult, according to the US Census Bureau.

As you can see from the graphs, there is essentially no relationship between a state's educational level and Clinton's performance in the polls; there is a rather strong relationship for Barack Obama. But it's actually Clinton's graph, rather than Obama's, that's unusual relative to how things have gone in the recent past. If you drew John Kerry's graph in 2004, it would look much more like Obama's than Clinton's.

Put differently, relative to John Kerry, Clinton performs worse in highly-educated states, and better in poorly-educated states. This turns out to be one of the more significant variables in her regression model; in fact, if you look JUST at the Kerry vote and education levels for Clinton, you do very nearly as well as if you consider all the other variables that our model evaluates.

Electorally, this is a bit of a wash for Clinton, but it might require a somewhat different allocation of resources than a Democrat like Obama would use. Following are the most and least educated states:

Average Years of Educational Attainment
Adults >=25
1. Colorado         13.46
2. Massachusetts    13.39
3. Maryland         13.37
4. New Hampshire    13.36
5. Vermont          13.33
6. Connecticut      13.31
7. Washington       13.28
8. Minnesota        13.25
9. Alaska           13.18
10. Montana         13.14

50. West Virginia   12.16
49. Kentucky        12.21
48. Mississippi     12.24
47. Arkansas        12.25
46. Louisiana       12.32
45. Texas           12.38
44. Alabama         12.42
43. Tennessee       12.43
42. South Carolina  12.52
41. Nevada          12.60

So this helps to explain why, for instance, Clinton has struggled in the polls in Colorado and New Hampshire, and why McCain has been close to her in a couple of polls of Connecticut. The regression model now has more confidence in the polls in those states. On the other hand, we can also see why Clinton has polled relatively well in states like West Virginia and Tennessee, and there may be opportunities for her there.

By the way, once we include the education variable, the Southern Baptist variable (which is changing to 'Evangelicals' -- I'll explain in a moment) drops out of Clinton's equation. It appears that Clinton does not have a particular advantage (relative to your usual Democrat) either in the South, or among evangelicals. Instead, she does better among low-education voters than most Democrats usually have, and there tend to be more of these voters in the South. But in a state like Georgia, which is significantly better educated than most of its neighbors, Clinton has performed quite badly in the polls.

I also tested whether its income levels, rather than educational levels, that appear to be the driving force behind this. It isn't. When both variables are included, the education variable remains highly statistically significant for Clinton, while the income variable drops out.

---

So long as I was including the education variable, I did a little bit of additional maintenance on the regression model:

1. Firstly, the variable for Southern Baptists was replaced with a variable for evangelicals. The Southern Baptist variable was always a little bit of a mess, as it was a hybrid of two different estimates of religious population. But I came across some very good, reliable-looking data on the number of evangelicals from the Association of Religion Data Archives (it's worth a few minutes of your time to explore the site). In addition to being a bit 'cleaner', this variable also turns out to have a slightly stronger relationship with Obama's polls than the old Southern Baptist variable (as I stated above, neither variable is significant in Clinton's model once we account for educational levels). Of note: the ARDA does not consider predominantly black churches in its definition of Evangelicals; these are white evangelical Protestants.

2. The two variables 'Democrat' and 'Independent', which represent party identification in 2004 CNN Exit Polls, were replaced with one variable, 'Partisan', which represents the percentage of Democrats less the percentage of Republicans (so in Arkansas, where 41% of the electorate identified themselves as Democrat and 31% as Republican, the partisan index is 41-31 = +10%). This is a cleaner way to do things, as the two variables we had before ('Democrat' and 'Independent') were somewhat intercorrelated; there doesn't appear to be any such thing as an 'independent spirit' that causes states with a high proportion of independents to behave differently from their overall party leanings. Hillary's support is oriented slightly more strongly around this partisan axis than John Kerry's; Obama's is oriented significantly less so.

3. (Very, very technical). The program is now performing a proper stepwise regression instead of just wiping out a whole bunch of variables at once; there was no reason we weren't doing this before, but it took me a bit of time to figure out the programming. Also, we've slightly lowered the threshold wherein we include a variable from 85% statistical significance to 80% statistical significance.

The site will be updated momentarily with the revised regression model included. Clinton appears to do very slightly better with the new model; there is no real change for Obama.

UPDATE:

For Obama, the parameters currently included in the regression are as follows:

Variable      Coeff        t-score
$_Obama       8.13         4.35
Kerry         0.59         4.22
Evangelical  -0.34         3.47
Partisan     -0.36         2.41
$_McCain     -7.11         2.17
$_Clinton    -2.52         1.65

Constant      3.17         1.63

Dropped: Education (highly correlated with Obama fundraising), AfAmerican.

For Clinton, the parameters are:

Variable      Coeff        t-score
Kerry         0.63         7.47
Education    -7.37         3.61
$_McCain     -3.60         1.54
$_Clinton     1.33         1.36
Partisan      0.14         1.33

Constant      94.63        3.59

Dropped: AfAmerican, Evangelical, $_Obama.

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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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Today's Polls, 4/3: A 30,000-foot look at Pennsylvania

Two new polls today. In New Jersey, Farleigh-Dicksinson has both Democrats leading John McCain by 5 points. This is similar to FDU's last poll of the state, which showed Clinton ahead by 5 and Obama by 4, and qualifies as slightly reassuring news for the Dems in a state where polls have shown McCain being reasonably competitive.

But the bigger news for our purposes is the Strategic Vision poll of Pennsylvania that's being reported by MSNBC and Political Wire. The poll shows Obama closing the gap in the Democratic primary matchup to 8 points -- but it also shows Hillary leading her general election trial heat by 6 points, whereas Obama trails his by 5. The poll has not been released officially yet, but I'm assuming that the leaked reports are accurate and that the sample size is the same as Strategic Vision's last poll of the state (1,200). A little bit of snap analysis below the fold.

If we look at the two polls, Strategic Vision and Quinnipiac, where we can extrapolate trendlines in Pennsylvania, we see two things:

1. Obama improved by about 10 points in his primary matchup, a result also seen in other polls of the state.
2. Hillary has improved her general election standing by a solid margin against John McCain. She went from a +2 against McCain in Quinnipiac's last poll to a +8 in yesterday's, and a -6 in Strategic Vision to a +6. Obama's general election numbers, meanwhile, have essentially been static. He went from a +2 in Quinnipiac to a +4, but fell from a -3 in Strategic Vision to a -5.

So what's going on? In the primaries, Obama is likely gaining support with some of those white Catholics that Chris Matthews likes to talk about. Frankly, I never bought that Obama was at risk of losing Pennsylvania by 20 points. Pennsylvania has generally run about 10 points behind the national polling averages for Obama. Right now, he's ahead by 3 or 4 points in the national primary polls against Clinton, and behind by 6 or 7 in the Pennsylvania polling averages, so that would account for the 10-point margin.

But Pennsylvania has a closed primary, and if I'm right, those Chris Matthews Catholics were never the vote that Obama had to worry about losing in the general election anyway. He's converting Type 1 voters (Clinton-Obama-McCain) to Type 2 voters (Obama-Clinton-McCain).

So where is Hillary gaining her general election support from? From independents? Not exactly. Take a look at the Quinnpiac internals by party identification:



There is essentially no difference in any of the individual numbers for Hillary -- she has gained two points each among independents and Republicans, but McCain has gained two points each among Democrats and Republicans as the number of undecideds has gone down. That sounds like a wash.

Unles