Brendan Nyhan

For months I’ve been emphasizing the role of the political fundamentals in determining presidential election outcomes. Last night that approach was again vindicated. The median forecast from leading election models was that Barack Obama would receive 52% of the two-party vote. According to the current numbers on CNN’s website, he’s at 53.1%. And despite the (overhyped) attention to state polls at sites like Five Thirty Eight, the swing from 2004 was nearly uniform across states (with a few exceptions that were apparently driven by home-state advantages and race).

Update 11/6 9:49 AM: See also John Sides at The Monkey Cage.

Like Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, Bush overestimated his ability to change public opinion to support his policy goals. But 9/11 made it possible for him to overreach much further than Clinton or Gingrich ever did. As a result, the scope of the backlash is even more significant. He may truly be the Jimmy Carter to Obama’s Reagan.

James Carville just made a really important point on CNN that was also emphasized to me by one of my advisers — while Democratic gains in the House and Senate tonight are significant, the combination of 2006 and 2008 adds up to a shift of historic proportions:

Republicans are on target to lose somewhere between 12 and 14 Senate seats in a two-year period and somewhere around 50 to 55 House seats… The Republican party is getting a drubbing tonight the likes of which we’ve never seen. This is a two-year cycle in which this party has been hammered.

For the sake of comparison, the GOP picked up 54 House seats and eight Senate seats in the “Republican Revolution” of 1994.

Famous last words from the primary:

Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Wednesday to continue her quest for the Democratic nomination, arguing she would be the stronger nominee because she appeals to a wider coalition of voters — including whites who have not supported Barack Obama in recent contests.

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.
Clinton rejected any idea that her emphasis on white voters could be interpreted as racially divisive. “These are the people you have to win if you’re a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election. Everybody knows that.”

In the final minutes before election results come in, it’s worth reiterating the bizarre nature of the general election campaign and the way it is covered in the press. The final outcome is highly predictable from the political fundamentals and yet the media invests vast effort in making up stories about campaign events and their effect on the polls. The coverage that doesn’t focus on the horse race tends to try to answer unanswerable questions about politicians’ character, intentions, and motives. Discussing and examining the policy platforms of the candidates comes later or not at all. I keep waiting for reporters to realize the deep epistemological problems with this approach but professional norms and economic incentives have seemingly locked the status quo in place.

Since it’s Election Day, I want to reiterate my quadrennial objections to the Electoral College:

It’s an undemocratic constitutional legacy that causes voters in 30-40
states to be ignored in favor of a handful of battleground states.
People claim small states would be neglected without the Electoral
College, but most of them are not getting much attention right now
anyway (see Rhode Island, Wyoming, the Dakotas, etc.). And any
candidate who shunned vast swaths of the country would pay a heavy
price. We should give voters more credit – they will punish national
candidates who run regional campaigns.

Also, it’s absurd that so many states like North Carolina (where I live) elect their judges — voters know nothing about the candidates and it creates perverse incentives for politicking:

[Judicial elections] are increasingly indistinguishable from the rest of our politics – nasty, partisan and money-driven…

With legal and ethical norms eroding, strategic
candidates for the bench are going to play politics — bad news for
every citizen who wants an effective non-partisan judiciary. That’s why
all judges should be appointed. Let’s hold elected officials
responsible for the judges they appoint, rather than politicizing the
law. It’s the only workable solution.

Finally, I’m unhappy with the prevalence of early voting and voting by mail. If this country either (a) voted on a weekend or (b) had a national holiday for voting, we wouldn’t need to offer early voting as a convenience option. There’s something important about voting together as a community on Election Day — it affirms our social and political equality as citizens.

My friend and co-author Jacob Montgomery ran some numbers over the weekend on early voting by county in all 100 NC counties and the 11 Ohio counties that have public data. He plotted the percentage of the 2004 major-party vote that has already been cast against the proportion of African Americans in the county and finds a positive relationship:

It’s strong indirect evidence of how mobilized the black vote is going to be in this election:

As I’ve pointed out before (here and here), Barack Obama has been plagued by a series of controversies with a common cause — the lack of congruity between his state senate district and the presidential election landscape.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) committed a Kinsley-esque gaffe by suggesting as much during a visit to a synagogue in Boca Raton:

“Think of the history here,” says the six-term New York congressman. “You have a guy who’s half-white, half-black. He goes to an Ivy League school, comes to Chicago … to start a political career. Doesn’t know anybody.

“Gets involved with community organizing — why? Because that’s how your form a base. OK. Joins the largest church in the neighborhood. About 8,000 members. … Why did he join the church? … Because that’s how you get to know people.

“Now maybe it takes a couple years,” Nadler says, suggesting that soon Obama starts to think of Wright, “’Jesus, the guy’s a nut, the guy’s a lunatic.’ But you don’t walk out of a church with 8,000 members in your district.”

How solid is Barack Obama’s lead? NBC’s First Read notes that he’s led in 111 consecutive national polls whose methodology they trust:

Obama has now led in 111 straight national polls with methodologies we trust (looking back through the Pollster.com national trend), including the trackers back to Sept. 22-24 when a Gallup Tracking poll showed the race tied at 46%-46%. Since a Big Ten poll that showed McCain up 46%-45%, Obama has led in 117 of 119 polls.

It looks like I didn’t miss much during my work-related blogging hiatus over the last few days — here’s UNC’s Jim Stimson yesterday:

Friday 10/31: Steady As She Goes: With four days remaining the apparent tightening of recent days has relapsed to pretty much the state of affairs of a week ago. Notwithstanding claims from the McCain camp of progress in the private polls, the picture painted by the now huge numbers of public polls is one of stark stability. Perhaps we have never seen a lead as unvarying as this one — or maybe it is only the case that the data of previous elections weren’t good enough to observe such stability.

Stimson puts Obama at 53.7% of the two-party presidential vote; Pollster.com has Obama at 53.1%; and Sam Wang’s meta-analysis of the Electoral Vote puts Obama at just over 360 electoral votes with a 95% confidence interval well above 270. Absent a massive Republican tide in the last three days, this thing is over.