Showing posts with label Mitt Romney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mitt Romney. Show all posts

Friday, January 3, 2014

Christie's Primary Map May Be the Same as Romney's, But the Order of the Primaries Won't Be.

Dave Catanese over at The Run 2016 has this to say:
With the first four states likely to keep their pecking order, Christie’s team may just adopt the same mindset.  Must wins in New Hampshire and Nevada, with Iowa and South Carolina as only icing. 
 
The main difference would be Florida, a primary that could be rendered mostly meaningless if one of its homestate contenders jumps into the race. If say, Sen. Marco Rubio is a candidate, then South Carolina may become demonstrably more vital to Christie.
FHQ does not disagree here on the basic campaign strategic point. On the surface, Christie's strategy would theoretically be the same as Romney's. Win in New Hampshire and Nevada, take what you can get in Iowa and South Carolina and win Florida. FHQ has hinted at as much stretching back into primary season 2012.

And Mr. Catanese is absolutely correct that a home state candidate from the Sunshine state -- whether Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush -- upsets the calculus some for the latent presidential campaign of the New Jersey governor.

But here's the thing: We don't know if that is going to be the order of those contests. FHQ is reasonably confident that the four carve-out states will retain their positions with perhaps minimal pressure from any rogue states. FHQ is also fairly confident that Florida will not be one of those states pushing the carve-outs in 2016. However, given the new law scheduling the Florida presidential primary, Florida is also not likely to hold down the fifth position on the calendar as it did in 2012. Right now that distinction belongs to Arizona and Michigan.1

The situation in Florida -- the scheduling of the primary -- is conditional. The Sunshine state will conduct a presidential primary election on the first date in which there are no penalties assessed by the national parties. Many are interpreting that as the first Tuesday in March (March 1, 2016). But that misses one other highly relevant point. Florida avoids the timing penalty by holding a March primary, but there is also the matter of the proportionality window in the Republican rules.

Recall that Florida has stuck with a true winner-take-all allocation of its delegates. If the Republican Party of Florida continues with that practice in 2016, the new law would push the presidential primary in the Sunshine state back to the third Tuesday in March according to the proposed penalty structure likely to emerge from the RNC rules subcommittee reexamining the rules. Now, Florida Republicans could merely take the 50% delegate reduction associated with a violation of the proportionality requirement and go on March 1, but that is not what the law says. If Florida Republicans value the presidential primary as a means of allocating delegates, they would have to utilize the state-funded option that is administered by the (secretary of) state and follows the law.

…on March 15, 2016 along with the Illinois primary.

--
Arizona and Michigan now occupy the fifth position on the 2016 presidential primary calendar and are the biggest threats to the carve-out states. Florida will play a role, but it will likely be on or two weeks after Super Tuesday. That's different from Romney's map. Like Romney, Christie would like to and likely have to do well in Arizona and Michigan as springboards into Super Tuesday the next week. Christie would also need to employ a similar Super Tuesday strategy to the former Massachusetts governor: rack up wins and delegates outside the South while peeling off as many as possible delegates in the South.

That's what makes the method of allocation Texas Republicans adopt for 2016 so important. Remember "proportionality" on the Republican side isn't mathematical proportionality. There are a number of ways to get there.

--
1 And that assumes Colorado, Minnesota and Utah do not opt into early February dates for their respective caucuses, caucuses and primary. It also assumes that Missouri either moves its primary back or once again adopts caucuses as a means of allocating delegates. North Carolina is newly rogue as well. …but for how long?

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Friday, November 16, 2012

2012 Electoral College Wrap Up, Part 2

FHQ will have much more on this later, but we wanted to get the final results through the lens of our map and the Electoral College Spectrum up before too much time passed.



The 2012 Electoral College Spectrum1
HI-4
(7)2
IL-20
(163)
IA-6
(243)
IN-11
(154)
KS-6
(59)
VT-3
(10)
ME-4
(167)
PA-20
(263)
SC-9
(143)
AL-9
(53)
RI-4
(14)
WA-12
(179)
CO-93
(272/275)
MS-6
(134)
KY-8
(44)
NY-29
(43)
OR-7
(186)
VA-13
(285/266)
AK-3
(128)
NE-5
(36)
MD-10
(53)
NM-5
(191)
OH-18
(303/253)
MT-3
(125)
AR-6
(31)
MA-11
(64)
MI-16
(207)
FL-29
(332/235)
TX-38
(122)
WV-5
(25)
CA-55
(119)
MN-10
(217)
NC-15
(347/206)
LA-8
(84)
ID-4
(20)
DE-3
(122)
WI-10
(227)
GA-16
(191)
SD-3
(76)
OK-7
(16)
CT-7
(129)
NV-6
(233)
MO-10
(175)
ND-3
(73)
WY-3
(9)
NJ-14
(143)
NH-4
(237)
AZ-11
(165)
TN-11
(70)
UT-6
(6)
1Follow the link for a detailed explanation on how to read the Electoral College Spectrum.

