The Other Advantage of Opting Out

I'm actually reading the book on political targeting you see advertised along the left-hand column*. One thing it underscores is that a little bit of information can go a long way. If you simply know someone's name and either their address or their telephone prefix, you can determine their location (with 100 percent accuracy), their gender (with virtually 100 percent accuracy), their race (with high accuracy), their income level (with fairly high accuracy), and possibly something about their age. By cross-referencing other databases, you might also know something about their past voting behavior, and their level of engagement at different phases of the campaign. You have even more information if you know their employer and occupation, as required on FEC disclosure forms.

So apart from greasing the wheels of the campaign, the other thing that private fundraising provides a campaign is an incredibly rich source of data: essentially a real-time, n-dimensional focus group of its supporters.

There are innumerable situations in which this could be useful. Suppose that, in early September, a 527 group launches an attack on Barack Obama's patriotism. Fundraising slackens in the South, and among voters identified as age 55 and older; you can measure this stuff literally almost overnight. That would suggest that the threat is real, and that you need to combat the attack more forcefully. Alternatively, suppose that the same thing happens, but there is a huge surge in fundraising, particularly from new donors. Then, you might infer that your base will do the work of combating the ads for you, that they might be backfiring to begin with, and that you can keep things more at arm's-length.

Suppose that later that month, McCain starts hitting the offshore drilling issue again. You detect that you are getting very few first-time donations in New Jersey and Florida, states that might benefit from an offshore drilling program. That might underscore the importance of playing defense on the issue, or, more drastically, pulling resources out of Florida to make sure that you win in Colorado instead.

Suppose that, in early October, Carly Fiorina goes on TV and says she doesn't trust Barack Obama on women's issues. A mild, Wes Clark type controversy of ensues. But suppose that you notice that in the ensuing 48 hours, fundraising decreases among ex-Clinton supporters. So you send out a mailer to people identified as likely Clinton voters, which highlight McCain's pro-life position.

Fundraising data isn't the only way to collect this sort of information -- but it's a particularly efficient one, especially for a campaign that relies heavily on Internet financing and has thousands of donations rolling in each day. If it makes the difference of being able to react to a dangerous situation 24 hours sooner than you might otherwise, or seeing an extra move ahead, that's how campaigns are won and lost.

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* Disclosure: I do not benefit at the margins if you purchase this product -- the ad is already paid for at a fixed rate and is not based on click-throughs. The publisher was kind enough, however, to send me a free copy.

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Bob Barr Not Going Viral

The New York Times ran a feature today on Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr being a spoiler. But there is little evidence so far that Barr is gaining much traction in this election.

Consider, for instance, the rather modest fundraising goal established on Barr's webpage. He seeks to raise $88,000 by July 4, of which $27,000 has been raised so far. Candidates generally do not set fundraising goals that they do not expect to meet, so let's say that Barr succeeds and raises another $61,000 over the course of the next week to beat his goal. In fact, let's say that Barr beats that goal by 50 percent and raises $90,000.

A candidate who is raising $90,000 per week will raise approximately $1.7 million dollars between now and Election Day in November. How would this compare to the amount of funds raised by other recent third-party candidates? The amounts below reflect the total amount of individual contributions to third-party candidates in 2000 and 2004, ignoring PAC money, self-loans, etc.:

2004
Nader        Independent     $2.5 million
Badnarik     Libertarian     $1.0 million
Cobb         Green           $0.5 million
Peroutka     Constitution    $0.3 million

2000
Buchanan     Reform          $15.3 million
Nader        Green           $10.8 million
Brown        Libertarian     $2.1 million

There was a huge reduction in the amount of funds available to third-party candidates between 2000 and 2004, perhaps because Ralph Nader's impact on the 2000 election led voters to realize that third party candidacies weren't such a cute little idea. But a fundraising haul of $1.7 million would be relatively modest, even by the standards of your typical third-party candidate. Of course, this is just the roughest guesstimate of what sort of money Barr is bringing in, and fundraising may be a relatively small part of the story for a third-party candidate -- Pat Buchanan got more than $15 million from individual contributors in 2000, and had all of 0.43 percent of the vote to show for it. But so far, the Ron Paul money has not been flowing in.

