Brendan Nyhan

The “Bush stole the election” meme was dealt a blow today when Slate’s Josh Levin finally examined one of the key claims – that vote totals for Bush in Florida counties using optical scan ballots were disproportionately high, indicating that nefarious conspiracies were afoot. Lo and behold, the vote totals in those counties weren’t that different from 2000, as I suspected:

In response to my piece on election conspiracy theories, many readers have asked about supposed irregularities in Florida counties that use optical-scan voting machines. In Baker County, where 69 percent of registered voters identify as Democrats, 77 percent of voters went for Bush. Dixie County: 78 percent registered Democrats, 69 percent for Bush. Franklin County: 77 percent registered Dems, 59 percent for Bush. Holmes County: 73 percent registered Dems, 77 percent for Bush.

…The big problem with this theory is that this year’s results match those from 2000… In 2000, Baker County had 83 percent registered Democrats, and 69 percent of the county’s voters went for Bush. Dixie County had 86 percent registered Democrats, and 58 percent went for Bush. Franklin County: 81 percent registered Dems, 53 percent for Bush. Holmes County: 83 percent registered Dems, 68 percent for Bush…

While each of these counties had a lower percentage of Bush voters in 2000 than in 2004, the 2000 election was much closer than this one. Each of these counties also appears to be moving toward the GOP. In all four, there is a lower percentage of registered Democrats and a higher percentage of registered Republicans in 2004 than in 2000.

Update: Here’s more on problems with the conspiracy theories from Salon and the Los Angeles Times.

The implausible case for why Hillary Clinton could win the presidency — which we’re going to hear a lot about over the next four years — seems to depend on her surprising success at winning over skeptical New York voters in 2000, particularly upstate. Don’t believe the hype.

First of all, her 55%-43% win was not exactly a landslide. As the Almanac of American Politics 2002 points out, Chuck Schumer beat Al D’Amato by an almost identical margin of 55%-44% in the 1998 race for New York’s other Senate seat, and Hillary was riding the coattails of Al Gore, who won the state 60%-35%. According to Barone and company, when you break it down by region, she won New York City 74%-25%, lost in the suburbs 53%-45%, and lost upstate 51%-47%. The latter two numbers are pretty good, but again, compare her to Schumer — he won New York City 76%-23%, lost the suburbs 51%-49% and lost upstate 53%-45%. The figures are almost identical.

The obvious conclusion is that Hillary did about as well as your average Democrat in a Democrat-leaning state. While things could have gone much worse given how polarizing she was, it proves almost nothing about her ability to win over voters in the the battleground states of the industrial Midwest, let alone the South.

And then a thought jumps to mind — where have we heard this story before? There was someone who was reported to be a “good closer” that could win over voters when it really counted. As the story goes, after polls showed him neck-and-neck with his opponent in his toughest race, he pulled out a convincing win. The margin was 52%-45%; the state was Massachusetts; and the candidate was, of course, John Kerry in his 1996 race against William Weld. Just like Hillary Clinton, he benefitted from a presidential landslide in a heavily Democratic state — Bill Clinton took the state 61%-28% — to pull out a race that he should have won.

Will Democratic voters buy the same lousy analogy again?

Though I love the Daily Show, I keep waiting for the Jon Stewart backlash — it’s basically inevitable that media coverage eventually turns nasty when someone gets so much positive press. But it hasn’t happened yet. Even the professionally vicious Wonkette admitted she likes the show:

I keep on wanting to write
something mean about that show, be like, oh, it’s so over; everyone
likes it. But it really is good. And that’s almost disappointing,
that it can be that good all the time.

However, here’s professional contrarian Michael Kinsley in the Post today trying to get the ball rolling with the toughest shot I’ve seen at Stewart so far:

A moment of surprising resonance in the campaign was Jon Stewart’s Oct. 15 appearance on “Crossfire.” Taking just a tad too seriously his recent appointment by acclamation as the Walter Cronkite of our time, Stewart begged the show’s hosts to “stop hurting America” with their divisiveness. I used to work on that show, and I still think the robust, even raucous, and ideologically undisguised hammering of politicians on “Crossfire” is more intellectually honest than more decorous shows where journalists either pretend to neutrality or pontificate as if somebody had voted them into office.