2The numbers in the parentheses refer to the number of electoral votes a candidate would have if he won all the states ranked prior to that state. If, for example, Romney had won all the states up to and including Colorado (all Obama's toss up states), he would have gained 275 electoral votes. Romney's numbers are only totaled through the states he would have needed in order to get to 270. In those cases, Obama's number is on the left and Romney's is on the right in italics.


3
Colorado is the state where Obama crossed the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the presidential election. That line is referred to as the victory line.

Final FHQ projection.



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Monday, November 12, 2012

2012 Electoral College Wrap Up, Part 1

This is the first part in a two part look at how FHQ's weighted average stacked up in examining the 2012 electoral college. We'll first take a global look at FHQ in the context of the other models out there. Part two will take a micro view of the FHQ model in relation to the electoral college results.  

Now that we are nearly a week removed from the re-election of President Obama, FHQ thought it would circle back around and take a look back at how we did in examining the state of play within the electoral college. The answer is not too bad. What was 49 out of 51 correct state-level projections based on our simple weighted average in 2008 morphed into a perfect 51 out of 51 score in 2012.

FHQ was not alone. Drew Linzer (Emory) at Votamatic and Simon Jackman (Stanford) blogging for the Huffington Post and Sam Wang (Princeton) at the Princeton Election Consortium all were either right on or in Wang's case cautiously calling a tie in Florida. [And truth be told, Florida was a tie, but one that consistently -- around FHQ anyway -- ever so slightly favored the president. Again, we're talking about a decreasing fraction of a point as election day approached.] Oh, and Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight fame pegged it at 332-206, too. This was a great thing for the so-called "quants".

Despite that, there are a couple of notes that are floating around out there and are worth mentioning.

1) FHQ won't take any victory laps because of this.1 Don't get me wrong. It is nice to be a dart and not, say, the board itself, but this actually has very little to do with what FHQ was doing under the hood -- or what any of the above folks were doing, for that matter. If we were all making sausage, then FHQ and the others were merely turning the crank on our various sausage making apparati. The filling -- the polls -- was what really nailed the election projection on the state level.2 Drew first published his model in June. FHQ followed in July. The polls, even through our different lenses. told the story then. 332-206. Over the course of the summer and into the fall, that changed very little. For FHQ, Florida got as close as 0.04 points in favor of the president, but then took a turn back toward Obama. That was it. The Sunshine state was always the only state that ever truly threatened to jump what FHQ calls the partisan line into the Romney group of states. The polls were not only right on the money, but they were overall, pretty consistent. Jim Campbell's argument/observation that the September polls are a better predictor of November election outcomes came to pass. What we got in October was just noise before state-level polling reverted or began reverting to those post-convention, pre-October numbers.

As FHQ asked throughout October, were we witnessing a movement toward Romney in the polls or the typical sort of narrowing (Campbell 2008) that tends to mark the late campaign polls. The latter may not have been the true answer but it was closer than simply talking about Romney's momentum. Tom Holbrook's (1996) equilibrium theory of candidate support through the polls seems to have been the correct lens through which to view the dynamics of the race as election day drew nearer.

Score this one for the polls, then.

2) But where does that leave the models? After all, the sausage maker has some utility, too. Well, FHQ's natural inclination is to piggyback on the above point and state the obvious. The polls were right on and you didn't really need a statistical model -- complex or otherwise -- to accurately project the electoral college. In true self-deprecating fashion (Bear with me. I'll get there.) -- something FHQ is good at -- our little ol' weighted average was accurate enough to get all but two states right in 2008 and every last one in 2012. Again, it was the polls. In fact, if you removed the weighting and took the raw average of all the publicly available polls released on and before election day in all of 2012 you would come up with the same thing: 332-206. As I told Drew over the summer in a brief Twitter exchange, my hope was at that point just after the conventions that the race would tighten up so that we could, in fact, get a true measure of the utility of the more complex statistical models projecting the electoral college. As it stood then -- and how it ended up even with some narrowing -- there was a lot of overlap between the Bayesian models and the more pedestrian averages.

