Moderators: Alyrium Denryle, Edi, K. A. Pital
PhilosopherOfSorts wrote:Also, that was Iowa, things might be different in other states. In fact, they probably are.D.Turtle wrote:The people who ran the Iowa Straw poll have publicly said that any PArry votes were counted for Perry.
Do not know how long it will last, it is still very early... Still... If Perry edges out Romney, it will become increasingly important if the Media does something to show how crazy he is.Less than two weeks into his official campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Rick Perry has a 12-point lead over Mitt Romney, according to a nationwide Gallup poll of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents released Wednesday. Perry, the Texas governor, received the support of 29 percent of the poll's respondents.
Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who was in first place in the previous three Gallup surveys this year, slipped to 17 percent in the poll, just four points ahead of Texas Rep. Ron Paul, with 13 percent.
The poll's margin of error is 4 percent.
A closer at the numbers shows that, similar to recent polls taken in Iowa, Perry's base of support lies with the most conservative voters. Thirty-three person of self-identifying conservatives said they were most likely to vote for Perry, while 16 percent of those voters backed Romney. Among those who attend church regularly, Perry leads Romney by eight points.
Romney does have a slight edge on Perry among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents on the east coast, and Paul dominates among younger voters, carrying nearly 30 percent of the voters between 18 and 29.
You can. It requires a sort of grim, heroic determination, but you can do it.Darth Wong wrote:Why are we discounting his chances of winning? Have you not learned that you can never underestimate the intelligence of the American voting public?
Bush was elected in 2000 and 2004 partly because he ran against men who had the charisma of warm, moist cardboard. The "good old boy" aura works a lot better when the other candidate is a cardboard cutout.After seeing this guy on TV, and noting the striking resemblance to George W. Bush in body language and speech patterns, I can't help but be somewhat frightened at the possibility that the guy could actually get into office. How many people will vote for him just because he exudes that "good old boy" aura?
Darth Wong wrote:Why are we discounting his chances of winning? Have you not learned that you can never underestimate the intelligence of the American voting public?
After seeing this guy on TV, and noting the striking resemblance to George W. Bush in body language and speech patterns, I can't help but be somewhat frightened at the possibility that the guy could actually get into office. How many people will vote for him just because he exudes that "good old boy" aura?
Two previous blog posts (here and here) explore Perry's electability and Obama's broad-based decline in approval, respectively.Why Another Democrat Wouldn’t Do Better Than Obama in 2012
You know that a president is having a rough time when you start to see speculation that his party would be better off if it replaced him on the ticket.
There has been more of this recently: the political scientist Matthew Dickinson argued that Democrats would improve their chances if Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama in a primary challenge. The astute Ed Morrissey of the blog Hot Air wondered if Democrats might benefit if Mr. Obama simply declined to run for a second term.
President Obama’s re-election bid is in quite a lot of trouble, with falling approval numbers and sour economic forecasts. But it’s probably mistaken to assume that those problems would just go away if Democrats replaced him with another candidate.
The evidence, if anything, points in the opposite direction: Mr. Obama is more popular than his policies, and probably gives the Democrats a better chance of maintaining the White House than another Democrat would. Three pieces of data to consider:
First, Mr. Obama’s personal favorability ratings — which continue to average about 50 percent — are considerably higher than his approval ratings, which are now around 40 percent. It’s not uncommon for favorability ratings to track a point or two ahead of approval ratings — but this is a particularly large gap. Voters remain reasonably sympathetic to Barack Obama, the person, even if they’re growing less and less thrilled with his performance.
Can Mr. Obama use that sympathy to persuade hesitant voters to give him another chance? Well, we’ll see. But usually when a party would be better off disposing of its incumbent, it’s because these numbers run in the opposite direction: the candidate has some personal liability that is overshadowing his policy positions. Textbook examples would include the former Republican Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky, whose old age (and apparent symptoms of senility) concerned voters, or the retiring Nevada Senator John Ensign, who has been involved in a series of scandals. Mr. Obama, by contrast, is young and healthy and has probably had fewer scandals than any recent president.
The second statistic is Mr. Obama’s approval ratings which, although now rather poor, are no worse than you would probably expect from the sour mood of the country. In fact, for most of his first term, the opposite had been true. Based on the precedent established by past presidents, Mr. Obama’s approval ratings had been several points higher than they “should” have been based on questions about whether the country was headed in the right direction.