Update: More backlash in a Duke Chronicle column arguing against Stewart as a commencement speaker:

After Stewart appeared on Crossfire in October and lambasted the show’s hosts with facile jabs about their failures as journalists, he was seen as something of a hero among some Duke students. Why? There is nothing courageous about vague accusations about journalists helping “politicians and corporations” when the accuser refuses to accept accountability and deflects criticism with ad hominem attacks on Tucker Carlson’s bowties.

Michael Moore has offered the definitive entry in the silver lining sweepstakes in a new email to his list. Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel. Some choice excerpts:

1. It is against the law for George W. Bush to run for president again.

2. Bush’s victory was the NARROWEST win for a sitting president since
Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

5. The Republicans will not have a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the
Senate.

6. Michigan voted for Kerry! So did the entire Northeast, the birthplace of
our democracy. So did 6 of the 8 Great Lakes States. And the whole West
Coast! Plus Hawaii…

8. 88% of Bush’s support came from white voters. In 50 years, America will
no longer have a white majority. Hey, 50 years isn’t such a long time! If
you’re ten years old and reading this, your golden years will be truly
golden and you will be well cared for in your old age.

10. Five more African Americans were elected as members of Congress,
including the return of Cynthia McKinney of Georgia. It’s always good to
have more blacks in there fighting for us and doing the job our candidates
can’t.

12. Admit it: We like the Bush twins and we don’t want them to go away.

14. Bush is now a lame duck president. He will have no greater moment than
the one he’s having this week. It’s all downhill for him from here on out —
and, more significantly, he’s just not going to want to do all the hard work
that will be expected of him…

16. There are nearly 300 million Americans — 200 million of them of voting
age. We only lost by three and a half million! That’s not a landslide — it
means we’re almost there…

17. Finally and most importantly, over 55 million Americans voted for the
candidate dubbed “The #1 Liberal in the Senate.” That’s more than the total
number of voters who voted for either Reagan, Bush I, Clinton or Gore.
Again, more people voted for Kerry than Reagan. If the media are looking for
a trend it should be this — that so many Americans were, for the first time
since Kennedy, willing to vote for an out-and-out liberal. The country has
always been filled with evangelicals — that is not news. What IS news is
that so many people have shifted toward a Massachusetts liberal. In fact,
that’s BIG news. Which means, don’t expect the mainstream media, the ones
who brought you the Iraq War, to ever report the real truth about November
2, 2004. In fact, it’s better that they don’t. We’ll need the element of
surprise in 2008.

The debate is raging in Washington and across the country. Many reporters and conservative commentators are calling Bush’s victory a mandate, while liberal groups and other observers are denying that it is anything of the sort (Media Matters usefully rounds up both sides of the debate in the process of arguing the liberal side). All this raises an important question from a political science perspective – what are mandates and how do they work?

The best work I’ve seen on this is a recent American Journal of Political Science article by Jim Stimson, David Peterson, and two other political scientists (236K PDF). They define a mandate as essentially a social construction – a collective interpretation of election results that carries an informational signal to nervous incumbents worried about re-election. In response, members of Congress deviate from their normal voting patterns in the direction of the mandate for some period of time, particularly those whose winning margins decreased in the previous election (they give this period a half-life of approximately 150 days). The authors provide some useful empirical tests of this hypothesis, examining the 1964, 1980 and 1994 elections as the three most recent “mandate” elections (based on coding of media content). 1980 appears to have had by far the biggest impact on individual Congressional voting behavior.

So how does 2004 compare to those three elections? In 1964, Lyndon Johnson won 61% of the vote (compared to Barry Goldwater’s 38%) and 486 electoral votes. In 1980, Ronald Reagan received 51% of the vote (compared to Jimmy Carter’s 41%) and 489 electoral votes. And in 1994, Republicans received 52% of votes for the House (compared with Democrats’ 45%) and picked up 52 seats, as well as eight seats in the Senate. By contrast, in 2004, Bush won with 51% of the popular vote (compared to Kerry’s 48%) and 286 electoral votes, while his party picked up four seats in both the House and the Senate. Clearly, this election does not compare to the consensus “mandate” elections in terms of popular vote margins, electoral vote totals, or Congressional seat pickups.

