Just to tie together couple of things from yesterday: suppose that Barack Obama picks Evan Bayh as his running mate. Suppose this ticket wins. Do the Democrats lose a Senate seat?
Actually, it's not so clear. The Governor would get to make a two-year appointment if Bayh had to resign his seat, with a Special Election to be held in 2010. The present governor of Indiana is Mitch Daniels, a Republican. Unlike some states -- Arizona, for instance -- Indiana does not appear to have any requirement wherein a gubernatorial appointee must pick a candidate from the departing Senator's party.
But would Daniels still be Governor at the time Bayh resigned his seat? He's in a quasi-competitive race with Jill Long-Thompson. I'm not entirely sure how Indiana elections law works -- this is one of those instances where Google fails you --but I'd assume as a default that the incoming Governor would get to make the appointment (there's only a 49.99 percent chance that I'm wrong about this). If this whole parlay plays out, you could have a two-birds-with-one-stone, de facto Senate race in Indiana based on the gubernatorial result.
In any event, we have a very boring set of gubernatorial races this year, but Indiana is one that the Democrats ought to consider pouring some money into (and Republicans likewise to defend their incumbent). It's a state that has long been redder than it "should" be based on its demographics, and where there might be some long-run benefits to building out the party's infrastructure.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Shadow Senate Race?
Monday, July 7, 2008
State Similarity Scores
For the most of you who haven't followed my baseball work, I am best known for inventing a forecasting system called PECOTA, which generates predictions by comparing baseball players with a large database of historical peers and identifying the most similar ones. This same technology -- which is really just a variant of nearest neighbor analysis -- can be applied to virtually anything, including identifying the similarity of any two states along a number of dimensions of political salience. In fact, that's exactly what I've done in the chart below, with each state listed along with its three most similar states.
What factors go into the similarity score? There are quite a few, which are weighted in rough proportion to their importance in determining the Kerry-Bush result in 2004 and the McCain-Obama polling this year according to an analysis of variance.
Specifically, those variables are: (1) Partisan ID index; (2) Likert liberal-conservative score; (3) Average years of completed schooling per adult; (4) Per Capita Income; (5) 18-29 year old population; (6) senior population; (7) African-American population; (8) Hispanic population; (9) percentage of white evangelicals; (10) Catholic population; (11) Mormon/LDS population; (12) percentage of military veterans; (13) percentage of same-sex partner households; (14) gun ownership rate; (15) percentage of adults identifying ancestry as 'American'; (16) percentage suburban; (17) percentage of state jobs in manufacturing sector; (18) current unemployment rate, and (19) latitude and longitude (e.g. geographic distance).
The highest score theoretically achievable is 100, for two states that are exactly identical along each of these 19 dimensions. The highest score in practice is 71 between North and South Carolina. A score of 0 represents states that are as dissimilar as similar, and negative scores are both possible and quite common (though I list them as zeroes in the table above).
Note that some states really aren't like any other states at all, including big ones like Florida and Texas and small ones like Alaska, Utah, and New Mexico. Then there are other states that are sort of within the main sequence but need to pull from different regions -- like Indiana, whose three most similar states span the Midwest (Ohio), South (North Carolina) and the Prairies (Kansas).
And yes, this does have implications for our model, which will become clear at some point soon.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Today's Polls, 6/24
Why haven't the Democrats thought about nominating a Midwestern candidate before? States like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Missouri have all traditionally been swing states, giving the region the most fertile electoral soil on the map, winnable by either party in any given cycle. Two new polls today suggest that having a Midwestern candidate in Barack Obama may be paying dividends to the Democrats.
In Indiana, SurveyUSA has Obama with a 1-point lead on John McCain. A couple of other polls, including one conducted by SurveyUSA in April, had also shown a lead for Obama. But that polling had been done in the run-up to the state's primary, and the results frankly seemed aberrant. For Obama to continue to be battling Indiana to a draw is fairly impressive, and puts a state in play that the Republicans probably never expected they'd have to defend.
