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.

Here’s a little pop test, folks. Read over this assessment of the country’s condition, and venture a guess at its provenance:

America is in danger. Our ability to meet and solve the problems that face us is seriously compromised. National surveys reveal that an unprecedented seven out of ten citizens believe that life for our children will not be as good as their own. We are headed in the wrong direction. We share their deep concern and frustration. Our nation is indeed at risk.
–Approval for the United States around the world has dropped to historically low levels, with only one out of four people approving of our country’s actions, even in nations that are our longtime allies.
–We have eroded America’s credibility and capacity to lead on urgent global and foreign policy issues, including terrrorism, nuclear profileration, climate change, and regional instabilities.
–Our budget and trade deficits are out of control. We are squandering our children’s future. The ominous transfer of our national wealth has made our economy vulnerable, and our economic strength and competitiveness are both declining. Middle-income Americans are struggling to keep their homes and jobs and educate their children.
–We are not as secure as we should be. Our military is stretched thin and our nation remains vulnerabvle to catrostrophic terrorism.”
–We are being held economically hostage because we have no energy policy worthy of the name.
–Our educational system is failing to prepare our children to succeed in a globalized and technological world.
–Nearly 50 miillion Americans remain without health insurance, and the cost of medical care continues to spiral.
–The failures of bridges in Minnesota, and levees in New Orleans are harsh metaphors for the reckless neglect of our infrastructure.

Sounds like, say, every Democratic presidential candidate, wouldn’t you say? I certainly haven’t heard many Republicans talk this way. So this “wrong track” preroration would logically lead to a call for a Democratic president and Congress in November, right?
Wrong. Here’s the next passage in this statement:

These critical issues are uniquely interlocked and we must have a national strategy and priotiorization of resources. We are failing to address them because rampant partisanship has paralyzed the ability of our government to act. If we allow polarizing politics to continue, we will remain a nation divided and no matter who is elected this fall, he or she will not have a mandate for governing. Too many in both our parties have sought to energize their bases instead of reaching out to address the issues that concern our nation as a whole. They appeal to extremes and marginalize those in the commonsense center.
In order to break this partisan impasse, we urge the presidential candidates to provide:
–clear descriptions of how they would establish a government of national unity
–specific strategies for reducing polarization and reaching bipartisan consensus
–plans to go beyond tokenism to appoint a truly bipartisan cabinet with critical posts held by the most qualified people available regardless of political affiliation
–proposals for bipartisan executive and legislative policy groups in critical areas such as national security.

If you haven’t guessed it by now, these quotations are from a “bipartisan unity statement” read aloud by my former boss Sam Nunn at the conclusion of a confab in Oklahoma yesterday designed to threaten both parties with an indie presidential run, probably by the leading non-candidate candidate Michael Bloomberg, unless they improbably agree to build some sort of Government of National Salvation upon winning the White House.
Some people might read the Nunn statement and think it sounds like Barack Obama. But whereas Obama pledges to reach across partisan lines, and outside them as well, to build support for a progressive agenda, he’s not talking about abandoning his party and sharing power directly with people who don’t share his (or Nunn’s) assessment of the challenges facing America, and who would oppose any progressive agenda with every political weapon available. Best I can tell, Obama’s offering an extended hand to the GOP that he’s willing to make into a fist. And his argument with some in the Democratic Party, most notably John Edwards, over how to enact progressive policies, mainly reflects differences of opinion on how to marshal public opinion to reverse most of the GOP policies of the Bush era.
I know Nunn well enough to believe he’s sincere in the desire to go back to the days when Democrats and Republicans truly cooperated on matters of urgent national importance, particularly in the defense arena. But Nunn left Congress in 1997, and had limited experience with the savage partisanship, ideological extremism, and money-lust that has come to characterize the party primarily responsible for the conditions he deplores.
The same year Nunn retired, Bob Dole gave up his Senate leadership post to run for president, and delivered a highly emotional speech touting the bipartisan traditions of the Senate (a speech that was broadly panned by conservatives, BTW). Dole was clearly living in the past, and today Sam Nunn and his Bipartisan Junta colleagues are living in the distant past. It’s revealing that the Republicans involved in this effort are, frankly, a bunch of marginal has-beens, plus one heretic (Chuck Hagel). Today’s GOP is totally uninterested in power-sharing unless it’s on their own terms, and there are no alternatives. And no one who agrees with the Bipartisan Junta’s bleak diagnosis of America’s condition should succumb to its prescription, which would, ironically, perpetuate partisan gridlock for the foreseeable future and thwart any genuine movement for change, which now depends on Democrats.

