Brendan Nyhan

Hillary Clinton has sent a memo to House Democrats touting her victories in swing districts. The problem is that the memo, like so much of Hillary’s electability arguments, depends on the fallacy that primaries are an accurate guide to general election outcomes. You just can’t assume that to be true. What we need instead is polling in those districts among registered voters.

Discussions that have I’ve been having with my colleagues at PIPC this week:

(1) What happens to Joe Lieberman if the Democrats take the White House and expand their Senate majority to 56 or 57 seats? Despite his support for McCain, I think Democrats will want his vote on non-war-related issues, so they’ll hold their nose and let him keep his seniority in the caucus. Others say he’ll be stripped of his seniority, lose his chairmanship of the government affairs committee, and then leave the party to become a Republican.

(2) What happens in the fall campaign if John McCain is outspent 3:1 or 4:1 by Barack Obama? Obama has raised more than $250 million in the primary and seems likely to raise at least that much for the general. McCain will most likely only have $85 million in public financing. If money ever matters in politics, this is the time.

PS In his column today, Paul Krugman makes a similar point to the one I’ve been making here — namely, that the political fundamentals are heavily tilted against John McCain. The combination of those fundamentals and Obama’s vast fundraising advantage may be enough to offset his likely underperformance among downscale white voters.

Update 5/11 9:13 PM: In response, Matthew Yglesias argues that “there’s very little logic to keeping [Lieberman] in the party,” but TNR’s Josh Patashnik raises the key caveat:

My sympathies are with those who’d like to give Senator Lieberman the boot… The question that needs to be asked, though, is this: Is Joe Lieberman the type of vindictive, thin-skinned individual who would be likely to cast aside his longstanding moderate-to-liberal record on most domestic issues in order to join Republican filibusters and make life miserable for Democrats in retaliation for their snubbing him? I think the answer is quite possibly yes, and that’s a very good reason for biting the bullet and putting up with his shenanigans until 2012.

Josh is right. The Lieberman-defenstrators out there don’t appreciate the fact that the Connecticut senator’s overall voting record in the current Congress is actually pretty close to the middle of the party. If he switches parties, that’s unlikely to continue — previous party switchers have drastically changed their voting patterns. The resulting shift would make it that much harder for a President Obama to end Republican filibusters and get his agenda passed. My guess is Democrats will realize this and let Lieberman stay in the caucus. (However, if McCain defies the odds and wins, it’s possible that Democrats will take Lieberman down in their post-election wrath, particularly because they’ll want the Government Affairs committee in reliably partisan hands.)

Update 5/12 9:49 AM: Via email, Yglesias makes a point I may have neglected — the danger of Lieberman retaining his chairmanship for Democrats is that he might aggressively investigate an Obama administration. Once he launched those investigations, removing him from the chairmanship could provoke a major controversy, hence the possible need to remove him before that point.

In a fundraising email to supporters yesterday, NRSC chairman John Ensign suggested that one of the top legislative priorities of “Big Labor, MoveOn.org and extremist environmental groups” is “weakening our national defense”:

Dear Republican Supporter,

Big Labor, MoveOn.org and extremist environmental groups have promised to spend millions to elect angry liberals like Al Franken to the U.S. Senate in November.

What’s more outrageous is that these groups expect the Democrats to payback their efforts by implementing their top legislative priorities like eliminating the secret ballot and weakening our national defense.

I’ve added this to my timeline of Republican attacks on dissent since 9/11.

PS What does Ensign mean when he says another top liberal priority is “eliminating the secret ballot”?

Update 5/8 8:49 PM: Commenters and correspondents report that Ensign is referring to the Employee Free Choice Act, which “would for the first time in 60 years allow workers to organize without putting the issue to a secret-ballot vote” — a process that labor unions believe benefits employers. The problem is that Ensign never makes clear that he’s talking about union votes. His jargon is so obscure that readers might end up thinking that Democrats want to weaken the secret ballot in federal elections.

[Disclosure: I worked for the Ed Bernstein for Senate campaign in Nevada in 2000 against John Ensign.]

Self-parody alert — Michael Dobbs, the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker,” is fact-checking Bill Clinton’s facial expressions:

“Tonight we’ve come from behind, we’ve broken the tie, and thanks to you it’s full speed on to the White House.”
–Hillary Clinton, May 6, 2008.