Apart from Obama being a Midwesterner, the explanation for his results in Indiana may be as simple as this: the Democrats had never really bothered to compete in the state before, until the presence of an important primary there forced them to. Certainly, Indiana has been reliably Republican for a long time -- in 1992, Bill Clinton won every state bordering Indiana, but did not win Indiana itself. But that should also have provided a hint that there is nothing about Indiana that makes it demographically impossible for the Democrats; Democrats have found success in each of its neighbors. If Obama can hold his deficit in Southern Indiana to 10-12 points, tie in the small, industrial towns of Northern Indiana, and rack up 20+ point margins in Indianapolis and the Gary/Hammond region bordering Chicago, he can win the state.
Just to Indiana's north, Public Policy Polling shows Obama with a 9-point edge in Michigan. Although Obama's numbers in our Michigan polling averages still lag just a little bit behind those in Pennsylvania and Ohio, the state seems to be making up for lost time, breaking out of its state of self-imposed exile from the primary process. Michigan was by far John McCain's best opportunity to play offense in a Kerry state, and while it may tighten again if the national polls do, it might also eventually revert to its traditional position of polling about 3-5 points better for the Democrats than their numbers nationwide.
Finally, in New Mexico, SurveyUSA has Obama ahead by 3. While Rasmussen has usually shown New Mexico as an Obama state, SurveyUSA's last poll had shown the state tied. Obama is leading 63-34 among Hispanic voters in this poll, who make up about 30 percent of New Mexico's electorate.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Tea Leaves
To follow up on Sean's post, Sean Reagan at The Back Forty (not our Sean) tracked down a list of 17 states in which the Obama campaign is focusing its Organizing Fellows program. We can contrast these against the 16 states that McCain identified as toss-ups in its strategy briefing, and the 17 states that appear on one of the two versions of our Swing State Analysis:
One needs to be careful when pruning through these lists, because they may have as much to do with branding as the realities of what the campaign will ultimately do (particularly McCain's list, which was couched in what amounted to a donor pitch). Nevertheless, the contrasts are interesting. Obama sees North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey and Georgia as competitive whereas McCain does not. McCain sees Connecticut, Maine and Minnesota as competitive whereas Obama does not. Both candidates claim to want to focus on Washington and Oregon, even though the 538 list does not see them as competitive. Neither candidate claims to be focusing on Indiana, Montana or North Dakota, although our lists consider those states to competitive.
The states on McCain's list went to John Kerry by an average of 1 point. The states on Obama's list went to George W. Bush by an average of 2 points. The states on the 538 list went to Bush by an average of 6 points. McCain's list is ridiculously aggressive in a climate where the partisan advantage is shifting to the Democrats. One can understand that he does not want to lock into a defensive posture this early in the campaign, but he dawdles in organizing Virginia and North Carolina, he may find it impossible to regain the lead in the former, and difficult to shake Obama in the latter.
My critique of Obama's list would be the inclusion of Georgia rather than Indiana. This may be a reflection of the Obama campaign's belief that it can improve registration and turnout among traditionally low-turnout groups, like the African-Americans and young voters that are plentiful in Georgia. I think I like Indiana better, however, from the standpoint of portfolio theory. It's still very difficult to imagine Obama winning Georgia without winning North Carolina, and if he's won North Carolina, he almost certainly won't need Georgia. Indiana, on the other hand, offers a relatively unique set of circumstances. Obama is the first Midwestern Democrat to have received his party's nomination in years (and hails from Chicago, almost literally in Indiana's back yard). The Democrats devoted attention to Indiana for the first time in years as a result of the state's important primary. And Indiana is an extremely manufacturing-heavy state at a time of recession. I don't quite trust the couple of polls that showed Obama ahead in Indiana, but I can more easily see it being a surprise state that actually makes the difference between winning and losing the election.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Did Clinton Misplay her Ace?
Hillary Clinton lost last night by a combined 222,000 votes. Given that parameter, is there any way that Clinton might have distributed those votes in order to make herself more viable going forward? I suppose that, if she could, she would take about 50,000 votes from North Carolina and transfer them to Indiana. That would have allowed her to win Indiana by 4-5 points, enough to avoid the appearance of a "virtual tie" and probably to allow all of major networks to have called the race for her at some point in the early evening. She would have lost North Carolina by 18.5 points rather than 14.8, but perception-wise, it's not like the former number is much worse than the latter.