Mind you, I'm not saying that there is no place for these models. Boy, is there. I'm with John Sides on this one: The more models we have, the better off we all are on this sort of thing. Rather, my point is to suggest that the simple averages are a decent baseline. As November 6 approached and the FHQ numbers did not budge in the face of changing information following the Denver debate, I began to think of the FHQ weighted average like the Gary Jacobson measure of congressional candidate quality. Now sure, there have been herculean efforts littering the political science literature to construct multi-point indices of candidate quality, but they don't often perform all that better than Jacobson's simple test. "Has challenger/candidate X held elective office?" That simple, binary variable explains most of the variation in the levels of success that various candidates -- whether challenging an incumbent or vying for an open seat -- have enjoyed across a great number of elections. The multi-point indices only slightly improve the explanatory power.

Now, lord knows, I'm not trying to draw definitive comparisons between the work here at FHQ and Jacobson's oft-cited body of work. Are there parallels? Yes, and I'll leave it at that. Sometimes the best models are the simplest ones. Parsimony counts and to some extent that is what FHQ provides with these electoral college analyses. And again, the reason I was hoping that the polls would tighten as we got closer to election day was to demonstrate just exactly how much better the more complex models were. My expectation was that there would be a noticeable difference between the two. But there wasn't; not in terms of projecting which states would go to which candidates. By other measures, the more complex models wiped the floor with FHQ (as, admittedly, they should have).3

--
The tie that binds all of these models -- if you really want to call the pre-algebra that FHQ does a model -- is a reliance on polling. And that raises a different question as we shift from reviewing 2012 to looking at 2016 and beyond. The quants "won" this one. But it was not without a wide-ranging -- and fruitful, I think -- discussion about the accuracy of polling. The one question that will continue to be worth asking is whether the seemingly perpetually dropping rates of response to public opinion polls continue to drop and what impact that will have. If that continues, then there would almost certainly have to be a tipping point where phone-based polls begin to more consistently miss the mark. The good news moving forward is that the online polls -- whether YouGov, or Google Consumer Surveys or Angus-Reid -- performed quite well in 2012; offering a ray of hope for something beyond phone polls in a time when cell phones are hard to reach and landlines are disappearing.

Still, we are now at a point where pollsters are talking about the "art of polling" as a means of differentiating from other pollsters instead of the overarching science of polling. That has implications. If all pollsters guess wrong about the underlying demographics of the electorate, all the polls are wrong.  Of course, the incentive structure is such that pollsters want to find something of a niche that not only separates them from the competition to some extent but helps them crack the code of the true demographic breakdown of the electorate. [Then they can all herd at the end.]

The bottom line remains: these projections are only as good as the polling that serves as the sausage filling. If garbage goes in, then garbage is more likely to come out. On the other hand, if the polling is accurate, then so too are the projections.

--
1 I won't take any victory laps, but I will extend to all of those who have been both loyal and happenstance readers alike a very sincere thank you for spending some or all of election season with us. And yeah, that stretches back to late 2010. Thank you.

2 This is something Harry Enten of the Guardian mentioned via Twitter on Saturday and AAOPR more or less confirmed today.

3 One factor that should be noted here that may separate FHQ from the more involved models is polling variability. 2008 was witness to a great deal of polling variability. The margins in that open seat presidential election jumped around quite a bit more than in 2012 when an incumbent was involved. 2016, in some respects is shaping up as a repeat of 2008. That is even more true if both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden pass on runs for the Democratic nomination. Both races would be -- at least from our vantage point here three years out -- wide open and influence the polling that is conducted across firms and across states. Yet, even with that unique situation, FHQ lagged just one correctly predicted state -- North Carolina -- behind FiveThirtyEight.



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Thursday, November 8, 2012

332-206



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Tuesday, November 6, 2012

2012 Election Night Live Blog

12:30am: Waiting on speeches from the candidates and "537 votes close" Florida to wrap this thing up.

12:11am: Virginia to Obama.



12:00am: Alaska to Romney.



11:49: Obama wins Colorado.



11:43pm: Nevada to Obama.



11:17pm: Missouri to Romney.



11:16pm: Networks start calling Ohio for Obama. That's all folks.



11:15pm: Oregon is Obama's.