However, given the closely divided nature of Congress from 1996-2002 and the 50/50 results of the 2000 presidential election, Bush’s win is being portrayed as decisive. As mandate supporters point out, he’s the first president to win 50% of the popular vote since his father in 1988, though that statistic is largely an artifact of Ross Perot’s candidacy in 1992 and 1996. But in any case, perceptions are what matter here — Bush will have a mandate if everyone thinks he has a mandate, especially those conservative Democrats who will determine whether he can pass his agenda in Congress.

The latest issue of PS, a political science journal put out by the American Political Science Association, features a series of articles forecasting the 2004 presidential vote using various models that have been developed. Though they all illustrate that political scientists are much better at predicting the past than the future, it’s useful to take a look at how well they did.

(Note: Bear in mind that many of these models have been shaped by how well they predict past elections, a type of specification search that can be especially pathological given how few data points we have. That’s why it’s important to point out that the 2004 results don’t necessarily demonstrate that certain models are better or worse than others. Revising your model in response to each new data point is a bad idea.)

Here’s a summary of the contenders from an APSA press release (236K PDF):

In the earliest completed forecast, made in late January 2004, Helmut Norpoth (Stony Brook University) finds that the true determinant of a presidential victory lies in the performance of presidential candidates in primary elections. His model examines candidate support in presidential primaries since 1912, accurately calling the general election winner in every race except in 1960—the century’s closest presidential contest. Norpoth’s forecast makes Bush a 20-1 favorite, predicting a 54.7% to 45.3% Bush victory.

In late May 2004, Brad Lockerbie (University of Georgia) used two variables that are decided well in advance of the presidential conventions to forecast the presidential election: the amount of time a party has controlled the White House, and voters’ expectations concerning their financial well-being over the course of the next year. Lockerbie predicts that President Bush will garner 57.6% of the two-party popular vote en route to victory in the 2004 presidential election.

Alan I. Abramowitz’s (Emory University) model, completed at the end of July 2004, is based on the assumption that a presidential election is fundamentally a referendum on the performance of the incumbent president. Abramowitz’s model employs three variables: the incumbent president’s approval rating in the final Gallup Poll in June, the change in real GDP during the first two quarters of the election year, and the amount of time that the incumbent party has held the White House. He predicts that President Bush will collect 53.7% of the 2004 presidential election two-party popular vote.

Christopher Wlezien (Oxford University) and Robert S. Erikson’s (Columbia University) forecast model analyzes a combination of leading economic indicators, income growth, presidential approval ratings, and trial-heat polls to predict the election’s final outcome. Completed in late August just in advance of the Republican convention, their model predicts that Bush will win between 51.7% and 52.9% of the two-party presidential vote.

Michael Lewis-Beck (University of Iowa) and Charles Tien (Hunter College, CUNY) weigh the president’s low popularity and the net loss in jobs during his term with the powers of incumbency and economic growth to break from the ranks of the other forecasts and predict a razor-thin margin of victory for Senator Kerry. Completed in late August 2004, the Lewis-Beck/Tien model predicts that Bush will gain 49.9% of the two-party vote and 241 Electoral College votes.

Thomas M. Holbrook’s (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) forecast model integrates economic news and trends, voter level of satisfaction, and personal finances, weighed with the power of incumbency and presidential popularity. Holbrook’s model, completed in late August 2004, predicts President Bush will receive 54.5% of the two-party presidential vote.

Symposium editor James E. Campbell’s (University at Buffalo, SUNY) forecast model integrates the incumbent’s trial-heat Labor Day Gallup numbers and the real growth in the GDP in the second quarter of the election year. Completed in early September 2004, the Campbell model predicts that President Bush will win 53.8% of the vote.

