CCPSBlog

Panel discussion: The Future of Voting Technology

2009-04-20T13:59:00.004-04:00

This is the panel that I have looked forward to most, since it is the closest to my own research in the area of online voting. I'm not sure how much time the panelists will devote to online voting compared to electronic voting; my guess is that most of the discussion will be on electronic voting machines, ballot design, open source machine software, and

The panelists:

Debra Bowen, California Secretary of State
Norman Ornstein, AEI Scholar
Aaron Burstein, UC Berkeley ACCURATE research fellow
Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Founder, National Science Foundation CyberTrust ACCURATE Center

Just a guess, but I think this panel will tilt to the conservative on security issues.

Expanding Broadband Access - panel discussion

2009-04-20T11:51:00.002-04:00

Minorities still lag behind whites in access to broadband internet service. Mike McCurry (Clinton WH press secretary) is one of the panelists discussing broadband and expanding access for poor and rural areas. The panelists are talking about expanding broadband for getting access to telemedicine, educational materials, and other info, but this is also important if online voting is ever to be tested on large scale.

Online Voting at the Politics Online Conference?

2009-04-20T11:16:00.001-04:00

Online voting came up a couple of times at the Secretary of States panel this morning. First was an offhand comment by CA Sec of State Debra Bowen. Answering a question about privacy and security concerns with the use of new technology for registration, applying for absentee ballots, etc she said something like, "if we had online voting I would have to keep a file of all voters' iris imprints. I don't want to keep a file of your iris imprints." Then the moderator said, "But I want to vote online!" And Bowen replied, ok I'll keep your iris imprints. So, not a very serious intro to the online voting discussion, in my opinion. Then Bowen said there was a panel this afternoon devoted to online voting. Not really, it seems to me. The panel is called "The Future of Voting Technology" and seems to include alot on electronic voting machines. We'll see...

Then there was one question specifically on online voting: "Which of you Secretaries of State will have the bragging rights to being the first state to offer online voting?" Brunner: there is a program I think in Texas where one county e-mails PDFs of the ballot to overseas military personnel. We would like to do something like that. It is a slow process, we will take it slowly.
Bowen: we do that now (e-mail PDFs of ballot overseas) but then people have to fax them back and that compromises secrecy of ballot. More Bowen: we could have an online voting system now, but to have a secure system it would be prohibitively expensive. With only a few elections each year, the cost would not be worth the benefit. Also Bowen added: "I'm sure someone will figure out a way to do this, eventually." Well, maybe not if the people in this room are not even working on it.

PDFs? Faxes? For two very impressive Secretaries of State, who have made impressive progress in bringing online gvernment services to their constituents, these answers about online voting did not impress me. Clearly, online voting is not at the top of their agendas - they are working on improving technology in voting, but right now online voting is not part of it.

This conference is not about online voting. It is about campaigning and organizing online, delivering govt services online, using social networking sites for political campaigns, using electronic media effectively. But as someone who is writing a dissertation about online voting, I wish there was more work being done by the conference participants on this issue.

Live from the Politics Online Conference

2009-04-20T10:11:00.003-04:00

I'm at the Politics Online Conference at the Ronald Reagan building in downtown DC. It is sponsored by the sponsored by the Institute for Politics Democracy at GWU and the Internet and Politics Magazine, with a big presence by Google, Politics.com, and other politics/news/tech companies.

On the opening panel this morning we heard from Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner and California Secretary of State Debra Bowen. Brunner has created many ways for Ohio voters to go online to get info about elections - how and where to register and vote, applying for absentee ballots, candidate guides, but also capturing voter e-mail addresses so the SOS office can send reminders to send it absentee ballots. Ohio partnered with Google, Pew, and the JEHT foundation to set up sophisticated online tools for voters.

Brunner is a big fan of absentee voting and she did alot to encourage voters to choose this method. They had a program called "avoid the line," as in avoid the line on Election Day. I was in Columbus, Ohio on election day 2004 and I will never forget the long snaking lines of people standing in the rain on that gloomy November day. Back then (before Brunner, when Ohio had a Sec of State who was more interested in preventing fraud than encouraging participation) absentee voting was very limited. In 2008 about 30% of the state's voters cast an absentee ballot, and Ohio avoided the lines and bad publicity from 2004. But what if the election had been close in Ohio, like it was in Minnesota? Would Ohio have seen the same problems that Minnesota has faced since Election Day? Probably, and with a new absentee voting law in Ohio the litigation ther could have been even more of a tangled mess than it has been in MN. Did not have a chance to ask Brunner this question, but will try to catch her later if she is still here.

Obama's New Lobbying Rules

2008-11-12T10:13:00.011-05:00

As a professor who has taught a class on Lobbying and Ethics for many years, I want to commend President-Elect Barack Obama on the historic new ethics rules for his administration. The President-elect’s record as an ethics and lobbying reformer continued yesterday with his new requirements for members of his transition team and prospective members of his administration. His campaign pledge to change the way Washington works with the lobbying industry became a reality yesterday with the toughest ethics rules of any presidential transition in the history of the United States. His revolving door and gift ban rules for the transition team will help bring trust in government and the way decisions are made in Washington. He shuts the revolving door of lobbyists working on issues in government that they were advocating outside of government. The new ethics rules are great for our democracy. The rules include the following:

Federal lobbyists cannot contribute financially to the transition.

Federal lobbyists are prohibited from any lobbying during their work with the transition.

Lobbyists are prohibited from working in the fields of policy on which they lobbied if they have lobbied in that area in the last 12 months.

If someone becomes a lobbyist after working on the transition, they are prohibited from lobbying the administration for 12 months on matters on which they worked.

There is a gift ban that is aggressive in reducing the influence of special interests.

In sum, this is a great start for the Obama administration and the renewal of our democracy and the way Washington works.

Blogging from NBC

2008-11-04T21:26:00.002-05:00

It is really quiet here in the NBC studio in Washington, DC. Most of the action tonight is in New York... unfortunately, we have no giant ice rink with the electoral map painted on it here.

Along with Professor Thurber one of the experts here tonight is Ken Duberstein, a Republican strategist. He just said, "If Sarah Palin is Cinderella, it's just about to strike midnight for her."

Also, off camera he was just told that NBC is calling Ohio for Obama. His response: it's over.

I am actually surprised that it is taking so long for the networks to call this thing...

Live on NBC

2008-11-04T19:23:00.002-05:00

Professor Thurber is in the NBC studio tonight in Washington, DC, sitting at the anchor desk with Pete Williams. I am here too, providing research assistance and election analysis as needed.

Election Forecasting Event

2008-10-27T00:29:00.004-04:00

Professor Thurber moderated a panel discussion Monday, October 27, at the National Press Club, hosted by the American Political Science Association and featuring three prominent political scientists who will present their forecast models for the upcoming election.

The power point presentations can be viewed and downloaded from the CCPS website.

Speakers:

James E. Campbell is Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department at University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. He is editor of the presidential election forecast symposium in the October 2008 issue of PS: Political Science & Politics and author of The Presidential Pulse of Congressional Elections, Cheap Seats, and The American Campaign and the co-editor of Before the Vote. His research interests include election forecasting, swing voters and presidential elections, congressional district competition, electoral realignments, and the polarization of the electorate. He has been widely published, including numerous books and in the major political science journals.
Alan Abramowitz is the Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University. His areas of specialization include American politics, political parties, elections, and voting behavior and his current research involves party realignment in the U.S. and its consequences for presidential and congressional elections. He is the author of dozens of scholarly publications, including Voice of the People: Elections and Voting in the United States (2004).
Michael Lewis-Beck is Professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa. His areas of specialization include American and Comparative Politics, and he has authored or co-authored dozens of publications on American and European politics—including most recently The American Voter Revisited (2008).

Moderator:

James A. Thurber is Distinguished Professor of Government and Director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. He is author and co-author of numerous books and more than seventy-five articles and chapters on Congress, congressional-presidential relations, congressional budgeting, congressional reform, interest groups and lobbying, and campaigns and elections. Recent publications include Campaign Consultants, Political Parties, Interest Groups, and Voters in American Elections (with Candice J. Nelson and David A. Dulio, 2005).

BACKGROUND
Election forecasts are a biennial feature of the APSA journal PS: Political Science & Politics, and draw upon the expertise of prominent political scientists from around the country to forecast the outcome of U.S. presidential and congressional elections. PS is a quarterly journal of the APSA (est. 1903), the leading professional organization for the study of politics, which has over 14,000 members in 80 countries. For more news and information about political science research visit the APSA media website at www.politicalsciencenews.org.

Panel 3: Working with a Polarized Congress

2008-10-15T14:05:00.005-04:00

Scott Lilly of the Center for American Progress is chairing this panel. Before coming to CAP, Scott was Staff Director of the House Appropriations Committee and served in many other leadership roles in his 30 year career on the Hill.

Other panelists are:

Tom O'Donnell, who was chief of staff to House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt

Professor Jim Pfiffner of George Mason University and Professor Stephen Wayne of Georgetown University

Clay Johnson keynote speech

2008-10-15T13:10:00.007-04:00

1:30 question from National Journal reporter:
With all of the secret natl security memos in the Bush admin, how can we be sure the next intelligence officials will be knowledgeable about everything they need to know?
Johnson: Confident that the director of National Intelligence (Mike McConnell) will prepare the incoming team to the best of his ability.

Thurber follow up: Are the pres candidates being briefed now on intelligence matters?
Johnson: Not sure if they are specifically on this, but he agrees that this should be part of their preparation.

Question on budget:

1:25 Josh Bolton (WH CoS) asked Johnson to organize the preparation of agencies for transition. On July 18, Johnson send a list of "to-dos" to the agencies, such as appointing an agency coordinator for all transition activities. Many of the things he asked them to do are supposed to be completed by Nov. 1. Others: have a senior career person in charge of every part of the agency until a political appointee is assigned; prepare senior career people for the event of a national security incident (if one occurs before a political apointee is in place).

1:20 Johnson: The next president needs to be ready to take over right away - there is no time once he gets into office to say he is "preparing to govern". The outgoing administration is taking its responsibility very seriously to make sure the incoming administration is prepared.

1:15 pm Clay Johnson is well known in Washington for being a longtime close friend and confidante of President Bush. He has been invited to speak to many groups working on the transition, including the House admin subcommittee hearing last month. He speaks passionately about his role in Bush's transition, and he seems genuinely committed to working hard to make the next transition smooth.

(sorry for the formatting problems below... no time to fix now)
Prof. Thurber reminds us in his intro that Clay Johnson led what was perhaps the most difficult WH transition – George W. Bush’s, a transition that couldn’t really start until after the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore made Bush the winner.

Balancing act between rewarding your loyal friends and people who helped get you elected, and the people who are really best for the job.

Getting the leadership team in place (cabinet secretaries). This needs to be done quickly – but they need to go through Senate confirmation. In 2001, it took 90 days on average for a cabinet official to be confirmed. Clay says this time needs to be cut in half (45 days from the time the president names the official to the time they take office).

Panel 2: From the Election Through the First Hundred Days: Opportunities and Hazards

2008-10-15T10:44:00.007-04:00

11:30 Sullivan analyzes his presidential scheduling data to see what presidents spend their time on in the first 100 days.
Working alone: Carter and Nixon did this most
Traveling: Nixon traveled most, Eisenhower traveled least
Bush spent the most time on "Commander in Chief" issues; Kennedy spent the most time on "economic" issues

Sullivan also creates an "isolation index" to measure how much advice presidents get from advisors: external advisors, cabinet members, congressional leaders, WH staff, and heads of state.

11:15 Terry Sullivan has a handout showing the work schedules of the first 100 days of presidents from Eisenhower through George H. W. Bush. I will try to get an electronic copy to post here. A few of his findings, which are based on 50,000 observations of 20,000 events over 4 decades (drawn mostly from presidential diaries and presidential papers):
- modern era (post-Nixon) presidents have an average workday of 13.5 hours
- pre-modern presidents worked around 9.5 hours per day
- workdays of presidents get longer and more efficient over the 100 days

11:10 Kumar reminds us of the stories in the news media last Spring, that criticized Obama for already thinking about his transition team ("he is already measuring new drapes for the Oval Office, and he hasn't even been given his party's nomination!"). Kumar says that Clay Johnson (who is delivering the keynote lunch speech today) was brought on as Bush's tranistion director in 1999. It is important for these candidates to be planning early for the transition of the federal government; the news media should not be mocking them for it.

11:00 am Martha Kumar recently testified before a congressional hearing on the upcoming transition. Cong. Adolphus Towns is chairman of the subcommittee of the House administration committee that is responsible for overseeing the transition - along with several other federal agencies (including OMB, OPM and GAO) and other congressional committees (including the Senate Government Affairs Committee).

Kumar: some of the big problems in the first days of new administrations is with the appointment (and approval from Senate) of cabinet members. The failed nomination of Zoe Baird as Clinton's attorney general took up lots of time and energy in Clinton's first weeks. If she had been properly vetted, they could have avoided this.

10:45 am Michele Jolin, who is running a transition project at CAP, introduced the panel. CAP has a big transition report coming out on November 12.

Prof. Martha Kumar of Towson University is Director of the White House Transition Project.

Prof. Terry Sullivan of Univ. of North Carolina Chapel Hill is Executive director of the WH Transition Project (WHTP)

The WHTP was orignally funded by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts to create an archive of past presidential transitions -- to create an instittutional memory that will last after the staff of the outgoing president is gone.

Martha and Terry will likely provide some good historical perspective, and some good stories from transitions dating back to President Johnson.

Panel 1: Structuring a White House Legislative Affairs Office

2008-10-15T09:43:00.002-04:00

The first panel is going now. It includes Patrick Griffin, who worked in President Clinton's legislative affairs office, and Gary Andres, who worked in the first President Bush's legislative affairs office. They are sharing lessons learned from their experiences working with Congress from the perspective of the White House. Even when the president shares the same party as the majority in Congress - as President Clinton did when he took office in 1992 - there are still many obstacles to a President getting his agenda passed. Remember health care reform? So even if Obama wins (as many polls are now predicting) and there is a strong Democratic majority in Congress, his path to legislative success will not be an easy one.

Live at the Presidential Transitions Conference

2008-10-15T09:35:00.002-04:00

We are at maximum capacity here at the Center for American Progress -- every seat is full and the standing room-only lobby is just about full too. If you were not lucky enough to get in the room today, you can watch us live on C-Span 2 which is also live-streamed to their website:
http://www.c-span.org/Watch/C-SPAN_wm.aspx

Presidential Transitions Conference: From Campaigning to Governing - October 15, 2008

2008-10-13T14:40:00.004-04:00

American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies and the Center for American Progress Action Fund will host a conference discussing this shift in power and how the next president will work with Congress titled “Presidential Transitions: From Campaigning to Governing,” from 8:30 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 15, at the Center for American Progress offices located at 1333 H St., NW, 10th Floor, Washington, D.C.

The conference will include both academic and professional participants, who will comment on the upcoming presidential transition by looking at the successes and failures of past transitions. There will be a specific focus on the promise made by both presidential candidates to change the way Washington works, exploring how these changes can take place, if these changes should take place, and how presidential-congressional relationships can improve.

Also sponsored by AU’s Kennedy Political Union, the conference will include three panel discussions: structuring a White House legislative affairs office, policy making in a polarized Congress, and working with Congress: lessons from past presidential transitions. A key note speech will be given by Clay Johnson who organized President George W. Bush’s transition in 2000.

DRAFT Agenda

8:30 – 9:00 a.m. Registration and light breakfast

9:00 – 9:15 a.m. Welcome
Scott Lilly, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and former Staff Director of the House Appropriations Committee
Dr. James A. Thurber, Distinguished Professor and Director, Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University and editor of Rivals for Power: Presidential-Congressional Relations

9:15 – 10:30 a.m. "Structuring a White House Legislative Affairs Office"
Chair: Dr. James A. Thurber
Dr. Patrick Griffin, Former Assistant to President Clinton for Legislative Affairs and Academic Director of the Public Affairs and Advocacy Institute at American University
Dr. Gary Andres, Former Assistant for Legislative Affairs to President George H. W. Bush and Vice Chairman of Public Policy and Research at Dutko Worldwide

10:30 – 10:40 a.m. Break

10:40 – 12:00 p.m. "From the Election through the First Hundred Days: Opportunities and Hazards"
Michele Jolin, Senior Fellow at Center for American Progress Action Fund and Editor, "Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President"
Dr. Martha Joynt Kumar, Professor of Political Science at Towson University and Director of the White House Transition Project
Dr. Terry Sullivan, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Executive Director of the White House Transition Project

12:00 – 12:45 p.m. Buffet lunch

12:45 – 1:30 p.m. Clay Johnson III, Deputy Director for Management at the Office of Management Budget and former Executive Director of the Bush-Cheney Presidential Transition

1:30 – 1:45 p.m. Break

1:45 – 3:30 p.m. "Working with a Polarized Congress"
Chair: Scott Lilly
Thomas J. O’Donnell, Executive Vice President at the Gephardt Group and former Chief of Staff to House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt
Dr. Jim Pfiffner, Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and author of The Strategic Presidency: Hitting the Ground Running
Dr. Stephen Wayne, Professor of Government at Georgetown University and author of The Road to the White House and The Legislative Presidency

3:30 – 3:45 p.m. Closing Remarks

Professor Thurber on the Diane Rehm Show 10:00 am

2008-10-01T10:04:00.001-04:00

Professor Thurber will be on the Diane Rehom show today at 10:00 am.
Click here to listen live.

Congressional Reaction to Pressure for a Wall Street Bail-Out

Guest host: Frank Sesno

President Bush warns the economic damage will be "painful and lasting" unless a financial bailout bill is passed. Guest host Frank Sesno and guests examine how record low approval ratings for Congress and the White House are affecting efforts to convince the nation that a Wall Street rescue plan is vital to the country's economic future.

Guests:

Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press

Prof. James Thurber, Director and Professor at the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University

Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute; coauthor with Thomas Mann of "The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track"

NY Times Story Outlines McCain's Ties to Indian Gaming Industry

2008-09-30T12:18:00.011-04:00

An article by Jo Becker and Don Van Natta Jr. of the New York Times went largely unnoticed on Sunday due to the nation’s focus on the ongoing financial crisis. The story was a lengthy examination of the relationships cultivated between lobbyists representing the Indian gaming industry and Senator John McCain over his 22 years in the U.S. Senate. Both presidential candidates have pledged to change the way Washington works, emphasizing their Senate records as champions of lobbying and ethics reform.

In a move that is emblematic of the rapid-response mindset in modern campaign advertising, the Democratic National Committee wasted no time in producing an eerie web video, portraying McCain as a “betting man” who stacked the deck in his favor during the explosive growth of a now $26 billion Indian gambling industry.

While on the stump, the candidates have downplayed their own ties to lobbyists while publicly ignoring the fundraising role policy advocates and their firms play in presidential campaigns. This has not prevented Senators McCain and Obama (and their surrogates) from ramping up the attacks against each other, however.

The junior senator from Illinois has attempted at times to portray McCain and his campaign as hypocritical: “This is somebody who has been in Congress for 26 years, who put seven of the most powerful Washington lobbyists in charge of his campaign,” Obama quipped at a recent campaign rally. “And now he tells us that he's the one who is going to take on the old boy's network. The old boy's network, in the McCain campaign, that's called a staff meeting.” Senator McCain, for his part, has not been reluctant to send barbs in Obama’s direction: “The crisis on Wall Street, my friends, started in the Washington culture of lobbying and influence-peddling, and [Senator Obama] was right square in the middle of it.”

In spite of these zingers flying back and forth between the candidates in what is a very competitive race, the Times article raises some interesting questions for McCain, who, as chair of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, presided over the congressional investigation into the lobbying activities of Jack Abramoff. While both Senators McCain and Obama have been at pains to distance themselves from any close association with Washington lobbyists and “special interests,” it is clear that both candidates could be more forthright on this issue.

Questions from tonight's debate

2008-09-26T22:10:00.006-04:00

Early in the debate, McCain said that the amount spent on earmarks has increased greatly in recent years, that earmark spending has gotten out of control. We have done some research on this at CCPS, and have found that it is not necessarily true that earmarked spending has gotten so much worse. Although it is hard to count "earmarks" (in part because they are defined differently by different committees and agencies) and even harder to count the actual dollar amounts attached to them, we pieced together an aggregate dollar amount for each year from 1994-2006 and found that although the number of earmarks increased, the value of the earmarks as a total percentage of the discretionary budget did not change.

Senator McCain keeps referring to General Petraeus (who I love and have followed his story, in part because he has a PhD and has surrounded himself with a staff full of PhDs, something I am hoping to have soon). Does McCain know that Petraeus is actually no longer in Iraq, that he left on September 16? Here's the "Change of Command" video from Pentagon TV.

The First Debate

2008-09-26T21:26:00.004-04:00

Watching Obama and McCain debate tonight reminds of the first time they were in a public debate, during the effort to pass lobbying reform legislation way back in 2006 (when not very many people thought either Senator had a chance of ever being president). In February 2006,they got into a disagreement over some of the details of the legislation. They exchanged tersely written letters - McCain would later say they had become "pen pals" - and when they were scheduled to testify together before the Senate Rules Committee meeting on February 8, 2006, lots of cameras were there to document their "make-up" handshake. Professor Thurber had been working closely with Senator Obama and his staff on the legislation, and he was also at the hearing that day to testify. A New York Times photographer caught the Obama-McCain handshake, and managed to get Prof. Thurber in the shot too.

Here is the story from the New York Times where this photo ran.

And here are copies of the letters that Obama and McCain exhanged on the lobbying reform bill.

February 2, 2006

The Honorable John McCain
United States Senate
241 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510

Dear John:

Thank you for inviting me to participate in the meeting yesterday to discuss lobbying and ethics reform proposals currently before the Senate. I appreciate your willingness to reach out to me and several other Senate Democrats to discuss what should be done to restore public confidence in the way that Congress conducts its business. The discussion clearly underscored the difficult challenge facing Congress.

You and many in the Democratic Caucus have played a major role in reform efforts in the Senate. In fact, the Indian Affairs Committee hearings you led were instrumental in promoting public awareness of the culture of corruption that has permeated the nation's capital.

As you know, Senator Harry Reid and others in the Democratic Caucus have taken an important step by introducing S. 2180, the Honest Leadership Act, which imposes many of the same disclosure requirements for lobbyists that you have proposed, while also strengthening enforcement, eliminating "pay to play" schemes, and imposing more restrictive rules on meals, gifts, and travel that Members and their staff can receive from special interests that advocate before Congress. This bill, which now has the support of 40 members of the Democratic Caucus, represents a significant step in addressing many of the worst aspects of corruption that have come to light as a result of the Justice Department investigation of Jack Abramoff.

