Another thought on these Clinton campaign postmortems is that there's a tendency in them to overstate the extent to which changes in the Clinton campaign account for her better performance at the end of the primary process than at the beginning of it. As best I can tell, the real cause of the change was just a change in which states were voting -- the schedule shifted to places where the sort of older working class white voter who formed Clinton's base were a larger proportion of the electorate. Holding demographics constant, there was little change in either candidate's performance over the course of the primary season.
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Elect New Voters
08 Jun 2008 11:41 am
Comments (22)
Matt, also watching Meet the Press?
But it's not clear that it would have held if you change the order. Suppose Super Tuesday went as it did, but Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Texas and Pennsylvania all voted in February, and the Obama states voted afterwards. Wouldn't Clinton have won those states by larger margins, and then sapped some of the energy of the Obama campaign?
This is mostly true. However, I'd point to South Dakota as a troubling counterexample. If you look at the election map, South Dakota stands out as a lone Clinton state in a sea of Obama states. For that reason alone, most of us assumed that it would go for Obama.
Nobody made much of it, because it couldn't change the overall race and was the second to last state to report, but if I were the Obama team, I'd spend a certain amount of time figuring out what went wrong in South Dakota, because that's the one thing that's been pretty troubling to me.
More interesting to me is how certain states (CA) would have gone the other way if they'd voted later in the primary season.
I think SD went to Clinton because Obama had stopped campaigning for primary votes pretty much after Pennsylvania. And she, Bill, and Chelsea were in SD in full force right before the campaign.
Also, has anybody looked into the possibility of sympathy votes? I think most voters who were objective knew by March that Clinton had already lost. Toward the end, couldn't people have been voting for Clinton out of sympathy, knowing it didn't really matter anymore? Probably not, but just a thought.
And if SD has any significance, then shouldn't NC and Indiana?
JMS, South Dakota is mostly explained by the fact that voter turn-out was so low and Hillary's demographics simply made up a much larger portion of the electorate than they did for the state population as a whole. A lot of his voters stayed home because the media was making it pretty clear they didn't matter anymore (the 4 more delegates to clinch! thing), while her voters were still turning out hoping to change the narrative for the day.
"Holding demographics constant, there was little change in either candidate's performance over the course of the primary season."
I disagree: HRC shifted from trying to sell herself to trying to get people not to "buy" Obama. HRC would have went down even quicker had she not pivoted away from who she is to "some people say" my opponent represents icky black people syndrome.
And also SD is easily explained by the fact Obama barely paid attention there while the Clintons did twenty appearances all together within the last week. She won largely on the last week decideders that broke 2 to 1 for her.
South Dakota makes sense if you look at the demography. Being a closed primary hurt Obama, as did the fact that South Dakota is the second-oldest state in the nation. The S.D. Democratic party is more female than most states, and tribal turnout in the Dakotas is always very, very low.
Seems to me that Obama peaked in Virginia. After that came Hillary states of Ohio and Texas. That seemed to change the momemtum somewhat, though too late to help her. In Virginia and Wisconsin too, however, it would seem that Obama did more than just get his usual demographic. He was making in roads into Hillary's. That changed, however, after Virginia.
SD was definitely about Obama simply not campaigning. His campaign had sent staff organizers on forced break post-NC/IN when they could've flooded MT and SD if they wanted to. They were in GE mode already, and even had some organizers in 17 battleground states (like PA) doing GE prep, while not bothering to really fully staff the last few states. Goes to show how much his field operations did make a difference in the campaign.
Cap and Gown--
not really. There was no such thing as "momentum" in this campaign, it's always been about political coalitions. As for making in-roads into her base, the idea that white working-class voters are her "base" has always been an artifact of over-simplified analysis that overlooks the vast differences amongst white voters, even when you control for things like education, socio-economic status, and age. The fact is that all those things considered, self-described liberals in Mass are not the same as self-described liberals in Ore, Baptists are culturally different from Protestants who are culturally different from Catholics, Southerners are culturally different from mid-westerners, etc etc. Those differences matter when it comes to political preferences. Wisconsin has always been reform-minded, even though its demographically similar to more rust-belty states that aren't that into reform, e.g.
The simple truth is that Obama and Clinton had pretty static coalitions, and Obama's was bigger, and the fluctuations in those coalitions were rather small from election to election. I'd say the only time we truly saw some level of change in those was after the second Wright outburst, when some of Obama's white-male support started to abandon him, but the gas-tax holiday had the double-whammy effect of reminding the vast majority of those voters why (a)they like Obama in the first place, and (b) why they distrusted Clinton. It also took his abstract message and showed how it could be a concrete path to real improvements in people's daily lives. And that brought those voters right back into the fold, by and large.