In fact, Ron Paul's website is still getting two or three times as much traffic as Barr's, and appeared to be getting something like 30-40 times as much traffic at its peak in January versus what Barr's is getting now.

It's still early in this election, but perhaps less so for a third-party candidate than for a major party one. There's really very little going on right now on the campaign trail, making it a good time for a third-party candidate to get some free media impressions from a bored press corps. But once the Beijing Olympics begin on August 8th, the country will be distracted for two weeks by those and then we begin the mad dash to the finish, with the conventions and the debates and both sides ramping up their advertising and their opposition research. So Barr has about five or six weeks left to do something newsworthy, or he's going to find it hard to get media oxygen later on.

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Today's Polls, 5/30

We're a little late with today's polling thread. These have been the most hectic 24 hours I've had since book season. If you've sent me an e-mail, I probably haven't had the chance to respond to it, but I sincerely appreciate all the support and I'll be catching up over the weekend.

Four polls today, and they all look like pretty good news for Barack Obama. In California, the highly respected Field Poll has both Obama and Clinton leading John McCain by 17 points. The poll also shows that Obama is now preferred over Clinton among California democrats by a margin of 51-38, a reversal from the state's primary result (a similar finding had previously been reported by SurveyUSA). As much as I tend to convey the impression that demographics have been destiny in the primaries, this is some of the strongest evidence that the race has in fact been dynamic.

Another deep blue state also looks safe for the Democrats: Clinton leads by 30 points and Obama by 19 in Rasmussen's poll of New York. The poll also suggests that about half of New Yorkers want Hillary Clinton to drop her Presidential bid. While home-state advantage is an electoral blessing, it should also be remembered that a candidate's home constituency has conflicting incentives. New Yorkers would love to see Hillary as President, but they'd also like to see her get back to representing them in the Senate.

SurveyUSA shows Obama 6 points ahead in Wisconsin; no poll for Clinton. SurveyUSA's results have consistently shown Obama ahead in Wisconsin, while other polls like Rasmussen see the state as more of a toss-up.

Finally, in Wyoming, Research 2000/Daily Kos has Obama trailing McCain by a relatively modest 13 points. While Obama is not going to win Wyoming, this improves our regression model's impression of his prospects in somewhat more moderate states like North Dakota.

I've also noticed that the regression model seems to be giving progressively less and less weight to the fundraising numbers, which is causing some weird things like Obama not having quite the home-state advantage in Illinois and Hawaii that he probably should. It may be the case that the fundraising numbers are somewhat out of date, and that we should be focusing more specifically on how a candidate has fundraised over his past couple of months. Something else to explore when we can find a little bit of time.

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The Eighth Reason

To add to Mark Ambinder's list of the seven reasons why Hillary Clinton might consider remaining in the race -- I'd like to propose an eighth. Perhaps she can actually make money the rest of the way out? By having a schedule heavy on fundraising, cutting back advertising to a bare minimum, and letting her staff dwindle by attrition -- there surely are plenty of exhausted folks on Team Clinton -- it's conceivable that Clinton could use the pretense of a campaign in the remaining primaries in order to help to pay off any campaign debt that her team has accumulated.

To some extent, the Clinton campaign may already have hedged its bets in the remaining states. They have 17 field offices open in the six remaining primary states: seven in Oregon, five in Kentucky, four in West Virginia, one in Montana, and none in South Dakota or Puerto Rico. Obama, by contrast, has 44 field offices open: 17 in Oregon, 10 in West Virginia, seven in each of Kentucky and Montana, three in South Dakota, and none in Puerto Rico.

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John McCain: Darling of the East Coast?

The tendency of most commentators in this election -- and certainly the tendency here -- has been to frame everything through the eyes of the Democrats. If a new poll comes out showing McCain close with both Democrats in New Jersey, say, it is assumed to be on account of some or another flaw with the Democrats, and not some strength of McCain's.

But what if instead of comparing McCain to the Democrats, we compare him to another Republican -- George W. Bush. Below is the ratio of funds that McCain has raised thus far in his election campaign to the funds raised by Bush in 2004.

