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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The rightly esteemed Mark Blumenthal weighed in today with his assessment of the various theories for why the polls got the Clinton-Obama race in NH wrong. But while his post was helpful, it didn’t provide any real answers. Blumenthal did pour at least cool water on the popular “Wilder Effect” theory that NH voters reported support for Obama and then voted for Clinton on racial grounds. And he also expressed doubts that indie defections from Obama to McCain shifted the results, on the same grounds I talked about last night.
But there has still been no discussion that I can find outside this site and OpenLeft about the theory that absentee ballots helped HRC bank a lot of NH votes prior to Iowa, that could not be tracked by pre-election or unadjusted exit polls. If that’s right, all the thumb-sucking about disguised racism, the impact of HRC’s show of emotion, and the idea that NH voters were reacting to polls or Iowa itself, could all be significantly off-target. So in my mind at least, the mystery persists.

While we await word from Mark Blumenthal or some other wizard who can resolve the questions about why the pre-primary NH polls of Democrats were wrong (and I hope someone addresses my theory that absentee ballots cast before Iowa had something to do with that), I guess we should take a look at what happened to the GOP.
While much of the talk has been about the exceptionally unlikely resurrection of John McCain as the Republican front-runner, the demise of Mitt Romney is an equally compelling story.
The CW is that Romney’s loss in IA killed his lead in NH. But his lead was slipping well before IA. On a broader front, John Judis of TNR offers the best explanation of why the Mittster lost:

Arizona Sen. John McCain defeated former Gov. Mitt Romney to win the New Hampshire Republican primary. And there is a delicious irony in this result. If you look at their political history before the presidential race began last year, Romney is the more moderate of the candidate, particularly on social and economic issues. His main foreign policy advisor Mitchell Reiss is also a former aide to Colin Powell and probably more critical of the conduct of the Iraq war than McCain ever was.
But if you look at the exit polls, McCain got his edge over Romney by winning over moderates and people who were critical of Bush administration’s foreign and economic policies and who took a more liberal position on abortion or gay civil unions. These could have been Romney’s voters, but he opted to market himself as a right-winger. As a result, he bested McCain only among voters who considered themselves “very conservative” and were “enthusiastic” about the Bush administration. In New Hampshire, these voters were a decided minority.

In other words, Romney’s national strategy wound up backfiring on him in what should have been his best state. That National Review endorsement turned out to be pretty expensive.
The other newsworthy development was that Mike Huckabee got even less of an “Iowa bounce” than Barack Obama, finishing a weak third at 11%. In this case, the CW that Huckabee’s conservative evangelical base just didn’t matter much in NH seems to have been right. He ran even with McCain and Romney among “born again or evangelical Christians” at 28%, but they represented less than a third of the primary electorate, and he won just 6% with everyone else.
Still, he finished ahead of Rudy Giuliani, who was leading or running second in NH for months.
This is not an original observation, but it does seem that Republicans are playing a game of “hot potato,” with no one willing or able to nail down the nomination. If McCain can snuff Romney in MI and then Huckabee in SC, that could change pretty fast, but Lord knows this isn’t a good year for confident prognosis.

The Big Three election-night speeches on the Democratic side in NH were different from those in IA in that at least the losers acknowledged defeat. And they were obviously very different from each other.
Edwards’ speech was notable in that he not only promised to stay in the race until the convention (which in the end not even Dennis Kucinich did in 2004), but also pretty much dismissed the early states as unrepresentative and/or statistically insignificant. I understand why he said that (four times, by my count), but I’m sure it didn’t go over well among all those Iowans that Edwards spent the last four years courting so relentlessly. Edwards was smart, though, to avoid making any specific state his comeback target, since his native state of SC isn’t looking very good. Beyond his pledge to keep going, his speech was almost identical to the one on Caucus Night in Iowa. If Edwards loses in the end, it won’t be because he didn’t get his message out.
Obama’s speech is generally getting reviewed as the best of the night, crisply delivered, gracious to HRC (even running the risk of asking for a round of applause for her), upbeat, and a more succinct version of his stump speech than the one he offered in Iowa. He did hit a few more explicitly progressive licks as well.
HRC’s speech started out very effectively, with her “my heart is full” and “found my own voice” lines. In sharp contrast to Iowa, where she stood in the midst of a very old and very dispirited crowd of national and local politicians, she was accompanied only by her family members, in a large, young and enthusiastic audience. (BTW, the change in style from the well-oiled professional Clinton machine extended to her staff; those I saw on the tube all looked impressively scruffy). The bulk of the speech was largely forgettable (though she, like Obama, threw in some sharp populist notes), and was apparently written on notes she had to keep looking down to read, but in the end, the results were sufficiently eloquent for her purposes.
I didn’t pay much attention to the Republicans tonight, and will have more to say about them tomorrow. But I did catch much of McCain’s victory speech, which was, well, pretty bad. Looking down much of the time, McCain kept losing his place and stumbling over words, and generally suggesting an old gent who was up past his bedtime. Given the drama of his comeback, which has been the single most remarkable development in the whole presidential race until now, it was a singularly underwhelming moment.

To listen to or read much of the coverage of the New Hampshire Democratic primary tonight, you’d think the winner wasn’t Hillary Clinton, but voters determined to defy polls and pundits. Indeed, the Clinton campaign itself, which spent much of the last 48 hours lowering expectations for NH, seemed as surprised as anyone else.
But HRC did win, and we’re now into a contest whose outcome simply cannot be predicted.
So how did HRC beat Obama after losing in IA? Well, on one level, it’s obvious that Clinton did better in a two-and-a-half candidate race than in a three-candidate race. She wasn’t stuck with a capped and eroding share of the vote after all.
Moreover, the exit polls indicate that the Democratic primary vote broke down along the lines everyone expected before the Iowa results. HRC won women, people with family income under $50,000, union members, and registered Democrats, while Obama won men, upscale voters, non-union voters, and independents. Obama won big among the youngest voters, as did Clinton among the oldest (though Obama failed to do nearly as well among thirty-somethings as he did in Iowa).
It wasn’t much about ideology: all three leading candidates performed almost exactly at their statewide percentages among every liberal, moderate and conservative category.
And it wasn’t much about turnout patterns, either: levels of both Democratic and independent participation were up sharply from 2004, though Democratic turnout was up a bit higher. (Oddly, Bill Schneider of CNN suggested that McCain beat Obama by attracting higher-than-expected indie particicpation to the GOP primary. But since registered indies represented 42% of Democratic primary voters, and 34% on the GOP side, while total Dem turnout appears to have been nearly 25% higher, it’s hard to credit that theory, particularly since McCain didn’t exactly crush the field among indies).
So: were all the polls just wrong, or did something happen in the last day or two?
I’m sure I don’t know, but I’m more likely to think the polls were wrong than believe HRC’s tearing up or anger at the polls themselves moved thousands of voters. One theory we’re going to hear about is the “Wilder factor” (named after former Gov. Doug Wilder of VA): African-American candidates tend to underperform their poll numbers because people are more likely to indulge their racial prejudices in the privacy of the polling booth (a privacy that doesn’t, of course, exist in the Iowa Caucuses).
One thing I haven’t heard a thing about tonight is early/absentee voting. It’s possible that a lot of Granite Staters voted one way a couple of weeks ago and then reported their preferences to pollsters another way.
In any event, tomorrow is early enough for speculation about the impact of NH on the contest as a whole.