11:10pm: Iowa to Obama.



11:04pm: North Carolina held out this long. As I said earlier, the longer the Tarheel state played out -- no matter who won -- the better it would be for the president.



11:00pm: California, Hawaii and Washington are all Obama states as we hit the West Coast. Idaho is Romney territory.



10:50pm: Minnesota to Obama. Another Lean Obama domino falls toward the president.



10:42pm: Arizona to Romney according to NBC. Montana has moved that way too. New Mexico is blue.



10:00pm: And Utah slips into the Romney column.



9:52pm: New Hampshire to Obama. The path is squeezing down to nothing.



9:39pm: Pennsylvania is also big. The paths to 270 are increasing for Obama; decreasing for Romney. Romney is going to need to carry North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, Ohio and either Iowa or Colorado to take this.



9:31pm: Wisconsin to Obama is a biggie.


9:00pm: That Michigan call is pretty big.
Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Texas all are in for Romney.

New York, New Jersey, and Michigan all go to Obama.



8:41pm: Alabama is Romney's.



8:31pm: Arkansas and Tennessee move into the Republican column.



8:14pm: Georgia to Romney.



8:00pm: Connecticut, Delaware, DC, Illinois Maryland, Massachusetts, Maine (3) and Rhode Island all go to Obama at the 8pm hour. Oklahoma goes to Romney. Obama 64, Romney 40.



7:41pm: South Carolina to Romney. Romney 33, Obama 3.



7:30pm: West Virginia is in Romney's column as the 7:30 states close. I'll take this opportunity to remind everyone that it was just a few cycles ago that the Mountain state was reliably Democratic.



7:23pm: Indiana to Romney. My, what a difference four year makes. Regression to the mean in the Hoosier state.



7:02pm: Kentucky to Romney. Vermont to Obama. Just like four years ago. ...and every year before that.



7:00pm: Here we go.




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What to Watch for Election Night

Oh no, not another one of these guides.

Yeah, I know. They're a dime a dozen at this point.

However, FHQ did want to reiterate a point we made recently. Call it a one state guide to the early part of election night.


This one hinges on how things go in the early going in North Carolina. The Tarheel state is a state that Mitt Romney should win. That isn't what this concerns. Instead, we should be looking at how early and how comfortable the networks are in calling North Carolina. If a call is able to made early and it is a 2-3 point margin for Romney, then the governor may be overperforming the polls there and perhaps -- perhaps -- elsewhere. But there are two other possibilities that if we extrapolate from the North Caroline situation, could have implications.

  1. If Romney outperforms the polls by more than 5 points and a call is made very early/quickly in the Tarheel state, then we may have some early evidence that there is in fact a tide behind the Republican candidate.
  2. If, however, North Carolina drags out into the night in a manner approaching what happened in the state four years ago, then that may alternatively bode well for the president. 
No, this is not a definitive guide. And yes, FHQ is well aware of the fact that idiosyncrasies within one state may prevent generalizing to other states. It is also true that the campaigns have both backed off just a little in the last week here in the Old North state. Yet, North Carolina is something of an early signal in this presidential election. Obviously, Virginia closes its polls early too and there may be indications there as well. But Virginia is a little more competitive than North Carolina and likely won't be able to be called as quickly.



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Tuesday, October 23, 2012

If Virginia is tied, Obama wins1

Despite the fact that the FHQ weighted average formula does not reflect it, I am sympathetic to the notion of the state of Virginia being if not tied, then very close to it at the moment. As FHQ has mentioned over the last several days the polling in the Old Dominion has been back and forth in the time since the first debate in Denver.

But if we are talking electoral strategies, Virginia being the closest state on November 6 translates into an Obama reelection considering the order of states that has been established based not only on historical precedent but also via state level polling throughout 2012. If the partisan line -- the line separating both candidates' shares of states -- is drawn on the Obama side of Virginia (see the Electoral College Spectrum below), then that is enough to get Governor Romney to 257 electoral votes, but pushes Iowa, Ohio and New Hampshire into the president's column and additionally hands him victory with 281 electoral votes.

