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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: January 2008

Fun With Superdelegates

As the Democratic presidential contest gets ever-more-intense, and delegate counts gradually become as important as poll numbers, a lot of attention is now being paid to “superdelegates,” the 796 DNC members and elected officials who get an automatic ex officio ticket to Denver. They matter in part because they collectively represent nearly 20% of the entire convention; and in part because they will go to Denver officially unpledged–i.e., they cannot legally be bound by primary or caucus results, and they can in fact change their endorsements at will.
The best place to track superdelegates and their preferences is a site called 2008 Democratic Convention Watch, which not only keeps up with the numbers but also posts varying counts by other sources. By their own count, 282 superdelegates have endorsed, with Clinton holding 175, Obama 73, Edwards 27, and Kucinich 2 (these numbers include superdelegates from MI and FL, which may be excluded from the convention). Obama has been narrowing the gap in recent days, unsurprisingly. That leaves another 514 superdelegates up for grabs, and again, they can shift allegiances at will.
A quick look at the endorsement lists shows some unsurprising patterns: the three main candidates pick up big chunks of superdelegates from their home states, while HRC is benefitting disproportionately from DNC member support. But beyond that, the lists are pretty polyglot, and certainly don’t fit any of the left-center ideological boxes that some observers have tried to build for the candidates; Blue Dogs and Progressive Caucus members are all over the lot.
Superdelegates are unlikely to decide the nomination; plenty of the currently unaligned folks will feel some pressure to follow their state’s primary/caucus results, and a concerted superdelegate effort to counteract clear majority support for a candidate from elected delegates would almost certainly backfire. But they do represent a modest firewall against the nightmare contingency of a late development that makes a putative nominee a general election disaster. And in the very unlikely case of a highly competitive contest that’s not resolved by the primaries, then they could become a big prize indeed, even now in an era where convention conference rooms will be officially smoke-free.


Buried Treasure

Sen. John Kerry’s endorsement of Barack Obama last week was generally met with indifference or derision amongst the political chattering classes (never a hotbed of Kerry support). If his endorsement had value, many said, why wouldn’t it have been secured before the NH primary, which Kerry won four years ago?
The DailyKos blogger DHinMI has a response that’s worth reading. If Kerry turns over his fundraising-contact database to the Obama campaign (a logical assumption), there could be some buried treasure there in terms of voter profiles and fundraising potentials. That makes sense unless Obama (and perhaps HRC) have already mined the known universe of Democratic activists and donors.


Big New National Polls: A Few Gleanings

Three big national outlets have released new national polls during the last few days–CNN/Gallup, ABC/Washington Post, and CBS/New York Times. All three have Clinton maintaining a national lead over Obama, though one–ABC/Post–has Obama closing to within five percent. All three have McCain running first and Huckabee second among Republicans; one (CBS/NYT) is distincting in showing Romney plunging into single digits.
Some of the variations are simply of degree. For example, the ABC and CBS polls both over-sample African-American Democrats, and both show Obama now leading HRC there, but the former shows a much larger Obama lead. And all three show McCain making gains among moderate Republicans and independents, but differ somewhat in the other candidates’ standing with these groups.
But the finding that struck me most was in the ABC/Post poll, where the usual questions about the attitude of voters to the idea of the first female, African-American, or Mormon president was supplemented with a question about John McCain’s age.
Looking at the “effect on enthusiasm” of such candidate attributes among voters in both parties, the poll found these “net effects:”
Obama as first black president Dems: +22 GOP: -2
Clinton as first woman Dems: +32 GOP: -20
Huckabee as first Baptist minister Dems: -17 GOP: +5
Romney as first Mormon Dems: -25 GOP: -23
McCain as first at age 72 Dems: -35 GOP: -22
In other words, the “first” characteristics have a positive overall net effect for both Democrats, and negative overall net effect for all three Republicans. But the biggest negative impact of all is the knowledge that McCain would be the oldest candidate ever elected president (Reagan would become the second oldest, at 69).
If nothing else, this kind of polling may soon make McCain’s age and health the issue a lot of observers have expected it to become for a long time. And if he has the bad luck to have one of those moments like Bob Dole’s fall off a platform in 1996, it could be a real problem for him.