Their median prediction was that Bush would receive 53.8% of the two-party vote, and according to the totals on CNN.com this morning he actually received 51.5%, which is pretty close. Despite the predictions from many pundits, Iraq didn’t appear to drastically change the fundamentals of this election — presidential approval and the state of the economy (the core of most models) appear to have again played a decisive role, though we’ll have to wait for all the post-mortems to see for sure.

Yale political scientists Donald Green and Alan Gerber deserve a lot of credit for the high turnout on Tuesday. For a long time, the effectiveness of different methods of voter contact was an open question. It was too hard to control for all the different factors affecting the turnout decision. So they conducted a series of controlled experiments in real-life elections, which showed that face-to-face contact is the most effective way to mobilize voters. Their work has been very influential, and parties and interest groups are now using it to mobilize people on a scale not seen in decades.

Alan S. Krueger recently Get Out the Vote in the Times:

-Door-to-door canvassing, though expensive, yields the most votes. As a rule of thumb, one additional vote is cast from each 14 people contacted. That works out to somewhere between $7 and $19 a vote, depending on the pay of canvassers – not much different from the cost of that three-pack of underwear. Canvassers who matched the ethnic profile of their assigned neighborhoods were more successful.

-The effect of leaflets on turnout has not been evaluated as thoroughly as canvassing, but results from two partisan campaigns indicate that one vote was generated for every 66 leaflets hung on doors. In another experiment, just one vote was added for every 200 nonpartisan leaflets. Over all, leafletting costs $14 to $42 a vote. (A salutary aspect of the book is that one, two or three stars are placed next to the central findings to signify the degree of confidence the authors have in the results. This is only a one-star result.)

-Direct mail is less cost-effective than leaflets. Mailing costs totaled around $60 for each additional vote cast. Telephone calling is also not highly effective, with the cost per vote ranging from $200 for heavily scripted calls to $45 for more personalized calls. Even worse, recorded messages and e-mail had no detectable impact on turnout.

-Some candidates mail negative messages to their opponent’s supporters to discourage voting. Mailing a negative message depresses votes, but at a very low rate. The cost per vote diminished was about $300. (This is another one-star finding.)

In just-completed research, Professor Green and Lynn Vavreck of the University of California, Los Angeles, placed 5,500 get-out-the-vote commercials on cable networks across randomly selected geographic areas in four states shortly before the general elections of 2003. The ads hardly affected turnout, although the estimated impact necessarily entails much statistical uncertainty. A similar conclusion was drawn from a study of ads in the 2000 presidential election. Thus, commercials may persuade viewers to support a candidate, but they do not appear to affect whether they vote.

Krueger ends with this:

A great deal of knowledge about turnout strategies has been gleaned from experiments in election campaigns, but many gaps remain. Professors Green and Gerber conclude their book in a novel way, by giving office seekers a step-by-step guide on how to conduct scientific experiments on their own. This is not just fanciful thinking: two campaigns have already taken the bait and conducted randomized experiments. The 2004 election promises to be the first to exploit scientific research on voter turnout on a national scale.

Along the same lines, a Times article today on John Kerry’s Internet fundraising notes the campaign’s extensive use of experimentation:

[Kerry’s campaign] also spent a lot of time testing which wording in e-mail messages and on the Web site drew the most contributions. With 2.6 million supporters on the campaign’s e-mail list and a Web page averaging 250,000 daily visitors during peak times, even small increases in the percentage of people who donated could equal large gains.

“You start adding those nickels up and it makes a dramatic, dramatic difference,” Mr. Ross said.

The campaign learned that fund-raising letters do poorly on Monday. E-mail messages are best sent around 11 a.m., after people have cleared their mailbox of unwanted “spam.” And contributions swell at lunchtime on both coasts, when people spend time online.

Mr. Ross’s team also tested e-mail subject lines. On the day of Mr. Kerry’s convention speech in July – which was also the last day the campaign could raise private money before switching to public financing – the campaign sent out a long letter and a shorter letter, some carrying the subject line “this is it” and some saying “last chance.” The short version with the “last chance” heading did best and was delivered en masse.

The Web page was also engineered to bring in money. One example was the “splash page,” the first thing that new visitors see. At one point, Mr. Ross and his colleagues had 30 versions of the page up on a wall. They tested photos until they settled on a picture of Mr. Kerry flashing the thumbs up. They tested headlines until they chose “Make history with us.”