State              McCain '08    Bush '04     Ratio
1. Arizona        $ 3,506,000   $ 3,260,000   1.08
2. New Hampshire  $   311,000   $   615,000   0.51
3. New York       $ 5,290,000   $12,215,000   0.43
4. Mississippi    $   326,000   $   899,000   0.36
5. Utah           $   201,000   $   566,000   0.35
6. Virginia       $ 3,075,000   $ 8,780,000   0.35
7. Rhode Island   $   101,000   $   289,000   0.35
8. Connecticut    $ 1,498,000   $ 4,310,000   0.35
9. Idaho          $   128,000   $   370,000   0.35
10. Maine         $   130,000   $   378,000   0.34
11. Michigan      $ 1,741,000   $ 5,081,000   0.34
12. California    $ 6,801,000   $20,865,000   0.33
13. New Jersey    $ 1,783,000   $ 6,064,000   0.29
14. Massachusetts $ 1,147,000   $ 4,155,000   0.28
15. Colorado      $   715,000   $ 2,684,000   0.27

46. Alabama       $   284,000   $ 3,126,000   0.09
47. Nebraska      $    79,000   $   964,000   0.08
48. West Virginia $    43,000   $   552,000   0.08
49. Arkansas      $   109,000   $ 1,412,000   0.08
50. Kentucky      $   125,000   $ 2,424,000   0.05

After Arizona (no surprise), where McCain has already raised as many dollars as Bush did in 2004, the preponderance of states on the top of his list are on the East Coast. Five of the top ten states are in New England, and that isn't counting New York, which might as well be. There are a couple of West Coast states scattered throughout McCain's list -- the region where he's generally assumed to have the most advantages -- but nothing overwhelming.

Now, we don't know whether it's a matter of East Coasters tending to have some real affection for John McCain -- or having had some real disaffection for George Bush. But after looking at this list, I'd tend to take at least a little more seriously the prospect that McCain could compete in some East Coast states. Against Obama, the most likely targets are New Jersey (McCain 38% to win), and maybe Massachusetts (24%). Again Clinton, we're likely talking about New Hampshire (75% -- Clinton is actually the underdog here), perhaps Maine (24%) and Connecticut (30%), and perhaps even Delaware (30%), which is not as safely Blue as people assume.

By contrast, McCain's inherently weakest region would seem to be the South. But neither Democrat is quite well positioned enough to take advantage of it, since Clinton will piss off some black voters and Obama will piss off some rural white Democrats. A hypothetical John Edwards nomination might have been interesting in this regard.

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State-by-State Fundraising Numbers

One of the metrics we use in our regression analysis is the state-by-state fundraising totals received by each of the three major candidates. These fundraising numbers turn out have a highly statistically significant relationship with their standing in the polls, even after accounting for things like the party identification in the state, and the Kerry-Bush voting tally in 2004.

The FEC has recently updated its website, including fresh fundraising data through 2/29/08. February was a huge fundraising month for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton -- less so for John McCain -- so this gives us a better idea of where each candidate's strengths and weaknesses lie.

The way I look at fundraising is in terms of dollars raised per 2004 general election voter. So in Missouri, for example, Obama has raised just over $1.3 million dollars, and whereas there were 2.7 voters in the 2004 general election. This works out to about 50¢ per voter (actually 49¢).

In the abstract, the fundraising numbers are very impressive for the Democrats. McCain has outfundraised Obama in only four states: Arizona, Michigan, Mississippi, and South Carolina. He's outraised Clinton in each of those states, plus Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Wyoming, and North and South Dakota. However, it's the relative numbers that count for purposes of our regression model. On that front, here are Obama's Top 10 -- and bottom 5 -- fundraising states.

Barack Obama, Funds Raised per GE voter

1. Illinois $2.85
2. New York $2.24
3. California $2.15
4. Connecticut $2.07
5. Vermont $2.01
6. Massachusetts $1.83
7. Hawaii $1.65
8. Maryland $1.61
9. Virginia $1.38
10. Washington $1.38

46. Mississippi $0.19
47. Louisiana $0.16
48. West Virginia $0.14
49. Arkansas $0.14
50. North Dakota $0.14

No real surprises on the top of the list -- these are mainline, Democratic states that also happen to be quite wealthy. The one exception is possibly Virginia, but Virginians tend to donate a lot of money to all Presidential candidates because of their connections with the Beltway. At the bottom of the list are several states from our Deep South region, plus North Dakota -- where, even though Obama hasn't raised very much money, he's still raised more money than Clinton and McCain combined. North Dakotans just have better things to do than to part with their money for Presidential candidates, I guess.