The Fair Tax State

After my last post on the Democratic presidential contest in GA, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the perhaps-even-more-pivotal GOP race there. According to the new AJC/Mason-Dixon poll, Huckabee’s romping in the Peach State, leading McCain 31-18, with Romney at 14, Giuliani with 9, and Big Fred at 8.
Sure, some of the Huckabee juice in GA is attributable to his southern identity, and/or to the prominence of conservative evangelicals in the GOP there. But it’s also worth noting that an issue which has become a Huckabee handicap in many conservative precincts, his championship of the so-called “Fair Tax,” is a positive in GA. The Bible of the Fair Tax movement is a book by Georgia congressman John Linder and the ubiquitous Atlanta-based conservative talk radio gabber Neal Boortz. Georgia Republicans have been exposed to a torrent of propaganda on this topic for a long time. Given Boortz’s well-known libertarian tendencies, it may privately bug him that the leading advocate for his tax plan is that Christian Socialist Huckabee. But hey, it sells books, and probably attracts votes as well.


Georgia and the Non-Ideological State of the Race

Now that my home state of Georgia has become relevant as one of the larger February 5 venues, I’ve been paying some attention to the state of the race there, and it illustrates how non-ideological the contest has become on the Democratic side.
There’s a new AJC/Mason-Dixon poll out, which shows Obama leading Clinton 33-30, with Edwards trailing at 14%.
In the absence of cross-tabs for that poll, one is driven to a review of the heated competition for big-name endorsements in GA among the Big Three campaigns, which tell you a lot about what the campaign’s not about (big hat-tip to the blogger RuralDem for compiling the lists of endorsements).
As I noted in a post back in October, much of the old-line moderate-conservative white Democratic Establishment in Georgia has lined up in support of John Edwards. Aside from the overlap of these folks with the identity-group of trial lawyers, there’s not much about them to suggest they’re down with the anti-corporate, “fighting populist” rhetoric of the Edwards campaign this year.
The Obama-Clinton competition for Georgia endorsements, mainly of African-American elected officials and other notables, is fascinating for its absence of any ideological, racial, gender, or even generational character.
HRC’s got two congressmen: John Lewis and David Scott. Obama’s also got two: Sanford Bishop and Hank Johnson. Scott and Bishop are Blue Dogs; Lewis is a member of the House Democratic leadership; and Johnson has the most liberal voting record of any Georgia congressman. Go figure.
Beyond Congress, HRC has been endorsed by the only two black statewide elected officials, Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond, and Attorney General Thurbert Baker (who flipped from an early Obama endorsement). Obama’s been endorsed by the best-known African-American elected official, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin. Clinton’s endorsement by civil rights icon John Lewis is countered by Obama’s endorsement from civil rights icon Joe Lowery. HRC has the bulk of behind-the-scenes African-American business and civic leaders, while Obama has the bulk of black state legislators and clergy. (There’s also a sizable biracial group of legislators that endorsed Bill Richardson, whose state chair, former congressman Buddy Darden, is a prominent DLC/Blue Dog backer; they are now up for grabs). Again, if there’s any discernable pattern on racial, gender, or ideological lines, it’s hard to find.
Maybe endorsements don’t matter much, but in Georgia at least, they do paint a fascinating picture of how little the 2008 contest seems to revolve around what we think of as the normal intraparty conflicts. I hope and trust that’s a good thing.


