Just a couple of brief notes from my blogging over at Washington Monthly:
(1) Everyone in partisan politics is tempted to harvest the available data selectively to show “Our Team” is doing better than, well, it actually is. But Dick Morris offered such an extreme example this week that it was worth the effort to deconstruct it, just to show how it worked. So it you want to see how to convert some double-loaded statistics from past presidential races, a Rasmussen poll, and some irrelevant external factors into an impending GOP landslide this fall, check it out.
(2) The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is, well, sort of everywhere on the political landscape this year. On the one hand, the Bishops have frustrated Rep. Paul Ryan’s efforts to pretend his budget reflects Catholic social doctrines. On the other, they have, in concert with the Vatican, cracked down on organizations representing American nuns who have refused to join the Bishops’ campaign against the Obama administration on health care and contraception.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In his TNR column last week, my esteemed colleague and mentor William Galston expressed one of the more regularly repeated convictions about presidential politics: Reelection campaigns are a referendum on the incumbent. As he wrote:

One of the best established findings of contemporary political science is that in presidential contests involving an incumbent, the incumbent’s record is central to the public’s judgment. A race for an open Oval Office is about promises and personalities; a campaign for reelection is about the record and performance of the person currently occupying the White House.

In other words, the results of November’s election will hinge on what voters think of Barack Obama, not what they think of Mitt Romney. But is this really true?
Judgments of the incumbent’s record are certainly central to any campaign for reelection–but so are judgments of the challenger‘s record, character, ideology, agenda or party. After all, life today looks a little better if you know that tomorrow could be worse. This argument isn’t just academic: It affects how Obama runs his campaign. Should he focus only on his own achievements? Or should he emphasize Romney’s failings and the agenda of the G.O.P.?
It turns out that political science is not an infallible guide to this particular subject. The sample size of recent presidential reelections is limited, and the most recent, in 2004, cut against the “referendum” hypothesis, and the closely associated belief that undecided voters will break sharply against incumbents late in the election cycle. The 2004 election also showed that drawing attention to doubts about the challenger is not always a waste of time–it certainly wasn’t for George W. Bush. Arguably, 1996 was similar: The Clinton campaign spent the early stages of the cycle feeding on negative perceptions of the opposition party.
A more nuanced version of the referendum hypothesis holds that challengers to even the weakest incumbents must cross some threshold of credibility before achieving victory. Take 1980, one of the prior elections that is often cited by both supporters and doubters of the referendum hypothesis. The contest between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan was very close until Reagan, in that contest’s sole televised debate, famously asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Reagan was urging voters to make the election a referendum, just as Carter, in the same debate, was urging them to choose between two different agendas for the future. (If, of course, presidential re-elections are automatically referenda, then Reagan’s peroration would have been unnecessary and irrelevant.) Reagan’s entreaty ultimately won out, of course–but it did not necessarily have to be so. Even 1980 was, in an important respect, a “comparative” election. Jimmy Carter was a famously wounded incumbent representing a deeply divided party, and (towards the end of the cycle) bleeding support to a third-party candidate as well. That set the threshold for Reagan quite low, but he still had to achieve a certain level of credibility and approval to win. His campaign message and debate performance satisfied that criterion, overcoming Carter’s efforts to describe him as an extremist.
If economic conditions–or, for that matter, the perceived security and status of the United States–deteriorate to the levels bedeviling Carter in 1980, then the threshold Mitt Romney must cross to win may well be very low. But it still exists, and with Romney’s favorability ratings–and just as importantly, those of his party–at perilously low rates, Democrats would be foolish not to keep them as low as possible. And if, as is presently more likely, objective conditions in the country improve at a modest rate, then all sorts of factors could be decisive: including the populist “base mobilization” efforts that Galston cautions against, the arguable responsibility of past Republican administration and current Republicans members of Congress for poor economic conditions, and yes, comparisons of the two futures offered by the candidates.
Interestingly enough, just as Galston is warning Democrats not to ignore the “referendum” hypothesis, a smart Republican commentator, National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru, has warned Republicans not to rely on it. Ponnuru cites 2004 as a precedent, suggesting that partisan polarization has changed the usual dynamics:

The strategic insight of the Bush re-election campaign in 2004 was that times had changed. The nation was divided 50-50 between the parties. The number of committed partisans had increased, and the number of true swing voters — as opposed to voters who say they are independent but reliably vote for one party — had shrunk. In a polarized country, no president could hope to achieve high approval ratings for very long.