I know you have expressed an interest in creating a task force to further study and discuss these matters, but I and others in the Democratic Caucus believe the more effective and timely course is to allow the committees of jurisdiction to roll up their sleeves and get to work on writing ethics and lobbying reform legislation that a majority of the Senate can support. Committee consideration of these matters through the normal course will ensure that these issues are discussed in a public forum and that those within Congress, as well as those on the outside, can express their views, ensuring a thorough review of this matter.

Given the state of affairs in Washington, we have a historic opportunity to make fundamental changes in the way our government operates so that the actions we take as public officials are responsive and transparent to the American people. Thank you again for your interest in this important matter.

Sincerely,

Barack Obama
United States Senator

February 6, 2006

The Honorable Barack Obama
United States Senate
SH-713
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator Obama:

I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere. When you approached me and insisted that despite your leadership's preference to use the issue to gain a political advantage in the 2006 elections, you were personally committed to achieving a result that would reflect credit on the entire Senate and offer the country a better example of political leadership, I concluded your professed concern for the institution and the public interest was genuine and admirable. Thank you for disabusing me of such notions with your letter to me dated February 2, 2006, which explained your decision to withdraw from our bipartisan discussions. I'm embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble. Again, sorry for the confusion, but please be assured I won't make the same mistake again.

As you know, the Majority Leader has asked Chairman Collins to hold hearings and mark up a bill for floor consideration in early March. I fully support such timely action and I am confident that, together with Senator Lieberman, the Committee on Governmental Affairs will report out a meaningful, bipartisan bill.

You commented in your letter about my "interest in creating a task force to further study" this issue, as if to suggest I support delaying the consideration of much-needed reforms rather than allowing the committees of jurisdiction to hold hearings on the matter. Nothing could be further from the truth. The timely findings of a bipartisan working group could be very helpful to the committee in formulating legislation that will be reported to the full Senate. Since you are new to the Senate, you may not be aware of the fact that I have always supported fully the regular committee and legislative process in the Senate, and routinely urge Committee Chairmen to hold hearings on important issues. In fact, I urged Senator Collins to schedule a hearing upon the Senate's return in January.

Furthermore, I have consistently maintained that any lobbying reform proposal be bipartisan. The bill Senators Joe Lieberman and Bill Nelson and I have introduced is evidence of that commitment as is my insistence that members of both parties be included in meetings to develop the legislation that will ultimately be considered on the Senate floor. As I explained in a recent letter to Senator Reid, and have publicly said many times, the American people do not see this as just a Republican problem or just a Democratic problem. They see it as yet another run-of-the-mill Washington scandal, and they expect it will generate just another round of partisan gamesmanship and posturing. Senator Lieberman and I, and many other members of this body, hope to exceed the public's low expectations. We view this as an opportunity to bring transparency and accountability to the Congress, and, most importantly, to show the public that both parties will work together to address our failings.

As I noted, I initially believed you shared that goal. But I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party's effort to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman Senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness. Again, I have been around long enough to appreciate that in politics the public interest isn't always a priority for every one of us. Good luck to you, Senator.

Sincerely,

John McCain
United States Senate

February 6, 2006

The Honorable John McCain
United States Senate
241 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510

Dear John:

During my short time in the U.S. Senate, one of the aspects about this institution that I have come to value most is the collegiality and the willingness to put aside partisan differences to work on issues that help the American people. It was in this spirit that I approached you to work on ethics reform, and it was in this spirit that I agreed to attend your bipartisan meeting last week. I appreciated then - and still do appreciate - your willingness to reach out to me and several other Democrats.

For this reason, I am puzzled by your response to my recent letter. Last Wednesday morning, you called to invite me to your meeting that afternoon. I changed my schedule so I could attend the meeting. Afterwards, you thanked me several times for attending the meeting, and we left pledging to work together.

As you will recall, I told everyone present at the meeting that my caucus insisted that the consideration of any ethics reform proposal go through the regular committee process. You didn't indicate any opposition to this position at the time, and I wrote the letter to reiterate this point, as well as the fact that I thought S. 2180 should be the basis for a bipartisan solution.

I confess that I have no idea what has prompted your response. But let me assure you that I am not interested in typical partisan rhetoric or posturing. The fact that you have now questioned my sincerity and my desire to put aside politics for the public interest is regrettable but does not in any way diminish my deep respect for you nor my willingness to find a bipartisan solution to this problem.

Sincerely,

Barack Obama
United States Senator

Shades of Gray: When Campaign Consultants are also Lobbyists

2008-09-25T12:45:00.002-04:00

In Professor Thurber's chapter in the book, Shades of Gray: Perspectives on Campaign Ethics (2002, editors Candice Nelson, David Dulio and Stephen Medvic), he writes about the ethical dilemma surrounding political consultants who are both campaign advisors and lobbyists. The simplest case is of a campaign staffer who helps a candidate get elected, then goes on to lobby the now-elected official on behalf of some private interest. The former campaign staffer has unique access to the elected official, especially if he helped get them elected.

The case we are seeing play out in the McCain campaign is more complicated, since Rick Davis (McCain's campaign manager who is accused of being paid as a lobbyist for Freddie Mac until just before the bailout of Fannie and Freddie) is said to have "recused" himself from his firm's dealings with Fannie and Freddie. The ethical question here is whether Davis, as the top staff person on the McCain campaign, should have been involved with Fannie and Freddie (*especially* during the worst housing crisis and the bailout of these firms) and if he was, did he tell his boss the extent of his involvement.

Thurber's chapter, "From Campaigning to Lobbying," reviews the American League of Lobbyists Code of Ethics, and it seems pretty clear that Davis violated Article IV - "Conflicts of Interest" (since on Sunday night in a CNBC interview McCain said that Davis was no longer involved with the mortgage giants). But the funny thing is that Fannie and Freddie probably kept Davis' firm as its lobbyist BECAUSE of his connection to McCain, so the "conflict of interest" is apparently a one-way street.

This happened to a Dem consultant during the primaries: Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's top strategist, who was doing work for the government of Columbia at the same time that he was working on Clinton's campaign. This was such a conflict of interest, that he was actually helping the Columbian government advocate for something that his candidate opposed.

Is this what we should come to expect of our country's top political consultants? They can't pay their bills working just for presidential candidates, can they - since presidential campaigns only happen every 4 years? (Even though the campaigns never really stop, do they?) So we have to expect that they will have other clients besides candidates and campaigns. It seems to me that the burden here lies with the candidates as much as it does with the consultants. Candidates should expect their high-paid consultants to work only for them, not their private-interest clients, when a campaign is underway. Candidates should know about the Lobbyist Code of Ethics, and consultants should be expected to adhere to them.

What do you think?

40 Days Left

2008-09-24T21:35:00.002-04:00

With just 40 days left until Election Day, today seems like a great day to resurrect the CCPS blog. Even though Senator McCain is suspending his campaign at the same time we're restarting our blog, we bet that there will be great campaign stories just about every day until November 4.

I can't promise that we'll have the same kind of original analysis of polls and trends that Brian Schaffner offered when he was the chief blogger here, but we here's what we will do:

- Keep you updated on CCPS events and activities.

- Post research and reports written by CCPS fellows and board members.

- Share with you some of the interesting political analysis that we're reading.

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Today the CCPS phones were ringing with reporters calling to ask Professor Thurber about the McCain campaign's ties to lobbyists for Freddie Mac. Here's the story, which became more interesting this weekend when Senator McCain denied to reporter John Harwood in a CNBC interview that his campaign manager, Rick Davis, was involved as a lobbyist for Fannie or Freddie. Here is a transcript of the exchange:

HARWOOD: You mentioned cronyism and corruption on Wall Street and in Washington, and you've criticized Obama for self dealing here. How do you square that with the fact that your campaign manager, Rick Davis, was involved in some lobbying activities on behalf of Fannie Mae? And secondly, what specifically would you prevent, would you outlaw--what activity would you outlaw in Wall Street to make sure this doesn't happen again?

Sen. McCAIN: Now, on Wall Street, I'd--obviously we need to stop--we need to more--have more transparency. We need to take the regulatory agencies and merge them together in one effective agency. These regulatory agencies, this alphabet soup, was really designed for a different era. We're now in global transactions. We need more transparency. We need to combine the regulatory agencies, and we need to give them some more authority, if necessary, to do so. You know, Secretary Paulson had a package of recommendations sometime ago that basically did not really go anywhere. Maybe we can look at those and other recommendations in the future.

In Washington, I still think that it was the special interest money that went--and Fannie and Freddie money that went, and everybody was involved in this--not everybody, but certainly Senator Obama got next amount of money, except for the two Democratic chairman. His vice presidential search team was headed by Mr. Johnson, and...

HARWOOD: And your campaign manager?

Sen. McCAIN: And my campaign manager has stopped that, has had nothing to do with it since, and I'll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it.

(The entire transcript of the interview is available here.)

So after examining Rick Davis' record, it looks like his lobbying firm was getting about $15,000 a month from Freddie Mac until just before the bailout.

E-Voting Conference in Austria

2008-08-08T00:28:00.004-04:00

I am at the 3rd International E-Voting Conference in Bergenz, Austria. There are people here from about 30 different countries - political scientists, election administrators, voting system experts and vendors, computer scientists. Many are leading efforts in their countries to introduce electronic voting (which includes remote e-voting, also called Internet voting, as well as e-voting machines in polling places). Yesterday, I presented a paper from my dissertation research on Internet voting (my powerpoint presentation will be posted here soon).

I was hoping to blog live from the conference, but unfortunately (and ironically) the hotel's wireless Internet access has been disabled during the conference proceedings (and all of last night) so the presentations can be streamed live on the conference's website. The presentations (and live streaming) start today at 9:00 am (that's 3:00 am in Washington, DC), available at: http://www.e-voting.cc/

Below is the conference program.

The 3rd International Conference on E-Voting promises to become a meeting point for Experts from all over the world, discussing technical, social and legal aspects of E-Voting in the Castle Hofen, in Bregenz.

Like in the last years, we have had a double-blind review system to guarantee a high quality of speakers and papers for the Conference. In total we have received more than 30 contributions. The following papers were selected to be presented and discussed at the Conference:

Wednesday, 6th August

Pre-Conference Programme
(Admission is included in the participation fee)

09:00 Competition

19:00 Welcome Cocktail

Thursday, 7th August

09:00 Welcome Notes by Michael Remmert, Rüdiger Grimm and Robert Krimmer

Session 1: E-Voting Experiences
Chair: Robert Krimmer

11:00 E-Voting in the Netherlands; from General Acceptance to General Doubt in Two Years
Leontine Loeber

11:45 Improving the Transparency of Remote E-Voting: The Estonian Experience
Epp Maaten; Thad Hall

Session 2: Empirical Findings of E-Voting
Chair: Gregor Wenda

14:00 Assessing the Impact of E-Voting Technologies on Electoral Outcomes: an Analysis of Buenos Aires’ 2005 Congressional Election
Gabriel Katz, R. Michael Alvarez, Ernesto Calvo, Marcelo Escolar, Julia Pomares

14:45 Assessing Internet Voting as an Early Voting Reform in the United States
Alicia Kolar Prevost

Session 3: Legal & Procedural Issues of E-Voting
Chair: Susanne Caarls

16:00 A Methodology for Assessing Procedural Security: A Case Study in E-Voting
Komminist Weldemariam, Adolfo Villafiorita

16:45 Secure Remote Voter Registration
Victor Morales-Rocha, Jordi Puiggali, Miguel Soriano

17:30 Long-term Retention in E-Voting – Legal Requirements and Technical Implementation
Rotraud Gitter, Lucie Langer, Susanne Okunick, Zoi Opitz-Talidou

18:15 International Programme Committee Meeting

19:30 Reception in Bregenz

Friday, 8th August

Session 4: Comparison of E-Voting
Chair: Thad Hall

09:00 The E-Voting Readiness Index: A Survey
Robert Krimmer, Ronald Schuster

09:45 Malfunction or Misfits: Comparing Requirements, Inputs, and Public Confidence Outcomes of E-Voting in the U.S. and Europe
John Sebes, Gregory A. Miler

Session 5: Verification of E-Voting
Chair: Melanie Volkamer

11:00 Simple and Secure Electronic Voting with Prêt à Voter
David Lundin

11:45 Improving the Farnel Voting Scheme
Roberto Araújo, Peter Y. A. Ryan

Session 6: Certification of E-Voting
Chair: Thomas Buchsbaum

14:00 Development of a Formal IT Security Model for Remote Electronic Voting Systems
Melanie Volkamer, Rüdiger Grimm

14:45 The Certification of E-Voting Mechanisms. Fighting against Opacity
Jordi Barrat i Esteve

16:00 Workshops
Workshop 1: Regulation & Certification
Workshop 2: Observation & Evaluation
Workshop 3: E-Voting - Where are we heading?

18:30 Conference Dinner & Best Paper Ceremony

Saturday, 9th August

Session 7: Technological Issues of E-Voting
Chair: Rüdiger Grimm

09:00 Code Voting with Linkable Group Signatures
Jörg Helbach, Jörg Schwenk, Sven Schäge

09:45 CAPTCHA-based Code Voting
Rolf Oppliger, Jörg Schwenk, Christoph Löhr

Session 8: Political Issues of E-Voting
Chair: Jordi Barrat

11:00 E-Voting in Brazil – Reinforcing Institutions While Diminishing Citizenship
José Rodrigues Filho

11:45 The Voting Processes in Digital Participative Budget: A Case Study
Cristiano Maciel, Gleison Pereira de Souza

12:30 Closing Remarks by Robert Krimmer

CCPS, International

2008-08-06T17:05:00.003-04:00

After a long summer break and the departure of Brian Schaffner to U-Mass and Pollster.com, we are relaunching the CCPS blog with an international tour, starting with the publication in today's Financial Times of an op-ed piece by Professor James Thurber, the founder and director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies.

Tomorrow, I will be live blogging from the International Electronic Voting Conference in Austria, and I will explain why this important for American elections and how it relates to our research agenda at CCPS.

Democrats can cash in on public anger at Congress

By James Thurber

Financial Times - FT.com

Published: August 5 2008 19:22 | Last updated: August 5 2008 19:22

Public confidence in the US Congress is at a historic low, with 12 per cent of respondents to a recent Gallup poll expressing confidence in the legislature. It is the worst rating Gallup has found for any institution in the 35-year history of this question. Will the low approval have an impact on the November elections?

Voters accuse Congress of fostering a crippling partisanship that has led to inertia, overspending, failure to end the Iraq war or stand up to President George W. Bush and inattention to the needs of the American people. There is also anger at the continued scandals and unethical behaviour of members.

Public trust in Congress has been dismal since the early 1960s, but this new low has members of Congress worried about the 2008 election. Even so, there is usually a paradox in public attitudes: voters dislike the institution, but re-elect their members at high rates. Incumbents have been re-elected in the 90 per cent and above range for the past 30 years and there is little evidence that poor evaluations have had demonstrable effects on elections. Will this year be different?

What is the foundation for the dissatisfaction? Consider these factors, which have become more pronounced in recent years. The public clash of egos and bickering, combined with the complexity of the institution (more than 200 committees and subcommittees), the partisan stalemate and the overall messiness of Congress contrast with the immediate needs of the public. It is easy to stop policies, delay appropriations and slow down reforms but hard to move legislation. The primary functions of Congress are lawmaking (solving public problems), representation (of the public interest and constituency interests over specialised interests) and scrutiny of the executive branch. Congress is doing poorly on all accounts and Americans know it.

Will Democrats or Republicans be blamed for these failures? It is early, but a Democratic party wave is building in House races and significant gains may be made in the Senate. In a June Washington Post-ABC poll, 52 per cent of respondents said they would support the Democratic candidate in their local congressional race compared with 37 per cent who said they would vote Republican. Both presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, are running against Washington (and Congress) and calling for change in the way Washington works. Epiphanies are few in Congress: change comes from elections. There will be change in the election; it will be substantial and favour Democrats.

Several factors are at play. The number of safe Republican seats in the House has shifted dramatically towards Democratic challengers. With Democrats holding 236 seats and Republicans only 199, and only 20 seats competitive for the Democrats but 33 competitive races for the Republicans, Republicans have to be worried. Moreover, Democrats surprisingly won in three recent special elections that were solid Republican districts. The predicted gain for Democrats of 10 to 20 seats in the House brings them into a strong position to implement their policies in 2009.

Democrats are also benefiting from a historic surge of new voter registrations, an unprecedented financial edge and the recruitment of quality challengers. Democratic candidates are taking advantage of damage to the “Republican brand”, including the low ratings of the current president, continued Republican scandals (the latest being the indictment of Senator Ted Stevens from Alaska) and the retirement of moderate Republicans. These may be enough to dilute the power of incumbency that has thrived in the atmosphere of little or no competition.

In the Senate, Democrats have a chance to solidify their tentative majority. Currently the partisan split is 51-49 (with two independents voting with the Democrats). There are 10 competitive Senate seats (nine held by Republicans) that are too close to call, 13 solid or leaning-Republican seats and 12 solid or leaning-Democratic seats. A strong wave in favour of the Democrats will translate into more seats but it is not likely they will attain the 60 seats needed for a filibuster-proof Senate, which will leave continued deadlock.

This is shaping up to be the year that Americans’ negative view of Congress matters, and at least some members should be worried.

Coupled with the low public approval of Mr Bush, a bad economy and an unpopular war, the distrust and anger felt towards Congress as an institution is likely to be directed at and felt by the Republicans.

The writer is director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University in Washington

Update on My Whereabouts

2008-07-18T21:25:00.004-04:00

I know I said I was done, but this is really my last post at the CCPS Blog; I promise.

Some of you have posted comments or sent emails indicating that you'd like to see me posting again at some point. So, for those interested, I wanted to let you know that as of next week, I will become an occasional contributor to Pollster.com. When Mark Blumenthal asked if I was interested in contributing to his blog it was a real honor because I have always been a big fan of his site (many of you may remember when Mark was the "Mystery Pollster"). It is also a far more workable situation since I'll be writing a few posts per month rather than the several posts per week that I was doing here during the past several months. In short, it is an ideal situation for me to balance my "day job" and my blogging "hobby" and I hope that you will check out my posts over there.

As for this blog, it is my understanding that Alicia Prevost and Jim Thurber have plans in the works. So this site will stay operational...stay tuned.

Culture and Presidential Preferences: Obama vs. McCain

2008-07-07T12:00:00.001-04:00

Political scientists, pundits, and journalists have noted that partisan divisions in the United States have become increasingly correlated with cultural cleavages. But given that cultural conservatives have not always been quick to embrace McCain, will we see the same cultural divisions this year as we did in 2004?

For this (final) post, I wanted to examine the extent to which a handful of cultural indicators was correlated with presidential vote preferences in the 50 states. To do this, I draw from two sources of data. First, I use Pollster.com to create a measure of the margin by which Obama leads/trails McCain in each state. In most states, I use the Pollster.com average for the state; in states where there was not enough polling to create that average, I used the most recent survey from that state. Second, I use the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) to create the statewide cultural indicators. The CCES is valuable in this regard because it includes nearly 20,000 interviews conducted across all 50 states, thereby including a significant sample size in each state. So, with that out of the way, on to the analysis...

First, let's start with one factor that is often tied directly into politics--gun ownership. Gun owners have tended to vote more Republican over the years due at least partly to the fact that the Democratic Party has often sided with stricter gun ownership statutes compared to Republicans. However, despite recent attempts to improve his image with gun owners, McCain not typically been a favorite of gun owners and the N.R.A. So how strongly does gun ownership correlate with the breakdown in support for Obama and McCain so far? The figure below plots this relationship.

Obama's margin over McCain decreases significantly as the percentage of gun owners in a state increases. On average, in state's where gun owners comprise about 20% of the population, Obama holds a lead of about 20% over McCain. On the other hand, in states where gun owners make up about 60% of the population, McCain has, on average, a 10% advantage over Obama. Montana is an interesting outlier here. Despite having the highest percentage of gun owners in the country, the last poll out of Montana gave Obama a 5% lead over McCain.

A second cultural indicator we can examine is the pickup truck ownership. Of course, owning a pickup truck is not as obviously connected to politics as gun ownership, but there is often something culturally distinct about a pickup truck owner versus someone who drives a Prius (to take an extreme example). Indeed, we would expect the states with more pickup truck owners to generally be more Republican. As the figure below shows, this appears to be the case.

While the relationship is not as perfect as it was for gun ownership, it is still the case that support for Obama decreases (and support for McCain increases) as the percentage of pickup truck owners in a state increases. Once again, Montana is a big outlier here, along with Hawaii, Vermont and Maine. In each of these four states, Obama holds a bigger lead over McCain than one would expect based on the percentage of pickup truck owners.

As the largest private employer in the world, Wal-Mart is certainly a cultural icon in the United States. As such, it stands to reason that those who shop regularly at Wal-Mart may share a different perspective from those who do not. Indeed, Wal-Mart shoppers tend to be culturally conservative and they were much more likely to vote for Bush in 2004 than Kerry. Thus, it would not be surprising to find a similar relationship in 2008. The figure below shows the relationship between the percentage of a state's population that shops regularly at Wal-Mart and the support for Obama vs. McCain.

For the most part, this is one of the clearest relationships among the cultural indicators that I examine in this post. There are only a few outliers, Obama's home state of Illinois, Hawaii (his childhood home), Vermont, and Maine. Otherwise, the relationship is pretty clear: when more of a state's population shops at Wal-Mart, Obama fares worse and McCain does better. Even Montana (an outlier when looking at gun and pickup truck ownership) falls close to the regression line in this figure.

So, Obama fares better in states with fewer gun owners, fewer pickup truck owners, and fewer Wal-Mart patrons. After looking at those three cultural indicators, it only seems obvious that the last factor we should examine is a state's affinity for Jon Stewart. Respondents to the CCES survey were asked to rate Jon Stewart on a scale from 1 to 7, with 7 being very favorable and 1 being very unfavorable. As a vocal critic of the Bush administration, there is little doubt about the type of relationship we would expect here.

Indeed, when a state's population had a more favorable opinion of Jon Stewart, that state was more likely to support Obama over McCain. In fact, on average, an increase of just 1-point of the favorability scale (from 4 to 5) would turn a state from supporting McCain by about 10 points to supporting Obama by a similar margin. As with the other cultural indicators, there are some interesting outliers. For example, North Dakota has the second most favorable opinion of Jon Stewart, yet Obama trailed McCain by a substantial margin in the last poll taken in that state. On the other hand, Delaware has a relatively low opinion of Jon Stewart, but it favors Obama by a significant margin.

