NOTE: This is the third item in The Democratic Strategist’s Rountable Discussion on swing and base voters. It’s by Brookings Institution senior fellow and TDS Co-Editor Bill Galston.
It’s hard to discuss “swing voters” without a precise definition of the term. The best I’ve seen so far is that of Northeastern University political scientist William Mayer: A swing voter, he says, is one who could go either way, one not so solidly committed as to make persuasion all but futile. Relative to committed voters, swing voters have mixed or balanced attitudes about the major-party candidates, as measured by the difference between the two on the American National Election Studies (ANES) so-called “feeling thermometer.” If the maximum theoretical difference is 100, corresponding to total approval of one candidate and disapproval of the other, voters who see a gap of 15 points or less constitute the pool of potential “persuadables.” Since 1972, swing voters, so defined, have averaged 23 percent of the total in ANES preelection surveys.
Mayer does not underscore a crucial point that emerges from his data: the ideological distance between the major-party candidates strongly affects the percentage of swing voters. In 1976, the Republicans nominated a moderate after a fierce intra-party battle, while the Democrats nominated a newcomer widely regarded as their most conservative candidate in decades. As a consequence, swing voters amounted to a full 34 percent of the electorate, by far the highest in any election in the past three decades. In 2004, by contrast, the Democrats nominated a Massachusetts liberal to run against a Republican who had governed as a movement conservative. In this context, swing voters amounted to only 13 percent of the total, by far the lowest in the past three decades.
This relationship has important consequences for 2008: the Democrats’ choice between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will shape, not only how swing voters will vote, but also how many swing voters there will be. Consider a recent Greenberg Quinlan Rosner/Public Opinion Strategies survey for NPR, which compares the two Democrats against McCain. In a Clinton/McCain contest, McCain receives 9 percent of the Democratic vote, while Clinton receives 5 percent of the Republican vote. In an Obama/McCain matchup, by contrast, McCain gets 18 percent of the Democratic vote and Obama, 13 percent of Republicans. Roughly speaking, a general election between Obama and McCain roughly doubles the number of partisans who can contemplate crossing party lines. All other things being equal, a less polarizing contest, when voters can see advantages and disadvantages in both candidates, will expand the pool of voters open to persuasion.
The net effect of this expansion depends on circumstances. The NPR survey indicates than McCain receives only 48 percent of Independents when facing Obama, versus 58 percent against Clinton. But because Clinton does a better job of consolidating the base, McCain ends up with same share of the total vote—48 percent—against each of the Democratic contenders.
A snapshot cannot foreshadow the dynamics of the general election, of course. The partisans of Sen. Obama can argue, plausibly enough, that wavering Democrats will “come home” as the differences between him and Sen. McCain are cast in higher relief. The partisans of Sen. Clinton can retort that this same process of differentiation will reduce Obama’s appeal to Republicans, and that in addition, as Independents learn more about the gap between his unifying rhetoric and his traditionally liberal position on the issues, some of them will switch as well. To pile uncertainty on uncertainty, the relationship between Independents and swing voters is loose at best: as Mayer shows, many Independents are covert partisans, and they make up only 41 percent of the total pool of swing voters. At this point, we have far more variables than equations, making prediction impossible.
What we can say is this: if a McCain/Obama contest did no more than increase the share of swing voters from its 2004 low to its post-1968 average, an additional 10 percent of the electorate would be in play after the parties’ conventions, shifting both campaigns away from all-out mobilization and toward persuasion. By contrast, if Sen. Clinton turned out to be as polarizing as her detractors maintain, the tone of the 2008 election could bear more than a passing resemblance to 2004 . . . which is not to say that the outcome would necessarily be the same.

With a lot of the focus of the Democratic presidential contest now shifting towards labor-heavy OH and PA, it’s significant that Barack Obama is picking up an endorsement from the Teamsters. This gives him endorsements from four of the seven unions of the Change to Win coalition (one, the Farm Workers, has endorsed HRC), and increases the possibility that the entire coalition could make its first-ever joint endorsement. Clinton, however, still has the lion’s share of endorsements by AFL-CIO unions, though not enough to make a federation joint endorsement likely.

