A Few Random Thoughts

06.05.2008

1. It continues to annoy me that commentators on the cable networks confuse electoral momentum for the random quirks of the primary calendar. Nothing new happened--Obama didn't "rebound" in any meaningful sense, any more than he'll be "losing ground" when he gets beaten badly in West Virginia and Kentucky. North Carolina was an Obama state in terms of demography and political culture, so he won it comfortably; Indiana was a tossup, so it was a close race there. Not that the Clinton campaign should derive any satisfaction from this--the lines between the two coalitions are clearer and more static than ever, and Obama's is a little bit larger. Indeed, from looking at election results, I think you could easily make the case that nothing really new has happened in the race since Super Tuesday. I just wish someone on TV would point out the role that happenstance primary scheduling plays in shaping this whole narrative. (It's an interesting question whether the race would have played out differently had Super Tuesday been followed by Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania.)

2. Now that, in Indiana, Obama has (as he did in other states, like Wisconsin and Missouri) slightly outperformed poll expectations in a heavily white state, can we put to rest the notion that there's any systematic Bradley effect at work in the race? Look: any candidate, black or white, will outperform polls by a bit in some states and underperform by a bit in others. You can't scream "Bradley effect" every time the latter happens and ignore it every time the former happens. It just puzzles me why, in a situation where any number of hypotheses can plausibly explain the observed results, some commentators insist on advancing the one theory that paints a large segment of the American public as closet racists.

3. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that eighteen months ago, the conventional wisdom among pretty much everybody was that the Democratic race would consist of a Mark Warner or an Evan Bayh assembling a coalition of working-class, rural, socially conservative Democrats challenging the Hillary coalition of African-Americans and urban liberals. And here we are...

--Josh Patashnik

Posted: Tuesday, May 06, 2008 10:51 PM with 5 comment(s)

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forrestnash said:

With regards to 1., I have to say that this has worked drastically more in Hillary's favor than Obama's, so there isn't much room to complain about tonight. I

May 6, 2008 11:03 PM

roidubouloi said:

Geez, Patashnik,

You just noticed that nothing has changed fundamentally since Super Tuesday other than the clock running out? Is anyone at TNR awake? There has, however, been an important story that you all consistently miss. When Obama campaigns on Hillary's turf -- those states where the demographics are in her favor -- he manages to bring it close. See, e.g., TX and CA. Contrariwise, when Hillary campaigns on his turf, he blows her out. And THAT alone explains this race.

Instead of recognizing that this ability to keep it tight in the other guys playing field and win big in your own is the real measure of Obama's strength, you all get completely confused by the fact that the demographics vary from one state to the next, sometimes favoring him, sometimes favoring her. Thus, you mistakenly report that Hillary's 9% in PA was a victory. No, it was a huge loss, the loss that finished her, because she could barely gain anything in a state with great demographics for her.

Had Super-Tuesday been followed by TX-OH-PA, the overall outcome would have been as bad or worse for Hillary. After MS, she had lost 5 delegates in the TX-OH-VT-RI-MS round. If you add in PA, she would have gained a net 7 and it really would have been downhill for her from there. The loss she just suffered in NC would have looked even worse than it does tonight because she would not have had the recent win in PA to offset it a bit.

You simply don't know how to handicap these races in an appropriate manner. Fortunately, David Axelrod does.

May 6, 2008 11:16 PM

liberal reformer said:

You are dead on, Mr. Patashnik. I was telling a friend the same thing last night while watching the returns. Nothing fundamental has changed, Hillary is still behind and is still slogging on. The numbers look bad for her, though, and roidubouloi is correct - she has suffered slippage in the superdelegate category.

May 7, 2008 5:10 AM

shims-b said:

1. Thank you. You are the first person I've seen make this exceedingly obvious point. The results of yesterday's primaries, as with nearly every previous primary going back to March 4th at least, have come out almost exactly as the demographics would have predicted. Except that one could theoretically argue that Obama did better than expected in PA, media narrative notwithstanding.

2. Great point. I don't think you need me to make the obvious point that the media keeps up the race narrative because it is so obvious (African-American candidate) and juicy (identity politics), but it looks to me like the polls are showing a fairly random distribution of error, which is to be expected. And if anything, they seem to almost always underestimate Obama's support among African-Americans, which I just don't get. What do all the Zogby-bashers have to say now that it turns out that they were right on, in NC at least?

May 7, 2008 8:48 AM

geoffgraham said:

Hillary is fighting a war of attrition, but there's no attrition. If this were a real war with bullets and bombs flying, we'd be calling it a quagmire.

May 7, 2008 9:09 AM