If you put all these cultural indicators together, how well can they actually predict support for Obama vs. McCain? Well, they actually do a pretty good job. In fact, these four indicators can account for about 70% of the variance in support for Obama over McCain (even better if you drop a few of the outlier states like Illinois, Vermont, and Maine). That means that you can probably get a good sense of how your neighborhood is going to vote if you know how many of your neighbors own guns, how many have pickup trucks parked in their driveways, how many of them you see shopping at the local Wal-Mart, and how many of them saw the funny bit that Jon Stewart did on his show the night before. As always, there will be exceptions to the rule (Vermont and Maine are good examples of places where people like their guns and pickup trucks, but still support Democrats), but these cultural traits do appear to be associated with political predispositions.

Now, back to my "day job."

Coming Soon: My Final Post

2008-07-06T14:54:00.004-04:00

I wanted to inform the readers of this blog that I am about to post my final analysis here. I have struggled with this decision over the past few weeks, but I'm sure that I am making the right decision. I started blogging fervently in January and the extended Democratic primary provided more fodder than I expected. Rather than posting once or twice a week as I had originally intended, I was often blogging daily (or more). And these posts generally were not just my thoughts on the what was happening in politics on that given day, but they were involved posts that necessitated the collection and analysis of data. In short, this blog was taking up too much of my time.

The problem, is that I have a day job that I really like and something has to give. The only reason I could actually sustain this blog during the spring is that I was not teaching any courses. However, my work load will soon be changing and I won't be able to sustain the blog and my academic career at the levels I'd be happy with. Therefore, I have to give up the blog.

I want to thank everyone who has kept track of the blog over the past 6 months or so, particularly those of you who have offered your own feedback. I really did enjoy doing this and it is disappointing to be giving it up. Hopefully I'll have a chance to do some guest blogging on other sites at some point.

But don't forget that this is my penultimate post...my last one will appear soon and will be an analysis of how well cultural indicators do at predicting support for Obama vs. McCain in each state. I figured I was good for one last analysis before I called it quits.

CCPS Blog on Vacation Again

2008-06-20T12:39:00.003-04:00

I'm leaving for a week at the Outer Banks tomorrow morning, so I will be off-line for the next week or so. I'll use my time at the beach thinking of some great new stuff to post on when I get back (or maybe I'll try to forget about politics for an hour or so).

Webb, Sebelius, and Strickland: Who Offers the Most to a Democratic Ticket?

2008-06-19T17:12:00.005-04:00

Three of the more prominent names mentioned as potential running mates for Obama are Jim Webb (D-VA), Kathleen Sebelius (D-KS), and Ted Strickland (D-OH). On Monday, I posted about which groups Webb would help Obama with. Today, I thought I'd expand the analysis by comparing Webb's performance among particular key groups with the performances of Sebelius and Strickland in 2006. To do this, I examine the 2006 exit poll data from each race.

First, I should caution that one major challenge in comparing these candidates is that each faced a different opponent in a different state, meaning there are a lot of factors at play here. These differences are evident from the fact that each candidate was supported by a different percentage of exit poll respondents--54% for Webb, 61% for Sebelius (who was running for re-election), and 64% for Strickland. Despite these limitations, it is still interesting to examine which groups each candidate performed better or worse with in their own states in 2006. The figure below summarizes these patterns:

One key group to look at is white women, a key swing group. Webb actually performed worse among white women than he did overall in winning his senate seat in 2006. Strickland won about the same percentage of white women (65%) as he did overall in his gubernatorial bid, a level of support similar to what Sebelius captured in her bid for re-election in 2006. Based on these patterns, Strickland and Sebelius appear to be more likely to help Obama with women than Webb.

Working class whites are another key group that Obama may wish to reach out to with his vice presidential selection. If that is the goal, then Strickland seems to be the clear favorite among this group. Neither Webb nor Sebelius performed very well with low-income or non-college-educated whites, particularly compared to their overall support (both did worse than their baseline support with these groups). On the other hand, Strickland won a great deal of support from these groups, near or above his total support. Strickland also performed very well among rural voters, though Webb also excelled with this group. Sebelius's support, on the other hand, came more from urban areas (where Obama tends to run strong anyway).

Thus, each of these three candidates offers different pluses and minuses for Obama. If Obama is concerned with making a pick that would win support from white women, then Sebelius or Strickland seem like a safer bet. If Obama wants to make inroads with working class whites, Strickland runs very strong with that group, even relative to his overall support in 2006. Strickland and Webb also both run well in rural areas, though Webb does exceptionally well in rural areas relative to his overall support.

What Does Jim Webb Add to (or Subtract From) a Democratic Ticket?

2008-06-16T12:09:00.006-04:00

I am back from a week away and am ready to start tackling the first of what I hope will be several installments looking at possible vice presidential choices for both Obama and McCain. In this installment, I will look at what Jim Webb might bring to the Democratic ticket.

Webb's name has been a popular one with many pundits because he seems to bring a lot of strength among groups where Obama may be weaker. Generally, Webb is viewed as someone who can help with working class white voters, especially those in rural areas. On the other hand, there is some concern about Webb's image among women voters.

To get a better sense of how Webb stands among these various demographic groups, we can look at his performance in the 2006 Senate race (when he upset George Allen) compared to the performance of other Democratic Senate candidates nationwide in that same year. This comparison is shown in this figure:

First, Webb did under-perform among women when compared to other Democratic Senate candidates in 2006. He won just 46% of the vote among this group compared to other Democrats who won 51% of white women in 2006. He also did not make this disadvantage up with a stronger performance among white men, as he won the same share of the vote from white men as other Democratic Senate candidates did in 2006. Webb's problems among white women could be decisive in leading Obama toward another choice, because Obama cannot afford to alienate women who are already disappointed with the way the Democratic primary turned out.

Webb also does not necessarily bring the advantages among "working class whites" that pundits have been quick to attribute to him. In fact, he won just 47% of the vote among whites making less than $50,000 per year compared to 52% for other Democratic Senate candidates. He also won just 32% among whites without a college education, far below the 47% baseline established by other Democratic candidates.

So, what up-side does Webb bring? He did out-perform other Democrats among voters 60 and older, a group that Obama did not fare as well with during the Democratic primaries. He also did 8% better among frequent church-goers and 6% better among rural voters than other Democrats did in 2006. These are groups that the Obama campaign would certainly want to reach out to, if only to minimize the size of McCain's advantage among those demographics.

Finally, there are two things we can't really get a handle on with these exit polls. First, Webb does bring some national security experience that could be important for the Democratic tickets. Second, Webb hails from Virginia, a state that Obama intends to doggedly contest in 2008. The question is, are these advantages important enough to out-weigh concerns about Webb's image among women? My guess is no. The Obama campaign simply cannot afford to alienate white women, no matter what other advantages they think they pick up by doing so.

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Which potential VP candidate would you like me to analyze next? Vote on the right side bar to make your pick!

CCPS Blog on Vacation

2008-06-08T20:34:00.004-04:00

After a killer 5 month primary season, I'm in some desperate need of political decompression before the general election campaign shifts into full gear. Fortunately (for me, at least), I've got a couple of trips planned over the next few weeks. I won't be posting at all next week, though Alicia or Mike may blog here during the break.

That said, I've put up a new choice of topics on the sidebar. Voting will be open for a week and then I will blog on the winning topic next week. In the meantime, I'll be trying to see if I can survive without my daily dose of CNN and MSNBC.

In the meantime, here are some things worth looking at:

The John McCain Campaign's blueprint for victory.

Marc Ambinder says that Barack Obama solved the collective action problem.

Mark Blumenthal examines what happens when Astrophysicists moonlight as political scientists.

The New York Times keeps up its good work on producing interactive graphics, this time an interactive electoral map.

Nate Silver argues that, in this election, the electoral college is biased against Republicans.

How Obama Can Win Back Women

2008-06-05T22:50:00.000-04:00

As Obama wraps up his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, he faces a serious problem with women, a constituency that has been central to every Democratic presidential candidate’s electoral success since 1980. According to the latest poll from the Pew Research Center, only 47% of women currently say that they would vote for Obama over McCain (42% support McCain). This figure has to be a major concern for the Obama campaign. Every Democratic presidential candidate since 1980 has done better among women than their Republican competition. In fact, Democratic candidates do not need to simply win a majority of women, but they need to win them by a significant margin. In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote because he carried women by a margin of 54-43%, an 11% advantage. In 2004, John Kerry’s advantage among women shrunk to just 3%, the smallest advantage for a Democratic nominee since Michael Dukakis in 1988. Had Kerry carried women with the same percentage of the vote that Gore had in 2000, Kerry would have cruised to victory. Instead, Kerry lost the election by more than 2 million votes. Obama is currently faring worse among women than Kerry was at this same stage in 2004. No matter how many new voters Obama brings into the electorate, his prospects in the general election will ultimately depend on how he fares with women voters.

Obama’s problems with women are at least partly attributable to the long primary campaign against Clinton, which has alienated some of Clinton’s female supporters. According to the Pew Research Center, 58% of women who supported Clinton had a favorable opinion of Obama in March, but that figure dropped to just 43% in May. With the nomination race coming to a close, Obama needs to reach out to these women; but how can he go about repairing his image among women who were so invested in Hillary Clinton’s campaign to become the first female president? Some have suggested that the choice of a female running mate would be an important symbolic gesture that would help Obama gain support from women. While a female running mate (perhaps even Clinton herself) would go a long way toward helping Obama with women, the most important weapon Obama has for tackling this problem is substance, not symbolism. Obama needs to emphasize issue that are important to women and delineate how his views differ from McCain’s when it comes to these concerns.

My research examining dozens of campaigns over several years has indicated a clear pattern: when Democratic candidates know that they need a good showing among women to win a race, they turn to a set of issues that help them attract that support: education, health care, and child care. Democrats seeking support from women emphasize these issues because they tend to be particularly important to women and women’s views on these issues place them much closer to the Democratic Party. As a result, when these issues become a significant part of the campaign agenda, women are much more likely to vote Democratic and the electoral prospects for Democratic candidates improve markedly.

So far, the debate between Obama and McCain has centered on the economy and foreign policy. To These issues are certainly important, but issues like education, child care, and health care are especially salient to women and, so far, those issues have largely taken a back seat in the general election campaign. If Obama wants to improve his standing with women, he needs to talk to women about the issues they want to hear about, drawing clear differences between what an Obama presidency would accomplish for women and what a McCain presidency would mean for them. If not, he may very well fail to attract the overwhelming support from women that he needs to win in November.

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ADDENDUM:

I actually wrote most of this post yesterday. Then, today, I noticed that in his first event as the presumptive nominee, Obama was standing at a podium behind a sign I had not seen him use before. Look for him to push the health care issue early and often in this campaign; it is one issue where he can win over a lot of those women who may currently be on the fence.

Coming Soon: How Obama Wins Back Women

2008-06-05T09:33:00.002-04:00

You, the readers, voted pretty overwhelmingly for me to post about how Obama can win back women during the general election. I will be posting on that topic later this evening.

In the meantime, here are some interesting nuggets to chew on:

The Politico writes about the amazing discrepancy between the amount of money that Obama and McCain will be working with.

Some early rankings on the Senate races this Fall and National Journal polls the insiders to get a sense of how many seats they expect Democrats to pick up.

Mark Blumenthal points out that American Research Group was off...again.

Carl Bialik profiles Nate Silver, the statistics-minded blogger at fivethirtyeight.com.

And a cool interactive graphic from the New York Times.

Clinton Concession Watch: Worth Remembering

2008-06-04T14:15:00.004-04:00

In 2004, the early exit poll results suggested John Kerry was going to beat Bush. For at least part of election day, Kerry thought there was a pretty good chance he was going to win based on these early numbers. The election itself was not called until late on election night. Of course, the vote did not go his way and he came out early on the following afternoon to make a gracious concession speech.

Not sure how good a comparison this really is. Clinton supporters would probably point out that nothing is official until delegates cast their ballots at the convention and Clinton does have the popular vote argument to make (not to mention a spot on the ticket to try to negotiate for). Obama supporters would probably point out that Clinton has known since late February (and certainly since early May) that she was probably not going to be the nominee, so it shouldn't have been as hard for her to "come to grips" with the loss as it was for Kerry.

Last Day of the Democratic Primaries Live Blog

2008-06-03T12:55:00.037-04:00

1:52am (Final Thoughts): Sorry about the somewhat limited blogging tonight. There was a lot going on (including storms in the area) and I had a hard time getting to the computer as much as I would've liked.

It looks like Clinton will take a 9-6 delegate advantage from South Dakota and Obama will likely get a 9-7 split in Montana. That will give her a 16-15 win on the evening with pledged delegates. Unfortunately for her, Obama picked up about 60 superdelegate votes today while Clinton lost a few. So, Obama passed the 2,118 bar with plenty of room to spare.

I have to say that even though we were told all day that she would not concede, Clinton's speech still struck me as a bit odd given the context. To simply pretend as though the networks weren't all naming Obama the nominee was strange, and asking her supporters to go to her website and let her know what they want her to do seemed to be firing up the troops rather than asking them to stand down.

In the meantime, Obama's speech contrasted quite favorably with those delivered by Clinton and Obama. He began in a very gracious way, which was a bit different from Clinton's speech, and the energy of the event just overpowered McCain's speech earlier in the evening. All in all, it seemed to be an effective pivot to the general election.

I've been trying to figure out the VP situation for quite a while and am still not entirely sure what to think. In my mind, the way this day panned out seemed to make it much less likely that Obama would offer the position to her. The question is whether there are enough superdelegates who have already endorsed Obama who would push him to take her on the ticket. If that happens, then things could certainly get a bit messy and perhaps this is what the Clinton campaign is trying to . But I'd guess that most of the superdelegates don't want any part in pushing something like this.

So, where do we go from here? The Obama campaign will now be trying to move as quickly as possible to leave the primary campaign far behind. There are lots of interesting questions that we will likely be getting answers to soon. The first, of course, is when and where will Clinton concede and will there be a big joint appearance to symbolize the unity? Will Clinton's superdelegates begin flipping their endorsements to Obama en masse even before she officially concedes? And how hard will Clinton work for the Obama campaign once she does accept him as the nominee?

Will Obama get a "bump" in the polls from having wrapped up the nomination?

And, finally, the other big question that doesn't have to do with selecting a running mate is when will the Obama campaign announce that they intend to forego public financing in the general election? And, relatedly, what is the over/under on the amount of money Obama will raise for the general election (assuming he does forego public financing)?

In some ways it is hard to imagine that this nomination race went on for 5 months from Iowa until today. This is truly unique in the modern era of presidential nomination politics (and it will provide a lot of fodder for the next edition of my book, which, unfortunately, means a lot of work in the revisions for me). Yet, in other ways it really makes a lot of sense that this went on so long. You knew when Obama was raising tons of money last summer that this nomination race could go on for quite a while; after all, how else was he going to spend all that money? But people always expected that Obama would be the one chasing Clinton, not the other way around. The bottom line is that the Obama campaign out-maneuvered the Clinton campaign throughout. They raised more money, energized citizens who had previously eschewed politics, built a superior grassroots organization, had a superior online presence, and, most importantly, they understood the importance of running up big margins in caucus states and having an organization to compete after Super Tuesday. In fact, that last point is just it. When they were raising all that money in 2007, they knew that they could use it to extend the campaign into February and beyond and that was their plan all along. The Clinton campaign wasn't ready for that and, as a result, even though it went on until June, this race was won by Obama in February.

So, does his campaign have anything left for an encore in the general election? We have the next five months to find out.

12:27pm: With all the "Clinton on the ticket" talk tonight, it seems worth asking how many votes Obama would pick up by not picking her? We are no longer in a primary campaign and the playing field has changed now. How many independents and Republicans are out there who might vote Obama unless he takes Clinton as a running mate?

12:08pm: Here are the Clinton talking points distributed to surrogates tonight. These are not the talking points of a candidate who is conceding. In the meantime, Obama is going to earn more popular votes tonight than Clinton. Her net in South Dakota is somewhere between 10 and 12k, whereas he already has a 15k lead over her in Montana with only 25% in.

11:30pm: Rendell, one of the biggest Clinton supporters, is on MSNBC saying that Obama can definitely carry Pennsylvania without Clinton. However, he does think it would be a good ticket and that it would help in New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

11:23pm: I'm not quite digging the John King replacement on CNN...not nearly as great with the futuristic big board as King is. After some digging, we've figured out that King and Dana Bash are evidently on their honeymoon (if they announced this earlier on CNN, I missed it).

11:22pm: The CNN crowd is noting that with the Clinton campaign basically demanding a spot on the ticket, they have probably hurt her chances of getting it. I agree, it seems now that he really can't choose her, because it would make him look weak and the choice would seem far too forced and unnatural.

11:04pm: In her speech, Clinton asked the 18 million people who voted for her to go to HillaryClinton.com to tell her what she should do now. For what it's worth, one friend of mine who voted for Clinton said she wants to go to the website and tell her, "I'm one of the 18 million, and I want out." It is going to be very interesting to see how this progresses in the next several days.

10:50pm: The Montana exit polls show a 56-39% breakdown in favor of Obama.

10:13pm: In case it wasn't clear from her speech that Clinton wants to be on the ticket, there is this.

10:02pm: The networks call Montana for Obama on the hour. And that's all we have left folks. No more states, no more territories, just the official casting of votes in Denver in August. I'll update the delegate tracker in a few minutes.

9:25pm: MSNBC has called South Dakota for Clinton.

9:13pm: The early tabulations of South Dakota exit polls indicate a 54-46% edge for Clinton. In most cases, early exit poll tabulations for Clinton have held up throughout the night, though Indiana was one case where her early exit poll lead shrunk throughout the night.

9:00pm: According to MSNBC, Barack Obama has enough delegates to put him over the top. The announcement steps on the end of McCain's speech. Obviously this is a historic moment in so many ways. I'm not sure we'll ever see anything like the campaign that we witnessed over the past 5 months.

8:00pm: MSNBC did not add any delegates to Obama's count between 7 and 8pm. Is that because everyone's at dinner or has the Obama campaign told everyone to stop endorsing so that he can win it when they call Montana? I wouldn't be surprised if it was the latter.

7:30pm: Here is some useful information about the large number of House and Senate primaries happening today.

6:00pm: The superdelegate endorsements are coming so fast now that I'm updating by the hour at this point. The only real question remaining is whether Obama will go over before the networks are able to call either state. The other questions is what these speeches will look like tonight. Should be VERY interesting to watch.

5:25pm: There is no doubt about it now. Obama WILL cross the threshold of 2,118 tonight. MSNBC now says he is 19.5 short. Between South Dakota and Montana's elected delegates and the five Montana delegates that have committed to voting for the winner of that primary, he should pick up at least that many delegates tonight.

5:15pm: I've updated the delegate totals, though things are moving so quickly that I'm having a hard time keeping up.

4:45pm: Lots of talk online and on the networks about the possibility of an Obama-Clinton ticket, including some suggestion that Clinton herself has told superdelegates she would serve if asked. I was looking at Survey USA's VP poll tests last night and was interested to find (a) that they didn't bother testing an Obama-Clinton ticket and (b) Edwards seems to help Obama in nearly every state they've polled.

3:08pm: Several more superdelegate endorsements in the last two hours. Obama is probably about 7 or 8 away from the number he needs to allow himself to go over the top when the polls close tonight. By the way, MSNBC announced that Jimmy Carter will endorse Obama tonight.

2:05pm: The Associated Press is evidently calling the race based on "new math," to paraphrase Ben Smith at the Politico.

1:35pm: Just to give you a graphical idea of how Obama piles up superdelegates throughout the day, I give you this chart that I'll continue to update every couple of hours based on the MSNBC count.

12:56pm: I figured I'd make this an all-day running blog since we may very well see Obama win more delegates before the polls close than he wins after. As expected, it seems as though his campaign is trying to bring in as many superdelegates as possible to make sure he can clinch with delegates elected in today's primaries. So far, depending on which count you look at, Obama is either 33.5 or 34 delegates away from 2,118. He will win AT LEAST 13 delegates tonight* (most likely a few more than that) meaning that, to be safe, he needs at least 20 more superdelegate votes in the bank before tonight.

*Five Montana superdelegates are set to endorse the primary's winner as soon as that is announced. Thus, assuming he wins in Montana, he will get at least 13 delegates from that pick-up. Thus, assuming he thinks that Montana is in the bag, he really only needs to pick up about 15 more superdelegates today to be safe.

Projecting Delegate Allocations in the Final Democratic Primaries: How Many Superdelegates Does Obama Need to Clinch?

2008-06-02T17:57:00.005-04:00

First things first. As the Puerto Rico result made very clear, the delegate projections for the last few primaries are going to be pretty rough estimates simply because there are not very many polls in any of these states. In Puerto Rico, I projected a 32-23 delegate split in favor of Clinton, but Clinton won a much bigger margin, taking 38 delegates to Obama's 17.

So, with that said, the projections about delegate allocations from the South Dakota and Montana primaries differ quite a bit depending on which polls you look at. Last week, our projections based on the latest polls had Obama winning 10 delegates in Montana (to 6 for Clinton) and 9 in South Dakota (to 6 for Clinton). Overall, that would give him 19 delegates tomorrow night compared to 12 for Clinton.

However, American Research Group released surveys from Montana and South Dakota today suggesting a very different result. These surveys give Obama just a 48-44% edge in Montana and put Clinton ahead by a 60-34% margin in South Dakota. If these polls are correct, then there would be an 8-8 split in Montana and South Dakota's delegates would be allocated 10 to 5 for Clinton. Overall, that would give Clinton 18 delegates tomorrow night compared to just 13 for Obama.

Why does this matter? The Obama campaign would love to line up enough superdelegate endorsements tomorrow to allow them to pass the 2,118 mark and have a victory party tomorrow night. But they might need a few more than they had initially thought they did if the American Research Group polls are accurate. Here are some graphics showing how close Obama will be to 2,118 after either scenario (assuming no more superdelegates endorse before tomorrow night):

Depending on which polls you believe, Obama will either end up 20.5 or 26.5 votes short of the nomination. So, if Obama wants to go over the top tomorrow night based on the results of the primaries, he needs at least 21 superdelegate endorsements between now and tomorrow night and to be safe he'd like to have 26 or 27 endorsements to bank. It will be interesting to see if he can pull together two dozen endorsements in the next 24 hours.