Next, Hillary's list:

Hillary Clinton, Funds Raised per GE voter

1. New York $3.77
2. California $1.88
3. Maryland $1.77
4. New Jersey $1.67
5. Connecticut $1.54
6. Rhode Island $1.35
7. Virginia $1.30
8. Arkansas $1.28
9. Massachusetts $1.10g
10. Florida $1.09

46. Wisconsin $0.16
47. Montana $0.11
48. South Dakota $0.10
49. Mississippi $0.09
50. North Dakota $0.06

Hillary's fundraising prowess in New York is astounding -- it's as though every single voter in the state decided to pony up and buy her a Value Meal. That's what happens when you combine a state that inherently should be kind to any Democrat with Manhattan money and being that state's representative in the Senate. Also, her Florida numbers should be considered encouraging. The shocker is Wisconsin, which ranks at #46 on Hillary's list. I don't know what it is about Wisconsin. The money in the state, I guess, is in Madison, Milwaukee, and parts of the Fox River Valley. Madison is an Obama town, the Fox River Valley is sort of half-way between NASCAR and Country Club Republican, and perhaps the business elites in Milwaukee have a lot of ties to Chicago? Either way, it does not portend well for Hillary in Wisconsin, where her polling against McCain has been sluggish.

John McCain, Funds Raised per GE voter
1. Arizona $1.74
2. Virginia $0.96
3. Connecticut $0.95
4. New York $0.71
5. Texas $0.65
6. California $0.55
7. Florida $0.52
8. New Jersey $0.49
9. Nevada $0.49
10. South Carolina $0.48

46. Nebraska $0.10
47. Iowa $0.08
48. North Dakota $0.07
49. Kentucky $0.07
50. West Virginia $0.06

On John McCain's list, we see perhaps more relationship with the states in which he ran an active primary campaign -- South Carolina is 10th on his list (and New Hampshire is 11th), whereas voters in Iowa seem to have punished him for blowing off the state. Otherwise, we see a largely predictable list of states -- and a reminder that there is plenty of money to go around in blue states like California and New York.

The complete list of numbers is below. I've presented them two ways: first, the basic funds-raised-per-voter calculation I described above, and second, on a relative basis, where 100 represents the average state for that candidate. Thus we see that, for example, while Obama has raised more funds in Alabama than John McCain, it's relatively speaking a stronger state for McCain; Obama is so far ahead everywhere in the fundraising game that this will be the case any time McCain keeps it reasonably close.



A few thoughts on the above list:

Arkansas really seems to be almost punitive toward Obama -- this has also held in the polling numbers.

It's not clear that the lack of an officially-sanctioned primary has harmed the Democrats in Florida. Clinton's numbers are pretty strong. Obama has raised slightly less than his state average, but the demographics in Florida aren't great for him to begin with. In Michigan, on the other hand, there clearly seem to be some Democrats who are punishing their candidates for the lack of a competitive primary there. I don't know how else to explain how McCain outfundrasies both candidates in a state that has voted Blue each year since 1992, when he's otherwise been unable to outfundraise any Democrat, anywhere.

The Massachusetts numbers should be encouraging to Obama. Perhaps it's a bunch of Harvard Law grads contributing their $2,300, but this fundraising is a big reason why our regression model just doesn't buy that McCain can keep the state competitive against Obama, as some polls have suggested.

Everyone's numbers are low in Ohio, which seems to be suffering from a combination of economic hardship and Swing State Fatigue.

Another state where I'd be encouraged by these numbers if I were Obama: Colorado. Another state where I'd be worried: New Jersey.

p.s. Swapping in these new fundraising numbers does have some slight effect on our overall analysis, so I've refreshed the charts and graphs.

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