Mr. Smith Meets Mr. Bonaparte

Unity ’08 started life as very much a “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” movement. The idea, hatched by two well-known if long-toothed political operatives, one Democratic, one Republican (Gerald Rafshoon and Doug Bailey, respectively), was to create a grass-roots, internet-based campaign that would mobilize the gazillions of Americans disgusted with partisan polarization, recruit volunteers, raise money, gain ballot access, and then draft a platform and a bipartisan ticket and sweep to victory in November of 2008 over the dead carcasses of the donkey and the elephant, with high-minded folk everywhere applauding madly.
So how’s that worked out for them? Well, yesterday brought the unsurprising news that Rafshoon and Bailey have left Unity ’08 to work for a draft-Bloomberg outfit, while Unity ’08 itself sheepishly admits failure and “scales back” its operations from little to none.
Seems that Unity ’08 has only signed up 124,000 “volunteers”–measured very loosely–and has $1.4 million in the bank. That’s sofa-cushion change for Mike Bloomberg, who is said to be willing to spend somewhere between a half-billion and a billion smackers if he decides to run for president–an increasingly likely prospect despite all his public disavowals of candidacy. Aside from the Unity ’08 crowd, Bloomberg can also count on support from the Village Elders crowd of former elected officials that assembled in Norman, Oklahoma the other day to call for some sort of bipartisan Government of National Salvation.
These developments are depressingly predictable and familiar. History is replete with examples of extra-partisan, extra-ideological “populist” movements that take a turn towards the authoritarian desire for a Big Man who can squash the petty, squabbling parliamentarians and govern in the “true” national interest. Mr. Smith often yields to Mr. Bonaparte.
I am not–repeat not–suggesting that Mike Bloomberg is some sort of proto-authoritation, or that in the unlikely event he won the presidency, he’d suspend the constitution or arrest Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell. My simple point is that the exasperation with political parties and “gridlock” expressed by Unity ’08 and the Draft Bloomberg crowd reflects an attitude of despair towards democracy itself that isn’t very healthy, and that has a long, unsavory history in world politics.
It’s telling that the Unity ’08 founders, and the Village Elders as well, claim to represent tens of millions of Americans who are eager to abandon the two major parties–yet their “movement” now depends entirely on Mike Bloomberg’s polling, and his willingness or unwillingness to throw enough money into a campaign to buy crediblity. You’d think the irony would give them pause. We’ll soon see.


Yet More NH Outcome Theories

I know we need to move on regarding NH, but a couple more notions about HRC’s big win merit a mention. Karl Rove has some intriguing insights about NH in his Wall St. Journal article, “Why Hillary Won.” I thought these two were instructive:

Sen. Hillary Clinton won working-class neighborhoods and less-affluent rural areas. Sen. Barack Obama won the college towns and the gentrified neighborhoods of more affluent communities. Put another way, Mrs. Clinton won the beer drinkers, Mr. Obama the white wine crowd. And there are more beer drinkers than wine swillers in the Democratic Party.
The dirty secret is it is hard to accurately poll a primary…Our media culture endows polls — especially exit polls — with scientific precision they simply don’t have.

Rove sees HRC’s ‘Muskie moment’ as a big, humanizing net plus. He gives Obama’s track record a scalding critique, which may well become the GOP meme should he win the nomination. Obama’s long-term strategists might be wise to begin working on the rebuttal right now. Come to think of it, Obama is a very appealing candidate, but he could use a little warming-up too.
Rove clearly places a lot of value in the “likability” thing turning the tide for HRC. He does seem to want her to win the Democratic nomination, probably on the theory that her relatively high negatives make her vulnerable, as some netroots writers and a few msm’ers have charged. But that doesn’t mean Rove is right (see elections, 2006 for proof of his fallibility). IA and NH together have convinced me that any of our candidates can beat any of theirs on a good day. It’s up to Democratic activists, campaign workers and rank and file to make it a good day.
Another WSJ article, “Polls Missed Late Voter Shift, Key Absence” by June Kronholz has a couple of insights – one in particular – worth mulling over before we refocus on near and long-term campaign concerns. Kronholz explains:

Pollsters also overestimated the turnout of young voters, who overwhelmingly favored Mr. Obama in exit polls but didn’t surge to vote as they had in Iowa. Although Mr. Obama won the biggest share of independent voters and “walk-ups” (those registering to vote that day), neither was enough to offset the tide of women shifting to Mrs. Clinton.

In other words the youth vote returned to normal in NH. If she is right, somebody deserves a huge pat on the back for mobilizing the youth turnout in IA.
The last thought I have about NH: With 38 percent of NH voters making up their minds on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday, is it so unlikely that a pivotal number of basically undecided voters said to themselves in effect. “Jeez, who died and made Iowa queen? I’m not 100 percent settled on any one candidate — they’re all pretty good — and I’m not quite ready to let a small fraction of Iowa’s eligible voters decide who runs the world. I guess the only way to slow things down for now is to vote for Hillary.”