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Ok, so which projections am I going with. Well, frankly, I don't trust these American Research Group polls for a couple of reasons. First, in Montana, we had a poll conducted last week by Mason-Dixon that showed a very different picture. This survey put Obama up 52% to 35% over Clinton. In the American Research Group survey, Obama was winning 18-49 year olds by a margin of just 48-43% while the Mason-Dixon poll had him winning that age group 56-30%. Second, there seems to be little reason to think that South Dakota would be a huge blowout for Clinton. As Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com notes:

"But South Dakota isn't all that idiosyncratic a state, and 26-point win just doesn't make any sense in the context of what we know about the demographics of this race. The national tracking polls are fairly stable, and the campaigns aren't behaving like South Dakota is a 20-30 point Clinton win."

Nate predicts a 5% edge for Obama in South Dakota.

Of course, one problem in pegging the expectations in South Dakota is that every state that South Dakota borders held a caucus. The only primary we have for comparison is the beauty contest held by Nebraska (on South Dakota's border) which Obama narrowly won, 49-46%. Nevertheless, the 60-34% margin just seems way off base. So I'm sticking with the projections from last week.

Worth Re-visiting: Popular Vote Claims and the Michigan "Primary"

2008-06-02T01:52:00.003-04:00

Since the Clinton campaign is gong to be pushing hard on the "popular vote" argument for the next 48 hours, I thought I'd link to this analysis that I conducted several weeks ago.

Bottom line: the Clinton calculation of the popular vote in Michigan nets her campaign 328,151. However, based on the exit polls, it is safe to say that this is not an accurate reflection of her support among Michigan voters. Instead, that margin is something more along the lines of 65,000.

Here are the key passages:

Of the 593,837 Democrats who turned out to vote in the Michigan primary, 55% (328,151) cast their vote for Clinton. But what would have happened if all the candidates' names had been on the ballot? Fortunately, we have exit polls from Michigan which can give us some insight here. On the exit poll survey, voters were asked who they would have voted for had every candidate's name actually been on the ballot. Here are the results:

Clinton: 46%
Obama: 35%
Edwards: 12%

So, what happens if re-allocate the Michigan vote accordingly? In Michigan, the vote would have broken down as follows:

Clinton: 273,165 votes
Obama: 207,843 votes
Edwards: 71,260 votes

Thus, had Obama's name been on the ballot, Clinton's margin in the state would have been much smaller. Of course, there is no really good metric for measuring the vote in Michigan. Even in this scenario we have to assume that turnout wasn't suppressed by the fact that Obama's name wasn't on the ballot. Yet, you can imagine that many Obama supporters (and some Clinton supporters) may not have bothered to turn out to vote given that they knew that their votes were not likely to count. Nevertheless, this metric probably comes closest to capturing the actual preferences of those who did turn out to vote in Michigan.

UPDATE: This post from Mark Blumenthal regarding the accuracy of the exit polls for making such judgments is definitely worth a read.

Democratic Delegate Projections Under Post-RBC Meeting Numbers and Other Thoughts

2008-05-31T19:27:00.009-04:00

(Note: I updated the delegate totals in this post to reflect MSNBC's count).

Well, with the conclusion of the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting, the delegate numbers have just changed. It is unclear whether the Clinton campaign will seek to appeal these decisions at the convention, but until then, these new rules stand.

According to MSNBC, the magic number for winning a majority of the total delegates to the convention is now 2,118. Obama picked up 68.5 delegates (actually, delegate votes) today, 63 pledged and 5.5 superdelegate votes (from 10 supers who have endorsed him) from MI and FL. The figure below shows how Obama's delegate allocation changed as a result of today's meeting. It also uses our projections to determine how close Obama will come to the new majority number of 2,118.

According to MSNBC, Obama now has 2055.5 delegates (pledged and superdelegates combined). That puts him 62.5 short of clinching the majority. Based on our projections, Obama will pick up 23 delegates from Puerto Rico, 10 from Montana, and 9 from South Dakota. This would leave him just 21.5 delegates shy of a majority. You can bet that the Obama campaign is going to be working as hard as possible to roll out 20-25 superdelegate endorsements by Tuesday evening so that the voters in Montana and South Dakota will put his campaign over the top.

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Though some of the numbers are a bit dated, this post is worth re-visiting in the wake of today's decision. It is an analysis of what the popular vote in Michigan would have been if Obama and Edwards' names had been on the ballot.

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One other thing to note about the decision on Michigan. The 69-59 division of delegates means that Clinton received 54% of the delegates while Obama received 46%. However, if you take just those who said, in the exit poll, that they had wanted to vote for either Obama or Clinton (in other words, you exclude those who wanted to vote for Edwards or other candidates), Clinton carried 56% of that vote to Obama's 44%. Thus, the 69-59 split was more than just a tabulation based on exit polls. If you split the delegates 56%-44%, that would come out 72-56. It appears that the Michigan Democrats were making allowances for the fact that Obama's name not being on the ballot meant a lot of his supporters stayed home.

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Finally, it seems to me that the Obama campaign totally mismanaged this entire episode. My guess is that two or three months ago, the Clinton campaign would have agreed to today's outcome. Obama could have gotten out in front of this issue back then and said he thought half of Florida should be seated and that something like a 69-59 compromise on Michigan would work for him. Even then, he had the delegates to spare to offer such a compromise and that move would have likely killed the whole story, rather than allowing it to build up over the last few months and come to a head like it did today. Of course, campaigns tend to be very risk averse and I'm sure the Obama campaign didn't want to risk any delegates at the time. But I'd bet they wished they had after seeing how that meeting ended today.

Live from the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee Meeting - Session 2

2008-05-31T16:41:00.018-04:00

7:10 The Michigan motion passed, 19-8. So Michigan and Florida will have full delegations, with each delegate having a one-half vote (which is what I guessed would happen in my 2:00 pm post). But what I did not expect is how quickly these votes were moved along.

The discussion went so much faster than I thought it would. I expected much more debate and a fuller airing of the pros and cons, more on the history of the fair reflection rule, more discussion of the importance of following the rules to keep order in 2012, just more. I think the interruptions from the crowd impaired the debate today. How ironic, since allowing people to attend the meeting is a democratic principle, but isn't a full debate even more important? I think a more reasoned debate today, more discussion, more time for consensus, would have made it less likely that there will be a credentials fight at the Convention. The way this meeting ended, I don't feel confident that this is the last time we will hear about the Michigan delegates.

7:09 The room is going crazy. If they can't maintain control at a Rules and Bylaws meeting, what is going to happen in Denver?

7:00 It has been a long day at the RBC and it seems as though people are starting to get restless and downright rude. It seems like a totally different crowd from this morning. Chairman Roosevelt keeps telling people to stop interrupting, and that their disruptions are reflecting poorly on their candidates.

The Florida motion to restore the full delegation with 1/2 vote each passed easily. The committee is now considering a motion to restore Michigan's full delegation with 1/2 vote each (69 Clinton, 59 Obama). The big point of contention here is that the 69-59 split is based on an estimate by Michigan Democratic party officials for the Obama vote, since he was not on the ballot. And that does not reflect the "fair reflection" of presidential preference of the actual votes that were cast. Clinton supporters want the "uncommitted" voters to stand (and be translated into uncommitted delegates) so the candidates can go back and try to persuade those uncommitted voters at a future state convention.

6:30 The meeting is (finally!) back in session. They are considering a motion to reinstate all of Florida's delegates with full voting rights. It is highly unlikely that the committee will support this, it would be a complete reversal of their earlier decision. Maybe they just want to get on the record why Florida needs to be punished in the first place, since it did violate the rules. Next we should expect to see a motion to seat the pledged delegates with 1/2 vote each.

5:03 Marc Ambinder reports on his blog that committee members are behind closed doors arguing about a resolution for Michigan, and that they've already agreed to a resolution on Florida. Not surprising, given that the problems in Michigan (as I noted earlier) are so much more complicated due to the inability to accurately estimate a delegate allocation for Obama, based on the vote (since he was not on the ballot).

4:50 In my experience as a staff member to the RBC in the 2004 cycle, the chairs would not typically let a meeting go so far after the scheduled starting time, even without so many cameras anxiously waiting (Jim Roosevelt was co-chair during my tenure, and Carol Khare Fowler - still a member of the committee - was the other co-chair). My guess is that they are trying to work out some kind of consensus as to how to proceed, trying to get some agreement (perhaps from the campaign representatives) on the wording and substance of the motions that will be introduced.

4:30 We are waiting for the RBC members to take their seats after the lunch break. These people have got to be tired - their schedule started at 8:30 or so this morning, and last night they met at an informal dinner that according to some reports lasted until close to 2:00 am.

More on those Michigan "Uncommitted" Voters

2008-05-31T16:40:00.001-04:00

Mark Brewer noted earlier the efforts that his party made to direct Obama and Edwards supporters toward the "uncommitted" line on the ballot in the primary. Here is the evidence from the Michigan Democratic Party's voter guide (and in a FAQ):

"Supporters of Joe Biden, John Edwards, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson are urged to vote “uncommitted” instead of writing in their candidates’ names because write-in votes for those candidates will not be counted under state law."

And even a video posted on December 18th:

Live from the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee Meeting

2008-05-31T10:48:00.042-04:00

Just about to break for lunch, I wonder if the cable news networks will return this afternoon? I hope they do. If you thought the presentations today have been interesting, you will probably find the debate later riveting.

Sec. Herman said they will reconvene at 4:15 pm.

2:45 Donna Brazile just said she will support the proposals to give the states' their voices back. "My mama always taught me to play by the rules, and to respect the rules... and my mama taught me that when you decide to change the rules - especially in the middle of the game - that's called cheating." But who is trying to change the rules? Both Clinton and Obama are advocating positions not totally based on the outcome of the actual election. And everyone in the room is cheering - I guess both camps think they are playing by the rules (or maybe they just love Donna?). Maybe what Donna really means is that Michigan and Florida broke the rules (not the campaigns), and that is why she will support reinstating some - but not all - of the states delegates.

2:30 Jim Blanchard, former governor of Michigan, is speaking now on behalf of the Clinton campaign. He just made a good point that is often overlooked in this discussion of Michigan and Florida - Florida has a state law that makes it almost impossible for a presidential candidate to take his/her name off the ballot. Basically a candidate has to end his campaign nationwide in order to be removed from the Florida ballot. Michigan should have made its ballot access law as strong, and they would not be in this mucky position today about how to allocate the delegates fairly according to presidential preference.

2:10 The discussion about Michigan is wrapping up, but the real action will take place after lunch. It is amazing to me that so many people are still in the room - it seems like no one has left since 9:00 this morning, even though it is now after 2:00 pm.

The committee members will have lunch in a private room - more for logistical convenience, not so they can retreat to some back room (smoke-filled or not) to decide in private what decision they will make publicly this afternoon. Chances are that some negotiations will take place over lunch, but anything could happen when the committee reconvenes this afternoon. I think the proposals (with a chance of success) on the table will be:

- Seat the full Florida delegation with 1/2 vote each.

- Seat the full Michigan delegation with 1/2 vote each, allocated according to the 69-59 compromise (although there will be more debate about the validity of exit polls in determining this).

- What will they do about the superdelegates? Part of Jon Ausman's proposal was that it was against DNC rules to sanction superdelegates. But will the RBC members halve the pledged delegate votes while giving full votes to supers?

1:50 David Bonior is speaking on behalf of the Obama campaign. Right now he is denying that it was Obama's fault that there was no "do-over" primary in Michigan. I happened to be in Michigan at the time that the do-over primary was being discussed in the legislature, and it was reported at the time (as I remember) that the Obama campaign would not comment on the legislation until they read it, but that the legislators drafting it would not put anything in writing until they got an agreement from the Obama campaign - a kind of chicken and egg problem. Hillary, on the other hand, made an appearance in the state to try to get the second primary to happen. In any case, a do-over primary would have been terribly problematic, since who knows how many Democrats voted in the Republican primary (like my Dad) and those voters would not have been allowed to participate in the second Dem primary.

1:35 "Fair reflection" -- Harold Ickes has mentioned this concept a few times, and Elaine Kamarck referred to it too. This is an important part of the DNC delegate selection rules (Rule 13). It means that the pledged delegates in a state must be allocated according to the "fair reflection of the presidential preferences" in the state - so 55% of the vote Hillary should translate to 55% of delegate, and 40% for "uncommitted" (which is a real line on the ballot, and comes from the tradition of allowing voters to participate in the primary even if they don't have a candidate they want to support). Harold says "as a matter of law" the committee must respect the sanctity of those uncommitted votes, "this resolution as drafted is not even legal under the rules". He is really drilling into Sen. Levin.

Sen. Levin: "Let me clarify, you are calling for a fair refection of a flawed primary?" (Applause)

"How do you have a fair reflection of a flawed primary?"

1:27 Anyone interested in the protest that happened (maybe is still happening?) outside the hotel, check out the HotlineOnCall blog for a few updates on that. They say it was a "lovefest" - no serious squabbles between Clinton and Obama supporters.

1:15 The issue of the timing of Michigan's primary has been a passionate project of Sen. Levin's for years. He was the one who instigated the creation of the DNC Commission on Presidential Nomination Timing and Scheduling (the commission that added Nevada and South Carolina to the front of the calendar). Kind of ironic, but maybe it was because of his voracity on the issue that Michigan earned a reputation on the committee for being a trouble maker, and because of that they probably never had a real chance of getting one of the early calendar spots they applied for. Terry McAuliffe tells a great story in his book about a shouting match with Carl Levin over the timing of the state's 2004 primary... basically McCauliffe and the DNC promised the commission to Levin in exchange for Michigan staying put in the calendar well after Iowa and New Hampshire.

1:05 Sen. Carl Levin is presenting now. "The Democratic Party has achieved unity... we are asking you to preserve it." What he means is that the Michigan Democratic Party and both candidate representatives in the state have all agreed to this position. What they are asking for is a 100% reinstatement of the state's delegation, based on the 69-59 allocation of pledged delegates that Brewer described. My guess is that the RBC is in no mood to completely go back on its previous decision to punish Michigan... a more viable solution is to seat the delegation 69-59 (as they are asking) but with each delegate getting just a 1/2 vote each (just like I think they will do for Florida).

12:56 Brewer's proposal has been endorsed by the Michigan State Party, Sen Carl Levin, and other elected officials in Michigan... but he seems to be having a hard time convincing the committee members of its value. Don Fowler's reference to this feeling like "Alice in Wonderland" has I think led committee members to think the 69-59 proposal is based on a fantasy... but really the whole primary process in Michigan was the Alice in Wonderland scenario; this compromise proposal is really not that wild and seems to me to be the best legitimate way to divvy up the delegates between Clinton and Obama.

Democrats do not like exit polls (I guess this is from Florida 2000 and the perception that the exit polls showed Gore winning?)... I hope they do not let their bias against exit polls get in the way of using them for a fair solution to the Michigan problem.

12:45 Yesterday on this blog, Brian Schaffner offered a good analysis of the "uncommitted" voters in the Michigan primary. He rightly points out that there is no way to determine how many people stayed home because they couldn't vote for Obama, Edwards, etc (rather than casting a vote for uncommitted), but exit polls can help show who people supported. Mark Brewer is explaining that the exit polls are being used in their analysis that gives them the 69-59 delegate split for Clinton-Obama.

One thing that I haven't heard discussed much is how many Democrats voted in the Republican primary, since they viewed the Dem primary as invalid. My dad - a lifelong Democrat - voted in the Republican primary, just to "screw up their election" as he puts it. How many Dem voters in Michigan acted like he did?

12:40 The Michigan problem is much more complicated than Florida, since Obama took his name off the Michigan ballot. The Clinton campaign will remind you that Obama did this proactively - he and the others who removed their names from the ballot (Edwards, Richardson, etc) had to take specific steps to do this; the default position would have been to stay on the ballot and just not campaign in the state (as Clinton did). The ballot game was motivated by political calculations on both sides: Clinton thought she could win Michigan, Obama and the others thought they couldn't, and bargained that they would get extra favor with the voters in IA and NH for dissing Michigan (remember Iowa and NH voters viewed Michigan and Florida as trying to encroach on their territory as first in the nation caucus and primary)

12:30 Sec. Herman is reviewing the long and sordid history of the 2008 Michigan primary. This is particularly painful for me, as a native Michigander, and also because my dissertation research is on the use of Internet voting in the 2004 Michigan primary. The state party was supposed to use Internet voting again in the 2008 primary, which would have given scholars (like me) an invaluable opportunity to study online voting in the US.

Mark Brewer - one of the longest serving state chairs of one of the best organized and most effective state Democratic parties (Michigan has turned from a swing state to a fairly solid blue state under his leadership) - is presenting now.

12:25 We spent the whole morning on Florida, and have gone waaay over time. Alexis Herman just announced they will hear from Michigan before lunch -- this is important, because the committee members will meet informally at lunch and discuss possible courses of action based on the presentations. There is a mass exodus of the Florida people from the room.

12:20 Alan Katz (RBC member and Obama supporter) is speaking now. The chair confirmed that he will not be allowed to vote on the Florida matter. (But presumably he can vote on Michigan, and Mark Brewer of Michigan will be able to vote on Florida)

12:08 Committee member Tina Flournoy (Clinton supporter) is pressing Wexler to say whether he would support a full restoration of Florida's delegation... she is putting him in a hard place, because as a congressman from Florida he needs to represent his constituents - who surely want a full delegation - but he is here for Obama, who would be harmed by seating the full delegation.

He is really in a tough spot, and the crowd is starting to get a little ugly... shouts for him to "answer the question" (from the Clinton supporters) met with "shhhs" from the Obama supporters. But he just keeps saying he endorses the Ausman position, which is the 50% reduction in delegates.

11:58 Cong. Robert Wexler is speaking for the Obama campaign, and he is getting the loudest applause of the day so far. He is endorsing the 50% reduction in delegates. Is anyone here not endorsing the 50% reduction in delegates? (Except the Clinton campaign folks, even President Clinton is reportedly supporting it). There seems to be consensus on this, and that is probably what we'll see the committee decide this afternoon.

One area of contention for Florida is what to do with the superdelegates. Wexler just asked for a 1/2 vote for each super... and was met with the first boos of the day from the crowd (I guess since so many of the people here are superdelagtes? Pretty funny).

You can watch the meeting on C-Span here

11:38 Applause in the hotel lobby (where people are gathered around the TVs watching C-Span) for the conclusion of the remarks from the FL state representative (Arthenia Joyner) who was representing the Clinton campaign. The people here in the lobby must be Clinton supporters hanging out after their protest this morning in front of the hotel.

11:15 For those not watching on TV, the room is packed with about 300 people in the main audience, which is positioned in front of a u-shaped conference table at which the 30-member committee is seated. There is a balcony overlooking the ballroom, where about 2 dozen bloggers are seated all in a row (and almost all with glowing Apples in their laps). I am sitting in a chair on the floor.

The room is incredibly calm (incredible to me, given the number of people), no protesters - just supporters who interrupt occasionally with applause. I just took a walk out into the main area of the hotel, and nearly ever seat is taken at the bars and lounges with folks watching the proceedings on C-Span. So far it is a very civil meeting (and maybe even a bit boring, even for a rules junkie like me). Boring because there is nothing yet that we haven't heard before...

10:55 Some things to note:

- Jim Roosevelt (co-chair of the committee) is the grandson of FDR.

- The other co-chair, Alexis Herman, was labor secretary in the Clinton administration.

- Watch for comments/questions from committee member Don Fowler. He is a former chairman of the DNC and had a hand in writing many of the rules.

- Harold Ickes and Donna Brazile are also committee members to watch. Harold is a top adviser to Hillary, but he is also a longtime RBC member and knows the rules perhaps better than anyone. Donna is uncommitted in the race, but her voice is always influential - on the committee as well as in the party.

10:30 Sorry for my late start. I have been working for my credential to get in the room here today... my (small) job was to help get the briefing materials to the members this morning before the meeting started.

If you have been following on TV (assuming it is still being covered, even though it has been about as exciting as a session of Congress on C-Span, complete with charts on poster board) you know that right now we are in the middle of hearing the first challenge, which deals with Florida. The DNC member who presented the case for Florida (Jon Ausman) is basically asking to restore 50% of the state's delegates and all of the supers (he argues that the charter of the DNC does not allow superdelegates to be part of the sanction).

The discussion is really getting into the weeds of the rules, I can't imagine that many in the general public - even those who have been paying unusually close attention to this race - are finding these proceedings very interesting. what we are seeing today is really a legal proceeding, but instead of referencing the US constitution or state statutes, it is the rules of the Democratic National Committee.

New Feature: You Choose the Topic, I do the Analysis

2008-05-30T23:04:00.002-04:00

There are so many things about the 2008 race to analyze that sometimes it is hard to decide what to blog about or, more importantly, what you want me to blog about. So, in a new feature that I hope to make a regular one, I'm letting you make the call. On the right sidebar there are three topics that I'm prepared (with a little work) to analyze and blog on. Vote for which one you'd like to see most and I'll blog on the winning topic at the end of next week. The other two topics will cycle into the next week's options and I'll add a new option to the mix to replace the previous week's winner. And if you have ideas for topics that you'd like to see that aren't on the list, leave a comment here and I'll add the feasible ones to the options.

What Should the RBC Do With those Michigan Delegates?

2008-05-30T18:06:00.004-04:00

“It’s impossible to discern the mind of each of the 238,000 people who voted for ‘uncommitted.’”
Harold Ickes, 5/30/08

Is Harold Ickes correct? Are the intentions of the "uncommitted" Michigan voters really all that much of a mystery? Well, not really. In fact, we can get a pretty good sense of the preferences of Michigan voters from the exit poll that was conducted in that state on the day of its primary in January. In fact, one of the questions on the exit poll asked which candidate the respondent would have voted for if all the candidates had been on the ballot. We can look at these figures in two ways:

1) The simple way to read the exit poll is to look at how these voters broke down in terms of their preferences. When asked who they would have voted for if all the candidates had been on the ballot, 46% of Michigan Democratic primary voters said that they would still vote for Clinton, 35% would have voted for Obama, and 12% would have voted for Edwards. Let's say you split the Edwards vote evenly between Obama and Clinton; then the vote would be 52-41% in favor of Clinton. ("But wait," you are probably thinking, "we all know that Clinton got 55% of the vote in Michigan, not 52%. Why would she have gotten less of the vote?" Good point, I'll get to that in a second.) Turns out, this is the most favorable reading of the exit polls as far as the Clinton campaign is concerned. If you look at things this way, giving Clinton a small majority of the delegates makes sense. (Alternatively, you could give Clinton 46% of the delegates, Obama 35%, and keep the rest (19%) truly uncommitted.)