There’s obviously plenty of stuff available today about Barack Obama’s double-digit win in Wisconsin yesterday, but perhaps the most interesting analysis is by RealClearPolitics’ Jay Cost, who looks closely at the evidence that Obama, for the first time, began to win in demographic categories previously dominated by Clinton. He concludes that we may finally be seeing evidence of a “momentum effect” for Obama. But it’s a relatively small effect, and Cost thinks we won’t know for sure if it’s in play until Texas and Ohio weigh in.

NOTE: This, the second item in The Democratic Strategist’s Roundtable Discussion on swing and base voter strategies, is an excerpt from political organizer and strategist Robert Creamer‘s recent book, “Listen To Your Mother: Stand Up Straight! How Progressives Can Win.” It’s reprinted with permission of the publisher.
In election campaigns our goal is to change the behavior of the voters, since they are the actual decision-makers. Sometimes there are secondary targets as well, but the secondary targets are only important insofar as they can help us impact the primary targets—voters.
And our primary targets are not just any voters. They are the only two categories of voters whose electoral behavior can be changed by a campaign. We call them persuadable voters and mobilizable voters.
Persuadable voters have two characteristics:
•They generally vote.
•They are undecided.
Mobilizable voters also have two characteristics:
•They would support our candidate.
•They are unlikely to vote unless they are mobilized to do so.
In many political campaigns, massive amounts of political resources are wasted because they are used to communicate with voters who are not part of one of these two groups. They are spent trying to convince voters who always vote Democratic to vote for a Democrat, or they are spent trying to convince people who always vote Republican to vote Democratic. They may also be spent trying to convince voters who never vote, but would vote Republican if they did, to vote Democratic. All of these are wastes of campaign resources, since the behavior of these target voters will not likely change.
Democrats are particularly prone to target voters who always vote Democratic—and always go out to vote—with resources that should go elsewhere.
Of course, base Democrats who always vote are critically important to campaigns as potential sources of volunteers and contributors. But they are not primary targets for the campaign’s message since we don’t want their voting behavior to change. They always vote Democratic, and always go out to vote. They behave that way no matter what is done by the campaign.
In an election, persuadable and mobilizable voters are never the same people—and our communication with these two distinct groups has two different goals.
This is one of the most important rules of effective electoral politics, — and one that is most often violated, forgotten and confused.