Even a small contribution button toward the bottom, which was bringing in more than $75,000 a day at its peak, was maximized. The campaign tested four different versions before finding that the label “contribute before deadline” increased the number of donations by 35 percent.

“We have no problem testing our own assumptions,” Mr. Ross said. “We don’t do anything based on a guess.”

Call it the Moneyball-ization of politics (after the brilliant Michael Lewis book on how the Oakland A’s use statistics to stay competitive with better-funded teams). In the economic and political realms, people are moving from informed guesses to testing their assumptions against hard data. It’s going to change everything.

Slate’s Daniel Gross endorses the mess cleanup thesis:

The only solace for sullen Democrats is that now Republicans might have to clean up their own fiscal mess.

And Larry Beinhart says much the same thing in the Baltimore Sun:

Sen. John Kerry’s loss of this election is a disaster for the country, but it could be the salvation of the Democratic Party.

If Mr. Kerry had won, he would have had to deal with the mess that President Bush has created. The war in Iraq. The coming implosion of the economy.

Mr. Kerry would have had to face a Republican Senate and a Republican House and a Republican judiciary. All eager to oppose, undermine and, in particular, blame him. Just as they did in the campaign. Don’t think that a spirit of bipartisanship would have arisen. Just remember how they went after the Clintons.

The new conventional wisdom is on the move! It looks like the standard interpretation of Tuesday’s results is being wildly overplayed — “moral values” and gay marriage did not drive the outcome nearly as much as some people think.

Consider the evidence:

-As UVA’s Paul Freedman points out in Slate, gay marriage bans that were on the ballot did not cause substantial increases in those states when compared to other states, nor did it substantially increase Bush’s vote total compared with 2000 in those states. And when controlling for a state’s past Bush vote, “a 10-point increase in the percentage of voters citing terrorism as the most important problem translates into a 3-point Bush gain. A 10-point increase in morality voters, on the other hand, has no effect. Nor does putting an anti-gay-marriage measure on the ballot.”

-David Brooks argues convincingly along the same lines today. “As Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center points out,” he writes, “there was no disproportionate surge in the evangelical vote this year. Evangelicals made up the same share of the electorate this year as they did in 2000. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who are pro-life. Sixteen percent of voters said abortions should be illegal in all circumstances. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who say they pray daily.” Instead, he points out that “Bush did better this year than he did in 2000 in 45 out of the 50 states,” which he attributes to his overall job approval and a general trend toward conservatism.

-Finally, ABC polling director Gary Langer makes a strong case that the “moral values” exit poll question was highly misleading (the controversy is also the subject of a news article today). The poll asked voters which issue was most important in their decision: taxes, education, Iraq, terrorism, economy/jobs, moral values or health care. Langer writes that “Six of these are concrete, specific issues. The seventh, moral values, is not, and its presence on the list produced a misleading result. How do we know? Pre-election polls consistently found that voters were most concerned about three issues: Iraq, the economy and terrorism. When telephone surveys asked an open-ended issues question (impossible on an exit poll), answers that could sensibly be categorized as moral values were in the low single digits. In the exit poll, they drew 22 percent.” He attributes the increase to the imprecision of the phrase and its resonance with conservatives. (Disclaimer: Values, of course, mattered in the election, but their importance was exaggerated by a poorly worded question.)

Unfortunately, this may be too little, too late — the talking head consensus on the “message” of this election has already sent Democrats into a post-election frenzy, and we’ll be hearing simplistic stories about Bush winning because of the gay marriage issue for the next 30 years. Thanks press corps!

PS For a more measured take on what happened, I recommend Ron Brownstein’s exit poll analysis as a useful starting point.

Update: See also Phillip Klinkner in The New Republic Online. He finds that Bush’s performance with people who attend church once per week or more was the same as 2000, but “Bush improved his performance with voters at the upper end of the income ladder…. In fact, Bush’s gains among the wealthiest Americans account for a good chunk of his popular-vote margin of victory.”