2) Another way to look at the exit polls is to use them to get a sense of how many uncommitted voters wanted to vote for Obama (or Edwards) and whether any Clinton voters would have voted for a different candidate if they had the opportunity. This information is presented in the figure below, which shows the composition of Clinton and uncommitted voters depending on which candidate those voters actually wanted to vote for:

Now you can see why Clinton's support dips down to 46% when the exit poll asked respondents who Clinton voters would have voted for if all names had been on the ballot. A non-trivial share of her voters actually preferred Obama or Edwards. Of course, Edwards is not in the race anymore, so we'll let her keep those votes. But, based on the exit polls, about 6% of the electorate voted for Clinton, but would have voted for Obama if they had been given the opportunity to do so. This means that Clinton's vote would have been right around 50% if Obama's name been on the ballot. Thus, it is not simply the case that Obama didn't get any votes because his name wasn't on the ballot, but it is also evident that Clinton got more votes than she would have because some Obama supporters went ahead and voted for her. (As an aside, I'd love to know how many of those Obama supporters would do the same thing now.) If you look at the exit polls that way, then a 50-50 split of Michigan's delegates doesn't seem so far off base.

Two last thoughts on this issue, because it really will be the thorniest one the Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) has to tackle (halving the Florida delegation's votes is a pretty obvious and easy call at this point). First, a good share of the delegates who have already been selected to fill the "uncommitted" slots have already stated that they intend to vote for Obama if seated. So, even if those slots aren't dedicated to Obama specifically by the RBC, it is likely that Obama is going to get the lion's share of those votes. Second, what the exit poll cannot tell us is how many people stayed home and didn't vote in the primary because their favored candidate's name was not going to be on the ballot? Most likely, many supporters of both Clinton and Obama failed to turn out to vote because they didn't think the primary was going to count for anything, but the drop off might have been even greater for Obama supporters. Ickes is overstating things when he claims that we can't possibly know who the uncommitted voters really supported; the exit poll gives us some pretty solid evidence that most of them supported Obama (along with some of Clinton's voters). But what we can't really know is how many people might have gone out to vote for both candidates if all the candidates' names were on the ballot.

This week's big event: DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee Meeting

2008-05-29T15:08:00.000-04:00

Although there isn't a primary or caucus taking place, a huge number of delegates - 366 - will be potentially up for grabs on Saturday. That's more delegates than Pennsylvania and Ohio combined, and many more than the 63 at stake in Puerto Rico's primary on Sunday. The group deciding the fate of these delegates is the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee, which will meet on Saturday in Washington, DC. I described the responsibilities of the RBC in an earlier post on Michigan and Florida, and when I blogged from the RBC meeting in August 2007, when the committee voted to sanction the Florida delegation.

I'll be at the meeting Saturday as a volunteer for the DNC (I worked as staff to the Rules and Bylaws Committee during the 2004 election). The meeting will likely be covered by C-Span and some of the cable news networks including CNN and MSNBC, so even though space in the meeting room is limited, anyone can watch the proceedings. I will also post updates as often as I can, but be forewarned that this meeting could last all day Saturday (and could possibly go into Sunday... rumor has it that RBC members were asked to stay in DC Saturday night just in case).

According to the Committee's schedule, they will hear oral arguments from the interested parties in the morning (that probably means separate presentations from the Florida and Michigan state parties, and representatives of the Clinton and Obama campaigns). Then after lunch, the committee will discuss and debate the options. The Democratic Convention Watch website has a good analysis of the possible scenarios for allocating the delegates, which ranges from seating all of the delegates according to the election results in the states (this is what the Clinton campaign is asking for), to sticking with the current sanctions that strip both states of all their delegates. According to their analysis, the only scenario that strengthens Clinton's position is seating all of the Michigan and Florida delegates. All of the other scenarios, which involve some decrease in the state delegation size or voting strength, will allow Obama to claim a majority of pledged delegates. That doesn't mean the contest is over, since there may still be enough unpledged delegates for Clinton to make up the difference, but Obama's ability to claim a majority of pledged delegates will be a very strong argument.

The Clinton-Obama breakdown on the 30-member committee is 13 Clinton, 8 Obama, and 9 uncommitted. There is also one committee member from Michigan (Mark Brewer, the State Party Chair, uncommitted) and one from Florida (Alan Katz, Obama supporter), who may not be able to vote on the fate of their own state delegations, but even they could vote we should expect they will support fully restoring the delegates (consistent with the Clinton position, even though Katz publicly supports Obama). So the number in favor of the Clinton position could be as high as 15 votes, and Obama's support as low as 7.

But even though Clinton has an advantage, I wouldn't expect to see members' votes guided only by their candidate preference. In addition to their publicly-expressed candidate loyalties, these committee members - many of whom helped write the delegate selection rules and are guided by decades of experience in presidential nominations - will be guided by their commitment to the party's chances of winning in November, and also with an eye towards the 2012 nomination process.

Delegate Predictions for Puerto Rico, Montana, and South Dakota

2008-05-29T00:08:00.004-04:00

Amazing to think that the final three primaries are less than a week away. I mean, it seems like the cold dark night of the Iowa Caucuses was just the other day. Or is it just me?

One thing I've neglected to do over the past month or so is go back and check on how well the polls have done in predicting the delegate break downs in the last several primaries. Let's take a look:

Indiana prediction: 38-34 Clinton.
Indiana actual: 38-34 Clinton.

North Carolina prediction: 62-53 Obama.
North Carolina actual: 67-48 Obama.

West Virginia prediction: 20-8 Clinton.
West Virginia actual: 20-8 Clinton.

Kentucky prediction: 35-16 Clinton.
Kentucky actual: 37-14 Clinton.

Oregon prediction: 29-23 Obama.
Oregon actual: 31-21 Obama.

Using the poll averages, I got Indiana and West Virginia exactly correct and only missed Kentucky and Oregon by 2 delegates. In North Carolina, the polls were off significantly, which meant Obama performed 5 delegates better than I predicted.

Now on to the final three primaries. I know it is hard to believe, but there have not been a whole lot of polls conducted for the last three primaries. Perhaps, as Mark Blumenthal points out, it has something to do with one island's Spanish-speaking population and the tiny share of delegates at stake in Montana and South Dakota. Nevertheless, we do have at least one survey in each of the last three states, and we'll have to rely on those polls to generate the final delegate predictions of the race. These predictions are below.

As expected, Clinton should take a significant delegate total out of the Puerto Rico primary on Sunday. On the other hand, Obama is expected to continue his strong performance in the Mountain West by winning more delegates in both Montana and South Dakota. When all is said and done, these projections have Clinton cutting all of 4 delegates off Obama's lead.

Later this week, I'll lay out how the various proposals that the RBC is considering will influence the end game scenarios faced by the Obama campaign.

High Gas Prices Don't Help McCain

2008-05-28T01:55:00.006-04:00

The high gas prices are one tangible way that the public feels the bite of a weak economy and those gas prices are doing no favors for McCain. Using data from the American Automobile Association and state-by-state polling data available on Pollster.com*, I examined the relationship between the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline and the polling margin between Obama and McCain in each state. You can see how the states plot on these measures in the figure below.

Notably, there is a significant increase in how Obama fares against McCain as gas prices in a state increase. The regression line indicates that for each 10 cent increase in the cost of a gallon of gasoline in a state, Obama's margin against McCain improves by approximately 6.7%. In other words, Obama does well where people pay more to fill up their cars while McCain fares better where gas prices are lower.

Of course, the relationship is far from perfect as there are several outliers. Vermont gives Obama his biggest advantage over McCain despite the fact that the state pays slightly below the national average for gas. On the other hand, Alaska has some of the most expensive gas in the country, but also tilts strongly in McCain's favor.

Nonetheless, a struggling economy can effect people in many ways and one of the most obvious is at the pump. Filling the tank may serve as a frequent reminder about the economic state, something that doesn't help any Republican candidates, including McCain, in this election.

-------------------------------------

*When available, I used the pollster.com averages for each state. When there were not enough data points to generate an average, I used the most recent available poll.

The Dramatic Erosion of the Republican Brand

2008-05-22T12:00:00.000-04:00

There has been a lot of discussion recently about how the Republican brand is in trouble. There are a variety of ways of quantifying what this means--fewer are identifying themselves with the Republican Party and Bush's approval is at historic lows--but one important thing that brands are meant to engender is trust. In politics, a party brand is strongest when citizens trust that party to handle a wide array of issues facing the country. The brand is weakest when there is little trust in the brand.

Generally, citizens trust one party to handle some issues while they have more confidence in the other party on another set of issues. For example, over the last few decades, Republicans have been more trusted on issues involving taxes and national security while Democrats have fared better on domestic policy issues such as health care, social security, and education. However, as the figure below indicates, Republicans are no longer trusted more than Democrats on any of these issues. (This figure was based on a national ABC News/Washington Post survey conducted in early February.)

As the figure shows, Democrats are far more trusted by the public on issues such as the economy, the budget deficit, and health care. But Democrats also now have a narrow edge on issues Republicans have traditionally owned, including taxes, the conflict in Iraq, and even the campaign against terrorism.

The decreasing trust in the Republican Party (and increasing trust in Democrats) on Iraq and terrorism has been one of the most notable changes over the past six years. The figures below track the public's trust of the parties on these two issues since 2002. Note that at the beginning of the period, Republicans held about a 20% advantage over Democrats on these issues. However, in the course of just a few years, Democrats are now significantly more trusted on handling the situation in Iraq and slightly more trusted on handling terrorism.

Last week, the Bush and McCain went up against Obama on national security issues, something that Republicans have consistently used to their advantage over Democrats in the past. But the shifts I've outlined below suggest that these themes may not be as successful as they once were. The public no longer trusts Republicans substantially more than Democrats on these issues. On the other hand, Republicans have to choose from a bad lot when it comes to the issues they stress. After all, they no longer seem to have a definitive advantage on any issues. And, as the figure below shows, the other major issue in this campaign, the economy, strongly favors Democrats at an even greater rate than it did in 1992 when George H.W. Bush lost his bid for a second term.

Ultimately, the erosion of the Republican brand has been dramatic. In the current climate, there are no strong issue areas for Republican candidates (presidential or otherwise) to focus on. Rather, there are simply some issues that are not as bad as others. Currently, it appears as though terrorism may remain a target issue for Republicans if only because their brand isn't as weak on this issue as it is on most others now.

Comparing the Obama Campaign's Predictions to Reality

2008-05-21T14:00:00.000-04:00

As I noted in an earlier post, we can gain some interesting insight from comparing how the Obama campaign thought they were going to perform in states to how they actually did. It is not all that often that you get such a clear sense of how a campaign thinks it is going to do in a series of primaries, but thanks to a memo the Obama campaign accidentally sent a reporter for Bloomberg, we can do precisely that.

The figure below plots the percentage of the vote that the Obama expected to get in each state (based on their memo released just after Super Tuesday) against the percentage of the vote Obama actually received. States falling along the line would be those in where Obama did just as his campaign expected him to do. States falling above the line are those in which Obama's actual voted total exceeded his campaign's expectations, and those below are where he failed to meet those expectations.
Several interesting patterns are evident from this plot. The most obvious is that Obama over-performed in every primary and caucus held between Super Tuesday and March 4th. This is the period during which Obama won the nomination by accumulating a much bigger delegate lead than even they expected, one that became so insurmountable that the Clinton campaign was never able to recover. It has often been repeated by reporters and pundits that the Clinton campaign was not prepared with a post-Super Tuesday strategy, and Obama's over-performance in these is strong evidence of this dynamic.

The second point that stands out from the figure is that Obama has under-performed (relative to his campaign's expectations) in seven of the 13 states with caucuses or primaries on or after March 4th. He did just as his campaign expected in TX and MS, and better than expected in VT, WY, NC, and OR. Once again, this very much reflects the dynamics of the race, with Obama suffering from the Jeremiah Wright remarks and the general scrutiny involved with being the nominee while Clinton regained her footing on March 4th and began a relatively effective two months of campaigning as the front-runner turned underdog.

Finally, on the "under-performing" side of the line, note WV and KY as the real outliers. Why did the Obama campaign think that they would do about 10-15% better in these states than they actually did? Did the underestimate the role that race would play in these primaries? Did they not anticipate Clinton's increased appeal to working class whites? Did the Jeremiah Wright hurt them more in those states than in other places?

By the way, just for the record, the Obama campaign predicted that they would have accumulated 1,605 pledged delegates by today compared to 1,536 for Clinton, a lead of less than 80 delegates. Instead, Obama's lead in pledged delegates is nearly twice as large.

Assessing the Accuracy of the Oregon/Kentucky Predictions: The Big Winner was Pollster.com

2008-05-21T02:05:00.003-04:00

While there are still votes to be counted in Oregon, it looks like Obama's margin in that state will be 18%, while Clinton won Kentucky by 35%. So, who came closest to getting the margins correct in both states? The figure below plots the predictions from three survey firms that released polls from both states during the last week of the campaign, along with Poblano's predictions based on demographic models and Pollster.com's poll averages.

While each of these organizations underestimated the size of the Obama margin in Oregon, Pollster.com came closest to getting the results correct in both states. The pollster.com averages had Clinton winning by 35% in Kentucky (which she did) and Obama winning by 12% in Oregon. Among the individual pollsters, it appears as though Survey USA came closest on the pair of margins. While American Research Group was closets on Oregon (they predicted a 36% margin for Clinton), they greatly underestimated Obama's margin of victory in Oregon. Survey USA came closest on the Oregon margin and were only off on the Kentucky margin by 4%.

Unlike two weeks ago, when he nailed the NC and IN outcomes, Poblano's model was the farthest off last night. To his credit, Poblano did state that he thought his predictions for Kentucky were likely to be understating Clinton's support. He was right, he missed that margin by 16%. Poblano's model did come much closer on Oregon.

UPDATED: Post was updated at 2pm on May 21st to reflect the fact that Obama's lead in Oregon is now 18%.

Kentucky/Oregon Primaries Live Blog

2008-05-20T18:49:00.018-04:00

12:46am: Well, as promised, that was a watered-down version of the traditional primary night live blog. Frankly, I'm not sure what else there is to say at this point. This is getting a bit redundant. Obama struggles in the Appalachia region (WV, KY, central PA, southern OH, etc.) but there is no way he isn't going to be the nominee at this point. Frankly, anyone who was really doing the math has known since the end of February that Clinton was facing a very difficult climb; it is no surprise that she fell short.

The only truly interesting thing is to see how Clinton exits. My guess is that FL and MI get half their delegates back when the Rules and Bylaws Committee meets on May 30th. Even when that happens, Obama will still have a majority of the pledged delegates and will not be too far off of the overall delegate majority. In the meantime, I'd expect to see a fair number of superdelegates coming Obama's way in the next, many of whom may make the the point that he was the pledged delegate winner so he should be the nominee. (Not to mention that Chuck Todd just made the point that a majority of the uncommitted superdelegates are from states Obama won). Then, on the night of June 3rd, after the final votes are cast, I'd expect a gracious concession speech from Clinton and an equally gracious victory speech from Obama. But that is just a guess. The only thing I know for sure is that this has been a crazy ride (and a political scientist's dream, in many ways). It is kinda sad that it is winding down.

11:13pm: Democratic Convention Watch points out that not only has Obama won the pledged delegate majority if you do not include FL and MI, but he has also clinched a majority of pledged delegates under almost any compromise that is likely to pass out of the Rules and Bylaws Committee at the end of the month. The only way he hasn't clinched it is if you seat MI and FL delegates "as is." There is no way that the DNC is going to do that and allow MI and FL to send delegates without any penalty.

11:07pm: The "exit poll" out of Oregon is showing a 56-42% Obama margin. If that is correct, then the pollster.com average will have nailed the margins in both states almost perfectly. But let's see if that is really the Oregon margin.

11:00pm: Nevermind on that whole "gun shy" thing. They called for Obama right away.

10:57pm: By the way, there will be six add-on superdelegates chosen between today and June 3rd. All six come from states Obama won and will, therefore, likely be Obama supporters. If that is the case, then Obama need only about 20 more superdelegates endorsements to be able to claim an overall delegate majority on June 3rd (though the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee may change the magic number when it rules on the FL and MI challenge on May 30th).

10:50pm: Ten minutes from the Oregon "polls closing." Will Obama get an immediate call there? The difficult part of calling Oregon is that there isn't really exit polling. Rather, the "exit poll" is just another poll that has been conducted over several days leading up to the election. May mean that the networks are slightly more gun shy on the call.

10:45pm: Interestingly, CNN and MSNBC seem to have slightly different pledged delegate counts. CNN says he has already captured a majority of pledged delegates while MSNBC says he is one shy and will have to wait until the Oregon delegates are allocated.

10:07pm: Democratic Convention Watch lists superdelegates who are members of the "Pelosi Club." This refers to a group of superdelegates who have said that they will vote for whichever candidate wins the majority of pledged delegates. The question is whether the "Pelosi Club" will make their endorsements tomorrow, now that Obama has clinched this metric. My guess is that, at the very least, its namesake will not endorse until after June 3rd.

9:58pm: Votes won't be reported out of Oregon for another hour still, but the Obama campaign has sent out an email with the following:

"The polls are closed in Kentucky and votes are being counted in Oregon, and it's clear that tonight we have reached a major milestone on this journey.

We have won an absolute majority of all the delegates chosen by the people in this Democratic primary process."

9:55pm: Clinton's victory in Kentucky is certainly large in terms of sheer numbers. Although the state is much smaller and has fewer delegates, the number of votes she will win by is larger than her margin in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

7:47pm: This post is about right. I would add that the Clinton campaign could have said similar things at any point over the last few months and been very wrong. The crystal clear pattern throughout has been that the later a superdelegate has made an endorsement, the more likely that endorsement was for Obama.

7:39pm: Check out the Clinton margins in the counties in eastern Kentucky. She is winning a lot of those counties by a margin of 85-10% or more.

7:30pm: As expected, Clinton will win Kentucky by a significant margin. I'd imagine that her margin will continue to grow as the western part of the state comes in.

6:52pm: I probably won't be blogging as much as usual tonight for two reasons. First, we pretty much know who the nominee is going to be, so the only thing that is really left to determine is how this is going to end, not what the ending will be. Second, there are four hours between when the Kentucky polls close (7pm) and when the Oregon "polls close" at 11pm (I put that in quotes since this is an all mail election). I doubt there will be an abundance of news to discuss during these four hours.

I assume that the networks will be calling Kentucky right at 7pm. If not, then that will be the first surprise of the evening.

Oregon and Kentucky Delegate Estimates and an Update on the End Game

2008-05-20T01:01:00.009-04:00

Another Tuesday brings another pair of primaries. And it appears as though it will also bring another split, with Obama holding a strong lead in the polls out of Oregon while Clinton holds a commanding lead in the polling out of Kentucky. Three pollsters (Survey USA, ARG, and Suffolk) have conducted surveys in both Kentucky and Oregon over the past several days. The figure below plots the margins these polls found for Obama in both states along with the Pollster.com averages (the margin is just the percent for Obama minus the percent for Clinton). (UPDATE: I have now added Poblano's predictions to the figure). ARG has the best case scenario for Clinton--a margin of greater than 35% in Kentucky and only a narrow win for Obama in Oregon. Survey USA predicts a bigger (double-digit) margin for Obama in Oregon, as does the Pollster.com average.

As always, I will use the pollster.com averages to generate predictions for today's primaries. Because of the enormous margin that Clinton has in Kentucky, she is poised to pick up a net gain of more than 19 pledged delegates in that state. Obama will only be able to partially off-set Clinton's Kentucky gains with his win in Oregon, meaning that Clinton should gain about 13 delegates on Obama tonight.

Despite the fact that Clinton will win more delegates on Tuesday night, the 45 delegates that Obama is poised to win should be more than enough to allow him to clinch a majority of elected delegates. According to the Democratic Convention Watch site, Obama currently holds 1,612.5 pledged delegates, just 15 shy of a pledged delegate majority (a benchmark I predicted Obama would reach on this very date back in March).

But what about the magic number of 2,025 total delegates? Well, Obama is not too far from that benchmark either. If you add the 302.5 superdelegates that Democratic Convention Watch tallies for Obama, then he is just 110 delegates short of 2,025. If he captures 45 delegates in tomorrow night's primaries, that will put him within 65 of a majority. However, as the figure below shows, there aren't quite enough pledged delegates left to get him there.

Based on the only poll out of Puerto Rico (showing Clinton with a 50-37% lead), Obama would pick up 23 delegates in that primary on June 1st. I have not seen a poll out of Montana, so let's split those 16 delegates evenly, giving Obama 8. In South Dakota, the only poll I've seen puts Obama up 46-34%, which would give him 9 more delegates for a total of 17 on June 3rd.
If not a single superdelegate endorses Obama between now and June 3rd, he would fall 25 delegates shy of the magic number when all the voting ended. The question remains, can the Obama campaign line up enough superdelegates so that the pledged delegates from the June 3rd primaries are the ones that put him over the top for the nomination? Even though we know who is going to win, it should be interesting to see how it ends.

Is Obama Relying on Late Ballots in Oregon?

2008-05-18T21:37:00.009-04:00

Oregon's vote-by-mail system may make polling a little more tricky close to election day. After all, a substantial portion of the electorate have already cast their ballots, while there are many who wait until just before the election to vote.

On this front, one interesting finding stands out when it comes to the surveys out of Oregon over the past week or so. According to polls from Survey USA and American Research Group, Obama has a significant lead in Oregon among those who intend to vote, but he is in a dead heat with Clinton among those who say they have already voted.

In the Survey USA poll (conducted 5/9-11), 43% reported that they had already mailed in their ballots and Obama's lead in this group was just 49-48% (well within the margin of error). On the other hand, among those who intended to vote but had not yet done so, Obama a 58-38% lead. Similarly, the American Research Group survey (conducted 5/14-15) indicated that Obama was tied with Clinton at 49% among the 58% of Oregon Democrats who already mailed in their ballots (the higher figure for those who had already voted makes sense given that the poll was conducted a few days later than the Survey USA poll). Among those who intended to vote but had not yet done so, Obama led 52-40%. Thus, if these two polls are correct, Obama and Clinton are in a dead heat among the votes that are already in and Obama is relying on those who have not yet cast their ballots to generate the big margin he is expected to win by.

Two things are notable about these findings from those who have already voted. First, Obama has generally performed better among early voters in other states, which might have led us to expect him to over-perform rather than under-perform among those who had already mailed in their ballots. Second, Clinton is the candidate who has generally done better among Democrats who made their decisions in the last few days of the campaign, yet she appears to be doing better among those who have already cast their ballots.

Survey USA is set to release a new poll out of Oregon on Monday. It will be interesting to see whether these patterns persist in their last poll before election day. Stay tuned...

UPDATE (5/19, 3:00pm): Survey USA has now released their final Oregon poll (interviews conducted 5/16-5/18). It shows that 77% of Oregon Democrats have now cast their ballots and Obama now has a significant 53-44% lead among this group. Of the 23% who had not yet cast their ballots but intended to, Obama led 62-34%. The size of Obama's victory in Oregon will likely depend on how many of those 23% actually do get their ballots in on time.