Over the weekend, Dana Goldstein posted a thoughtul piece on the American Prospect site about the disorganized and arguably unfair conduct of the Iowa Caucus site she monitered. Though I didn’t much convey it during my hurried live-blogging of Des Moines Precinct 19 on Caucus night (in part because I was typing with my laptop wedged at a crazy angle in a fire extinguisher alcove at the margins of the room, and was constantly moving to avoid obstructing the actual participants), my own experience paralleled hers.
Precinct 19 shared the site with Precinct 43, but there was virtually no signage indicating who should go where, and the party had not provided maps to indicate precinct lines (fortunately, one Biden and one Obama supporter had maps, if you lucked into encountering them in the midst of the chaotic crowd shuffling into the school). The room set aside for Precinct 19 was totally inadequate, with participants spilling into the corridor and beyond, where some could not have possibly heard the precinct chairman’s explanation of the process. The doors obviously had to remain open throughout the proceedings, and there was no monitoring of comings and goings, or indeed, whether participants had formally registered.
Since there was no space for separating preference groups, at least two (Kucinich and Clinton) were sent out into the adjoining lobby. This seriously handicapped the HRC effort when “realignment” began, since they couldn’t personally persuade supporters of non-viable candidates without luring them out of the room. And the entire preference group process underlined the most obvious difference between Caucuses and primaries: the absence of a secret ballot.
Candidate precinct captains for each campaign were allowed to conduct counts of their supporters without any official verification (at one point, the precinct chairman patiently explained to one captain how to efficiently conduct a hand count). And there were definite disparties in the quality of campaign preparation. I overheard one of the three HRC supporters who appeared to be in charge of her precinct operation ask a bystander at one point: “What happens next?” And the Biden captain convinced about half of his group to refuse to realign behind a second choice, on the dubious theory that this stubborn fidelity would be reflected in the “raw counts.”
Maybe my and Dana’s concerns are irrelevant in terms of the actual outcome, but given the consequences of Edwards’ razor-thin delegate margin over Clinton, a lot of small mistakes and accidents could have easily added up to a big effect on the presidential nominating process. I’m sure that there will be another debate after the nomination is decided about the caucus and primary calendar and Iowa’s iron grip on a highly disproportionate role. But however that turns out, if Iowa is still “first in the nation” in 2012, I hope both parties pay more attention to the need for sufficient space and direction to enable Iowans to know what they are doing for or to the rest of us.

The first poll of NH to be conducted after the results from Iowa were in shows a decent “bounce” for Barack Obama, but not for Mike Huckabee.
The Democratic poll by Rasmussen has Obama up ten points over Clinton–37%-27%–with Edwards at 19%. Clinton led Obama 31%-28%, with Edwards at 18%, in the last Rasmussen poll, conducted before Xmas.
On the Republican side, Rasmussen has McCain moving ahead of Romney 31%-26% in NH, with Huckabee running fourth at 11%, trailing Ron Paul’s 14%. This represents a precise reversal of McCain and Romney’s standing, while Huckabee hasn’t moved at all.
Post-Iowa “bounces” in the past have often increased a few days after the Caucuses, so this is hardly the final word. But right now the CW that Obama and McCain became front-runners after Iowa looks reasonably sound.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist
Both these polls closely track the Rasmussen findings on the Republican side, with John McCain holding a six-point lead over Romney, and Huckabee mired in the low teens.