If there was a contested Republican primary, Obama would've won Indiana too (exit polls show that a non-negligible % of voters have McCain as their top choice, and those voters broke overwhelmingly for Clinton, to an extent that it changed the election by ~4%).
The states Obama won, he would've won unless the press had declared him dead and hectored him out of the race. He was able to win big in February because Clinton stupidly didn't contest those states, and his turnout machines juiced his numbers big time. After that, just b/c of his money and the strength of his organization, she was never going to be able to replicate that feat for her campaign to the extent she needed to in order to catch him. They fucked up on super Tuesday by investing in the big states, and they magnified that error exponentially by doubling-down on that strategy.
There was never momentum, just two large political coalitions, one larger than the other (if just barely), and two organizations, one monumentally superior to the other, and not surprisingly, the campaign that had the bigger coalition, the superior organization, and didn't commit a series of terrible strategic blunders, won.
Yglesias is so clueless, he wouldn't know how to pour sand out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.
It seemed to me that Obama's campaign was simply not running up the score. Once they knew that Obama had the nomination pretty much locked up, they eased back on their primary campaigning and started pointing toward the general election. They start opposing Hillary head on, and they did not campaign as vigorously in the remaining states. Hillary, on the other hand, was campaigning harder than ever. The result was that it looked like Hillary was gaining momentum when in fact her opponent had pretty much packed up and gone home because he had already won.
The risk in this approach is that it made Obama seem weaker than he was at the end. However, it minimized the damage from head on attacks with Hillary, and it left her credibility more intact. I think this was a carefully thought out strategic calculation made by the Obama campaign.
> It seemed to me that Obama's campaign was simply > not running up the score. Once they knew that
> Obama had the nomination pretty much locked up, > they eased back on their primary campaigning and > started pointing toward the general election.
I've been thinking this myself, but would never dare to mention it where any Clinton supporters could read it. They would go absolutely ballistic at the notion that Obama stopped competing with Hillary and instead went after McCain. Even though it was the truth.
The outcome in South Dakota suggests that Obama's strength -- the plains states and the west -- arose more from the format (caucuses) than popular support.
If you look at the states across the six states that cover the great plains, for example, from North Dakota to Texas, two held only primaries (OK and SD), and Clinton won them both. Texas did both, and she won the primary while he won the caucus. Replace the Kansas and Nebraska caucuses with primaries, and does Obama win? Who knows now, but she did win the state primaries immediately to the north and south (SD/OK). If ND holds a primary, does Obama win?
His high water mark was VA-WI, which came before Wright blew up. He never did as well demographically after that.
Wow you commenters are horrible. MY makes he excellent point: demographics held constant. A few people make interesting points (South D. was weird, would things have been different if OH came before the February rush?), but you all just ignore that and ramble about momentum.
Let me repeat this. In caps:
MOMENTUM DID NOT MATTER. DAILY SCANDALS AND CONTROVERSIES DID NOT MATTER. OBAMA WON AND LOST THE EXACT SAME DEMOGRAPHICS IN PENN THAT HE DID IN VIRGINIA!!!
Is this not clear? There was no peaking, or Wright-backlash, there was just changing demographics.
uh, shock mouse, you're wrong. look it up.
PJ: At least you addressed the issue at hand, instead of ignoring it entirely.
You're wrong though. If you are referring to your previous comment, the SD through TX line is a bit arbitrary. The plains states would be better thought of as from Missippippi to Idaho. For instance, Obama won Montana the same night he lost SD. We can't really ascribe current event reasons to 1 and not the other.
Shock Mouse
My geographic boundaries aren't arbitrary -- those are the great plains states. MT is half in the plains, but its considered a Rocky Mountain state. Certainly the people of the dakotas are a lot different from the people of Idaho, and MS is no more simlar than brookyln.
When I said that you're wrong, I meant look at the exit polls -- your assertion is false. Obama had momentum in february, and was doing better in each primary. He got a majority of the white vote in virginia, and an even bigger majority of the white vote in Wisconsin.
Obama was cruising to crushing victories across most of the primaries before the Wright flap hit. Obama was never the same after that.
He won catholics in VA, got crushed 2 to 1 among catholics in TX and PA.
He won latinos in VA, got crushed 2 to 1 among latinos in TX.
look at the exit polls at cnn's website. The data refutes you.
Well something happened since Obama underperfomed his vaunted spreadsheet in every state he lost (and Guam) from March on.(The sheet was right for states he won) At the end of the day it was wine plus cognac defeating beer but there were changes at the margins that Clinton's new fighting persona was partly responsible for. (along with the Rev and bitterguns) Clinton also did better with white women and higher income voters after February.
The Yglesias' "states" rationale is they same that Team Clinton used to explain the ass kicking it took during February.
Comments closed June 22, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Matt, also watching Meet the Press?
Posted by Bob from Brooklyn | June 8, 2008 11:59 AM