The figure below shows the amount of support Obama and Clinton have in both polls from those who had already voted and those who intended to vote:

UPDATE 2 (5/19, 11:55pm): Public Policy Polling also released a survey today showing Obama with a comfortable lead among both those who had already voted and those who had not yet mailed in their ballots but intended to do so. Thanks to "x curmudgeon" for pointing out the poll.

The Mississippi Special Election: Outlier or Continuation of a Trend?

2008-05-16T11:30:00.000-04:00

Republicans certainly seemed a bit rattled after they lost their bid to retain a seat that they had previously held in Mississippi's first congressional district. Part of the reason for being so worried is that the district they lost on Tuesday was not just one that they had previously held, but also one that Bush had carried with over 62% of the vote in 2004. But was this just an outlier, or a continuation of what happened with Republicans in 2006?

The figure below plots each congressional district contested in 2006 based on the percentage of the vote Bush won in the district in 2004 and the percentage of the vote the Republican candidate won in the district in 2006. The plot is divided into quadrants. Districts in the top left quadrant are those where the Republican House candidate won a majority despite the fact that Bush did not carry the district in 2004; districts in the bottom right are those where Republican candidates did not win a majority of the vote despite the fact that Bush did carry the district in 2004.

Note that very few districts fall in the top quadrant as very few Republicans over-performed in 2006. Far more of the districts fell in the lower right quadrant with many Republican candidates losing districts that Bush carried in 2006. I added the Mississippi special election outcome to this plot to give some perspective of the extent to which this result followed what happened in 2006. The district also falls in the lower right hand quadrant, in close proximity to dozens of other districts where Republican candidates under-performed.

Of course, many of those districts in the lower right-hand quadrant are those where Democratic incumbents were running, therefore making it more difficult for the Republican candidates. Therefore, it is also instructive to look just at open seat contests, which the figure below does.

Note that when it came to open seats, not a single Republican candidate carried a district that Bush did not win in 2004. On the other hand, more than a half-dozen districts were won by Democrats in 2006 despite the fact that Bush had carried those districts two years earlier. The Mississippi special election, which was also an open seat contest, stands out as a bit more of an outlier here. There were only three open seat contests in 2006 where the Republican candidate under-performed by as much as Greg Davis did in the Mississippi 1st district this week.

Thus, the special election isn't a dramatic outlier when compared to other House elections in 2006. However, the result does suggest that prospects are not improving for Republicans; indeed, they may very well be getting worse. This is particularly true when you consider that Republicans are going to be defending a lot more open seats in 2008 than they were in 2004.

For the most recent ranking of House races by the Cook Political Report, check out this helpful chart.

Are Superdelegates Afraid of Obama at the Top of the Ticket?

2008-05-15T01:27:00.004-04:00

If you watch too much cable news coverage of the campaign (as I do) then you'll notice that one theme the pundits like to return to repeatedly is the question of whether Democratic office holders are worried that Obama will be a drag at the top of the ticket. Yesterday's special election victory for Travis Childers (D) in Mississippi seemed to temper these arguments somewhat, but it is surely something that the Clinton campaign hopes is weighing on the minds of superdelegates. After all, most of the superdelegates have to win reelection in the fall and who the Democratic nominee is may affect their prospects. Superdelegates from states and districts that tend to be more Republican may be particularly concerned with which Democratic presidential candidate their opponent will attempt to tie them to during the general election campaign.

So who do these red state/district superdelegates see as the safer choice? Well, based on those who have already declared their support, it appears as though Obama's superdelegates actually come from slightly more Republican areas than those who have endorsed Clinton. The figure below shows the percentage of the vote that Bush won in the state (or district for House members) of superdelegates who have already endorsed. In each category, Obama's superdelegates, on average, come from areas where Bush fared better in 2004 compared to Clinton's supers.

The same general pattern holds when you look at who superdelegates from strongly Republican states or districts are endorsing. The figure below presents this information. Of the senators and governors who come from states that Bush carried with more than 55% of the vote in 2004, Obama has received 17 endorsements from this group while Clinton has received the support of 12 of these superdelegates. Obama also leads among House members from districts that went 55% or more for Bush in 2004.

However, what might be most notable is that of the 28* House member superdelegates who come from districts where Bush won at least 55% of the vote in 2004, only 11 have endorsed either Obama or Clinton. The remaining 17 in this group are still undeclared. Perhaps they have decided that the safest thing for their reelection prospects is to avoid being tied to either candidate for as long as possible.

* This does not include the new House member from Mississippi, Travis Childers.

Pledged Democratic Delegate Projections: West Virginia and Beyond

2008-05-13T11:19:00.008-04:00

Even though the race for the Democratic Nomination is winding down, there are still 6 primaries left to contest. While there hasn't been the same abundance of polling in the remaining states as we've seen in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, and North Carolina, there has been at least one recent poll in 5 of those states. Based on the polls, today's primary in West Virginia looks to be a blowout in Clinton's favor. If you average the four surveys released in May from that state, you get a 61-24% advantage for Clinton. If you allocated the pledged delegates accordingly, Clinton would receive 20 delegates compared to 8 for Obama (a net gain of 12).

You can see the estimates for West Virginia and the other 5 states here:

On May 20th, the polls estimate that Obama and Clinton will split Oregon and Kentucky, with Clinton taking 3 more pledged delegates than Obama. The one state without a poll is Montana, where Obama is expected to fare well. Overall, Clinton should pick up between 122 and 124 of the remaining pledged delegates while Obama should accumlate between 93 and 95.

So, how close is Obama to actually hitting that magic number? The figure below starts with Obama's delegate (both elected and superdelegates) support as of this morning and then adds to that total the projected elected delegates he would pick up in each state (assuming an 8-8 split in Montana). As I estimated back in March, May 20th is the magic date when Obama will have a majority of the elected delegates. If he doesn't pick up one more superdelegate between now and May 20th (which is obviously very unlikely), he will be about 100 delegates shy of the 2025 figure he needs to clinch the nomination (assuming you don't include Michigan and Florida). If he didn't pick up a single superdelegate between now and June 3rd, he would end up just 66 delegates shy of the magic number.

Even though Obama has picked up at least 25 superdelegates in the past week, it seems unlikely that another 100 would endorse between now and next Tuesday. Nevertheless, I'm sure his campaign is working hard to accumulate enough superdelegates so that he will clinch the nomination after winning a state's primary rather than doing so when some unknown DNC official pledges his/her support on some random Thursday in June. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out, even if we do already know who the winner is going to be.

The End of Our Superdelegate Predictions?

2008-05-13T02:13:00.005-04:00

I got an email over the weekend that made me laugh:

"You have done great work with your superdelegate predictions. However, I think I have a model that I would bet a buck will outperform your model going forward: Model definition: if (superdelegate), then prediction = Obama"

The email was funny, particularly since I had already been mulling over whether to continue generating predictions for this very reason. Since Obama's big win in North Carolina, 21 previously unpledged superdelegates have made endorsements (not including add-ons). You can see the names along with our predictions here:

As you can see, we've gotten 17 out of these 21 endorsers (81%) correct. This would generally be very good for the model, which has usually hovered around a 70% accuracy rate since we started generating the predictions in early February. However, 81% isn't so good once you realize that if somebody had guessed that everyone was going to endorse Obama, he/she would have gotten 18 right (86%). This clearly reflects the status of the Democratic nomination race at this point: it doesn't take a statistical model to estimate what the remaining undeclared superdelegates will do at this point.

Just for fun, I did add the newly committed superdelegates to our dataset along with a variable capturing the change in dynamics after the May 6th primaries. The predictions generated by the model appear to largely match reality. There are only 31 superdelegates left on the Clinton side of the distribution with most siding with Obama:Of course, it is hard to say that even the few superdelegates falling on the right side of the distribution will actually endorse Clinton now. In short, unless something changes, from here on out I'd also take our reader's model over the one we have been using.

We began generating these predictions on February 8th and 9th. The idea behind the model at the time was to examine whether one candidate was likely to pick up more superdelegate support than the other over the coming weeks and months. Our underlying assumption was that superdelegates were politicians who were accountable to various constituencies. As such, we believed that their behavior would be relatively predictable. Based on those first predictions, I wrote:

"The pattern in the figure is pretty clear: our model estimates that there are a lot more unpledged superdelegates who are likely to support Obama over Clinton than vice versa. In fact, the Obama advantage is about 2 to 1. This is significant since Obama presently trails Clinton by nearly 100 superdelegates."

Indeed, three months later, it appears that our predictions were borne out. Obama has now passed Clinton in superdelegates just as we have always predicted he eventually would.

Despite the fact that the model seems unnecessary at this point, I will continue to update the data and check how we are doing from time to time. And if something changes in the contest and superdelegate endorsements are again up for grabs, we will be ready to jump right back into business. But, for now, I will be spending much less time focusing on the model.

I want to thank the Democratic Convention Watch website for supporting our efforts to generate these predictions and for maintaining such helpful information on the superdelegates. I also want to thank Alicia Prevost and Caitlin Zook at CCPS for working hard to collect the data we used in the model. And I definitely want to show my appreciation for all of the readers who posted comments that helped us refine and tweak the model.

For those of you who missed out on all the superdelegate prediction fun over the past few months, check out the archives of this blog and see Carl Bialik's post on it here.

Mr. Super Endorses, and We Predicted Him Correctly!

2008-05-09T13:01:00.005-04:00

UPDATED (5/10)

The superdelegate behind the blog Mrsuper.org was revealed in the past few days to be Ed Espinoza, a member of the DNC from California. Several weeks ago, when he was still anonymous, Mr. Super expressed interest in this web site's predictions, even noting that he had found his own name in our list of estimates.

Well, Mr. Super has evidently declared his support for Barack Obama and guess what? The model predicted his endorsement correctly! He was actually in the "unclear" range for the model, but the estimate was that his probability of supporting Obama was .56.

By my count, 15 (updated from 10) previously undeclared superdelegates have announced their support since May 6th and the model has gotten 12 (updated from 8) of them correct so far.* Here is the list:

* Two other superdelegates who had already declared for Clinton switched their endorsement to Obama. However, the model is not set up to predict who will switch sides, just to predict who undeclared superdelegates will support. There is also some debate about whether Ellsworth had endorsed Clinton or not. For now, I'll punt on this one.

Which Superdelegates Are Most Likely to Desert Clinton?

2008-05-08T09:00:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, Jennifer McClellan, a superdelegate from Virginia, switched her support from Clinton to Obama. A week earlier, Joe Andrew did the same. With Clinton's chances of winning the nomination shrinking even more after Tuesday, we may begin seeing even more superdelegates fleeing the Clinton campaign to support Obama. But which of Clinton's supporters are most likely to switch their support?

My model for predicting who superdelegates will endorse is not really built to estimate which superdelegates would change their endorsements. After all, making an endorsement is a very different process from choosing to switch an endorsement. However, what the model can do is provide a list of superdelegates who appear to be most mismatched. In other words, I can use the model to identify which superdelegates have endorsed Clinton when the model would've predicted that they would endorse Obama.

Here is the list of superdelegates who have endorsed Clinton despite the fact that the model suggests that they would be better matched to Obama (these are the 25 most mis-matched Clinton endorsers):

Two interesting things stand out on this list. First, most of these superdelegates come from states that Obama won. It makes sense that these superdelegates would be under some pressure to desert Clinton first given that their state went with Obama. It will be interesting to see if any of them do abandon her campaign in the coming days/weeks.

Second, several names on this list include superdelegates that have endorsed Clinton very recently. For example, Governor Mike Easley (NC), Rep. John Tanner (TN) and Rep. Tim Ryan (OH) all endorsed Clinton in the last few weeks. In the case of Tanner and Ryan, the decision to endorse Clinton is understandable given that Clinton did win their states. Easley's state went definitively for Obama, but he is term-limited and will be leaving office at the end of this year, so his endorsement of Clinton will probably not cost him much.

The (Very) High Turnout in North Carolina and Indiana

2008-05-07T11:26:00.000-04:00

One thing about yesterday's primaries that deserves further attention is the high turnout for the Democratic primaries in both states. Generally, primary turnout tends to lag far behind general election turnout. Therefore, one statistic really jumped out at me about yesterday's primaries: in both contests, turnout in the Democratic primary exceeded the number of votes Kerry won in the states in the general election. In North Carolina, over 67,000 more voters voted in the Democratic primary than cast votes for Kerry in 2004. This is particularly impressive given that North Carolina has a semi-closed primary, where Republican registrants could not participate in the Democratic primary. In Indiana, which has an open primary, over one-quarter of a million more Hoosiers voted in the Democratic primary than voted for Kerry in 2004. And Rush Limbaugh can't take credit for this gap. The exit polls indicated that 10% of Democratic primary voters identified themselves as Republicans. Even if you subtract this group from the turnout figure, Democratic participation still would've out-paced Kerry's vote by well over 100,000.

How did this play out in other primaries? The figure below plots these numbers. The diagonal line shows the point at which Democratic primary turnout and the 2004 vote for Kerry are equal. As you can see, Texas is the only other state where Democratic turnout exceeded Kerry's 2004 vote, though many other states had totals that approached the 2004 Kerry vote.

Comparing Early Voters to the Overall Electorate in North Carolina

2008-05-07T08:06:00.003-04:00

I blogged several times over the past week about the composition of early voters in North Carolina. I speculated that the demographics of early voters strong favored Obama and had likely put him firmly in the lead going into election day. The only question was whether the composition of the complete electorate would differ substantially from that of early voters. Well, the answer to that question appears to be no. Here is the comparison of early voters and the full electorate (including early voters) as provided by the exit polls. (The exit poll figures may be adjusted over the next few days).

	% of Early Voters	Exit Poll
Men	38.7%	43%
Women	60.8%	57%

White	56.5%	62%
Black	39.9%	34%

White Women	33.2%	34%
White Men	23.1%	27%

African Americans voted early in larger numbers than they did overall, suggesting an impressive organizational effort to bank their votes. White women, the core Clinton constituency in most states, made up one-third of early voters and not much more of the electorate that voted on the day of the contest. White men appeared to be the least likely to take advantage of early voting, as they made up only 23% of early voters but 27% of the electorate overall.

All told, 404,599 North Carolinians voted early in the Democratic primary compared to 1,188,370 who cast their ballots on the day of the election. Thus, early voters made up about one-fourth of the electorate in North Carolina.

On a related note, I have already said this several times, but kudos go out to the North Carolina Board of Elections for having one of the best websites out there. The early voting figures on the site were updated constantly and on election night the site reporting of the results was particularly well done with tons of great features. Whoever their web designer is deserves a big raise.

Zogby is One of the Night's (Other) Big Winners

2008-05-07T01:24:00.006-04:00

Certainly the news media is emphasizing that Obama is the night's big winner. But as I noted earlier, there were five pollsters who released polls in both states in the last few days and they didn't always make the same predictions. I've reproduced the figure from that post here, but added the actual results from tonight's voting (at least as they stand now, with 99% reporting in both states).

As you can see, Survey USA was the night's big loser, at least as far as pollsters go. They were estimating a good night for Clinton, including a 12% win in Indiana and a mere 5% win for Obama in North Carolina. On the opposite end, Zogby was the big winner. Zogby came closest to the North Carolina result by predicting a 14% victory for him in that state. Zogby was also the only pollster to have predicted an Obama win in Indiana, though Clinton ended up winning by about that margin. Of course, lest any pollster get a big head, these pollsters have been in the opposite positions (Zogby as the big loser and Survey USA as the big winner) in earlier primaries this year.

UPDATE: I should've added that Public Policy Polling was also fairly accurate relative to the other pollsters and, unlike Zogby, they had the winner right in both states.

UPDATE: Who needs polls? As one of our readers points out:

"Probabay the best prediction was Poblano at the 538 website, who's demographic model predicted Obama +18 in NC (final was +15), and Clinton +2 in Indiana (right on). Poblano also came very close in Penn."

May 6th Primaries: Live Blog

2008-05-06T18:00:00.055-04:00

1:22AM: Looks like Lake County fell short for Obama and Clinton will have won Indiana by about 20-25K votes. This victory, however, is much smaller than most expected and Obama's margin in North Carolina was bigger than most estimates in the last few days. Clinton will possibly take a net gain of 1 or 3 delegates from Indiana while Obama will likely take a net gain of more than 10 delegates from North Carolina. All in all, Obama's big night allows him to cancel out the gains (in delegates and popular vote) that Clinton made in Pennsylvania two weeks ago.

Clinton has canceled her morning talk show appearances and is said to be contemplating what her next move is. Obama, in the meantime, is evidently planning to take on the air of a presumptive nominee.

This is a split decision that clearly favors Obama. Now, will large numbers of superdelegates begin falling in line behind his campaign? It may not take too long to find out the answer to that question.

Thanks for everyone who followed this blog tonight. According to Google Analytics, there were well over 1,000 visitors on this blog today and that number should increase since we are still waiting for the numbers to come in from Lake County.

1:00AM: Just noticed that the exit poll estimates have been revised (as they typically are to come in to line with where turnout is greater) and African American turnout in Indiana is now estimated to have been 18%. That is up from a 14% figure reported earlier. As I noted a few days ago, assumptions about African American turnout were driving the different poll figures we were seeing in the state. Blacks turned out at a greater rate than most pollsters expected in Indiana and that significantly affected the outcome.

12:40AM: The early voters in North Carolina went a little more strongly for Obama than did those who voted today, but the difference wasn't huge. With just a few precincts left, Obama won 59% of the early vote and 55% of the votes that came in today. As it stands now, 25% of the total vote came from early voters.

12:27AM: I think the networks are so focused on Lake County that they forgot about Monroe County. With 97% of the precincts in there, Obama won the county by a little over 5k votes. That is 1k more than the network sites are currently showing.

12:12AM: Tim Russert just said, pointedly, "We now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be and nobody is going to dispute it."

12:09AM: The CNN discussion right now is focusing on whether there is some conspiracy behind why it took so long for the Lake County returns to be reported. The Hammond (also in Lake County) mayor is on saying he turned in his vote hours ago.

11:59PM: Worth noting now that things has closed is that there are a small number of uncounted votes in Indianapolis and 1/3 of the vote still out in Bloomington.

11:55PM: Also worth noting is that Obama's margin (in total votes) in NC looks like it will be slightly bigger than her margin in Pennsylvania, wiping out any gains Clinton made in the popular vote gap two weeks ago.

11:49PM: It is important to note at this point that who wins or loses Indiana has little practical importance when it comes to delegates. It may mean the difference between one delegate. The only reason we care about this is perception...it will drastically effect how her candidacy is viewed by the media and superdelegates in the coming days.

11:45PM: Lake County is beginning to come in and it is already making a difference. Obama just cut Clinton's lead in half, from about 40k to about 20k.

11:32PM: Evidently the mayor of Gary is saying that there may very well be enough votes for Obama to take over the lead.

11:29PM: Turnout in the Democratic primary in NC has already topped 1.5 million. That is as many as voted for John Kerry in the 2004 general election. To get that kind of turnout in a primary is truly impressive.

11:04PM: Tim Russert reports that there are still 220k votes uncounted in Indiana. Clinton's lead is about 40k. If Russert is right, Obama needs to win about 60% of the outstanding vote to win Indiana. Certainly a possibility.

10:49PM: Clinton holds about a 40k lead over Obama and Lake County still has not come in. At this point, I'd say that it is unlikely that there are enough votes there for Obama to overtake her lead. Not impossible, but unlikely.

10:42PM: Oops, rest of Tippecanoe County just came in. It went 58% for Obama (he picked up about 5k votes there).

10:40PM: Here are the counties that still have significant votes that haven't been reported:
Porter County (about 30% missing) going 58% for Clinton so far.
LaPorte County (about 50% missing) going slightly for Clinton so far.
Tippecanoe County (about 50% missing) going 60% for Obama so far.
Monroe County (about 50% missing) going 66% for Obama so far.
Hamilton County (about 10% missing) going 60% for Obama so far.
Lake County (100% missing) supposed to go for Obama.
Union County (100% missing) not much vote there, even when they do come in.

10:16PM: Key statistic on Lake County: about 25% of the population there is African American. Is that, and its closeness to Chicago, enough to produce the big margins that Obama needs there?

10:09PM: Just to give you a sense of how many votes could be in Lake County, in 2004, about 115K voted for John Kerry in Lake. If there are 100K votes there, Obama needs to win about 2/3 of them to have a shot at pulling out a win.

10:05PM: Tim Russert now says that Lake County may not be in until 11pm. Evidently extra ballot counters were brought in to count the votes (are we doing this the old fashion way?). In the meantime, Clinton is supposed to be teaching soon, but what can she say without having won anything yet?

9:55PM: Evidently Lake County will begin reporting at 10pm. That county is going to decide Indiana. But even if Obama comes up short, he appears to be the clear winner tonight, at least as much of a winner as one can be when they lose one and win one.

9:52PM: There was a lot of Zogby bashing going on by the readers at Pollster.com and other sites over the last week or so. But at this point, it looks like he is going to be closest to getting both NC and IN right.

9:42PM: Chuck Todd says the Obama campaign thinks that they will come up just short (by about 10-15k or so). If it ends up that close, then there is no way CBS could've confidently known that he was going to win the state an hour ago. Unless something odd happens and it doesn't tighten significantly, the call was a mistake, regardless of whether or not they end up being wrong at the end of the night.

9:25PM: Here is why Indiana is now too CLOSE to call:
Monroe County (Bloomington) is only 10% in.
Marion County (Indianapolis) still has about 1/4 of the vote not in.
Hamilton County (Wealth suburbs of Indianapolis) is only 1/3 in.
Lake and LaPorte Counties (Chicago area) are reporting nothing.

These should all be Obama areas. Clinton is up by less than 50k votes now. Are there enough votes for him in these counties? Quite possibly.

9:15PM: Obama just congratulated Clinton on "what appears to be her victory" in Indiana. Does he know something we don't or is he unaware of how things are tightening there?

9:12PM: Will CBS end up with egg on its face? MSNBC just changed its IN statement from "too EARLY to call" to "too CLOSE to call." The change is important, because it reflects that the vote there is tightening and still not a single vote in from Gary.

9:10PM: This is a rare night (at least compared to the last several election nights) where Obama gets to come out early to celebrate while Clinton sits back and waits out "her" state's results.

8:52PM: CBS was too early in calling Indiana. Only about half of the Marion County vote is in, and he is winning that by about 25K votes. If he wins the second half by the same margin, that cuts her lead in half. And not a single vote has come in from Gary yet. IF Clinton wins this state, it is going to be fairly close and I think the votes are out there for Obama to catch up. I'm not saying it WILL happen, but it certainly COULD and the early call from CBS was probably too soon.