Brave, defiant words from Hillary Clinton. But observe the facial expressions. For many people watching television on Tuesday night, the most striking impression from the Clinton victory rally in Indiana was not the words that came out of Hillary’s mouth, but the look on Bill’s face. It was the look of a man who knows that a dream is slipping away.

The Facts

Try this experiment. Take a look at this extract from Clinton’s speech in Indianapolis with the volume turned down. Watch the expressions on the faces of Hillary, Bill, and Chelsea, and let me know what you think.

Here is what I saw. A candidate with a mask of upbeat determination on her face, who knows deep down that the game is lost but is still on auto-pilot, unwilling to accept defeat. A proud and loving daughter who will support her mother to the very end. An
exhausted spouse who is sick at heart because he knows, from his vast political experience, that the fight is over. He dutifully applauds at the right moments, and occasionally punches his fist in the air, but his face reveals his true feelings.

Even as the hope of a miraculous upset faded away, Hillary still came across as the energizer bunny, running on batteries that never seem to wind down. After giving it his all, in dozens of small town meetings across North Carolina and Indiana, Bill looked as if all the energy had suddenly been drained out of him.

The Pinocchio Test

The Fact Checker will no doubt be ridiculed by many readers for checking facial expressions, rather than verifiable facts. But sometimes body language can be more eloquent than the most stirring rhetoric. The look on Bill Clinton’s face said it all, qualifying for a Geppetto for agonized, heart-felt honesty.

I would like to become a charter member of the group objecting to “The Fact Checker … checking facial expressions.” The fact that Dobbs thinks he can read Clinton’s mind tells you all you need to know about (a) why we started Spinsanity and (b) the deep epistemological problems of political journalism.

PS The swami is working hard tonight.

In the annals of great Chris Matthews moments, this interview with former Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr. is one of my favorites — it’s swami time!

MATTHEWS: Do you think Hillary Rodham Clinton has the soul of a vice president? Do you think she would really feel right about that job? She was first lady, a supporting person to the president for eight years through all the turmoil of that.
Do you think she really wants to be on the ticket that wins, wants to serve as VP for four or eight years under a young president?

FORD: I take Senator Clinton at her word. She is deeply committed to this country, believing that the last seven, eight years of leadership in the White House has been difficult, at best, if not disastrous on certain fronts for the country, and is committed to being a part of a team to straighten that out and to fix that. I can’t answer that for her.

As we jump a step or two ahead here, I think this is a scenario that we in the party, and Barack and Hillary and their campaigns and their teams, ought to begin contemplating. I wouldn’t be surprised, if I were advising the Obama campaign tonight—I’ll say it again, tomorrow morning they ought to find as many super delegates outside of the Pelosi and Reid and Gore, but in the category right beneath him, who are willing to endorse him and to call for this campaign to play itself out in orderly way, but to be clear that the one with the most pledged delegates and the popular votes—it looks as if that will be Barack on both fronts—is going to be the nominee.

I think we have to begin to think seriously about a healing process in this party. Frankly, an Obama/Clinton ticket might address huge concerns that both sides have about personal differences and animosity, and frankly, some of the concerns that some in the party have about Barack’s ability to attract white working class voters, particularly white men going into the fall election.

What does it mean to have the “soul” of a vice president? And what does Harold Ford know about Hillary Clinton’s soul?

Ford’s response is almost as bad. As Matthew Yglesias points out, it’s bizarre to suggest that adding Hillary Clinton to the ticket will help Obama with working class whites in the general election.

Time to update my previous work on state-level predictors of Obama support. It turns out that Indiana and North Carolina were strikingly consistent with the trends in racial voting we’ve seen thus far. Here is a graph of total white and black support for Obama by the state’s black population (click for an enlarged version):

The lines are fractional polynomials fit to the data before yesterday’s primaries and the shading represents 95% confidence intervals. As you can see, the black vote in Indiana slightly overperformed for Obama but the other results fit almost perfectly with the predicted values.

Update 5/7 3:11 PM: To answer Rob’s question in comments, the y-axes represent the share of the total white+black Democratic vote received by Obama from whites and blacks, respectively. For instance, the total white vote (the left y-axis) is calculated as Obama’s percentage of the white vote multiplied by the proportion of the white+black electorate that was made up by whites. The total black vote is defined analogously.

The simpler graph below tells a similar story:

Update 5/7 10:38 PM — Here’s an equivalent graph to the top one using just Obama’s margin over Hillary in the white vote (corrected after Josh pointed out an error in comments):

Who are the 12,000 people who voted for Mike Gravel yesterday in North Carolina? And what planet are they from? I’m so confused.

