Nevada Turnout Note

I've seen a lot of people comparing Nevada turnout to 2008. Careful! Remember, context matters. Several issues...in 2008, Nevada had just moved up in the process, and so it was sort of a first-time thing, which might have increased turnout over this year. It was also essentially earlier in the process. In 2008, Nevada went on the same day as South Carolina, and before Florida -- although Michigan had squeezed in between New Hampshire and Nevada/South Carolina. Between the calendar and the way the process played out, the nomination was far more up for grabs when Nevada caucused in 2008 than it was this time around. In fact, there were still three viable candidates at that point (McCain, Huck, and Romney), and the press was still treating Fred Thompson and Giuliani as viable candidates, although they really weren't. And Ron Paul was Ron Paul.

I have no idea how to adjust for any of that, but at least in my view it's silly to do a straight year-to-year comparison without keeping the context in mind.

Read Stuff, You Should

Hey, it's Babe Ruth's birthday! February 6, 1895. Did you know that Fenway Park was, when he played there, an extreme pitchers' park and HRs were almost impossible to hit there? He did okay at Yankee Stadium though.

The good stuff:

1. I sort of like this NYT initiative to crowdsource obscure campaign finance reports. I'm more in favor of campaign finance disclosure than, I think, the evidence suggests it's worth...that is, I'm not really convinced that in real life disclosure actually does make that much difference, but I think in theory it's important to protect the potential of disclosure. So good for the Times.

2. We all know that the press has an interest in keeping the nomination battle going; Erica Fry on reporters actively rooting for it.

3. OK, I'm not going to stoop to giving Seth Masket a Catch of the Day for this one, but go ahead and click it.

4. Could have also given a CotD to Harold Pollack for this one on tax whiners.

5. And Sarah Kliff reports from inside Komen.

Sunday Question for Liberals

Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the economy right now?

Sunday Question for Conservatives

Is Newt Gingrich helping or hurting his future ability to profit in the conservative marketplace? I'm not really talking about the whole campaign -- just post-Iowa, when he started bashing almost certain nominee Mitt Romney.

Nevada Caucuses

It's hard to come up with something meaningful to say at this point..about the only suspense remaining is at what point everyone will concede that there's no longer any doubt about the nomination. Well, I suppose there's suspense about what wild accusations Newt Gingrich will make next. I'm hoping that he'll turn against Rick Santorum, because I'd like to hear what kind of sneering disdain Newt can come up with for the Keystone state (to join his sneering disdain for Massachusetts, San Francisco, Chicago, New York...am I missing anything? That's 18M+ Americans that Newt regularly sneers at if we confine it to city limits, quite a few more if we look at metro areas. It's true that there are liberals who do bash GOP-dominated states, but I'd be surprised if anyone could find an example of a Democratic national politician doing so, especially not as part of his or her regular public rhetoric).

Anyway, the biggest disappointment last night was in our TV pundits. I didn't watch all of it, of course, but I did have the TV on quite a bit on the cable nets, and despite the fact that Romney obviously had Nevada won with something around half the vote, I was terribly disappointed that the TV pundits didn't immediately move to create artificial suspense by deciding that Romney had to break 50% in order to "really" win the state. This shows an appalling lack of creativity in our TV pundits! We'll no doubt be overtaken by pundits from Japan or China or India or wherever it is that we're worried about being overtaken by these days. 

What Mattered This Week?

I'll start with the economic news, including of course the good jobs news for January. Remember as always that these numbers get revised, so everything is tentative, but certainly good economic news.

One week ago, I wasn't willing to rule out a realistic (but slim) chance that Mitt Romney could still lose the nomination. Now, it would take some sort of external shock. So that's something.

In international stuff, Syria again, and Iran, contain plenty of trouble for the US; meanwhile, we got the further confirmation that the US and coalition members are winding down Afghanistan a bit quicker than previously believed.

What am I missing, or wrong about? What do you think mattered this week?

