Brendan Nyhan

There’s no fact that Chris Matthews can’t get wrong — this is one of my favorite Hardball fact-checks ever:

On the May 13 edition of MSNBC’s Hardball, discussing Sen. Barack Obama, host Chris Matthews asserted: “I think, being an African-American, it’s all the more important to get in there and show who you are, introduce yourself as a person, not as an identity group, but as a human being, and connect with people. I think that’s still going to be his challenge.” Matthews then stated: “Playing pool, not a bad start, but it’s not what most people play. People with money play pool these days.” Matthews added: “The guys who have pool rooms in their house in the basement. You know what those tables cost?” After Matthews spoke, Hardball aired footage of Obama shooting pool.
…

According to a Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association 2007 study posted on the Billiards Congress of America website, “There are 46,990,000 Billiards participants in the U.S.” — defined as people who play billiards at least once a year — and “60% of all Billiards participants have a household income of under $75,000 per year.” Additionally, 54 percent of billiards participants also participated in bowling, and “30% of all Billiards participants have a college degree or higher.”

Matthews constantly does this sort of projecting of his Democrats-as-elitists narrative onto Obama:

As Media Matters for America has documented, Matthews has on numerous occasions purported to analyze whether Obama has the ability to “connect” with “regular” voters. Specifically, during the April 1 edition of Hardball, Matthews referred to Obama’s bowling performance at a March 29 campaign stop at Pleasant Valley Lanes in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and asked, “[C]an Obama woo more regular voters — you know, the ones who actually do know how to bowl?” During another segment on March 29, Matthews asked Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), “Let me ask you about how he — how’s he connect with regular people? Does he? Or does he only appeal to people who come from the African-American community and from the people who have college or advanced degrees?” Additionally, on the March 31 edition of Hardball, Matthews said of Obama: “[T]his gets very ethnic, but the fact that he’s good at basketball doesn’t surprise anybody, but the fact that he’s that terrible at bowling does make you wonder.” Matthews has also criticized Obama for turning down an offer of coffee at a diner in favor of orange juice and asserted that Obama has “got another problem. … He can’t walk into a dinette [sic] with five or six guys there, white guys, in some cases. He can’t just shake hands and hang out. He doesn’t seem to, ‘Hey, you know, how are the Eagles doing?’ Or ‘How are the Phils doing?’ “

There’s nothing like inside-the-Beltway millionaires lecturing political candidates about the habits of regular people. But you won’t hear anyone prominent object because they all want to be on Hardball!

PS It defies belief that some people think Matthews should run for the Senate in 2010.

As predicted, Obama got drubbed in West Virginia, so it’s time to update my series on the predictors of his state-level support. If we put the exit poll data in context, we can see that he did much worse among whites in West Virginia than we would expect based in states with similar black populations:

However, he did about as poorly as we would expect among whites given the proportion of state residents with college degrees, though West Virginia has fewer college graduates than any previous primary state in the sample:

[Both graphs include linear fits with 95% confidence intervals that are predicted based on previous primary results.]

Update 5/15 10:07 AM: Josh Marshall argues Obama’s struggles with downscale white voters are the result of the cultural and racial history of Appalachia, the location of most counties that he’s lost by wide margins (in purple):

Don’t miss Alix Spiegel’s NPR series (part one, part two) on the struggles of families with transgender children, though it will break your heart. Our society has such a long way to go in how we deal with these issues. As Spiegel notes, the parallels to the “treatment” of homosexuality in past decades are all too obvious.

Did The Onion ghostwrite this Robert Novak column on conservatives “[promoting] the biblical justification for an Obama plague-like presidency”? Can this possibly be real?

Some U.S. Christians are not reconciled to McCain’s candidacy but instead regard the prospective presidency of Barack Obama in the nature of a biblical plague visited upon a sinful people. These militants look at former Baptist preacher Huckabee as “God’s candidate” for president in 2012. Whether they can be written off as merely a troublesome fringe group depends on Huckabee’s course.