It followed, though, that a president could win re-election even with approval ratings that would once have spelled doom. In a 50-50 America, every presidential election was a choice between the incumbent and the challenger and not just a referendum on the incumbent. If voters who didn’t approve of the incumbent could be persuaded to prefer him to the challenger, the incumbent would win.

That was Bush’s game plan. Republicans portrayed Kerry as an effete liberal who would raise taxes and wouldn’t assert the national interest. They didn’t try to persuade Americans that Bush had been a terrific president or even that Kerry was unpresidential. They just made the case that Bush was better than the alternative.

When they had to contemplate a choice between Bush and Kerry, some voters found themselves starting to approve of the president by comparison: At the end of February 2004, when Kerry locked up the nomination, Bush’s approval rating was at 44 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. By Election Day, it had climbed five points.

Bush did not win in a landslide. In fact, no president has ever won re-election with a lower percentage of the major-party vote. But win he did. (Then, with Kerry out of the picture, Bush’s numbers resumed falling.)

If Ponnuru’s analysis is correct (and I see no reason why it isn’t), then the hyper-polarized atmosphere of 2012 may be even less conducive to a referendum.
In any event, as Galston himself notes cogently, Obama is not entirely the “master of his own fate.” There is only so much he can do to make life happier for Americans between now and November, and other actors, including the Iranian regime and the U.S. Supreme Court, could have an important impact on the dynamics of the election. So what is Team Obama to do? Certainly it should make every effort to defend the president’s record. But campaigns must work with the material at hand. Given the behavior of the GOP during the Obama administration, the ideological agenda it has foisted on its nominee, and the characteristics that have made that nominee such a hard sell to his own party, a strong “comparative”–or if you insist, negative–campaign against Romney is both wise and inevitable.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
Rick Santorum’s withdrawal from the Republican presidential race earlier this week marked the end of a long, strange trip for the former Pennsylvania senator, who made himself the political vehicle for Christian Right resistance to Mitt Romney. But the lesson of Santorum’s inevitable defeat isn’t that he was too socially extreme. Ironically, it was his record of loyal support for the compassionate conservative agenda of George W. Bush that did Santorum in, not his 1950s-era values. In the end, the final “true conservative alternative to Mitt Romney” just wasn’t conservative enough to nail down his potential constituency.
How did this happen? Santorum’s long march to victory in Iowa (reported on caucus night, of course, as either a narrow loss to Romney or a “tie”) represented the classic tortoise strategy. Strapped for funds and largely ignored by the media, Santorum painstakingly visited all 99 Iowa counties and rarely campaigned elsewhere. And in a state where social-issues activism was immensely important to the GOP rank-and-file and conservative leaders, his Iowa calling card was his strong record of outspoken fidelity to the twin social conservative causes of outlawing abortion and resisting legalization of same-sex marriage (or in Iowa’s case, overturning the 2009 court decision that legalized it). It was probably Santorum’s late endorsement by FAMiLY Leader co-chairs Bob Vander Plaats and Chuck Hurley that signaled his emergence as the best bet for a Christian Right bid to stop Mitt Romney.
After Iowa, Santorum initially seemed to be going nowhere. He never had a chance in New Hampshire, and despite an effort by prominent national Christian Right leaders to unify their flocks behind him, he finished a poor third in South Carolina. But Team Mitt’s efficient destruction of Gingrich in Florida and in Nevada, based mainly on saturation ads calling into question the conservative warhorse’s ideological reliability, gave Santorum another opening, particularly when Romney, having depleted his treasury and probably thinking he had already won, made a weak effort in the three states voting on February 7–Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri–all won by Santorum.
The second Santorum comeback set the stage for the rest of the primary calendar. There was a clear pattern: Romney regularly won a majority of delegates, while Santorum won popular votes in states with a sufficient white evangelical voting percentage. In the really crucial contests, in Ohio and Mitt’s native Michigan, Romney and his super PAC heavily outspent his rival, relentlessly pounding Santorum for heresies against conservative orthodoxy during his Senate career.
Romney’s success in exploiting Santorum’s reputation for ideological laxity was widely ignored by many media observers, fixated as they were by Rick’s more inflammatory social-issues statements, such as his criticism of John F. Kennedy’s famous separation-of-church-and-state speech in 1960. On primary night in Michigan, many wondered if Santorum’s failure to carry the state’s Catholic vote was attributable to the JFK gaffe, failing to realize that the Opus Dei candidate had been losing the Catholic vote everywhere (he did finally carry it in a blowout win in Louisiana). Far more important was Romney’s plurality over Santorum among the 61 percent of primary voters calling themselves conservatives. In Ohio, a far closer primary, Romney ran just six points behind Santorum among self-identified conservatives (66 percent of the Ohio primary electorate), and managed to convince 17 percent of voters that Rick was “not conservative enough,” a figure that rose to 23 percent in the March Wisconsin primary that finished off the challenger.
In other words, even though Santorum did consistently well among “very conservative” voters, outside his white evangelical base he never consolidated sufficient conservative support to topple Romney. The reason: He was the only 2012 candidate who was serving in Congress in the first term of George W. Bush, and thus voted for No Child Left Behind and the Medicare Prescription Drug benefit, and did not notably dissent from Bush’s comprehensive immigration reform initiative–all elements of Bush’s “compassionate conservative” agenda that were especially appealing to that era’s Christian conservatives, with whom Santorum was already closely identified. Santorum also voted regularly for earmarks, which had not yet become an ideological abomination to conservatives, and loyally followed Bush’s endorsement of his Pennsylvania Republican colleague Arlen Specter. All these highly conventional positions came back to undo Santorum in 2012, a year in which conservative activists were virtually united in believing the big spending and even “liberalism” of their one-time hero George W. Bush had caused the landslide Republican defeats of 2006 and 2008.
There were other factors, of course, that helped prevent Santorum from pulling off what would have been an astonishing nomination victory. For one thing, unlike Mitt and Newt, he never had a super PAC donor base willing to provide virtually unlimited funds. (His one big sugar-daddy, Foster Friess, pretty much disappeared from sight and curtailed his largesse after his infamous “aspirin” gaffe.) And he could not get Gingrich out of the race, which probably cost him Ohio. But anyone thinking his problem was that he was just too conservative for the GOP is wrong–it turns out that yesterday’s true conservatives have become today’s RINOs.