Matthew Yglesias makes a baffling claim:

There’s much talk in the air right now of the need for the Democrats to get serious about blocking the most objectionable elements of the Bush agenda, but I don’t think it’s realistically possible. Someday, Bush may put something on the table that’s sufficiently offensive to some group of moderate Republicans that they’re inspired to get on the horn with Harry Reid and say, “hey, if you guys all hang together on this along with me, we can block it.” If such a call is placed, the Democrats should, of course, answer the phone. But the call should not be expected, nor should the Democrats waste much time placing the converse call and canvassing moderates.

As I say, under the circumstances, the only viable path is opposition. Not obstruction, but opposition. To even try too hard at obstruction is to make it appear that Democrats have power that they do not, in fact, have. Participating in the system is a means of legitimizing it.

In the House, of course, it is true that the Democrats are generally at the mercy of the GOP leadership, but this is not the case in the Senate, where Republicans remain five votes short of filibuster-proof dominance. This is what I taught my freshmen today. So why does Matt think Democrats don’t have the power of obstruction? Whether you believe they should do so or not, the procedures of the Senate certainly allow them to act as obstructionists.

A quick historical reminder: Clinton had a 57 vote majority in the Senate in 1993-1994 — more than Republicans have today — yet he was thwarted by filibusters or the threat of them on multiple occasions. His health care plan, for instance, would have required 60 votes to pass, which was one of the key reasons for its failure, according to James Fallows. His economic stimulus plan and campaign finance reform proposal were also defeated by filibusters.

Ultimately, the 60th most conservative (or liberal) member is pivotal in the Senate (see Keith Krehbiel’s Pivotal Politics or Brady and Volden’s Revolving Gridlock). Sometimes it’s possible to pass legislation as part of the budget reconciliation process, which only requires 50 votes, but generally, the filibuster plays a key role in determining what legislation makes its way through Congress.

So who are the key pivot players in the Senate? The University of Houston’s Keith Poole, who along with Howard Rosenthal is the currently definitive source of voting data on Congress, has provided ideological rankings of the members of the 108th Senate based on all contested votes that are useful here. The most conservative Senate Democrats returning to the 109th Congress are:

1. Ben Nelson, NE
2. Max Baucus, MT
3. Mary Landrieu, LA
4. Blanche Lincoln, AR
5. Mark Pryor, AR
6. Evan Bayh, IN
7. Tom Carper, DE
8. Kent Conrad, ND
9. Byron Dorgan, ND
10. Tim Johnson, SD

Plus Ken Salazar, the Senator-elect from Colorado, has positioned himself as a conservative Democrat.

To get 60 votes, Bush will need to get every Republican vote plus win over five Democrats, which means that the political calculus of these eleven senators will play a decisive role in shaping what legislation will pass in the next four years. But to return to Yglesias’s point, if Democrats wanted to obstruct Bush’s agenda and had the party discipline to do so, they could.

Update: Sunday’s New York Times also makes this point in an article and accompanying graphic that are now online. But you read it here first!

Update 2: Yglesias responds, saying that Republicans will exploit the budget reconciliation process to dodge filibusters, use it to create election issues for 2006, or just get rid of it entirely.

To clarify one factual issue, I didn’t say the Democrats “should” filibuster everything, as Matt wrote — I’m agnostic on the political and substantive merits of the strategy. (The obvious answer: it depends.) But I do want to point out that the filibuster is a potent political tool for any opposition party that uses it effectively; it’s hardly true that the Democrats are powerless in Congress, at least in theory. The Republicans beat Clinton badly in 1993-1994 because they won the debates over most issues before they came to a vote, which caused weak-kneed moderates on both sides to become hesitant about supporting his agenda. The filibuster made those moderates crucial, and Clinton spent inordinate amounts of time trying to win their support. Without it, he probably could have pushed more legislation through on party-line votes. Over time, this deprived Clinton of legislative accomplishments and built up resentment against him that helped fuel the Republican landslide in the 1994 elections. The so-called Daschle Democrats were a different lot. They rarely defeated Bush in the court of public opinion, which left them vulnerable to charges of obstructionism and caused conservative Democrats to peel off and back the President on key votes.