Read more…

NOTE: In this introductory essay for The Democratic Strategist‘s Roundtable Discussion, TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore reviews the history and significance of the perennial issue of base-versus-swing orientations for Democrats, and poses a series of questions whose answers have traditionally divided many observers: (1) Who are the swing and base voters? (2) What is their relative value? (3) What are the opportunity costs involved in reaching beyond the base to swing voters? (4) What’s the best long-range strategy for building an enduring Democratic majority?
While this decade has ushered in a variety of new strategic issues for Democrats, from Internet politics to turmoil in the labor movement, some issues are evergreen. And perhaps the oldest unresolved argument among Democrats is over the nature and electoral value of “swing voters,” those much-pursued and much-maligned counterweights to the Democratic “base.”
Though the debate over “swing voters” has been raging for decades, it’s hard to find a subject more bedeviled by definitional and empirical confusion, by straw men and false choices, and by very different evaluations of recent political history.
It’s this last factor that’s revived the swing voter debate among pollsters, political practitioners, academics, bloggers and journalists.
To cite the most simplistic versions of a common argument, in one narrative of recent Democratic electoral performance, Bill Clinton broke the party’s long presidential drought by intelligently targeting swing voters. His successors, Al Gore and John Kerry (along with congressional Democrats in most cycles between 1994 and 2006), failed to completely follow the Clinton template. Republican abandonment of swing voters (politically and substantively) led to the big Democratic midterm victory of 2006.
A competing narrative suggests that Clinton’s pursuit of swing voters alienated the party base, blurred essential distinctions between the two parties, and forfeited the Democratic majority in Congress and in the states, while failing to produce a presidential majority. Gore and Kerry failed to match Bush’s relentless efforts to energize the Republican base, and Democratic fretting over swing voters made the party a weak and ineffective opposition party. That finally changed in 2006, when a netroots-led mobilization effort based on maximum partisan differentiation produced a Democratic counterpart to the base-driven Republican landslide of 1994.
It’s notable that each narrative diverges sharply over interpretation of the 1994 debacle, the 2000 “draw,” and the 2006 breakthrough. And there is naturally (though not universally) a strong ideological underpinning to the debate, with those on the party’s “left” typically disparaging swing-voter-focused campaigns and governing strategies as unprincipled and disloyal, and those in the “centrist” camp often arguing that base-focused campaigns cede critical ground to the GOP and make effective governing impossible.
The base-swing argument has many variations, of course. Most centrists favor a party message and agenda that’s congenial to both base and swing voters, and at most suggest keeping highly partisan base mobilization efforts “under the radar screen.” And most progressives believe in swing voter appeals that don’t conflict with sharp partisan differentiation and ideological principles, even if they sometimes seem to yearn for an election (as some hope for in 2008) where swing voter appeals are no longer necessary. Both camps agree that exposing GOP extremism can be an effective tool for both base mobilization and swing voter persuasion.
But even if all goes well in 2008 and this dispute does not become a major point of contention among Democrats before November, it will remain a semi-submerged problem for any Democratic administration and Congress in terms of designing a governing agenda. And while it would be naïve to think that this ancient argument can be completely resolved here or anywhere else, it would be helpful to create some general agreement on the terms of debate, and on certain empirically verifiable common ground.

Read more…

Fareen Zakaria’s Newsweek article “The End of Conservatism” makes the short case that GOP leaders are marinating in self-delusion by arguing that their party’s shrinking support is a result of abandonment of conservative principles. Zakaria counters that a combination of events, demographic change and the transformation of public opinion have rendered Reagan-Thatcher hard-line conservatism obsolete, creating a world in which “conservative slogans sound weirdly anachronistic.” Zakaria’s read on the Democrats’ prospects is also on target, and he quotes TDS co-editor Ruy Teixeira and his co-author John Judis:

“The Emerging Democratic Majority,” written in 2002, makes the case that perhaps for these broad reasons, the conservative tilt in U.S. politics is fast diminishing. It gained a brief respite after 9/11, when raised fears and heightened nationalism played to Republican advantages. But the trends are clear. Authors John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira note that several large groups have begun to vote Democratic consistently—women, college-educated professionals, youth and minorities. With the recent furor over immigration, the battle for Latinos and Asian-Americans is probably lost for the Republicans. Both groups voted solidly Democratic in 2006.

While many hard line conservatives have problems with John McCain’s policies on issues like torture and immigration reform, Zakaria is overstating the case in saying of McCain that “He seems to understand that a new world requires new thinking.” McCain’s advocacy of open-ended occupation of Iraq and his support of escalating US military presence in Iraq is anything but new thinking. Ditto for a broad range of McCain’s polices on such issues as the environment, women’s rights, health care and education. Republican voters who want some leaders capable of ‘new thinking’ can best send their party the message by voting Democratic in November, as many have already done in the primaries.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about the ‘superdelegates,’ who will cast more than 19 percent of the votes for President at the Democratic National Convention this summer, is that nearly all of them have been elected to something at some point. The general categories include: 28 Democratic governors; Every Democratic member of congress; 23 Democratic Party ‘elders’ (former Presidents, vice presidents, speakers of the House etc.); 411 DNC members elected by Party activists in the 50 states. After that the case for having superdelgates in the next convention gets very weak.
In his Sunday L.A. Times article “Who Are These Superdelegates?,” Peter Nichols quotes Craig Holman, a lobbyist for the watchdog group Public Citizen:

This is a device to try to reduce the influence of one-person, one-vote…It’s anti-democratic. It’s specifically designed for the purpose of having the insiders . . . have some sort of final decision over who the nominee is going to be, regardless of what the voters want.