Plum Line: GOP House Follies

My post over at Plum Line today looks at the two strategies under consideration by House Republicans: repeating last year's excellent results (can they get their approval ratings under 5%?), or Not Being Seen.

The key question, as I say over there, is about the Members who last year appeared to be far more concerned about being labeled RINOs than they were about the general image of the party, or even about how their own votes (such as, for example, the crusade against Planned Parenthood) would play with general election swing voters. I do wonder what they'll make of the presidential nomination battle. On the one hand, Mitt Romney's nomination should tend to reassure them that perhaps the threat of Tea Party primaries against incumbents has ebbed. On the other hand, the various manias of the past year -- Newt, Prince Herman, Bachmann, and even Trump -- might scare them even further, since their own nomination contests are almost certainly far less structured to avoid the crazy than is the high-profile sequential presidential nomination process. I'm not sure how that all shakes out, but it's a good story for reporters to dig into, I'd think.

Health Care Was Never Going to Save the GOP

Following this morning’s excellent jobs numbers, conservative Philip Klein tweeted:

With economic #s improving, good thing GOP will nominate a candidate who can run a credible campaign against unpopular Obamacare. Oh, wait..

Here’s what’s wrong with that…well, actually, beyond the inconvenient fact that many Republicans who have been in public office since before 2009 have supported major sections of ACA, including the individual mandate – it’s not just a Mitt Romney problem.

But what’s really wrong with Klein’s point is that he misunderstands the relationship between the economy, approval of Barack Obama, and the popularity of Obama’s initiatives. The real “Oh, wait…” here isn’t that Mitt Romney is unusually poorly positioned to take on Obama on health care. It’s that if the unemployment rate continues to drop, Obama’s approval ratings will rise, and if Obama’s approval ratings rise, “Obamacare” is going to be more popular.

Of course, Republicans pushed this even farther by personalizing the issue: one would have to guess that “Obamacare” is even more dependent on what one thinks about Barack Obama than “ACA” or a generic “health care plan” would be. But really, this isn’t something that Republicans have much control over. If it turns out that the economy is really getting healthy – and don’t forget, a few months of better jobs numbers is no guarantee at all of how things will look by mid-summer – then about the only thing the outparty can do is to find an Eisenhower, and unfortunately for the GOP those are in very short supply. That’s why if you want to know who will win in November, you can mostly ignore the primaries and caucuses – watch the economic numbers, the Fed policy, and the progress of the payroll tax cut and UI extender bill through Congress this month. But it’s not just that; those are also the indicators you should watch if you want to know how popular ACA will be in the fall. Overall, I think Jonathan Chait has it about right: economic pessimism is probably Mitt Romney's best bet, and either it will pan out or it won't.

Nevada, Nevada, The Helper and the Pal

The Nevada caucuses are tomorrow; the polling has all-but-certain nominee Mitt Romney way out in front.

Is there any reason to pay attention? Sure. Two things to keep an eye on. First, of course, the better Romney does, the more the press will treat the race as a done deal (as, in my view, they mostly should); the less likely that Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum will have yet another surge; and thus the more likely Romney can ignore them and focus on bashing Barack Obama. At least once he gets his lines straight.

And then there's the much-anticipated Ron Paul "delegate" strategy, which is supposed to show up in the caucus states. As I've said, I don't think there's really much to this; on the one hand I doubt that Paul's delegate haul overall will be even as high as his vote share, let alone higher, while on the other hand I don't think that his leverage at the convention is particularly related to how many delegates he has there. But still, it's going to be something of a story, and Nevada is a test to see how that goes.

I suppose there's also the question of when Rick Santorum will finally drop out...it's certainly possible that a blowout Romney win in Nevada could finally push Santorum over the edge.

So while the whole contest has certainly become a lot less dramatic, there's still some relevance to at least the first of the February contests.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to the great Maura Tierney, 47. You know, I think I've seen almost nothing she's done other than, of course, NewsRadio. Except, that is, for something else I can highly recommend: Scotland, Pa. Great idea, great execution, especially for the first first hour or so -- and she's terrific throughout.