8:48PM: The NC Board of Elections has a top-notch website complete with county maps and all sorts of other tools for looking at the primary results. The IN Secretary of State site struggles to calculate percentages. I'm just saying...

8:44PM: Wow, quite an exchange between Paul Begala and Donna Brazile on CNN. The long primary campaign appears to be wearing on even them.

8:29PM: On MSNBC, Howard Fineman just said that the Obama campaign now thinks that May 20th will be the day they wrap up the nomination because that is when they will have a majority of pledged delegates. Sound familiar? Well, I blogged this very point on March 31st. This is what I wrote then:

"Based on the delegate totals that Obama's campaign thinks he will win in the upcoming states (from the memo that the campaign inadvertently sent to a Bloomberg reporter), Obama would pass this milestone on May 20th, after picking up 28 delegates in Oregon and 23 in Kentucky. ... If he does clinch this on May 20th, might Clinton call it quits at that point? Certainly she would be facing increasing calls to get out of the race if she stayed in. In addition, on the 20th, she will likely have won Kentucky but lost Oregon. Thus, she would be able to leave the campaign on a day that she carried a state. The only states voting after the 20th are Puerto Rico and then Montana and South Dakota. She could win Puerto Rico, but she is likely to lose Montana and South Dakota and none of these states will do much to change the delegate count. If she left the race on May 20th, she could do it on a relatively high note and on her own terms, whereas anything after that may make it look like she was forced."

8:26PM: The NC Board of Elections breaks out the early vote differently from those voting today. It appears as though they've counted a little more than half of the early vote so far, and Obama leads with 61%. His percentage among election day votes counted so far is 54%.

8:18PM: Good thing Obama was in North Carolina this afternoon. He wouldn't have been able to do this in Indiana this afternoon. Bars in Indiana are closed while the polls are open. Wouldn't want anyone drinking and voting.

8:15PM: Evidently CBS called Indiana for Clinton. I would imagine that the other networks will follow soon. But still no vote in from Gary.

8:00PM: Here is the comparison between early voters and the racial and gender composition of the NC exit polls:

	% of Early Voters	Exit Poll
Men	38.7%	43%
Women	60.8%	57%

White	56.5%	62%
Black	39.9%	33%

White Women	33.2%	35%
White Men	23.1%	28%

7:55PM: 19% in North Carolina are voting in their first primary...they favor Obama 68-28%.

7:50PM: Clinton holds a comfortable lead in IN right now, but only 11% of Marion County (Indianapolis) is in and nothing in yet from Lake County (Gary).

7:47PM: Some talk on MSNBC right now about whether Superdelegates will start flocking to Obama (and calling on Clinton to leave the race) if Obama wins as big as it appears in North Carolina tonight.

7:40PM: The early exit polls are showing a 55-41% lead for Obama in NC. Usually, his lead shrinks, but I'll be curious to see if it does this time. We already know that the exit polls are overestimating the percentage of early voters who were white women, which would seem to inflate Clinton's support.

7:35PM: The initial exit polls indicate that blacks were 33% of the NC Democratic electorate. Will be interesting to see if that number creeps upwards closer to the 40% figure for early voters. But the work that the Obama campaign and other groups did in getting African Americans out early in NC is one of the most under-told stories of the campaign.

7:30PM: At the minute the polls close, most networks call NC for Obama. That's big for him, since it likely means a big victory. No unpleasant surprises for Obama tonight.

7:29PM: Apparently Romney and Huckabee were both on the IN Republican ballot. What will a strong second place showing mean for Huckabee's VP chances? What does languishing in 4th do for Romney's? Probably nothing at all!

Candidate	Vote	%
John McCain	42,744	76.4%
Mike Huckabee	5,990	10.7
Ron Paul	4,354	7.8
Mitt Romney	2,841	5.1

7:26PM: Question: will the networks be able to call NC right away? If not, how long will it take?

7:21PM: 21% of those voting in the IN Democratic primary were voting in a primary for the first time ever. That group went for Obama 59-40%.

7:11PM: According to early exit polls, 14% of IN voters were black. That is slightly higher than most pollsters were estimating, but lower than the Howey-Gauge poll that showed Obama ahead. (See here)

7:03PM: Networks say Indiana is too EARLY to call. Suggests Clinton wins by 5-10%?

6:59PM: MSNBC notes that exit polls show that 37% of early voters are white women. That figure is actually higher than the actual number, which is 33%.

6:50PM: The New York Times, perhaps inadvertently, has put the following exit poll data from Indiana online:

% of total		Clinton	Obama
14	17-29 years old	42	58
23	30-44 years old	43	57
34	45-59 years old	51	49
29	60 years old and older	67	33
85	Less than $100,000	52	47
15	$100,000 or more	52	48
17	Today/In the last three days	62	38
82	Sometime last week or earlier	50	50

Based on these figures (particularly the income figures) it looks like Clinton is up 52-47% in the early exit polls. Keep in mind, as well, that Obama usually does better in these than he ends up doing in the actual vote totals.

Obama did well among younger voters, but the 60+ crowd remains a tough group for him.

6:33PM: Interesting that the networks are expected to wait to call states until everyone has voted, yet election boards in Indiana are already reporting their vote totals. Ah, the ethical questions raised when your state spans time zones.

6:17PM: In case you hadn't noticed.

6:00PM: The polls just closed in most of Indiana. However, the areas near Chicago are on central time, so they have another hour to vote.

Some things to think about tonight:

1) Beware of early vote totals, particularly in NC. We already know that Obama is going to win big among early voters in NC. In Texas, the early voting returns were the first to come out, so Obama held a lead for the first few hours after the polls closed there. Eventually, Clinton overtook Obama based on the vote from the day of the primary.

2) For the same reason as above, be especially skeptical about the early exit polls. These have tended to favor Obama, but will they in NC when so many Obama supporters voted early?

3) The memo accidentally released by the Obama campaign after Super Tuesday projected that he would win Indiana 53-46% and North Carolina 53-45%. The IN result seems doubtful, the NC prediction may be closer to the mark.

4) What will African American turnout be in NC and IN? In NC, 40% of early voters were black, but pollsters have been estimating that African Americans would make up about 30-35% of the NC electorate. If it is closer to the 40% figure, it should be a blowout for Obama. Closer to the 30% figure, and it is a tight race. In IN, black turnout will also be very important. Most polls were estimating that African Americans would make up about 10-12% of the Democratic electorate. If that number climbs higher, the chances of an Obama upset increase.

Final Democratic Delegate Estimates for North Carolina and Indiana

2008-05-06T10:56:00.005-04:00

It looks like all of the pollsters have weighed in with their final polls at this point. Therefore, I'll go ahead and make the final poll-based predictions on how the delegates will be allocated according to tonight's primaries. As always, I use the Pollster.com averages to generate these estimates.

As you can see, the polls suggest that Clinton will take a net gain of 4 delegates from the Indiana primary while Obama would take 9 from his victory in North Carolina. Overall, Obama would take 5 more delegates from today's primaries than Clinton.

Of course, the polls have varied significantly in both Indiana and North Carolina and certain pollsters sometimes seem to favor particular candidates. As a result, we can also put together a best-case scenario for each candidate. Five survey firms have polled both Indiana and North Carolina during the final week of the campaign. The margins those firms give to Obama in each state are plotted below.

What is notable about this figure is that four of the five pollsters fall on a diagonal line across the scatter plot (only Insider Advantage falls off this line). This indicates that the pollsters who see Obama doing better in NC also see him doing better in IN, and vice versa. You wouldn't necessarily expect this to be the case unless these firms are using assumptions that systematically advantage one candidate in both states.

Zogby would have to be the favored pollster of Obama supporters. He is the only pollster (of these five) who projects an Obama win in Indiana and he also has Obama winning by the largest margin in North Carolina (14%). If Zogby is correct, Obama would take a net gain of about 20 pledged delegates from today's primaries. More importantly, the calls for Clinton to leave the race would likely intensify.

On the other hand, Survey USA has to be the Clinton campaign's favored pollster. They see Clinton winning by 12% in Indiana and only losing North Carolina by 5%. If this happened, Clinton would likely win two or three more delegates than Obama today.

So, what will it be? Will the results follow the Pollster.com averages and produce 5-10% margins for Clinton in Indiana and Obama in North Carolina? Will Obama or Clinton have a better day than expected, as forecast by Zogby or Survey USA? We only have a few more hours to wait.

And don't forget, I'll be live blogging this evening as the results come in. Should be interesting.

UPDATE: Check out Mark Blumenthal's excellent post on the IN and NC polls here.

Final Pre-Election Analysis of North Carolina Early Voters

2008-05-06T09:11:00.002-04:00

I noticed this morning that the North Carolina State Board of Elections has updated their early voting data and added a few more early voters. In all, they now report that 495,828 North Carolinians have voted early in advance of today's primary. The vast majority of these early voters (406,125) are casting their ballots in the Democratic primary.

While the number of those voting early in the Democratic primary has increased slightly since I posted on Sunday, the race, gender and party balance of these voters has remained the same.

	% of Early Voters
Men	38.7%
Women	60.8%

White	56.5%
Black	39.9%

White Women	33.2%
White Men	23.1%

Democrat	84.1%
Unaffiliated	15.8%

I've already blogged about how the composition of these early voters would seem to strongly favor Obama. So let's look at some other information about early voters.

The congressional district with the most early voters is district 4. This district includes both Chapel Hill and Durham and has a significant African American population (about 21%). The district with the second most early voters is the 11th district, which is Heath Shuler's district in the western most tip of the state. This district has a much smaller minority population and is often viewed as a more conservative district in the state.

Some other statistics of early voters:

# of Early Voters in Top Cities
Charlotte 39,216
Raleigh 23,881
Greensboro 20,596
Durham 19,276
Fayetteville 14,728
Winston Salem 14,182
Chapel Hill 13,628
Asheville 11,051
Wilmington 10,071

Precincts with most Early Voters
Nashville (Nash County) 1,099
Pittsboro (Chatham County) 1,096
West Williams (Chatham County) 1,073
Precinct 44 (Durham County) 1,041

And your totally pointless statistic:

Most popular first names of Early Voters
James 10,577
Mary 8,953
William 8,337
John 7,871
Robert 7,616

Check the blog tonight as I will be live-blogging as the returns come in. Polls close in Indiana at 6pm (though since parts of the state are in the Eastern Time Zone, they effectively close at 7pm). Polls close in North Carolina 30 minutes later.

Updated Democratic Superdelegate Predictions: Introducing New Variables and Subtracting Others

2008-05-06T00:42:00.008-04:00

If you read Carl Bialik's story about my superdelegate predictions, you'll recall that he mentioned that one factor that I could consider adding was which candidate the other committed superdelegates in the same state were supporting. This was easy enough to create, so I added it and when I did, it was a very significant predictor. This isn't too surprising since superdelegates from the same state are often facing the same considerations when making their decision. In fact, this new variable was so important that it washed out the effects of other predictors that I had been using, such as the percentage of the state's population that belonged to a union, the percent living in urban areas, the percent with a college degree, and the per capita income in the state. Therefore, I am revising the methodology for the predictions to simplify the model and, hopefully, give it greater predictive power at the same time.

I now include just 5 variables to predict who superdelegates will endorse. These variables are the gender of the superdelegate, the presidential vote in the superdelegate's state or congressional district (for House members), the percentage of the state's superdelegates who are supporting Clinton, whether Clinton or Obama won the state's primary/caucus, and whether the superdelegate made their endorsement before or after Super Tuesday. The last variable accounts for the fact that people who didn't line up behind Clinton early, when she was the front runner, are far less likely to endorse her now. Indeed, this proves to be a very important predictor in the model (and failing to include it changes the predictions substantially as I'll show below).

Based on this new model, I have now updated the superdelegate predictions. As always, information on the superdelegates is provided by the Democratic Convention Watch site. In the figure below, I present the distribution of unpledged superdelegates based on the probability of supporting Clinton: Superdelegates who are between 40% and 60% likely to vote for Clinton/Obama are labeled as "unclear." There are 61 superdelegates in this range. There are 139 unpledged superdelegates who are at least 60% likely to vote for Obama; just 41 unpledged superdelegates are at least 60% likely to vote for Clinton. These predictions suggest that unless something dramatically changes, Obama will be able to cut into and even overtake Clinton's superdelegate lead in the coming weeks and months.

The estimates for each unpledged superdelegate are listed here. Note that I am now generating predictions for superdelegates in NY, AR, and IL, which I was not doing previously. Not surprisingly, all unpledged superdelegates in NY and AR are estimated to go for Clinton while all unpledged IL superdelegates are predicted to support Obama.

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FOR THOSE INTERESTED:

I do want to return to a point I made above. It matters quite a bit if you include a variable in the model that accounts for when a superdelegate made his/her endorsement. This variable captures whether a superdelegate endorsed before Super Tuesday or if they endorsed after (or have not yet endorsed). This variable is intended to capture the dynamic aspect of the race that led many superdelegates to endorse Clinton before Super Tuesday, but then caused more to flock to Obama after Super Tuesday. But what happens if you ignore this factor? The figure below presents predictions from a model that removes the variable accounting for when a superdelegate made his/her decision.

As this figure clearly indicates, the predictions change dramatically when you don't account for the timing of a superdelegate's decision. In this model, 72 unpledged superdelegates are in the "unclear" range, 71 are at least 60% likely to endorse Obama and 98 are at least 60% likely to endorse Clinton. Thus, ignoring the dynamics of the race tends to favor Clinton. However, it is important to note that even in this scenario, Clinton would likely not pick up enough superdelegates to overtake Obama's overall delegate lead.

Analysis of Early Voters in North Carolina: Obama in the Lead?

2008-05-04T10:43:00.007-04:00

I have now posted several times on the composition of early voters in North Carolina. My last post analyzed those who had voted early through Thursday (May 1st). Since then, there has been a huge spike in the number of early voters. The figure below shows the number of early votes by date, with over 80,000 cast on Friday (May 2nd) and nearly 60,000 cast on Saturday (May 3rd).

In total, 486,786 valid early votes have been cast at this point with 398,635 (82%) of these being cast in the Democratic primary. Assuming these numbers don't change, about 13% of registered Democrats cast their votes early for this primary while 5% of unaffiliated North Carolinians voted early in the Democratic primary. It is hard to know just how much of the total vote that early voters will represent, but in 2004, about 1.5 million voted for John Kerry in the general election. Perhaps that gives us a sense of what a large turnout primary will look like. If we assume that turnout in the Democratic primary will be in the 1.5 - 2 million range, then between one-fourth and one-fifth of the electorate has already voted. If turnout is going to be less, then early voters represent an even larger share.

What do these early voters look like? Below, I present the gender, race, and party registration figures for those voting early in the Democratic primary.

	% of Early Voters
Men	39%
Women	61%

White	57%
Black	40%

White Women	33%
White Men	23%

Democrat	84%
Unaffiliated	16%

The most remarkable figure to note here is that 40% of early voters were African-American, a figure that is up from 37% earlier this week. It is important to note that most of the polls being conducted in North Carolina are assuming African-American turnout of about one-third; if it is closer to 40%, then this clearly will advantage Obama.

Clinton's most loyal supporters, white women, make up about one-third of early voters. The "swing" group of white men make up nearly one-quarter of early voters in North Carolina. Finally, voters registered as "unaffiliated" make up 16% of the electorate so far.

If we assume that Obama wins 85% of the African-American vote, just 30% of white women and 40% of white men and then we split the remaining 6% of the early voters (those in the "other" category) evenly between Obama and Clinton, then Obama is currently leading Clinton among early voters by a margin of 56-44%. In terms of raw numbers, that would give Obama a lead of somewhere close to 50k votes. And this estimate is probably slightly on the conservative side since Obama could very well win 90% or more of the black vote and could do a bit better among white men and women (indeed, reader "x curmudgeon" notes that surveys show early voters going 63-31% in favor of Obama).

So, Obama is almost certainly ahead by a significant amount at this point. The question is whether the composition of the electorate voting on the day of the primary will look like early voters. If it does, then Obama should have a very good day. But if African American turnout on the day of the primary doesn't match that among early voters, then this race could end up being much closer.

Update: dean4ever has posted a similar analysis today.

Who is Winning the Early Vote in North Carolina?

2008-05-02T21:03:00.002-04:00

As of Friday morning, 271,388 voters had cast valid ballots for the Democratic primary in North Carolina. So which candidate is faring better among these early voters?

The votes themselves won't be counted until the polls close on May 6th, but we can get a sense of who is ahead based on the race and gender of those who have already voted. As has often been noted during this campaign, race and gender tend to be highly correlated with vote choice. African-Americans have voted for Obama at rates upward of 85-90%. On the other hand, about 65-70% of white women have supported Clinton. White men have been a little less predictable. Obama won 58% of the white male vote in Virginia, 43% in Pennsylvania, and just 38% in Ohio.

So far, the early voters in North Carolina break down as follows:

	% of Early Voters
Black	38%
White Women	34%
White Men	24%
Other	6%
Total	271,388

Let's assume that Obama is winning 85% of the African-American vote, just 30% of white women and 40% of white men. We'll split the remaining 6% of the early voters (those in the "other" category) evenly between Obama and Clinton. Under these assumptions, Obama is currently leading Clinton among early voters by a margin of 55-45%. In terms of raw numbers, that would give Obama a lead of somewhere between 27,000 and 28,000 votes. And this estimate is probably slightly on the conservative side since Obama could very well win 90% or more of the black vote and could potentially do a bit better among white men and women.

So, Obama is almost certainly ahead by a significant amount at this point. The question is whether the composition of the electorate voting on the day of the primary will look like early voters. If it does, then Obama should have a very good day. But if African American turnout on the day of the primary doesn't match that among early voters, then this race could end up being much closer.

Race and the Divergent Indiana Polls

2008-05-02T08:40:00.001-04:00

UDPATED (5/2, 12:29pm): I have replaced the earlier American Research Group survey with the one released today and added the Downs Center poll that was just released.

I spent 5 years in Bloomington, IN while I got my PhD from Indiana University so I can tell you first-hand that the state is not the most racially diverse place. Yet, as I poured over the polling released over the past week in advance of the Indiana primary I came to realize that the relatively small African American population in Indiana may play a fairly significant role in the Democratic nomination race.

There have been several polls released out of Indiana during the past week. Surveys by Howey-Gauge and Research 2000 put Obama in a statistical dead-heat with Clinton, while surveys conducted by Public Policy Polling, Survey USA, TeleResearch, and American Research Group. One explanation for these divergent results may be the assumptions that pollsters are making about black turnout in the state. The figure below plots the percentage of each polling firm's sample that was black and the margin for Obama.

Note that most of the pollsters are using samples that are about 10-12% black, while Howey-Gauge stands out for its sample which was one-fifth African American. (Unfortunately, I was unable to track down the racial makeup of the Research 2000 poll, which also showed a statistical dead-heat). It is not surprising to find that the one survey organization who assumes much higher black turnout would be the one organization showing a small lead for Obama (rather than a significant deficit).

But which polling firm is making the right assumptions? African Americans make up about 9% of Indiana's population, but what percentage of the Democratic electorate might they comprise? Unfortunately, the Indiana presidential primary has not mattered for quite some time, so there is really no baseline for understanding what African American turnout would be in a typical presidential primary. Therefore, the best I can do here is use exit polls from the 2004 general election to get a sense of what share of the Democratic electorate is comprised of African American voters.

According to the exit polls, about 17% of Hoosiers who voted for John Kerry in 2004 were black. This figure is closer to the Howey-Gauge estimates than those being used by the other pollsters. On the other hand, blacks made up 15% of all Indiana voters who identified as Democrats in 2004, and 13% of those identifying as Democrats or independents. This figure would fall closer to the what the other pollsters are estimating for African American turnout in this primary.

Ultimately, we don't really know what to expect in terms of African American turnout. If it is around 10%, then it looks like Clinton may win by 5-10%. If black turnout approaches 20%, then Obama may be able to pull out a narrow victory that would go a long way to ending the race. Could African Americans in Indiana really play such a decisive role? Possibly.

Democratic Delegate Estimates for North Carolina and Indiana

2008-05-01T16:20:00.004-04:00

With the May 6th primaries fast approaching, there have been a slew of new polls conducted in Indiana and North Carolina. But how do these polls translate into predictions of how many delegates each candidate might receive in the May 6th primaries? As usual, I'm using the Pollster.com poll averages from each state to estimate how many delegates Obama and Clinton will receive in each state. These estimates are presented here:

Based on these estimates, Clinton would take a net gain of 8 pledged delegates from Indiana while Obama would take a net advantage of 17 delegates from North Carolina. Overall, this would give Obama a net gain of 9 pledged delegates from the May 6th primaries.

My final estimate for the Pennsylvania primary was an 84-74 delegate split in favor of Clinton. Right now, MSNBC is showing an 83-73 split from Pennsylvania with two delegates still to be allocated. This means that, at most, Clinton will have taken a 12 delegate edge from her victory in Pennsylvania and, if the current estimates are correct, Obama will make most of that up on May 6th. As if the point needs to be belabored any further, barring something extraordinary, it is impossible for Clinton to catch up to Obama in pledged delegates at this point.

What else do these estimates mean? Well, I'm correct, Obama will have about 1,590 pledged delegates in his column by Wednesday morning. If you do not include Florida or Michigan, a candidate needs 1,627 to clinch a majority of the total pledged delegates. He will be about 30 delegates away from that mark. If you add in superdelegates, Obama presently stands at 1,739 (according to MSNBC) with 2,024 needed to capture a majority. By Wednesday morning, he should be less than 200 delegates away from that magic number.

How do the North Carolina Polls Compare to the Composition of Early Voters?

2008-04-29T23:35:00.006-04:00

In the last two days, surveys of North Carolinians have shown a 12 point Obama lead (Public Policy Polling), a 10 point Obama lead (American Research Group) and a 5 point Obama lead (Survey USA). So far, we aren't seeing the widely divergent polling results that we had about a week before the Pennsylvania primary. On the other hand, there is a big difference between a 5 point Obama lead and a 12 point lead. After all, the former will be seen by pundits as a Clinton win while a double-digit margin would be enough for Obama to claim victory.

For the surveys leading up to Pennsylvania, I blogged about comparisons between the demographic compositions of the samples drawn by different pollsters. I present some similar comparisons here between the last three polls taken in North Carolina. However, North Carolina's Board of Elections offers us an additional interesting tool in evaluating the composition of these surveys' samples--a tally of actual early voters. As of Tuesday morning, over 144,000 voters had cast early ballots in the Democratic presidential primary. The racial, gender, and party balance of those voters is presented in the table below.

