Entries for May 2008

I've been writing, repeatedly, that the voting alignments in this general election could look quite different from those that prevailed in 2004 and 2000 (and, for that matter, 1996). And that the voting alignments could be quite different depending on whether Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee. The Clinton campaign is now arguing, in a lengthy memo, that its candidate would run stronger against John McCain than Obama would, and Gallup shows Clinton running stronger than Obama in primary/caucus states won by Clinton and running about the same as Obama in primary/caucus states won by Obama.

National elections are decided not by popular vote but by electoral votes. So I decided to take a look at all the statewide polls, conveniently gathered by Pollster.com, that have been conducted starting in February. That seemed to be the best time to start, since McCain effectively clinched the Republican nomination on Super Tuesday, February 5 (though Mike Huckabee continued campaigning until March 4) and Obama became considerably better known after his victories in January and on Super Tuesday. There are some problems with this procedure. Polls are plentiful in some states (Ohio, Pennsylvania) and sparse in others. There is just one poll, conducted in February, in South Carolina, which shows McCain with improbably low leads over the two Democrats; in Nebraska and North Dakota, the results are heavily influenced by February SurveyUSA polls, part of its 50-state polling, that showed Obama statistically tied with McCain. These look like outliers to me, but they could be indications that voting alignments are changing even more than I think possible.

"It's the economy, stupid," James Carville famously said during the 1992 campaign, when a young Bill Clinton was running against the other President Bush. The same could be said during this presidential campaign. The headlines are full of economic bad news—mortgage foreclosures, the collapse of an investment bank, higher gas and food prices, lower home prices. Voters routinely list the economy as their chief concern, and consumer confidence has sunk to low levels.

Yet at the same time the economic numbers are not so bad. A recession is defined as two quarters of contraction. But we haven't had one yet. The gross domestic product has grown, albeit by only 0.6 percent, in the past two quarters. As my U.S. News colleague James Pethokoukis blogged after the most recent numbers came in, "Dude, where's my recession?"

Hillary Clinton's 249,000-popular-vote plurality in Kentucky, offset only partially by Barack Obama's 108,000-vote plurality in Oregon, gives her a popular-vote lead in two of realclearpolitics.com's six metrics, i.e., counting Florida and Michigan, and including those two states and the imputed popular-vote margin in the Iowa, Nevada, Washington, and Maine caucuses. And it puts her within reach, depending on the result in unpredictable Puerto Rico, of a popular-vote lead in two more metrics—the two that don't include Michigan, where Obama removed himself from the ballot and Clinton didn't. All of which seems to me to make a solid case that Clinton is the choice of the people.

Yes, there's also a solid argument that Obama is ahead in the metric that, after all, determines the nomination—the delegate count. But that lead consists almost entirely of delegates won in caucuses. Obama has a pencil-thin lead among delegates chosen in primaries.

Barack Obama's campaign hopes it will. They're putting out the word that they hope to announce on the night of May 20, after the results come in from the Kentucky and Oregon primaries, that their candidate has the 2,025 votes needed for the Democratic nomination. That would mean that the nomination would be settled before the May 31 rules committee meeting on the status of the disqualified Michigan and Florida delegations; this would deprive Clinton of a grievance but would not deprive Obama of the nomination. The June 1 primary in Puerto Rico, in which it seems possible Clinton could win a big popular-vote majority, would become moot. So could the June 3 primaries in South Dakota and Montana, which Obama is expected to win, but not by wide popular-vote margins. But he may not win: On May 13 he won the nonbinding primary in Nebraska by just 49 percent to 47 percent, with a popular vote margin of just 2,665—a vivid contrast with his 68 percent to 32 percent, 13,681-vote margin in the February 9 Nebraska caucus. (Which is more representative? Some 38,571 Nebraskans voted in the caucus, while 93,757 voted in the primary.)

There are a number of reasons to believe that Obama's May 20 scenario won't come to pass.

Obama is not likely to have enough superdelegates lined up by next Tuesday night. As this is written, RealClearpolitics.com has Obama at 1,891 delegates. Current polling gives him 58 percent of the two-candidate vote in Oregon and 34 percent of the two-candidate vote in Kentucky. That should give him, under the proportional representation rules, about 17 delegates in Kentucky and about 30 in Oregon. That puts him at 1,938. That means he needs to add 87 superdelegates between Friday and Tuesday night. He's been getting four or five a day, it seems, even after his bad defeat in West Virginia, but he needs a lot more than that.

In trying to understand news about the conflicts in Iraq, I work to keep in mind the difference between what we know now about decision-making in World War II and what most Americans knew at the time. From the memoirs and documents published after the war, we've learned how leaders made critical judgments. But at the time, even well-informed journalists could only guess at what was going on behind the scenes.

Today we're only beginning to learn about what went on behind the scenes on Iraq. One important new source is the recently published War and Decision by Douglas Feith, the No. 3 civilian at the Pentagon from 2001 to 2005. Feith quotes extensively from unpublished documents and contemporary memorandums, just as in the late 1940s Robert Sherwood did in Roosevelt and Hopkins and Winston Churchill did in his World War II histories. The picture Feith paints is at considerable variance from the narratives with which we've become familiar.

The original Super Tuesday, in the 1988 cycle, was engineered by southern and moderate Democrats with the intention of securing the nomination for a moderate southern candidate in a flurry of southern primaries. It worked that year, but for the other party: George H. W. Bush, after his defining victory in South Carolina (scheduled for the Saturday before Super Tuesday by Lee Atwater), swept the South and won the Republican nomination, while on the Democratic side, Al Gore's five primary wins in the South were matched by Jesse Jackson's five, and Michael Dukakis, winning Florida and Texas, went on to win the party's nomination.

This year, the Republican nomination was effectively settled on Super Tuesday, when John McCain's narrow but decisive wins in several states, together with the party's winner-take-all delegate allocation rules, enabled him to build up an insurmountably big delegate lead over Mitt Romney. Mike Huckabee stayed in the race, but obviously had no chance to win; he and McCain traded compliments, and on subsequent election nights Huckabee delivered gracious concession speeches and McCain delivered victory statements aimed at the general electorate. It served both candidates' interests to pretend that there was still a real contest, and Huckabee actually won the Kansas caucus and was competitive in the Virginia primary during this period. But everyone knew McCain was going to be the party's nominee, and treated him accordingly.

The official results show what Friday's papers were predicting: Conservative Boris Johnson has unseated Labor Mayor Ken Livingstone in London. In the multiparty election, Johnson led in first-choice votes 43 percent to 37 percent. Under the rules, the second-choice votes of those who did not vote for either of the first two candidates are added to their totals. This slightly reduced Johnson's margin: Expressed as a percentage of total first- and second-choice votes for the top two candidates, Johnson won 53 percent to 47 percent. By way of comparison, Livingstone led Conservative Steven Norris by 36 percent to 28 percent in first-choice votes in 2004. This map shows the results in each of London's 14 assembly districts. Conservatives elected Assembly members in eight districts, Labor in six.

Regionally, there are some interesting patterns; I'll give Johnson's percentage of the two-candidate first- and second-choice votes in each. Livingston's strongest areas were City and East (37 percent), Southwark and Lambeth (37 percent), and North East (38 percent). These contain many of the historical slums and public housing estates of London. There's been some gentrification in the City and East, between the City and the Docklands, as financial services professionals upgrade old houses or move into spanking-new flats near their places of work. But there are also a lot of Muslim immigrants in some of these areas. The only other district in which Livingstone won an appreciable majority was Greenwich and Lewisham (44 percent), which is mostly low income.