OK, the good stuff:

1. Katie from Feministing on Susan G. Komen. Excellent. For more on that and other things, by the way, I did the roundup over at Greg's place yesterday evening, so lots of links there.

2. Larry Bartels checks out how those lucky "very poor" are getting along. Someone better tell Mitt Romney that he doesn't quite have it right.

3. If you ask me, sane conservatives are nuts to embrace (or in any way tolerate Ann Coulter just because they happen to agree with her on Romneycare; sane conservative David Frum obviously disagrees.

4. Spencer Ackerman on Afghanistan, 2013, and Mitt Romney.

5. And I think Ezra Klein has much the better of the argument about budget deficits, Obama, and George W. Bush, but I think he's overly generous to Keith Hennessey.

GOP War On Budgeting Update

Via Brian Beutler, a wonderful quote from John McCain, showing exactly how Republicans think about budgeting:

Let’s not let a domestic issue such as tax increases interfere…with our nation’s security.

That, in a nutshell, captures exactly how Republicans deal with the budget, and it explains almost all of the structural deficit. I have no idea whether they really believe it or if it's just the way they talk for political reasons, but it's as if there's just no recognition at all that revenues and expenditures have anything to do with each other. Which in and of itself is tough enough to defend -- but from a group of politicians who claim that "the deficit" is important, it's, well, breathtaking.

As I've argued several times, the way to square the circle is to assume that what they mean by "the deficit" has nothing whatsoever to do with, you know, the difference between federal government revenues and spending, and that in fact those two totals have nothing to do with each other. Read through Beutler's story; he gets Jon Kyl to admit that the spending cuts they support to pay for a payroll tax cut are simply spending cuts they support, regardless. Which is really what every budget argument I've heard Republicans give in the last few years boils down to: they have plenty of spending they're for and plenty they're against, and taxes they're against and more-or-less taxes they're for, but they just reject the idea of trade-offs designed to bring revenues and expenditures together. Even for someone such as McCain who presumably really cares a lot about military spending, it's as if he's entirely unaware that taxes have anything at all to do with how much spending is available. 

Romney as a General Election Candidate

Over at Plum Line, my post today is a speculative one about Romney's strengths and weaknesses as a general election candidate. I've been saying he's mostly a generic Republican candidate, but I find some pluses and minuses around that -- with the strong caveat, of course, that the out-party candidate against an incumbent president just isn't all that important.

I downplayed over there the issues having to do with Romney's wealth and his business background...perhaps I should explain that a bit. My feeling is that every presidential candidate brings baggage to the campaign which is available for the other side to exploit. Figure out what the average level of baggage is, and that's what I'd compare Romney with when assessing him as a candidate. So: is it awkward to have a rich guy as your nominee during a deep recession? Sure. Does Romney seem to have some trouble learning how to talk about his own wealth on the campaign trail? Yes, that too. But is it more baggage than Barack Obama or John McCain had in 2008, or John Kerry had in 2004, or Al Gore and George W. Bush had in 2000? I think it's hard to make a case for that.

So I'm not saying that Romney won't be attacked over these things, or even that those attacks won't lose some votes for him (remembering that all such effects, of course, are only around the margins). I'm just saying it's always something, and so far what we know about Romney's wealth and business background doesn't strike me as above par.

Ignore Those Polls! (Influence on the Vote Edition)

This has come up twice already this week, so I guess it's time for a reminder: people usually don't know why they vote for the candidates they choose to vote for, and are not particularly good at assessing how something influenced that vote -- let alone how some hypothetical future event would influence them.