The Electoral College Spectrum1
VT-3
(6)2
WA-12
(158)
NH-4
(257)
MT-3
(159)
MS-6
(58)
HI-4
(10)
NJ-14
(172)
OH-183
(275/281)
GA-16
(156)
KY-8
(52)
RI-4
(14)
CT-7
(179)
IA-6
(281/263)
SD-3
(140)
AL-9
(44)
NY-29
(43)
NM-5
(184)
VA-13
(294/257)
IN-11
(137)
KS-6
(35)
MD-10
(53)
MN-10
(194)
CO-9
(303/244)
SC-9
(126)
AR-6
(29)
IL-20
(73)
OR-7
(201)
FL-29
(332/235)
NE-5
(117)
AK-3
(23)
MA-11
(84)
PA-20
(221)
NC-15
(206)
ND-3
(112)
OK-7
(20)
CA-55
(139)
MI-16
(237)
AZ-11
(191)
TX-38
(109)
ID-4
(13)
DE-3
(142)
WI-10
(247)
MO-10
(180)
WV-5
(71)
WY-3
(9)
ME-4
(146)
NV-6
(253)
TN-11
(170)
LA-8
(66)
UT-6
(6)
1 Follow the link for a detailed explanation on how to read the Electoral College Spectrum.

2 The numbers in the parentheses refer to the number of electoral votes a candidate would have if he won all the states ranked prior to that state. If, for example, Romney won all the states up to and including Ohio (all Obama's toss up states plus Ohio), he would have 281 electoral votes. Romney's numbers are only totaled through the states he would need in order to get to 270. In those cases, Obama's number is on the left and Romney's is on the right in italics.

3 Ohio
 is the state where Obama crosses the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the presidential election. That line is referred to as the victory line.

Now, the obvious response here is, "Well, sure, but how good are the polls or a [weighted] average of them at accurately predicting the order of states (based on margin) on election day?" The answer is pretty good and especially good in the case of toss up states. That latter point is a function of the fact that the toss up states are the most polled states more often than not. [There is some variation within toss up states based on how many electoral votes each has and thus their likelihood of altering the outcome of the election.]

Where this potentially breaks down is when states are very closely jumbled together as it appears some or are now in 2012 or when there is late-breaking but insufficient information to predict a swing toward one candidate or another. Looking back four years ago, for instance, the FHQ averages correctly identified that Indiana, Missouri and North Carolina were a distinct cluster (and all on the McCain side of the partisan line), but did not get the election day order right. The best example of a state where late information changed the positioning in the order is Nevada, where signs late in the race four years ago pointed to a wider Obama margin, but there was not enough data to move the averages enough to reflect the reality on the ground (...though the Silver state did move out of the toss up category in the very last election day map).

All this is to say that the order of states is pretty well baked in two weeks out from election day. Given the information we have gathered to this point in the race, if Virginia is tied or if Romney wins the commonwealth by one vote, then it will not be enough to get him north of 270 in the electoral vote tally. However, if the post-Denver compression of the average margins continues it could -- could -- disrupt the tiers of states that have formed. Right now there is a very clear Virginia/Colorado/Florida tier (Tier 1), a New Hampshire/Ohio/Iowa tier (Tier 2) and a Wisconsin/Nevada tier (Tier 3). If Tier 1 leans to Romney and Tier 3 leans to Obama, then the next two weeks in New Hampshire, Ohio and Iowa will be a lot of fun.

...or something less than fun to anyone who is not counting electoral votes.

--
1 If the election was held today.


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Monday, October 22, 2012

2012 Debates: Third Presidential Debate (Foreign Policy)

Tonight's third and final presidential debate will get underway at 9pm from Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida. This will be the first debate featuring a sit down format (like the vice presidential debate) and will focus on foreign policy issues. Bob Schieffer of CBS News will moderate and has chosen the following topic areas to cover this evening:
  • America's role in the world
  • Our longest war - Afghanistan and Pakistan
  • Red Lines - Israel and Iran
  • The Changing Middle East and the New Face of Terrorism - I
  • The Changing Middle East and the New Face of Terrorism - II
  • The Rise of China and Tomorrow's World
The format tonight is similar to the first debate in that a broad question will be asked, the candidates will have two minutes each to respond and then the discussion will continue for the remainder of the 15 minute block set aside for each "pod". Mr. Schieffer will have the opportunity to follow up as Martha Raddatz did in the vice presidential debate. Jim Lehrer had that same power in the first debate as well, but gave the candidates more latitude.

The same rules apply as last week. Feel free to weigh in with comments and other observations in comments section. I'll pop over periodically respond, but I'll be most active on Twitter (@FHQ). Feel free to follow along there using the hashtag #fhqdebate.