The reality however is that working from a deficit of 222,000 votes (larger than her winning margin in Pennsylvania), there is very little that Clinton could have done to create the perception of a split decision on Tuesday night, much less a game-changing victory. I have Clinton gaining 228,610 votes over the remaining primaries. To stay on a pace where she could have won the +FL popular vote count (which she currently trails by 526,354), she would have needed to do about 300,000 votes better last night than she actually did. That means that she would have won the night by about 80,000 votes, which could have taken the form of either a solid win in Indiana plus a small win in North Carolina, or a double-digit win in Indiana plus a small loss in North Carolina. These were roughly the scenarios that the media seemed to be looking for in order to declare a 'game-changing' moment for Clinton.
Immediately after Pennsylvania, I proffered that considering that her paradigm at this point is to maximize her popular vote count, Clinton should have been just as devoted to North Carolina as to Indiana. And indeed, that's the viewpoint that her campaign seemed to have taken. According to the Washington Post Candidate Tracker, the Clinton campaign held 54 events in North Carolina since Pennsylvania concluded, as compared with 43 in Indiana (note: many of these events were Bill's, rather than Hillary's). The distribution of advertising expenditures was fairly lopsided toward Obama in Indiana, but more equitable in North Carolina. And Clinton deployed top campaign operative Averill "Ace" Smith to Tarheel Country.
After looking at the exit polling results, however, I'm not so certain about that decision. In North Carolina, 20 percent of voters made up their minds in the last week. But this includes only voters who went to the polls on election day, and about 25 percent of the state voted early. So the true percentage of late deciders was about 15 percent.
By contrast, in Indiana, 25 percent of election-day voters made up their minds in the last week. Early voting was a factor in Indiana too, but made up only about 10 percent of the electorate. So the true percentage of late deciders was 22.5 perecnt.
So, if we use late deciders as a proxy for swing voters, 22.5 percent of the voters in Indiana were swing voters, as opposed to 15 percent in North Carolina; the Indiana total is exactly 50 percent higher. And this makes a lot of sense if you consider the underlying demographics of each state. Start with black voters. They made up slightly more than one-third of North Carolina's electorate, and they weren't about to vote for Clinton when she made absolutely no effort to court their votes (much to her detriment; there is a big difference between losing blacks 92/7, as Clinton did in North Carolina, and losing them 85/15).
So already your strategy is speaking to no more than two-thirds of the electorate. But even among white voters in North Carolina, a lot of them are in aligned with groups that are strongly predisposed toward one or the other. After black voters, the group that has behaved most monolithically in the primaries are Southern, rural, working-class whites, who have favored Clinton approximately 3:1. She already had those votes in the bag -- she didn't need to win them over. And Obama's best group among white voters are highly-educated folks in college and university towns. There are plenty of those voters in North Carolina too in the Research Triangle area. In other words, a considerably smaller fraction of the electorate was in play in North Carolina, which means that her return on investment was liable to be lower.
With all that said, I tend to conclude with Marc Ambinder: investing heavily in North Carolina was undoubtedly risky to Clinton -- especially if it served to raise her expectations in that state. But given her position, her whole campaign was premised on a long-shot coming through. This time, the bet did not come through -- and perhaps it had faced even longer odds than the Clinton campaign had recognized. But credit to a campaign that knows how to gamble when the chips are down.
p.s. What's interesting about the Indiana voting is that Obama beat his polling by several points, even though Clinton won among late-deciders, and even though she benefited by some margin from a Limbaugh vote that might or might not have been accounted for in the polls. That suggests that Obama did a tremendous job of turning out his base, particularly in Marion County; 17 percent of Indiana's electorate was black, much higher than anyone was anticipating.