Today's installment was from one of the sillier events on the campaign trail: Donald Trump's endorsement, which apparently is going to go to Mitt Romney today. Now, in real life no one is going to care one way or another that Donald Trump endorsed a candidate. About the only effect would be a very short blast of publicity, but leading presidential candidates get plenty of that anyway. This isn't something that will be forgotten by November; this is something that will almost certainly have been forgotten by Saturday, when Nevadans caucus. In other words, it's not going to affect vote choice at all. And yet if you ask voters, it turns out that some will tell you that they would be more likely, and a somewhat larger number will tell you that they'll be less likely, to vote for someone with a Trump endorsement. Hey, reporters: don't believe those polls! You can take it as a measure of what respondents think about Trump, if you care about such things, but there's no reason to believe that this kind of self-reporting about vote choice is meaningful at all, and it shouldn't be included in stories about a Trump endorsement as if it was meaningful.

Similarly, there was a ton of coverage about exit polls in Florida that asked about whether ads or debates had influenced vote choice (sorry, no links; most of what I heard was on TV and radio). Hey, reporters: don't believe those polls! People have no real way of knowing how they were influenced in these sorts of things even if they try real hard, and there's no reason to believe that exit poll respondents did any such self-examination. Don't believe me? Ask a room full of people if they vote based on political party. You'll get only a handful of people who believe that they do -- and yet we know very well that party is far and away the biggest factor in partisan elections.

The bottom line here is that polling is a really good tool for reporters to use in many cases, but remember: what polling tells you for sure is only what people will say if they're asked a question by a pollster. We can be confident (if it's a competent pollster) that the answer can be extrapolated out to the full relevant population, but only to the extent that we can be confident that everyone would give similar answers to those questions when asked by pollsters. It's the reporters job to stop and think whether those answers have anything to do with real attitudes or real behavior. They might -- polling about vote choice the day before the election is usually very accurate! But in cases when there's no good reason to think the poll is telling us something meaningful, it's a disservice to readers to report those poll results. 

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday today to Pat Tabler; he's 54. 109 PAs with the bases loaded: .489 BA. OBP/SLG of 505/693; that's an 1198 OPS, which is just a bit higher than Babe Ruth's career number. Alas, we don't know what the Babe did with the bases loaded. I wonder who the guy is who was the Pat Tabler of, say, runner on second base?

The good stuff: 

1. Sasha Issenberg noticed that Newt's campaign in Florida was a mess. Amy Gardner noticed that Newt's campaign in Nevada is a mess. Hmmm. I sense a theme.

2. Rick Hason on Super PACs and Citizens United. My general sense is that the big thing you want to do if you want publicity for something is to get it called "Super" whatever. Seems to just mesmerize reporters.

3. What Matt Yglesias said about Romney's "very poor" gaffe: it's the policy that matters.

4. But it's also true that we could use some better journalism. Greg Marx explains.

5. Suddenly a lot less interested in supporting Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation? Over at Good, Nona Willis Aronowitz suggests five alternatives for supporting women's health.

6. And Seth Masket reports that redistricting doesn't seem to matter much in state legislatures, at least not on electoral competition and polarization. I know, it seems like the way districts are drawn should matter a great deal, but it just doesn't seem to.

Plum Line: Giving Money (and a Question for Political Scientists)

Over at Plum Line, I reprise an argument I've made over here before: that the worst place to give your money if you want to affect the outcomes of campaigns is in presidential general elections. Still, in my view at least, a very important message.

Which brings up a question. Hey, political scientists! Especially those of you who study US politics and campaigns and elections. If you give money to candidates, where do you put your money? Do any of you give to presidential candidates for the general election? It seems to me that this is something on which the research implications for political action are absolutely clear: do you all follow them?

The Debate Coach Story

The most overrated element in Mitt Romney's big Florida win? Has to be his new debate coach. Sure, you can make an interesting story of the fact that Romney had access to the best that the conservative network has to offer. Indeed, you could talk about how former Liberty U. coach Brett O'Donnell's willingness to work for the Mittster is a good example of how Romney won the nomination: basically, he managed to dominate moderate conservatives while being competitive among social conservative, Tea Partiers, and other more extreme groups. The specific effects O'Donnell may have had on Romney's rhetoric are interesting, too.