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Tuesday, October 16, 2012

2012 Debates: Second Presidential Debate

Tonight's second presidential debate kicks off at 9pm (EST) from Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY. This debate will be the sole debate to utilize a town hall format and will be hosted by CNN's Candy Crowley. It really isn't any mystery as to what to look for tonight. First of all, Crowley has bent the rules somewhat and will be asking follow up questions once the undecided voters chosen by Gallup have had their chance to pose a question. Beyond that change, all eyes are on the president following his lackluster performance in Denver almost two weeks ago and how each candidate will fare in the town hall format.

The same rules apply as last week. Feel free to weigh in with comments and other observations in comments section. I'll pop over periodically respond, but I'll be most active on Twitter (@FHQ). Feel free to follow along there using the hashtag #fhqdebate.



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Wednesday, October 3, 2012

2012 Debates: 1st Presidential Debate Open Thread

Tonight's debate from the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado will focus on issues from the domestic front. The forum will be divided into six 15 minute segments with pre-defined topic areas (the economy for three segments, health care, the role of government and governing) chosen by moderator Jim Lehrer.

Things kick off at 9:00pm, but feel free to weigh in with thoughts and other comments on what you are expecting and what is happening in real time in the comments section below. You can also follow along on Twitter by using the #fhqdebate hashtag.


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The Links (10/3/12): 2012 Debate Season

A couple of things to set the proper context for tonight's opening to debate season:

1) Tom Holbrook, indispensable as always, on the (limited) impact of debates over time.

1a) John Sides and Jon Bernstein also throw cold water on the idea of debates as game changing events in the campaign.

2) Emma Roller at NPR has another take.

[Eh, I'll side with the political scientist on this one.]

3) Alex Speigel had a nice story on question dodging in debates on Morning Edition this morning.

4) If you have the time before the debate tonight, the PBS documentary, Debating Our Destiny, is always a worthwhile view.

NOTE: FHQ will try to embed a Twitter conversation in a post for the debate this evening. I'll be most active over there, but will try to pull double duty and respond to any comments that may come up over here in response. If you are on Twitter either reply directly to one of my tweets and/or use the #fhqdebate hashtag to insure that your comment/response is included in the feed.


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Monday, September 17, 2012

Campaigns in Disarray

FHQ's Twitter feed was littered last night and this morning with reactions to the POLITICO story indicating infighting and disarray within the Romney campaign. Most seemed to either simply link to it or attack it for shortcomings like how inner circle those quoted in the story really were.

FHQ's reaction? I would place it somewhere between "meh" and "Sir, I'm not impressed."

This just isn't much of a story given the context of the race. If a general election presidential race is not exactly tied then there is a major party candidate who is ahead and a major party candidate who is behind. The 2012 presidential race is not exactly tied. Obama is slightly ahead nationally and ahead by varying degrees in enough states to total 332 electoral votes as of now. That means that Mitt Romney is slightly behind in this race.

And historically those candidates who are slightly behind can face an awful lot of scrutiny. When campaign strategic actions by underdog campaigns don't exactly move the needle, people (voters, the press, etc.) wonder why. When a series of those sorts of actions fall flat, those same people wonder what's wrong. That is where we are in this race. People are wondering what's wrong.

This is not something that is new. It hints at a structural mechanism in American presidential elections.

I humbly submit:
Kerry campaign shifts gear into attack mode 
Candidate seen setting agenda as debates near 
By Glen Johnson, Globe Staff  |  September 26, 2004 
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- The perception of a Democratic presidential campaign in disarray remained so widespread Wednesday morning that Senator John F. Kerry got unsolicited advice from a woman attending a town hall meeting on Social Security: Beef up your rapid-response team, the retired lawyer suggested. 
The remark prompted laughter, including from the candidate himself. But the Kerry campaign was already undergoing a transformation. 
Between a speech Monday in New York that gave a point-by-point accounting of continued problems in Iraq, and a speech Friday in Philadelphia that accused President Bush of taking his eye off the real terrorist threat, Osama bin Laden, the Kerry campaign seized control of the political dialogue during a week that was supposed to have been dominated by the incumbent as he visited the United Nations and invited Iraq's prime minister to the White House.
... 
And it goes on.