[regression: Obama's approval rating overperforms]
Mr. Obama’s approval ratings have slipped now — but so has the national mood, with recent polls suggesting that only about 17 percent of Americans think the country is on the right track. (The number was closer to 30 percent two months ago.) Mr. Obama’s approval ratings, at 40 percent, may not win him re-election — but seem tolerable by comparison.
To be sure, an argument can be made that Mr. Obama himself bears some responsibility for the pessimistic national mood — particularly in recent weeks, as the latest decline in confidence seems to have as much to do with political as economic factors. If nothing else, Mr. Obama has failed so far to persuade voters that America’s best days are ahead of it.
Then again, approval numbers are down for essentially all incumbent politicians. Quite a few Americans have been tolerant of Mr. Obama’s performance despite their concerns about where the country is headed.
Finally, it’s worth recalling the last major election in which Mr. Obama wasn’t on the ballot: last November’s midterms, in which Democrats lost 63 seats in the House. Although Mr. Obama’s approval rating was middling at the time — about 45 percent — that’s a somewhat worse loss than would have been expected based on his approval ratings alone.
[regression: Democrats underperformed in 2010 midterms]
The implicit assumption here, of course, is that another Democrat would not be able to shed Mr. Obama’s liabilities on the economy. Relatively few voters blame Mr. Obama personally for the performance of the economy — they’re simply sick and tired of the poor numbers all the same. Another Democratic candidate would not magically turn 9.2 percent unemployment into 5.2 percent unemployment.
Nor is it likely that another Democrat would advocate policy positions that differed substantially from Mr. Obama’s, which are very close to those of the typical Democrat in Congress. Few Democrats argued against the need for economic stimulus. The health care proposals advanced by Ms. Clinton and John Edwards during the 2008 campaign were not much different from Mr. Obama’s now-unpopular one. Few Democrats have any ideas about how to substantially reduce unemployment that could pass through the Republican Congress.
So the message would be mostly the same — but would be delivered by a Democrat who was probably no more effective a messenger than Mr. Obama, and who would lack the aesthetic and tactical advantages of being an incumbent president.
Instead, if Mr. Obama declined to run for a second term, Democrats would have to deal with questions about why their president had quit on the job, something which would be read as an admission of failure and which would make his record even harder to defend. The two most recent presidents who declined to run for another term while they were eligible for one, Harry Truman in 1952 and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, both saw their successors lose their elections despite a prosperous economy.
Certainly, Mr. Truman and Mr. Johnson had other concerns to deal with, like the Vietnam and Korean Wars. But Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey were attacked on those issues just as an incumbent might have been.
There was a post on the Center for Politics about that:Darth Wong wrote:It's usually assumed that "independents" are moderates and swing voters, but how many "independents" are actually more radical than their preferred respective parties? I've lost count of the number of times I've seen someone on the Internet self-declare as an "independent" and then turn out to be a rabid flag-waving Tea Party nutjob.
So, key take away: 7% of the voters were true independents. The rest voted largely with their preference. In close elections, independents were not the deciding group.Setting the Record Straight: Correcting Myths About Independent Voters wrote:
...
It’s true that independents are a diverse group. But that’s mostly because the large majority of independents are independents in name only. Research by political scientists on the American electorate has consistently found that the large majority of self-identified independents are “closet partisans” who think and vote much like other partisans. Independent Democrats and independent Republicans have little in common. Moreover, independents with no party preference have a lower rate of turnout than those who lean toward a party and typically make up less than 10% of the electorate. Finally, independents don’t necessarily determine the outcomes of presidential elections; in fact, in all three closely contested presidential elections since 1972, the candidate backed by most independent voters lost.
Let’s start with the claim that independents make up the largest segment of the American electorate. That’s true only if you lump all independents together including those who don’t vote and those who lean toward a party. In 2008, according to the American National Election Study, independents made up 40% of eligible voters but only 33% of those who actually voted. Moreover, of that 33%, only 7% were true independents with no party preference. The other 26% were leaners.
And what about those independent leaners? Fully 87% of them voted for the candidate of the party they leaned toward: 91% of independent Democrats voted for Barack Obama while 82% of independent Republicans voted for John McCain. That 87% rate of loyalty was identical to the 87% loyalty rate of weak party identifiers and exceeded only by the 96% loyalty rate of strong party identifiers.
It’s hardly surprising that the vast majority of independent leaners voted for their party’s presidential candidate in 2008. The evidence from the 2008 ANES in the following chart shows that independent Democrats and Republicans held very different views on major issues — views that were very similar to those of their fellow partisans. Independent Democrats were more liberal than weak Democrats and about as liberal as strong Democrats while independent Republicans were less conservative than strong Republicans but just as conservative as weak Republicans.