Update 5/7 2:28 PM: Phil Klinkner suggested an even better title. Watch out below!

I thought Barack Obama gave a great speech tonight, but it’s just silly for him to claim that he will end negative politics:

I didn’t expect when I ran for president that I would avoid this kind of politics [GOP character assassination]; I ran because it is time to end it … We will end it by telling the truth. Forcefully, repeatedly, confidently …

Andrew Sullivan loved this passage. But to me, it’s absurd. As I wrote last year, there’s no way Obama can deliver on this promise — polarization is not going to go away:

[M]ost of Obama’s appeal comes down to his call for a new politics that is less cynical and polarized — a vain hope. Bill Clinton and many other politicians have called for such a change, and none have succeeded. The underlying structural forces that promote polarization are unlikely to relent. And more importantly, polarization is a two-sided phenomenon. Calling for depolarization once you are president is, in practice, a call for the opposition to go along with your initiatives — as in President Bush’s call to “change the tone” (see All the President’s Spin for more). It’s an absurd promise that no candidate can deliver on…

And as I argued after seeing Obama speak back in November, there’s something vaguely anti-democratic about his promises to end negative attacks and transcend partisanship:

He said the reason he ran for president is to “change politics” — a goal that is, frankly, absurd and borders on the anti-democratic. The forces driving the trend toward increased partisanship won’t go away if he’s elected. Consider the only time in recent memory that the two parties “got along” and “worked together” — the aftermath of 9/11. During that period, President Bush’s high approval ratings silenced dissent among Democrats, providing the context for approval of the resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq in fall 2002. It’s not a great model.

To be fair, Obama could be right in the following narrow sense. If he overcomes the negative ads and wins a convincing victory in November, it might help force the GOP to move beyond its aging 1980s template of attacking Democrats as too liberal, elitist, and unpatriotic. But the trend over the course of the campaign has been for him to make statements suggesting that there’s something wrong with partisanship and opposition. After living through the GOP’s efforts to silence dissent since 9/11, he should know better.

Despite all of the questions that are being raised about the electability of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the reality is that the political fundamentals are heavily tilted in their favor. Yesterday, Bill Kristol reported that the McCain campaign realizes how difficult a task it faces:

Some conservatives are giddy at the thought — kidding themselves that the general election will therefore be easy, that Obama will be another Dukakis. I was struck, though, in several conversations this week with McCain campaign staffers and advisers that they’re pretty sober about the task ahead. About the Dukakis analogy, for example, one McCain aide said: If in 1988 Ronald Reagan had had a 30 percent job approval rating, and 80 percent of the voters had thought we were on the wrong track, Dukakis would have won.

And the McCain campaign knows the environment for Republicans remains toxic. They noticed that on Saturday night Republicans lost their second House seat in a special election in two months — this one in a district they had held since 1974 and that Bush had carried by almost 20 points in 2004.

Another McCain staffer called my attention to this finding in the latest Fox News poll: McCain led Obama in the straight match-up, 46 to 43. Voters were then asked to choose between two tickets, McCain-Romney vs. Obama-Clinton. Obama-Clinton won 47 to 41.

That reversal of a three-point McCain lead to a six-point deficit for the McCain ticket suggests what might happen (a) when the Democrats unite, and (b) if McCain were to choose a conventional running mate, who, as it were, reinforced the Republican brand for the ticket. As the McCain aide put it, this is what will happen if we run a traditional campaign; our numbers will gradually regress toward the (losing) generic Republican number.

Kristol then mentions talk within the McCain camp about choosing the young Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal as a vice presidential nominee. But that’s unlikely to make much difference. The problem for McCain is that he is likely to regress toward the Republican number no matter what he does.The reality is that presidential elections are highly predictable. Candidates probably only matter on the margin. This empirical reality is often inverted in journalism, which typically attributes results driven by the fundamentals to the candidates’ political skill (or the lack thereof). As a result, McCain’s likely failure will be interpreted as the result of some tactical mistake (my prediction: the loss of his “maverick” luster) rather than the result of an unfavorable political environment.

Today, David Brooks repeats the false report that Hillary Clinton referred to “Wall Street money-grubbers” — a widely circulated misquotation:

Clinton rails against “Wall Street money-grubbers,” but her policies are often drawn from the Wall Street wing of the party.

In fact, as her campaign’s fact-checking blog points out, she actually criticized “Wall Street money brokers” — you can listen to the audio here (MP3).