Race and “Effects”

Well, the cat’s out of the bag. As both Noam Scheiber and Chris Bowers have written about today, it no longer much matters whether a Bradley/Wilder Effect tilted NH to Clinton; discussion of that possibility in NH and beyond has taken on a life of its own. Scheiber calls it the “Bradley Effect Effect.”
In case you’re just tuning in, the Bradley Effect (or Bradley/Wilder Effect) is an insider term for the phenomenon of voters telling pollsters they’ll vote for an African-American candidate, and then pulling the lever against that candidate in the privacy of the voting booth. In the absence of any other completely convincing explanation of why all the polls in NH were wrong, it’s become a very popular theory, for obvious reasons. And that’s particularly true among African-American political observers, for equally obvious reasons having to do with the last few centuries of world and American history.
If you think about it, there are three different racially-motivated “Bradley Effects” that could theoretically have been in play in NH, and could be in play down the road.
There’s the classic “Bradley Effect” of voters lying about their preferences and then indulging racist impulses in the privacy of the voting booth (which is why, presumably, it didn’t happen to Obama in IA, where there’s no voting booth and no privacy). There’s the second-order “Bradley Effect” of lying to pollsters out of fear of being perceived as racist, followed by a more honest actual vote. And then, particularly in a Democratic primary (unlike the actual Bradley and Wilder elections), there’s a third-order “Bradley Effect” of a vote cast out of fear of other voters’ racism–i.e., concerns about an African-American candidate’s electibility (though this theory is undermined by the NH exit polls in which a lot of HRC voters deemed Obama the most electible candidate). This last “effect,” of course, has been widely reported as prevelant among African-Americans prior to IA, and particularly in SC, where for a long time Clinton was running ahead of or even with Obama among black voters.
We could now be about to witness a fourth-order “Bradley Effect,” if African-American voters in SC and elsewhere react to discussion of this issue by uniting behind Obama to counter-act perceptions of white voter semi-secret racism.
It’s all pretty complicated, eh? Maybe it’s good to get the race issue on the table and deal with it now rather than later; it’s inevitably going to be a factor in the decisive phases of the nomination contest, and if Obama wins, in the general election as well. But it is a little ironic that it’s come to the fore at this moment. After all, an African-American presidential candidate has just finished first and then a close second in two of the whitest states in the country. Thanks to the expectations game going into the second of these exceptionally honkified electorates, we’re having to face race straight up, and right away.


Resume Candidates

The news that Bill Richardson has withdrawn from the Democratic presidential contest–on the eve of what was supposed to be his breakthrough moment, the Nevada Caucuses–is getting limited attention, and much of that involves relief at the elimination of a candidate from the debates. To the extent that he’s Latino, and Latino voters are a very important source of support for HRC, maybe she’s helped by it marginally.
It’s also generally assumed that Richardson will be near the top of the short list for the vice presidential nomination, no matter who’s at the top. Why? That famous resume, of course.
All candidates for high office ideally want to achieve some sort of balance in their presentations among experience/accomplishments, persona, message and positioning. Some can, some can’t. While Barack Obama has gone to some trouble to tout his record as a state senator, and before that, as a community organizer, his resume simply isn’t his strongest suit. Richardson, on the other hand, was one of the purest “resume candidates” in memory: a congressman, a governor, an ambassador, a hostage negotiator, a Cabinet member supervising a suddenly sexy issue-area (energy), an impeccable electoral record, a Latino identity, and a home-base in a swing state and a swing region. It really doesn’t get much better than that.
But unfortunately for Richardson, it was about all he brought to the table. His efforts to position himself as the stoutest antiwar candidate went virtually nowhere, beyond earning him some temporary blogger buzz. His “folksy” persona apparently didn’t much charm Iowans, and came across as, well, unpresidential in debates and media interviews, undermining his credentials. And his theoretical electibility, based on the resume, wasn’t convincing to actual voters.
Richardson’s hardly the first presidential candidate to find out his resume wasn’t enough to get him the job. Some of the most feeble campaigns of the past have been launched by Big Cheese Washington figures who mistook insider adulation for potential national appeal (e.g., Wilbur Mills, Lloyd Bentsen, Howard Baker, John Connally, Fritz Hollings, Phil Gramm, Dick Lugar).
But resumes often are very important in vice presidential selections, which by their nature are usually designed to send a signal about the ticket rather than to choose the best or most exciting politician. That’s particularly true with relatively inexperienced presidential candidates (Kennedy-Johnson ’60, Carter-Mondale ’76, Dukakis-Bentsen ’88, and of course, Bush-Cheney 2000).
Richardson’s handicap in the veepstakes, ironically, is part of what made him interesting as a presidential candidate: his Latino identity. Would the first female or first African-American presidential nominee really want to double down by selecting the first Latino vice presidential candidate? It’s doubtful, though by no means impossible.
Besides, there are other Big Resumes out there, if that’s what the nominee wants (most notably Evan Bayh of Indiana, Bob Graham of Florida, or perhaps even the other Resume Candidate of 2008, Chris Dodd, who picked the wrong year to tout his Washington experience). So the odds are that Bill Richardson will serve out his gubernatorial term, and then, if things go okay in November and he chooses to do so, add another line to his resume in a Democratic administration.