...
In 1976, most independents voted for Gerald Ford but Jimmy Carter won the overall popular vote. In 2000, most independents voted for George W. Bush but Al Gore won the overall popular vote (despite losing the Electoral College). And in 2004 most independents voted for John Kerry but George W. Bush won the overall popular vote.
In a close election, a candidate with an energized and unified party base can sometimes overcome a deficit among independent voters. That doesn’t mean the candidates should ignore independents, but it does mean that unifying and energizing their own party’s base is just as important as appealing to the independents.
Yes, but if they're running someone like Bachmann or Ron Paul or Perry against Obama, they need a lot of Democrats to stay home... and the fear of getting a person like that in the White House will itself motivate Democrats to the polls to some degree.D.Turtle wrote:They don't have to convert people. They just need the Democrats to stay home.
The trick is that independent voters matter most in 'swing states-' places where, depending on who runs and what the zeitgeist is saying that year, the vote can easily tip to something like 52/48 in favor of either candidate. This gives them influence out of proportion to their numbers, something those familiar with parliamentary democracy will recognize- it's much like the way that minority parties in such systems can play one big party off against the other when forming coalition governments.If many Democrats stay home and the Republican base turns out, then Obama can very quickly be in deep trouble. They don't need independents for that, since true independents are a small minority, who in the end aren't all that relevant.
Except in the eyes of pundits and political Washington.
Flagg wrote:For those wondering what this paragon of sanity looks and acts like, I give you:
Elfdart wrote:Flagg wrote:For those wondering what this paragon of sanity looks and acts like, I give you:
Saddam Hussein had better taste in suits.
Yes, but this strategy cuts both ways.D.Turtle wrote:Simon Jester: Your analysis would work if there were only two large groups: Voters for Democrats and voters for Republicans.
There is however a third huge group in the US: Non-voters.
Mobilizing your voters can easily wipe out any fringe losses you might take, when only 36-56% of the voters go to the booth.
Flagg wrote:
Of course, even fucking Arabs have more class and taste than Texans.
Mid-term elections are almost always about the opinion towards the current office-holder. If you look at polls it now makes almost no difference who you pit Obama against - he gets between 45-48% of the votes.Simon_Jester wrote:Yes, but this strategy cuts both ways.
For one, disgust with a bad candidate is not unique to the Democratic Party. If the Republicans choose a fringe candidate, some of their own voters stay home rather than vote for someone like Michelle Bachmann. Do they come out ahead by mobilizing more Tea voters at the expense of non-Tea Republicans? Hard to say.
Plus, Democrats who might stay home in disgust in a race between Obama and Huntsman/Romney might well be driven to the polls by the fear of Bachmann in the White House. You have to be really, really committed to the idea of letting the country burn in hopes of triggering a revolutionary shift in its politics before you can say "it's OK if a Tea Party Republican takes the White House, because that's no worse than letting Obama sell out to the Republicans for another four years. How many people are that committed to the idea?
Except that the Republican base will already be mobilized because of the weak economy (and the Tea Party), while the Democratic base will be depressed because of the weak economy.Voter mobilization is a huge part of strategy in modern American electoral politics, but it's not a magic wand, especially when you deliberately make political choices that make it hard to mobilize certain chunks of your support base.
Maybe, maybe not. Factors like unemployment and GDP growth and inflation apparently have a weak enough impact on an election that you can't just say bad economy=lose, good economy=wins. It's the reason why polls are showing Obama fairly poorly against a generic unnamed Republican, but fairly soundly defeating every named candidate in the same polls except for Romney (who manages a draw).D.Turtle wrote:The single most important factor in presidential elections is the state of the economy.
Again, maybe, maybe not. The Republican base and the Tea Party aren't the same thing. Believe it or not, but there are still conservatives out there that will not blindly vote for anyone with an R after their name. They were the ones sitting out the 2008 election because of Sarah Palin.Except that the Republican base will already be mobilized because of the weak economy (and the Tea Party), while the Democratic base will be depressed because of the weak economy.
I myself was quite convinced for a long time that Obama would almost certainly be reelected. However, the weak economy is killing his chances of doing that. It seems unlikely he - or Congress - will do anything about the economy. And polling shows that it is almost irrelevant who he runs against. Obama is in a pretty close race already at this point. If the economic slide towards a double dip continues - as seems increasingly likely - then his chances of reelection will continue to nose-dive.