At Washington Monthly yesterday, I looked at the new Obama campaign web video attacking Mitt Romney’s “severely conservative” statements of late. Since we’ve all been wondering if Team Obama would choose the “too conservative” line of attack on Romney as opposed to the “unprincipled flip-flopper” angle, I wonder if this is a sign of the future, or simply an initial foray to pin Mitt to the right side of the mat before his Etch-a-Sketch machine gets warmed up?

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The end is near for Rick Santorum. That doesn’t mean, though, that it’s time for Mitt Romney to start celebrating. Yes, Romney won Wisconsin Tuesday night, and has a near-lock on the eventual nomination. But claims that he is beginning to seal the deal with party conservatives are premature. A look at Wisconsin exit polls shows that he is still struggling among right-wing voters. That has clear implications for the type of general election campaign Romney can run–and the kind of vice-presidential candidate he’ll eventually have to pick.
What did we learn from the Wisconsin primary? The first exit poll reports seemed to project a 7-point margin for Romney, and an impressive showing among very right-wing voters. “Evangelicals, tea party supporters, those supporting ‘traditional values’ and people calling themselves ‘very conservative’ went Romney’s way, exit polls showed,” CNN’s Peter Hamby reported in an early analysis. The final exits, though, told a different story, one more consistent with Romney’s narrow margin of victory of only 4 points: Santorum enjoyed his accustomed win among evangelicals, and there was a tie between the two candidates among “very conservative” voters. Santorum also won among the more than half of primary voters who say they attend church weekly, and among rural voters. Yes, Romney made strides among all the traditionally pro-Santorum demographic groups, and won some, but breakthrough is too strong a word.
Romney had better hope Santorum is out of the race or out of money by May, when almost every state voting has demographics significantly less favorable to the frontrunner than Wisconsin’s. The issue isn’t whether Romney will win the nomination–proportional allocation of delegates in the most troublesome May states, along with a decisive group of pro-Romney primaries in June, ensure that he will. But his continuing struggle among the most conservative segments of the GOP may mean he has to spend far more time courting them than he’d prefer.
There are other signs of conservative intransigence on the horizon. Some analysts noted that 28 percent of Wisconsin primary voters thought Rick Santorum was “too conservative.” Less mentioned was that 23 percent said he was “not conservative enough.” It’s unclear exactly how much overlap that group had with the 44 percent of Wisconsin voters who said the same thing of Romney. But it is obvious that much of the GOP base believes the field of primary candidates was never conservative enough to begin with–a belief encouraged by Mitt Romney’s super PACs, which tried to counteract the skepticism towards their candidate by mounting relentless attacks on the conservative credentials of Santorum (and earlier, on Newt Gingrich). In state after state, Romney was winning votes from hardcore conservatives, not because he had persuaded them of his conservative credentials, but because he had persuaded them to train their ideological ire against the competition. Stoking the grievances of the party in this way may have been an instrumentally useful tactic to gain the nomination, but it has also made it that much more difficult to unify and energize the base behind his general election campaign.
In any case, the long-awaited pivot to a general election message, already complicated by his communication director’s “Etch-a-Sketch” gaffe, could be delayed considerably. Once the primaries finally end, conservatives may shift from resisting Mitt by voting for Santorum to making shrill demands on Romney-as-nominee.