And Chris Bowers, who has launched a ‘Superdelgates Transparency Project,‘ has this to say about the danger of the superdelegate system in his Sunday Open Left post:

The Democratic Party is a living institution that changes through time, and it must change to adapt to the changing nature of its membership. This is a progressive era of mass engagement in politics, and for superdelegates to defy the popular will would deal a generational body blow to huge sections of its new activist corps, not to mention give it a black eye nationally for years, and would also simply violate progressive principles of democracy.

The demographic profile of the superdelegates is not impressive. In Josephine Hearne’s Politico article “White men hold superdelegate power balance,” for example, the author notes:

The exact percentage of white males varies slightly depending on whether the penalized Michigan and Florida delegation superdelegates are counted, but the overall percentage is at least 46 percent. Overall, men of all races represent 64 percent of the party’s superdelegates…The percentage of white male superdelegates is disproportionate to the share of white males who make up the overall Democratic electorate. According to a January 2008 national poll by Zogby International, 28 percent of Democratic voters are white men. Women account for 55 percent of Democratic voters.
…Among the superdelegates, including Michigan’s and Florida’s, there are 28 governors (21 white men), 49 senators (33 white men) and 228 representatives (137 white men). Members of the Democratic National Committee are also superdelegates, and among this group, there is more diversity.

One group. 2008 Democratic Convention Watch, keeps a running tally of the superdelgates who are committed and uncommitted. For their list of names of some 439+/- superdelegates who have endorsed a presidential candidate, click here. For their list of the 356+/- superdelegates who have not endorsed a candidate, click here. As of this writing 76 have yet to be chosen by their state conventions.
As Ed’s post below pointed out, the Clinton-Obama latest snapshot breakdown estimates vary somewhat, with a range of 210-242 for Clinton to 142-163 for Obama.

Back in October, the executive board of the Service Employees International Union met to weigh an endorsement. They’d been courted the most by John Edwards, but Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had both lobbied the union as well, and the chapters in Illinois and New York were firmly in the camps of their respective senators. Unable to make a decision, the leadership of SEIU declined to make an endorsement before the early primaries, and it was scored as a major loss for the senator from North Carolina.
On Friday, SEIU announced that the union had made a decision — with Edwards out of the race, they were backing Barack Obama.
Politically, the SEIU endorsement is important. It has around 2 million total members, second in size among unions only to the National Education Association — which has not picked a candidate. Leaders estimate that the union has 150,000 members in the states with primaries scheduled to take place over the next two months, and Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Rhode Island, and Oregon have particularly strong chapters. Its political action committee is also one of the biggest in the country, expected to raise $30 million in this election cycle.
Obama had previously been supported by the state SEIU chapters in Nevada and California. He lost Nevada narrowly, and lost California by a considerable margin. But those endorsements came just days before their elections, and probably weren’t a good test of SEIU’s organizing abilities.
SEIU should make an immediate difference with independent expenditures. On top of her initial fundraising advantage, Hillary Clinton has received significant support from outside groups in the early primary states. So far, these organizations have spent $5.2 million on her behalf, with the largest contributions coming from Clinton’s own labor backers — American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the American Federation of Teachers — and from Emily’s List. Separate groups have spent $1.5 million supporting Obama. Now, Ben Smith is reporting that SEIU is preparing to dedicate up to $5 million in independent spending on Obama’s behalf in Ohio and Texas. Whatever dollar advantage Hillary Clinton had there is likely gone.
For years, SEIU has worked to cultivate strong ties in the nation’s immigrant communities, and the union has a large Latino membership. Support from Spanish-speakers put Clinton over the top in California, Arizona, and New Mexico, and she is counting on support from Latinos in Texas to offset Obama’s advantage in the African-American community. If Obama can close the gap among those voters, or even narrow it by 4 or 5 points, Clinton’s path to victory is much more difficult. Starting Tuesday, SEIU will make an enormous effort to influence their Latino members to support the Illinois senator.
Support from the Service Employees could have big repercussions in the wider world of labor, as well. In 2005, SEIU was one of seven of unions that came together to form the Change to Win coalition. In January, Obama was endorsed by another Change to Win union, UNITE HERE, which represents hotel, restaurant, apparel and laundry workers. This last Thursday, a third, the United Food and Commercial Workers, threw its support behind the Illinois senator. A fourth, the United Farm Workers, endorsed Sen. Clinton in January. And the other three unions in the coalition — the Teamsters, the Laborers’ International Union of North America, and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America — have yet to endorse a candidate. But that could change: the entire coalition is scheduled to hold a conference call next week to determine whether to make its first joint endorsement.
If labor support for Obama manifests itself at the polls, it could shake up the demographics of the race in a potentially decisive way. To this point, Hillary Clinton has won a majority of voters without college degrees, and those with incomes under $50,000. If Obama can add union households to his coalition of African-Americans and affluent white voters, he could have an advantage in nearly every state that remains on the primary calendar.