However. As far as actual coaching is concerned, Romney was widely seen as the best debater among Republicans right up through the New Hampshire primary; a lot of the debate reviews, especially in the fall, were along the lines of "well, Romney of course was the best, but let's find something else to write about because it's boring to keep pointing out how much better he is at this than the rest of the field." The one thing that Romney seemed to really have problems with -- and here I'm very much agreeing with what I think was the conventional wisdom -- was talking about his wealth. And in my view, at least, that didn't change in the Florida debates.

Remember, one of the reasons people think that Romney got to the point he was at in the GOP race is through crushing his most serious opponents, Tim Pawlenty and Rick Perry, in debates. I don't know whether O'Donnell helped Romney on the margins or not, but the idea that his coaching was a major factor in Florida seems extremely far-fetched to me.

What Will Newt Do?

Will Newt fight on to the convention? Will he continue attacking Romney, or will he back off? What are the incentives at play here?

As Ed Kilgore notes, party leaders will presumably now lean on the disgraced former Speaker to "get out of the race—or at a minimum, to play nice." Will he listen? Especially if, as Steve Kornacki argues, at least part of the whole point of his candidacy is to sell more books (and movies, and lectures, and whatever else he can come up with).

One set of questions here is whether GOP leaders would really be willing to threaten to cut Newt off from the institutions that combine to produce conservative respectability, and whether they have the clout to do so. I don't really know the answers to that, but I suspect they mostly can't or won't. It's almost certainly a solid marketing move by Newt, Inc. to attempt to grab the title of The Conservative Leader...and even if those portions of the GOP that care a lot about winning elections may wind up upset with him, those portions which care most about purity and full expressions of conservative "ideas" are going to be very happy with him. It's almost certainly win-win, too: if Romney loses conservative purists will claim that it was because he wasn't conservative enough (and Newt can cash in) while if Romney wins then conservatives will complain that he's betraying them with his moderate policies. And Newt can cash in. (Not saying that Romney will attempt to be a moderate in office, but conservative purists will naturally be disappointed in the results because purists on both sides are always disappointed in the results and almost always blame the president).

Another issue, however, is about market sizes. Remember, you need an enormous number of votes to be elected President of the United States, and quite a few votes to be nominated for that office. But you can make a very good living off of a fairly small number of dupes, as long as they're rich enough and willing to keep shelling out for every new product you come up with.

So all in all I'm not really sure where Newt's incentives lie, other than to say that I'm quite certain that he really, really knows his marks and what works with them.

Read Stuff, You Should

OK, here goes; I'm going to try this daily, for a while at least.

And I'm not sure if this will be fun or dopey, but I'm going to try out a new feature as part of it -- birthday greetings. The idea is that it'll always be someone I like in some way, sometimes from politics, usually not. I have no idea whether I'll wind up keeping it; most likely, if you all seem to like it, I'll keep going. If not, it'll probably drop out. So:

Happy Birthday to the great Terry Jones, who is 70 today. No, not the crazy guy from Florida. I've been meaning to see his "Wind in the Willows," but haven't got around to it yet -- and I did not realize, until just now, that he was credited with the screenplay for Labyrinth, but wikipedia says (for whatever that's worth) that he didn't have much to do with the final movie. Well, there's their mistake, right there.

Ready for the good stuff?

1. Celebrity endorsements! I'm a big fan of following these. KRS-One for Ron Paul? Yikes!

2. Good nomination postmorten of Mitt Romney from Jonathan Chait.

3. Seth Masket looks at the Florida exit polls, with chart.

4. Lots of data about ads in Florida from Erika Fowler and the Wesleyan Media Project.

5. Away from the campaign, you'll want to see the evidence that ACA is actually working well so far, from Harold Pollack and Greg Anrig.

6. And I thoroughly agree with Stan Collender: you don't balance the budget by changing the budget process.