Now, this is not meant to be yet another connect-the-dots-to-2004 post. That is a story/discussion for another time. [Truth be told, FHQ has drawn that parallel enough already.] No, the intent here is to point out just how difficult it can be to defeat an incumbent president in an environment that is not necessarily favorable but one in which silver linings can be found (...whether in terms of the economy growing (but not quickly enough) or razor-thin approval/disapproval margins that benefit the president). The fundamentals continue to point toward a close election on November 6, and the polling to some extent reflects that as well. The problem from the Romney perspective -- now -- is that when those two things are combined -- the fundamentals and the polling -- the major issue that surfaces is that the polling has been so very consistent throughout the summer and heading down the stretch in this race. That is a tough but not insurmountable obstacle to overcome.

Is the Romney campaign embroiled in discord? FHQ is dubious. The Romney campaign is in the same position plenty of underdog candidates/campaigns have been: behind and looking for the right combination of things to right the ship. There isn't an easy out and as FHQ mentioned earlier, time is running short.


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Saturday, August 11, 2012

Paul Ryan, GOP Vice Presidential Nominee: Some Thoughts

FHQ will not go all long form here (or will try not to anyway). Plenty of others have more than adequately gotten the ball rolling in reaction to the Mitt Romney campaign's decision to tap Wisconsin representative, Paul Ryan, as the governor's running mate.

First thing's first: Let's check the speculation at the door here, shall we? I think we can all agree that the Ryan selection will have an impact. Subtract him and add, say, Tim Pawlenty and you get a potentially different outcome long term. That's the fun part, right? Treating this like the NBA Trade Machine. You can trade and trade and trade parts until you subjectively/hypothetically improve your team's chances of success. But other than gaining some insight into what the campaign is thinking, I don't know that the risk/reward calculus is all that fruitful an exercise. Hindsight is always 20/20 on these things. The one rule to always remember on VP selection is exactly what George W. Bush said about presidential debates, "I don't think you can ever win them, but you darn sure can lose them." In other words, these things are always "do no harm".

Instead of the calculus many are talking about then, let's talk about what we know. What data do we have?

1. Who is Paul Ryan?
A majority of Americans don't know. Those that do know Ryan are slightly more likely to view him unfavorably. That means that the race is on over the next two weeks -- before the Republican Convention kicks off in Tampa (and perhaps afterward) -- to define Ryan in much the same way that the campaigns' efforts have been about defining Romney this summer. Republicans will want to paint the Wisconsin representative as the visionary their standard bearer made the then-unknown pick to be in a recent NBC interview. Oppositely, Democrats will both want to tie Ryan to the frame they have attempted to construct around Romney (well off and out of touch with ordinary Americans) and to link Romney to the House Budget Committee chairman's controversial budget plan (which they view as a liability for the Republicans).

Just know that this attention on Ryan will be short-lived.  He is a number two and unless the Romney campaign roll out is gaffe-prone and rife with problems, the attention will ultimately shift back to the person at the top of the ticket and the race will, in Holbrook's terms, revert to its Romney equilibrium.

2. VP selection bounce
From FHQ's perspective, the best thing about the Ryan announcement occurring when it did is that the race will have a full two weeks before the Republican Convention in which to look at polls. That's a plus for a couple of reasons. First, we should see an uptick in polling starting now. Formerly risk-averse polling outlets will have a reason to go into the field: to test Ryan's impact. Secondly and unlike the two 2008 selections, we will have some time between the VP announcement and the conventions in which to -- admittedly only partially -- tease out the impact of each event. Both the Biden and Palin selections happened on the eves of their respective conventions. And in the Palin case that made it very difficult to discern whether or how much of McCain's early September jump in the polls was convention effect or VP effect.

As Jonathan Bernstein rightly pointed out, this VP bounce is a built-in part of the process. The structural impact of a vice presidential selection is approximately two points nationally. On the state level, however, that may be felt slightly differently. It isn't necessarily uniform across states. This is particularly true of the vice presidential nominee's home state. The Palin selection, for example, turned scantily-polled Alaska from a surprisingly competitive state to a rock-red state (a position the Last Frontier would likely have ended up in on election day anyway). Ryan's Wisconsin has been a comfortably blue state (Lean Obama throughout), but that consistency may bely the fact that the state hovers close to the breaking point in the FHQ metric between Lean and Toss Up (Obama) state. This could also potentially aid the Republican ticket in other midwest/blue-collar states.

But again, let's wait and see how the polls react to that instead of speculating.

Regardless, Romney will enjoy something of a bump out of the Ryan rollout, but we'll have to wait and see how exactly that manifests itself and where (in terms of location and groups of voters).



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