Quote of the Day
So, please correct me if I am missing something, but if a shift of 4-5% and two or three delegates in Indiana and North Carolina is enough to end the Democratic nomination, then why didn't anyone frakking tell us that the campaign was so close to ending? Why was there this massive kabuki theater pretending that it was still a close campaign where Clinton had a legitimate chance at winning? Why were Clinton's attacks on Obama repeated again, and again, and again, without anyone mentioning that Clinton was a desperate candidate hanging by a thread who would probably say anything in order to stay afloat?I agree with about 98% of what Chris has said here, but let me offer my 2% rebuttal. There is always an intrinsic possibility that a candidate wins by attrition -- by something bad happening to the leading candidate (e.g. a scandal -- or less likely something more tragic). For example, presently John McCain is attributed as having a 94% chance of winning the Republican nomination by the futures markets. But 94% isn't 100%. There's still that small, 6% possibility that some crazy shit will go down that will effectively disqualify McCain from the nomination.
The reason is simple: the established media was never covering the Democratic nomination campaign. They were, instead, covering some form of kabuki theater where reality is ignored and liberals are ritually gutted on the public stage for the pleasure of elite, rich, white, male pundits everywhere. That is all that we have been watching since the Wisconsin primary, since the delegates have not improved for Clinton since the Wisconsin primary (and have actually gotten much worse, if you include the supers). If we had been watching something else, then tonight would not be the end of the campaign, because nothing really changed tonight. If this is the end, then the last two and a half months have been a Clinton-fueled fairy tale, which is basically a white-hot lie about the nomination campaign. Puns intended in the previous sentence.
For a long time now, Clinton's odds of winning the nomination by any means other than attrition have been dwindling. They decreased, rather than increased, after Texas/Ohio, and they decreased after Pennsylvania, because while Clinton made up ground, she did not make up enough ground quickly enough to make up the fact that both candidates were getting closer to the finish line. Those odds were near zero, regardless of what happened in Indiana and North Carolina tonight.
Tonight, however, her odds of winning by attrition have gone down as well, because the results will be interpreted by superdelegates as meaning that neither the Jeremiah Wright issue nor the "bittergate" issue are enough to disqualify Obama from the nomination. Granted, they might never have been enough to disqualify Obama in the first place. But if Clinton had won North Carolina -- a state where the intrinsic demographics favor Obama by mid-double digits -- that would have been extremely significant. In fact, if she had won North Carolina, I suspect that Clinton would more likely than not have been the Democratic nominee.
What tonight's results mean is that there will have to be some new inconvenience for Obama of at least Jeremiah Wright magnitude for Clinton to become the nominee. The odds of this happening are not very strong -- Clinton is trading off the same 6% chance that people like Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney are working from. Obama has gotten the job, and Clinton now needs him to get fired from it. With that said, I think she has an extraordinarily strong moral claim** to the Vice Presidential slot if she wants it to be hers.
___
** I don't want to change my original wording, but I'm having trouble articulating myself after a very long night. I'm not entirely comfortable with the language "moral claim". It's not quite a moral claim and it's not quite a political claim -- it's somewhere in between.
There are obviously plusses and minuses to having Clinton as the VP. Demographically, it really is a match made in heaven -- look at the states where one of the Democrats is competitive where the other candidate isn't. Politically, it's potentially a clusterfuck. Of course the whole question is whether a joint ticket would tend to capture the best attributes of each candidate or the worst ones. And of course, Obama would need to be comfortable that he'd be able to draw boundaries around people like Bill Clinton and Mark Penn.
But my point is that if the decision is close, I think she's won enough votes that the tie goes to Clinton. Obama would need to have a good reason not to offer the job to her. "She'll cost us Colorado and Virginia" might be a good reason, but Obama and the DNC would need to look at some polling on that.
Another factor that breaks the tie in my eyes is that Clinton has become quite a strong retail campaigner. She campaigns tirelessly, she does well in interviews and debates, and her events would draw far more people than you'd get with any other VP candidate.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Election Night Thread
12:10 AM. Hillary Clinton is going to win Indiana. A big chunk of Clinton-leaning votes just came in from Lake County, which now has 98% of precincts reporting.
Instaupdate: MSNBC, indeed, calls it for Clinton, which looks like a pretty safe assumption.
11:54 PM. You think the Obama-Clinton margin is close? The margin in Indiana's gubernatorial primary is now within about 600 votes. Also: apparently all of the Gary vote has been counted, except for absentee ballots. I don't think Obama is going to do well enough in Hammond to make up the difference. He might need to pull in some votes from the remaining Marion County precincts if he's going to have a shot at pulling this out. Of course, there is also the provisional ballots issue.