Huckabee’s announced support of McCain is unequivocal, and he is regarded in the McCain camp as a friend and ally. But credible activists are spreading the word that Huckabee secretly allies himself with the bitter-end opposition. That hardly seems possible considering his public backing, but critics of Huckabee’s 10 years as governor of Arkansas say he is all too capable of playing a double game…

[T]he word is that some evangelicals dispute Huckabee’s support. One experienced, credible activist in Christian politics who would not let his name be used told me that Huckabee, in personal conversation with him, had embraced the concept that an Obama presidency might be what the American people deserve. That fits what has largely been a fringe position among evangelicals: that the pain of an Obama presidency is in keeping with the Bible’s prophecy.

According to this activist, at the heart of the let-Obama-win movement is longtime Virginia conservative leader Michael Farris — the nation’s leading home-school advocate, who is now chancellor of Patrick Henry College (in Purcellville, Va.) for home-schooled students. Best known politically as the losing Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Virginia in 1993, Farris is regarded as one of the hardest-edged Christian politicians. He is reported in evangelical circles to promote the biblical justification for an Obama plague-like presidency.

In conversations with me, Huckabee and Farris both denied saying that an Obama presidency should be inflicted on the country.

Warnings of the anti-Christ are soon to follow. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Some Antonin Scalia news you can use from Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick:

[Antonin] Scalia’s writing style is a disarming mix of the lowbrow and the lofty. He recently served up the Supreme Court’s first citation to Oscar the Grouch (PDF).

A reader shared the link to an excellent table that was posted on the website FiveThirtyEight.com back in April:

Hillary performs fully 11 points better against McCain than Obama does among voters with a high school education or less. But Obama performs 6 points better than Hillary among adults with some college, 10 points better among college graduates, and 13 points better among those with postgraduate educations.

Rather than analyzing these numbers by themselves, let’s compare them to previous election cycles, and see how other Democratic nominees performed in these categories. I was able to track down exit poll data for 1992-2004, as well as 1976 and 1980.

Though it’s way too early for the 2008 numbers to be strictly comparable to the exit polls from previous elections, the table illustrates the differences in the support Obama and Clinton get against McCain and changes in the Democratic coalition over time. In particular, note how Obama does about the same as Kerry among high school-educated voters and those with a postgraduate education, but makes significant gains among those with some college or a college degree. By contrast, while Clinton gets more support than Obama from high school-educated voters, she doesn’t improve on Kerry’s showing with voters who have some college or college degrees and does 14 points worse among voters with postgraduate education.

Update 5/13 9:55 AM: A reminder — as BG points out in comments, these numbers collapse across other demographic categories such as age, race, and gender.

For those who are interested (hi Mom!), there is a brief profile of me in the current issue of Duke Magazine. It includes some of my thoughts on the relationship between Spinsanity and my academic research.

The latest ABC News poll/Washington Post poll shows how negatively the public has come to view the direction of the country under President Bush (PDF):

82% of the public thinks the country is on the wrong track, which is just one percentage point lower than the 1973 record. (John McCain, once again, is in big trouble.)

The poll also includes yet another illustration of how Bush’s approval numbers have been in terminal decline since 9/11 except for a blip upward around the invasion of Iraq:

Back in early 2002, I wondered whether President Bush would become a transformational president who would define a political era like Ronald Reagan. Instead, Bush squandered his post-9/11 popularity so completely that he has provided Barack Obama with the opportunity to be a transformational president. (The situation is actually relatively parallel to the way that Jimmy Carter’s presidency created the conditions under which Reagan could emerge.)

Update 5/12 9:29 PM: A closely related graph from Gallup:

Thought of the day: Couldn’t reform-minded liberals and pork-busting conservatives agree that we should have randomized evaluations of almost everything the government does in social welfare, health care, etc.? When will Washington join the experimental revolution and find out which programs actually work?

Update 5/12 10:19 PM: In comments, Dave White points to a CRS study titled “Congress and Program Evaluation: An Overview
of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) and
Related Issues” (PDF) that provides considerable detail on the key issues in this debate.

Media Matters notes that the Washington Times quoted a man in Indiana saying “I can’t stand [Barack Obama]… He’s a Muslim. He’s not even pro-American as far as I’m concerned” without pointing out that Obama is a Christian. Similar reports appeared in the LA Times, the websites of the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun, and Maureen Dowd’s column.

Meanwhile, Media Matters also points out that Dick Morris said on Fox News that “the determinant in the election will be whether we believe that Barack Obama is what he appears to be, or is he somebody who’s sort of a sleeper agent who really doesn’t believe in our system and is more in line with Wright’s views?”