And the current conservative focus on Romney’s most vulnerable issue, health care, may not help either. Ironically, if the Supreme Court does overturn the Affordable Care Act this summer–either partially or completely–the problem for Romney could grow worse, as his much-repeated commitment to the “Repeal” part of the GOP “Repeal-and-Replace” message loses value. He’ll have to reassure conservatives once again that he wouldn’t “replace” ObamaCare with any sort of ObamaCare Lite, just as swing voters might want him to endorse national measures to, say, outlaw preexisting condition exclusions.
But the most important conservative demand on Romney will likely involve his running-mate. He might try to thread the needle by choosing someone like Marco Rubio or Paul Ryan, who are already on his “team,” but very popular among hardcore conservatives. But if he feels the need for greater tactical flexibility, he may not find much cooperation.
Sarah Palin’s suggestion this week that Allen West, the truly far-right congressman from Florida, would make Mitt a fine running-mate sounds ludicrous–but it may also signal a tough bargaining position by leaders of the right. After all, in similar circumstances in 2008, John McCain gave them Palin herself. This year, with conservatives feeling more optimistic than they did four years ago, and more in control of the party, they’ll hardly want to settle for less.

It’s been a busy week already over at Washington Monthly‘s Political Animal blog, and here are links and notes on three items that may be of particular interest to TDS readers:
* As Stu Rothenberg notes accurately, Mitt Romney’s lack of credibility extends from conservatives who don’t believe he’s one of them to GOP moderates who think he’s lying to conservatives. All in all, I conclude, Mitt really may be the New Nixon.
* There’s an increasingly apparent gap between poli-sci influenced analysts who stress “fundamentals” and play down individual campaign events, and “granular” reporters revealing “inside” stories. Politico’s latest e-book an extreme example of the latter.
* Conservatives seeking to justify franchise-shrinking Voter ID bills are always on hunt for rare “voter fraud” story. Now they are trying to stretch an obscure Indiana case involving allegedly forged primary ballot petitions into a Big Outrage.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
Last week was a pretty good one for Mitt Romney. He moved ahead of Rick Santorum in the polls in Wisconsin. His lead in national polls of Republicans increased as well. And he continued to get prominent endorsements from star conservatives like Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan, indicating a party moving in his direction. But despite all this encouraging news, there was a cloud on Romney’s horizon: his terrible approval ratings.
How terrible? According to a new ABC News-Washington Post survey, only 34 percent of Americans view Romney favorably (“the lowest for any leading presidential candidate in ABC/Post polls in primary seasons since 1984”). And 50 percent of Americans rate Romney unfavorably–that’s higher than any unfavorability score Obama has received ever.
Needless to say, this is not what you want to hear when you’re still busy courting your party’s most extremist voters in an effort to nail down the nomination. In fact, Romney’s record-low ratings probably have a lot to do with this year’s extended primary. John McCain, for example, was doing much better at this point in 2008, with a 54-40 approval/disapproval rating–but he had already won the nomination. According to ABC/Post, Romney’s unfavorability score has been exceeded “by only one top candidate in 28 years, Hillary Clinton in 2008.” It’s no accident that the past candidate who actually exceeds Romney’s unfavorable is Clinton, who was also still in a highly competitive nomination contest at the end of March.
A big part of Romney’s problem, as ABC’s Gary Langer explains in his analysis of the new poll, is that “core Republican voters” don’t much like him–in sharp contrast to Obama, whose troubles with the Democratic base seem to be over:

Romney’s seen favorably by 62 percent of Republicans and 47 percent of conservatives overall, including 54 percent of strong conservatives. Obama fares much better on the other side of the political spectrum – 86 percent favorable among Democrats, 75 percent among liberals.