11:38 PM. With some new voting in with Lake County, Clinton's margin has been reduced, but we're still showing her squeaking out an win by 0.9 points. It appears that most of the Gary vote has been counted, and that most of the outstanding vote is from Hammond, which is 15% black. I don't quite think Obama will pick enough votes in Hammond to win the state -- in fact, I'd guess they'll split more like 50:50, or maybe 55:45 Obama -- but we'll see. Obama also stands to gain a few points in Marion County and Monroe County (home to IU) which has yet to count its absentee ballots.
11:20 PM. Another milestone of sorts: if you COMBINE the results from Pennsylvania, Indiana, and North Carolina, it now appears that Obama will have gained in the popular vote between those three states. I am not sure about the delegate count.
11:10 PM. If we look at the outstanding vote OUTSIDE of Lake County, the model shows 3,771 votes for Obama and 3,000 exactly for Clinton. Most of that comes from the couple of precincts in Marion County that have yet to report. So Obama has just a tiny bit of wiggle room outside of Lake Co, but we all know where this is going to be decided.
Intrade shows Obama at 86% to win the Democratic nomination and 15% to win Indiana. For my money, those numbers should be more like 92% and 30%.
11:00 PM. Because of the provisional ballots issue, it's a strong possibility that neither candidate will be able to declare victory in Indiana until days from now. (Well, except that Clinton already did declare victory).
10:55 PM. Hendricks and Porter counties are now fully reported, adding slightly to Clinton's margin. However, those votes were expected to lean Clinton, so our model is still projecting a 1.0 point margin.
10:46 PM. The first votes have been reported from Lake County: Obama leads 27,991 to 9,470 with 28 percent of precincts reporting. It is not safe to make a straight extrapolation from these numbers because some precincts in Lake county are predominantly black and very Obama-leaning, while others will be Clinton-leaning. My model -- which does not make its projections that way, now show Clinton winning Indiana by 1.0 percent or about 12,000 votes, but obviously, we're at the point where absolutely anything can happen. Insta-update: Keith Olbermann says that the vote that just came in was in fact from Obama-leaning Gary, and that about half of Gary's vote remains to come in.
10:43 PM. Discussion question: name one state that an Obama-Clinton joint ticket might carry against John McCain, but that neither candidate might carry individually. For me, the first state that comes to mind is Indiana.
10:18 PM. Obama's popular vote margin in North Carolina is now 219,022, bettering Clinton's in Pennsylvania.
One positive for Clinton, though: she won Southeast Indiana by about 2:1 against Obama. That's what her margins are liable to look like in West Virginia and Kentucky.
10:03 PM. Russert says that there are about 229,000 outstanding votes in Indiana. I had figured on a slightly smaller number, around 195,000. So, that's a little bit more breathing room for Obama. On the other hand -- looking at the counties that surround Lake County (home to perhaps 160,000 of those votes) -- Obama did not particularly outperform his projections. I am guessing that his pulling this out is -- I don't know -- about a 12-to-1 longshot.
9:49 PM. Clinton's margin in Pennsylvania: 214,224 votes. Obama's margin in North Carolina with 13 percent of the vote yet to be counted: 204,419 votes. The remaining vote in North Carolina looks to me to be pretty representative of the state as a whole, so he will likely finish with a win in the 230,000 vote range.
9:45 PM. Tippecanoe is in, and Obama did not pick up quite as many votes there as he was probably hoping for. His path is now steeper, as we show Clinton's winning margin ticking up to 2.3 points.
9:40 PM. Isn't there something ironic about a candidate who's only remaining path to the nomination to insist that all votes are counted in Florida and Michigan giving a victory speech before all votes are counted in Indiana -- and three of the four major networks say the race is too close to call?
9:28 PM. Clinton's numbers ticking upward a bit on stronger-than-expected results in Clark and Gibson Counties. We now show her winning Indiana by 2.1 points and about 27,500 votes. Obama needs to hope that the outstanding precincts in Marion County contain a lot of ballots, and hope for both a big turnout and a substantia
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