Theories of Clinton’s Upset in NH

As Ed said yesterday, there is still scant factual evidence for various theories of why the polls were so wrong about the Obama and Clinton votes in New Hampshire. There are, however, plenty of different explanations being discussed in various blogs and traditional news sources. Mark Blumenthal, for example, examines the statistical underpinnings of eight theories of Clinton’s upset victory at Pollster.com.
Ken Dilanian’s USA Today article “Pollsters struggle to explain Clinton win,” takes an interesting look at three of the more frequently-cited explanations. Of HRC’s ‘Muskie moment,’ Dilanian quotes Gallup’s Editor-in-chief Frank Newport, pointing out “a lot of last-minute movement in this hothouse environment” and “the intriguing potential impact of the ‘verge of tears’ video,” also noted by Senator Diane Feinstein, GOP strategist Karl Rove and Clinton herself.
Dilanian notes that exit polls indicate that 17 percent of NH voters made up their minds on election day and quotes Zogby on the “havoc” such late-deciders can cause for pollsters. But ABC News Polling Director Gary Langer counters that Clinton had a 2 percent advantage among those who made their decision before election day, according to Dilanian.
Dilanian cites the argument that “the record-shattering turnout” resulted in “a different electorate” than the one used in polling samples. But Newport points out that his sample’s demographics, including the percentage of older women believed to lean strongly toward Clinton, were “very close to those of the actual voters.”
In his Open Left article, “Obama Lost Because Of The Angry With Bush Vote,” Chris Bowers notes that Clinton had a 39 to 34 percent edge over Obama with the 62 percent of voters describing themselves as “angry” with the Bush Administration. Bowers believes that Obama’s “message of conciliatory unity” hurt him and helped Clinton. But if NH voters wanted more anger, I have to wonder why Edwards didn’t do better, especially since he was the guy who tagged Obama for being overly-conciliatory.
In addition to the gender gap favoring Clinton, the AP‘s Charles Babington notes an even more dramatic gap — exit poll data showing that Clinton outpolled Obama and Edwards 14-1 among voters who identified “experience” as the top qualification, possibly offsetting Obama’s 2-1 advantage among voters citing “change” as their top concern.
Ed wonders whether absentee ballots cast before Iowa may account in substantial part for HRC’s win. Seniors do cast a disproportionately large chunk of absentee ballots, and seniors are mostly women. Charles Franklin is skeptical because NH is one of the states that restricts absentee ballots. Still, it would be interesting to see if there is a substantial difference between NH voters before vs. after the IA caucuses.
Absentee ballots are an increasingly-important strategic consideration in many states. The ‘absentee’ (early) voter campaign is certainly huge in California, where almost half of ballots are expected to be cast by voters well before election day, and where the Clinton campaign is already heavily engaged in reaching them.