The president peaks at 91 percent favorability among liberal Democrats, vs. Romney’s 66 percent among conservative Republicans. These are like-sized groups: Liberal Democrats account for 16 percent of all adults in this poll, conservative Republicans for 18 percent.
Intensity of sentiment is an even sharper point of differentiation. Sixty-one percent of Democrats and half of liberals see Obama “strongly” favorably, the most in nearly a year. Strongly favorable ratings of Romney dive to 15 and 13 percent among Republicans and conservatives.

But Romney’s unfavorability among core Republicans probably won’t cost him that much. There’s plenty of reason to figure Mitt’s most conservative detractors will ultimately support him in the general election, especially against an opponent they dislike far more than Democrats disliked John McCain in 2008.A Public Policy Polling survey a bit earlier in March that showed Romney with an even more dismal approval-disapproval ratio (33-58) also indicated his most avid conservative detractors would back him strongly in the general election. According to PPP, Romney’s approval ratio among “very conservative” voters was 43/48. Yet the same voters preferred him to Obama 76/16. Meanwhile, Obama’s 81/11 approval ratio among “very liberal” voters is almost identical to his support from them against Romney (81/15). In other words, Romney has a hidden cushion of support.
That cushion doesn’t extend, however, to moderate and independent voters. Romney’s poor approval ratios among independents (35-52) and self-identified moderates (35-48) has to be troubling, especially when you consider how much time he will still have to spend articulating very conservative policy positions in the next few months. Aside from the extended GOP primary season, the Republican convention is relatively late this year (August 27-30), and the general election campaign will not fully get underway until after the Democrats complete their convention on September 6. Particularly after his campaign’s “Etch-a-Sketch” gaffe, Team Romney will have to execute any pivot from a primary to a general election message slowly and carefully.
Beyond all these considerations, the deeper fear in RomneyLand must be that their candidate is just not terribly likable once voters get to know him. In early 2008, when he was last running for president, his approval/disapproval ratings were similarly poor (28/43 in NBC/WSJ poll; 34/46 in ABC/WaPo poll; 32/42 in USAT/Gallup poll). Given his famous difficulty in connecting with average voters, and his tendency to commit regular gaffes drawing attention to his wealth and unusual background, perhaps he has the same affliction as his recent rival Newt Gingrich, who for nearly two decades has followed a pattern of momentary popularity (at least among Republicans) followed by a return to gravity.
It’s worth noting that even after his pounding by Romney during the primaries, and his many years of rubbing voters the wrong way, Gingrich’s approval ratio in the most recent PPP poll (28-61) is not that much worse than Romney’s. If people barely like you more than Newt Gingrich, that’s probably a sign to start worrying.

TDS readers might be interested in my virtual debate with Walter Shapiro on media coverage of the GOP presidential nominating race. Shapiro, arguing that the chattering classes were prematurely calling the race for Romney, wrote here. I responded here.
And Jonathan Bernstein of WaPo’s Post-Partisan summed it up here:

Kilgore is exactly right, on two counts. The first is the state of the contest. Looking at delegates isn’t enough. Shapiro writes that nothing changed after Illinois, but that’s not really true. For one thing, while Romney was the favorite in that primary, there’s still a big difference in that he actually did sweep that state and reap a large delegate bounty (indeed, Shapiro seems to be ignoring that Romney also won big in Puerto Rice just before Illinois, which further nailed down his large delegate lead). Each time the front-runner wins, even when he’s favored, it makes it that much less likely he can be overcome. Also changed since Illinois, as Kilgore notes, are key endorsements heading Romney’s way. Those hurt Santorum severely; he desperately needed resources to remain competitive, and it’s increasingly clear he’s not going to generate any.

Follow all the links and judge for yourself.