(NOTE: As explained in the previous post, this is a guest item from Jonathan Krasno, Associate Professor of Political Science at Binghamton University).
With John McCain the all-but-certain Republican nominee, the obvious question emerges: which Democrat is likeliest to beat him? This, of course, is a purely hypothetical question. John Kerry won the Democratic nomination in 2004 in large part because of the perception that he was the strongest candidate against George Bush. He lost, but we have no way of knowing whether John Edwards or Howard Dean would have done better. The same is true of many of the judgments that people make of candidates. We’ll never know whether Hillary Clinton would be a better president than Barack Obama, whether his foreign policy would work better than hers, and so on. The best we can do make an informed guess. On the question of electability, my guess without question is Obama.
The case for Obama as the strongest candidate comes from simple electoral math. The 30+ primaries and caucuses to date, plus the polls and the pattern of endorsements from red-state Democrats, show that he has more appeal to independents, to a handful of Republicans, and to casual Democrats than does Clinton. Clinton’s support is largely concentrated in core Democrats, the sort most likely to vote in primaries and the reason why she remains in serious contention despite a string of loses. Obama is almost certainly right to claim that he would be more likely to win over Clinton’s voters in the fall than she would be to win over his. Although widely interpreted as a reference to blacks, it is independent and Republican supporters who are most out of her reach. In short, Obama begins with a larger pool of potential supporters, one that encompasses the core Democrats currently on Clinton’s side and extends past them.
The key word in that last sentence is “potential.” The main knock against Obama as a candidate – and the main argument for Clinton – involves his ability to withstand the withering attack to come. Obama has enjoyed a charmed political life, with fawning press and weak Republican opposition. Can he maintain his exalted status a fresh, new voice (for change!) once the campaign really begins? The Clintons, after all, knocked him off his stride for several weeks after Iowa with some hardball tactics, although by South Carolina he managed to turn those tactics against them.
Once the campaign begins, the argument goes, Clinton is better prepared. She has been in the national spotlight since 1992, so she knows what the counterattack will be like and what she has to do to get beyond it. She won’t, like Kerry or Michael Dukakis, be surprised by an attack and lose an early lead. She is not invested in a holier-than-thou image, so she can throw some pretty sharp elbows and do whatever is necessary to win, etc. Furthermore, the strong economy of the Clinton years supposedly gives her a solid claim as the candidate best equipped to deal with recession, especially versus McCain.
All of that would be more convincing if Clinton were a proven vote-getter or a proven campaigner. She ran five points behind Al Gore in New York in 2000, two points behind Elliot Spitzer in 2006. (Her husband, his recent missteps notwithstanding, who is a better politician than she is, never managed to win a majority of votes nationwide.) I live in upstate New York and can confirm that whatever Clinton hatred that remains here is muted, proving that with time Clinton can win over her critics. She does not have the time to lavish attention on the whole country as she has lavished it on New York, to get people who discount her to pay attention. More important, against the toughest political opponent of her career in Obama, she has squandered a huge lead and a dizzying array of advantages. If Obama has run a better campaign for the nomination (aimed at appealing to people who will be swing voters in the general) why should Clinton be seen as the stronger candidate in the fall? It is certainly hard to discount his superior rhetorical skills and the organizational success of his campaign.
Nor does Clinton’s ability to match up against McCain on an array of issues seem like a big deal. One of the things that the exit polls have consistently shown is that Clinton and McCain, arguably the two biggest hawks on each side, have done better than their opponents with voters who favor a quick withdrawal from Iraq. What that suggests, of course, is that voters look at a variety of things besides issues. In Obama’s case it is his uplifting message of hope and change; in McCain’s it is his reputation for honesty. Against either one, Clinton’s mastery of the details of government seems wonkish and uninspired. Given the choice between going into the general election with the master of the economy or the charismatic apostle of change, I would opt for the generic message of changing the friendless status quo.
In other words, the argument for Obama is most electable is based on breadth of his appeal, while Clinton is favored for her supposed mastery of the process of running against Republicans. Of the two, the first seems more tangible and more valuable to me. The potential to bring more Democrats to the polls (especially young ones who could help the party in the future), the potential to win more independents and perhaps more than a sliver of Republicans, the potential to keep the Republicans in disarray rather than healing their divisions for them by nominating an opponent who instantly unites them – all these make Obama the stronger candidate. Obama will be savagely attacked, pulled off his pedestal (along with McCain), and possibly even fatally wounded in the process. But will he end up any more disliked or divisive than is Clinton already? Probably not. The campaign against her is, after all, in the midst of its second decade. It will cost the Republicans tens of millions to try to demonize Obama as effectively as they have demonized Clinton, and there is no certainty they’ll succeed.
One of the common observations about Obama is that he is a high risk, high reward candidate, while Clinton represents a surer thing. The risk is that, with his lack of exposure on the national stage, the bottom could fall out; the reward is that Obama fulfills his potential as a transformational candidate. I do not see him doing any worse than Clinton’s worst. But with the stars aligned for a Democratic victory in November, Democrats can afford to think big. Clinton can win a narrow victory, but only Obama can deliver a landslide.

As Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama continue to slug it out on the campaign trail, the question that continues to obsess political observers and many actual voters is which candidate would be stronger in a general election contest with John McCain. Here at The Democratic Strategist, we’ve decided to occasionally publish some expert thoughts on the subject, beginning today, when Binghamton University political scientiest Jonathan Krasno makes the case for Obama. (We’ll publish someone making the case for HRC before long).
But underlying this comparative debate is a slightly different one: what are the fundamentals of this general election campaign? What’s the baseline of support for the two parties? Does either Democrat begin with an advantage based on Bush’s unpopularity, the trend of independents towards Democratic voting exhibited in 2006, the the “enthusiasm gap” between Ds and Rs evidenced in this year’s primaries and caucuses, the issues landscape, or the ability of the two Democrats to bring in new voters or persaude swing voters?
As the list in the last sentence reveals, I’m in the optimist camp when it comes to overall Democratic prospects, whether our presidential nominee is named Hillary or Barack. But others disagree. I was talking to a colleague the other day, who after I declared myself “upbeat” about November, said: “Upbeat? Let’s see. Republicans quickly decided on a war hero loved by the news media. We’ve got a cage match with daggers between two demographically limited candidates. Wanna give me some of that kool-aid you’re drinking?”
This far out, of course, all talk about the general election is highly speculative. But given the magnitude of the stakes, it’s probably not premature.