For the most part, the composition of the pollsters' samples appear to be fairly close to that of those who have voted early so far. However, there are some small differences. For example, each polling organization has African Americans comprising one-third of their sample, but so far they have made up 37% of early voters. In addition, 59% of early voters have been women, but the pollsters samples are comprised of slightly fewer women. On the whole, when it comes to race, gender, and party registration, American Research Group appears to have a sample that most closely mirrors the composition of early voters. However, it is important to note that the differences across polling organizations are not major.

One final important point to make is that early voters are not necessarily a representative cross-section of the eventual electorate. Research suggests that those who take advantage of early voting tend to be of higher socioeconomic status than the regular electorate. Only 4.5% of registered Democrats have voted early so far while about 1.8% of those registered as unaffiliated have early voted in the Democratic primary. Bottom line: the early voting figures may be a guide to the eventual composition of the electorate, but right now they represent just a small share of everyone who will eventually vote in this primary.

Answering Questions About the Superdelegate Predictions

2008-04-28T15:09:00.006-04:00

Since I've begun generating the Superdelegate predictions, I've gotten several questions from readers about how I generate the predictions or why various things are missing from the model. For some of the questions, you might find answers in Carl Bialik's recent blog posting about this site. I've also taken a stab at three questions below...

1) What about John Edwards (or other missing superdelegates)?

We originally left out special superdelegates, like John Edwards (CORRECTION: John Edwards is NOT a superdelegate), who are in their position because they are a former president, speaker of the House, etc. The issue with these delegates is that unlike active politicians, they don't have an obvious constituency, which makes their behavior far less predictable.

If you were assume that John Edwards' constituency is the people of North Carolina, then the model would likely predict that he would support Obama (as it does for other male politicians from North Carolina). However, he is a bit of a free agent since he doesn't really have to answer to any particular group, and that makes it far more difficult to model his behavior (or that of other superdelegates like him).

CORRECTION: Thanks to Matt from the Democratic Convention Watch site for pointing out that John Edwards is NOT a superdelegate. Being a VP candidate on a losing ticket does not qualify you for a vote. Since we took our superdelegate list straight from the Democratic Convention Watch website, Edwards has never been in our dataset, so this has not affected our predictions.

2) Why is race not also included in the model? I would expect that it would have similar predictive power to sex.

When my research assistants originally collected the data for these models it was very hard to find information like race on some of the superdelegates who are not governors or members of Congress. Many of these superdelegates were not well known and google searches revealed little to us about their race or ethnicity. This remains true about at least some of the superdelegates. Therefore, we had to exclude this variable from the model. If there is a central source of information that would allow us to fill in the holes on the race of superdelegates, let me know and we will add it to the model.

For what it's worth, I re-ran the model with the superdelegates that I did know the race of and found that the race of the superdelegate was NOT a statistically significant predictor of who a superdelegate chose to support.

3) Does your methodology take into account the fact that a large number of pledged superdelegates made their commitments (primarily) to Clinton prior to anyone believing that there would be a viable alternative candidate?

We use a two-stage model that allows us to account first for the factors affecting whether a superdelegate has endorsed at all and then estimates which candidate that superdelegate endorsed (if he/she has endorsed). To some extent, this should pick up some of the fact that potential Clinton endorsers were more likely to have already endorsed while more potential Obama supporters may be waiting to make sure he is going to actually pull out the nomination. Nevertheless, in recent works I have begun considering a different approach, by attempting to model when superdelegates made their decisions (for example, before or after Super Tuesday) and include that as a factor in the model. I may do that in the next iteration of the predictions.

Thanks for the questions, and let me know if you have more.

Early Voting for North Carolina Presidential Primary

2008-04-28T10:17:00.004-04:00

The North Carolina State Board of Elections does something very cool--they put all of their early voting data up on their website for easy download. So, of course I just had to download the data this morning and do a little crunching to see what types of people are voting early for the May 6th primary.

Based on the data I downloaded this morning, 144,440 voters have cast valid early ballots so far in North Carolina. Of that number, 117,655 have requested a Democratic ballot for the primary (only 26,371 have requested a Republican ballot, with the rest taking an unaffiliated ballot). Based on party registration figures included in the data, 68.6% of early voters are registered Democrats, 16.1% are registered Republicans, and 15.3% are registered as unaffiliated. 84% of the early voters who are registered as unaffiliated voted in the Democratic party. These voters make up 15.8% of those who have already voted in the Democratic primary with Democrats making up the rest.

The great thing about this data is that it includes the race and gender of those who have voted early, so we can take a look at a few different demographics. The table below presents the racial and gender makeup of early voters in North Carolina so far:

	% of Early Voters
White	59.10%
Black	37.20%

Male	40.40%
Female	59.10%

White Men	25.20%
White Women	33.70%

It certainly bodes well for Barack Obama that over one-third of the early voters are African American, since this group has supported him at such a high rate. White women, on the other hand, have been a very strong group for Hillary Clinton, and they also make up one-third of the early voters in the state.

I'll present some more information from these data as the week goes on.

Updated Democratic Superdelegate Predictions

2008-04-26T13:05:00.010-04:00

UPDATED AT 9:45PM ON APRIL 26TH

I have now had a change to update the superdelegate predictions. As always, I use information about the superdelegates who have committed to a candidate to generate predictions for the remaining unpledged superdelegates. I exclude superdelegates from DC and the territories because we lack complete data from those areas, and from IL, NY, and AR because superdelegates in those states have nearly unanimously cast their support for their native son/daughter. As always, information on the superdelegates is provided by the Democratic Convention Watch site. You can find more about the methodology I use here. Since I began generating these predictions, 106 superdelegates have announced their endorsements, and we have been correct on 74 of these. Thus, overall, the models have been correct 70% of the time.

In addition to adding the newest endorsements to the model, I have also added information about the add-on superdelegates who have been designated at this point. We are unable to predict how most add-ons will vote since we don't know who they are yet. But I added those who have been selected to the model (most add-ons have already endorsed one of the candidates).

In the figure below, I present the distribution of unpledged superdelegates based on the probability of supporting Clinton:Superdelegates who are between 40% and 60% likely to vote for Clinton/Obama are labeled as "unclear." There are 77 superdelegates in this range. There are 129 unpledged superdelegates who are at least 60% likely to vote for Obama; just 38 unpledged superdelegates are at least 60% likely to vote for Clinton. These predictions suggest that unless something dramatically changes, Obama will be able to cut into and even overtake Clinton's superdelegate lead in the coming weeks and months.

The estimates for each unpledged superdelegate are listed here. These estimates show that among Obama's most likely endorsers are Rep. Dennis Moore (KS), Rep. Michael Michaud (ME), and Rep. Tom Allen (ME). Clinton's most likely endorsers include Reps. Jerry McNerney, Susan Davis, and Lois Capps (all from CA).

UPDATE: I updated this information to reflect that fact that my original data had Patrick Lynch as undeclared (when he has, in fact, endorsed Obama).

Michigan and Hillary Clinton's Popular Vote Claim

2008-04-24T14:28:00.003-04:00

There has been much discussion since the Pennsylvania primary of the Clinton campaign's claim that she is now ahead in the popular vote. Of course, this only happens when you figure in Michigan and Florida into the count, and only when you do it in a very specific way.

According to MSNBC, the popular vote with every state included except Michigan (i.e. every state where Obama was at least on the ballot) breaks down like this:

Obama: 15,016,607
Clinton: 14,822,400

If you include all of Clinton's Michigan vote and nothing in Michigan for Obama (who was not on the ballot there), then you get a Clinton lead (this is the metric being promoted by the Clinton campaign):

Clinton: 15,150,551
Obama: 15,016,607

Of course, most people are looking at this metric with a great deal of skepticism. Of the 593,837 Democrats who turned out to vote in the Michigan primary, 55% (328,151) cast their vote for Clinton. But what would have happened if all the candidates' names had been on the ballot? Fortunately, we have exit polls from Michigan which can give us some insight here. On the exit poll survey, voters were asked who they would have voted for had every candidate's name actually been on the ballot. Here are the results:

Clinton: 46%
Obama: 35%
Edwards: 12%

So, what happens if re-allocate the Michigan vote accordingly? In Michigan, the vote would have broken down as follows:

Clinton: 273,165 votes
Obama: 207,843 votes
Edwards: 71,260 votes

Thus, had Obama's name been on the ballot, Clinton's margin in the state would have been much smaller. Of course, there is no really good metric for measuring the vote in Michigan. Even in this scenario we have to assume that turnout wasn't suppressed by the fact that Obama's name wasn't on the ballot. Yet, you can imagine that many Obama supporters (and some Clinton supporters) may not have bothered to turn out to vote given that they knew that their votes were not likely to count. Nevertheless, this metric probably comes closest to capturing the actual preferences of those who did turn out to vote in Michigan.

So, how big a difference does this make in calculating the popular vote nationwide? If you add in the Michigan vote using the reallocation based on the exit polls, then you get the following national count:

Obama: 15,224,450 votes
Clinton: 15,095,565 votes

That would give Obama a lead of more than 120,000 votes nationwide, a lead that would be difficult for Clinton to overcome in the remaining states.

Post from Public Policy Polling on their Pennsylvania Poll

2008-04-23T15:45:00.002-04:00

The folks at Public Policy Polling posted last night to discuss why their survey showing Obama beating Clinton in Pennsylvania was so off the mark. They note that their over-representation of voters in the 18-45 age group was a big factor in throwing off their results, something I noted before the primary.

Election Night Thoughts on Pennsylvania

2008-04-22T20:32:00.014-04:00

12:11am: Ok, this mini-live blog is over for the night. It looks as if the 9 or 10% margin will stick. I'll leave you with this interesting post from the Politico. It turns out that Mr. Super is a reader of this blog (or of our Superdelegate predictions, at least). I'd love for more superdelegates to reveal their preferences, if only so we could figure out how well our model really did.

How do you measure tonight's results? Here are a few ways:

1) Clinton will pick up about 12-15 pledged delegates from PA. The bad news for her is that at this rate she will be able to over-take Obama's pledged delegate lead some time in 2012.

2) That fact is of some solace to the Obama campaign, but they cannot be happy about their inability to deliver a definitive knock out punch. Their best shot at doing so comes on May 6th.

3) The Obama campaign expected that they would lose PA by a spread of 52-47%. Thus, by their own expectations, they did twice as badly as they thought they would.

And with that, goodnight. I promise you I won't be live-blogging Guam.

10:43pm: Looking ahead, the polls show a tight race in Indiana and the Pollster.com average in NC shows Obama up by about 20%. The pundits appear to be saying that she has to win both to stay in. Question: if she narrowly wins Indiana but does lose NC by 20%, will she still stay in the race? Another question: can she cut into a large Obama lead in NC the way that he cut into her leads in PA and OH?

10:25pm: Clinton is hitting hard on the spending disadvantage she suffered in PA. It is a way to make her look like the hard fighting underdog, which is quite a turn from where we were 5 months ago.

9:54pm: The lead is hovering between 6 and 10% with almost half the precincts in so far. If it stays at or above 10%, Clinton may get a nice bump from this victory. If less, than this probably doesn't change the dynamics of the race at all (other than extending it for at least two more weeks).

Tim Russert reports that the Clinton campaign is asking for $5 donations tonight via email. Are we now in a place where the candidates are scrambling to see who can get the smallest donations (with the most donors)? Should the Obama campaign begin soliciting $1 donations?

9:20pm: Just a thought about how this will be spun. The networks have little else to do for the next several hours other than watch how Clinton's margin ebbs and flows. How does this effect how the outcome will be framed by the media? Well, on one hand, if everyone goes to sleep thinking Clinton won big, then that may be the story. On the other hand, and possibly more likely, if she has a big lead early in the night, but it narrows significantly, will the final margin be discounted to some extent (since it had been bigger earlier on)? We live in a 24 hour cable news world where it probably matters matter which votes are counted first. Surely you can imagine Keith Olberman at 11pm saying something like, "wow, Obama has really cut into Clinton's vote margin in the past hour."

9:13pm: Marc Ambinder from the Atlantic notes how the networks were able to make the call despite no real vote in yet:

"They're merging the exit poll data with quick tallies from specially selected model precincts across the state. Clinton in those precincts is outperforming her margin in the exit polls."

8:59pm: All the networks are falling into line now and calling PA for Obama. Blumenthal over at Pollster.com made an interesting point about how the key thing the networks are working on in getting their exit polling right is how to weight the data they have geographically. In other words, how much weight do they give to their Philadelphia interviews versus those from Pittsburgh or other areas? If they under- or over-weight a particular region relative to actual turnout in that area, it could be problematic. Of course, just after I read that, the networks began calling the state for PA, so they must've figured it all out ok (or else they are going to look pretty bad).

EARLIER: Ok, I promised myself I wouldn't do a live blog for tonight, but I can't resist posting a few thoughts tonight. Here is the first one:

The early exit polls are showing that 9% of the Democratic electorate changed their registration to Democrat from Republican before the primary. Another 4-5% were newly registered and voting for the first time in PA. Obama won those voters by a margin of 60-40%. This certainly helped Obama cut into Clinton's lead.

Age Breakdown of the Early Exit Polls in Pennsylvania: Good News for Clinton?

2008-04-22T20:13:00.004-04:00

I noted yesterday that many of the differences in the pre-election polling in Pennsylvania appeared to be related to the assumptions that pollsters were making about the age-breakdown of the electorate. Public Policy Polling was the only survey showing an Obama lead, and they were also assuming a much higher share of the electorate (41%) was going to be between 18-45 years of age compared to the other pollsters (who were assuming a number around 20%). Well, the early exit polls hold good news for Clinton. These polls are showing that 27% of the electorate was in the 18-45 age group. This figure is much smaller than the Public Policy Polling sample, but pretty close to the Quinnipiac figure, which was 24%. Quinnipiac showed a 51-44% lead for Clinton in their last survey, so it will be interesting to see if they come close to the actual figure.

UPDATE (8:29pm): The exit poll figures have changed somewhat (or I misread them earlier). They are now showing that 31% of the electorate was in the 18-45 age group. As that number creeps higher, Obama may do better.

Final Pennsylvania Delegate Prediction: Clinton 84, Obama 74

2008-04-22T12:33:00.002-04:00

Pollster.com's final poll average for Pennsylvania shows Clinton at 49% and Obama at 43%. If you use these figures to extrapolate on how delegates will be awarded, Clinton should receive 84 of the state's pledged delegates compared to 74 for Obama. If this holds, Clinton will cut 10 pledged delegates off of Obama's lead, which would keep him well ahead of her in both pledged and total delegate tallies.

Is the Age of the Electorate the Key to Understanding the Erratic Pennsylvania Polls?

2008-04-21T11:55:00.004-04:00

There has been a lot of attention paid to the divergent polling results recently, including on this blog (here and here; see numerous posts on Pollster.com as well). As I've noted before, one reason for these divergent results may be due to the way that polling organizations are defining who is a "likely voter."

Rasmussen Reports notes the significance of these decisions when discussing their latest survey:

"It is far more challenging to project turnout in a Primary Election than a General Election. [...] The degree to which actual turnout varies from these [demographic] figures could have a significant impact on the final results."

For the most part, the survey firms appear to be coming up with relatively similar figures for the percentage of women vs. men (most are assuming about 55-60% will of the electorate will be women) and whites vs. African-Americans (most are assuming that about 80% of the electorate will be white and 15% African-American).

There does, however, appear to be some significant differences in the age breakdown of the samples being gathered by these pollsters. Unfortunately, it is sometimes difficult to compare different samples by their age breakdown because different organizations use different cut points. But let's take 3 firms where we can make comparisons.

Public Policy Polling (PPP) used an automated polling method to collect over 2,000 interviews during the weekend. They are the one firm today reporting an Obama lead (47-43%). Interestingly, the 18-45 age group made up 41% of those they polled.

On the other hand, Suffolk University conducted a poll during the same two days this weekend but they turned up a 52-42% lead for Clinton. One way to account for the major difference between these two polls is that in the Suffolk poll voters in the 18-45 age group comprised just 19% of their sample. That means that Suffolk is expecting a much older electorate tomorrow than PPP. Both firms see Obama winning the younger age group by a significant margin (49-41% in the PPP poll and 56-40% in the Suffolk survey), but Suffolk thinks that they will make up only one-fifth of the electorate while PPP believes that they will be 41% of the electorate.

Quinnipiac, who conducted interviews from Friday through Sunday, has Clinton winning Pennsylvania by a margin of 51-44%. Their poll also finds that Obama will win the 18-45 age group by a significant margin, but based on a little backwards induction, I determined that citizens between 18 and 45 years old comprised 24% of the sample.

Bottom line: pollsters do not appear to be drawing consistent samples by age and such decisions can dramatically affect the results that are being reported. PPP has Obama winning because its sample is much younger than that captured by Quinnipiac or Suffolk. The real question is, which firm is closer to having the right mix of old and young? We won't know until we see the exit polls tomorrow night, but the answer will likely determine the outcome in Pennsylvania.

New Pennsylvania Registered Voters--County-by-County

2008-04-21T11:08:00.005-04:00

The Politico has a great county-by-county map of the changing party registration picture in Pennsylvania. It may come in handy tomorrow night as we watch the county-by-county results come in.

New Democratic Superdelegate Predictions

2008-04-18T12:12:00.006-04:00

As promised, I've updated the superdelegate predictions that I've been generating from time-to-time during this primary campaign. Before I get to the new predictions, it is worth checking in on how well the model has been doing in predicting who superdelegates are supporting. Of the 14 superdelegate endorsements made since our last predictions, we correctly predicted 11 and missed only 3 (Note: There were several other superdelegate endorsements, but we do not make predictions for superdelegate add-ons or for superdelegates in IL, NY, or AR). Overall, since we began generating these predictions, 96 superdelegates have announced their endorsements, and we have been correct on 68 of these. Thus, overall, the models have been correct over 70% of the time.

You can see who we got right and who we got wrong here:

Name

State

Office

Actual

Prediction

Steven Alari

DNC

Obama

Clinton

Amy Klobuchar

Senator

Obama

Nancy Larson

DNC

Obama

Jean Lemire Dahlman

DNC

Obama

Hon. Margarett Campbell

DNC

Obama

Rep. David Price

House

Obama

Rep. Mel Watt

House

Obama

William Burga

DNC

Clinton

Obama

Bob Casey

Senator

Obama

Hon. Richard Donatucci

DNC

Clinton

Obama

Hon. Sophie Masloff

DNC

Clinton

Hon Al Edwards

DNC

Obama

Wayne Holland Jr UT Chair

DNC

Obama

Dave Freudenthal

Governors

Obama

Now on to the new estimates. As before, I use information about the superdelegates who have committed to a candidate to generate predictions for the remaining unpledged superdelegates. I exclude superdelegates from DC and the territories because we lack complete data from those areas, and from IL, NY, and AR because superdelegates in those states have nearly unanimously cast their support for their native son/daughter. As always, information on the superdelegates is provided by the Democratic Convention Watch site. You can find more about they methodology I use here.

Check out the distribution of predicted support among unpledged superdelegates below.
Superdelegates who are between 40% and 60% likely to vote for Clinton/Obama are labeled as "unclear." There are 74 superdelegates in this range. There are 175 unpledged superdelegates who are at least 60% likely to vote for Obama; just 7 unpledged superdelegates are at least 60% likely to vote for Clinton. These predictions suggest that Obama will be able to cut into and even overtake Clinton's superdelegate lead in the coming weeks and months. Unless something significant changes, there seems to be little hope for the Clinton campaign in hoping that the superdelegates will help her erase Obama's lead.

The estimates for each unpledged superdelegate are listed here. These estimates show that among Obama's most likely endorsers are Rep. Dennis Moore (KS) and Rep. Tom Allen (ME). Clinton's most likely endorsers include Reps. Jerry McNerney, Susan Davis, and Lois Capps (all from CA).

New Democratic Delegate Predictions for Pennsylvania and Beyond

2008-04-17T22:09:00.005-04:00

There has been no shortage of polling in Pennsylvania recently. Of course, as I've noted in earlier posts (as have others), this polling has been all over the map. How does this effect the estimates of how Pennsylvania's pledged delegates will be divided? Well, consider the following. If the most recent Survey USA poll from Pennsylvania (which shows a 54-40% advantage for Clinton) is correct, then Clinton would capture a net gain of approximately 24 delegates from the state's primary. On the other hand, if Public Policy Polling (which shows a 45-42% Obama advantage) is more accurate, then Obama would take a 6 delegate net gain from the state.

Of course, it has been our tradition to generate delegate predictions based on Pollster.com averages of all the recent polling in each state. For Pennsylvania, this average currently stands at 47-42% in favor of Clinton. If that division holds up, then Clinton would win approximately 83 delegates from the state compared with 75 for Obama, a net gain of 8 delegates.

Using the polling data in the upcoming states, we can also project further ahead. This information is presented in the table below. I use the Pollster.com averages in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and North Carolina, where there have been several polls conducted. In West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oregon, I simply use the most recent survey.

Note that based on these projections, any gains made by Clinton in Pennsylvania and Indiana will be made up for by Obama's large lead in North Carolina, where he is currently projected to pick up 23 delegates. Clinton is set up to pick up big gains in West Virginia and Kentucky, but Obama is favored in Oregon. Altogether, the estimates show that if Clinton remains in the race for the next month, she will make very little headway in cutting into Obama's lead, with a net gain of fewer than 20 pledged delegates in the next six contests.

Finally, the graphic below shows the projected pledged delegates that Obama will accumulate over the next month or so. The line drawn at 1,627 indicates that point at which Obama will have accumulated a majority of the total pledged delegates available (not including Florida and Michigan). The 1,627 mark may end up being a significant milepost in the discussion about when Clinton should leave the race.

Finally, it has been a while since I updated the superdelegate predictions. I am hoping to find time to put together some new predictions tomorrow.

Those Erratic Pennsylvania Polls

2008-04-16T11:48:00.003-04:00

I put together the figure below to show just how erratic these Pennsylvania polls have been. Below are surveys conducted within the last week. None of these surveys has Obama breaking the 45% barrier, but Clinton's support varies from greater than 55% in the American Research Group poll to 42% in the latest Public Policy Polling survey.

UPDATE: Mark Blumenthal has posted a much better scatter plot of the recent polling in Pennsylvania along with a column on the topic. Definitely worth checking out.

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Age Breakdown of the Early Exit Polls in Pennsylvania: Good News for Clinton?

Final Pennsylvania Delegate Prediction: Clinton 84, Obama 74

Is the Age of the Electorate the Key to Understanding the Erratic Pennsylvania Polls?