New Research on 2008 Nomination Politics

A new report from the American Association for Public Opinion Research examines the polls that falsely indicated that Barack Obama would win the New Hampshire primary. It concludes:

• Given the compressed caucus and primary calendar, polls conducted before the New Hampshire primary may have ended too early to capture late shifts in the electorate’s preferences there.
• Most commercial polling firms conducted interviews on the first or second call, but respondents who required more effort to contact were more likely to support Senator Clinton. Instead of continuing to call their initial samples to reach these hard‐to‐contact people, pollsters typically added new households to the sample, skewing the results toward the opinions of those who were easy to reach on the phone, and who more typically supported Senator Obama.
• Non‐response patterns, identified by comparing characteristics of the pre‐election samples with the exit poll samples, suggest that some groups who supported Senator Clinton—uch as union members and those with less education—ere under‐ represented in pre‐election polls, possibly because they were more difficult to reach.
• Variations in likely voter models could explain some of the estimation problems in individual polls. Application of the Gallup likely voter model, for example, produced a larger error than was present in the unadjusted data.

A new experimental study finds:

After Clinton's concession in June 2008, Democrats were more generous toward supporters of their own preferred candidate than to supporters of the other Democratic candidate. The bias observed in June persisted into August, and disappeared only in early September after the Democratic National Convention. We also observe a strong gender effect, with bias both appearing and subsiding among men only

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Public Financing

Jay Cost has an excellent post on public financing of presidential campaigns:

[T]he death of public financing cannot be pinned solely, or even mostly, on President Obama. It was a long time coming. In fact, I'd wager that some of the other '08 Republican contenders would have refused public financing if they had won the GOP nomination. Ultimately, the big trouble with public financing is that it is not keeping up with the realities of electoral politics.

He goes on to explain how the public financing system provides candidates with much less money than they could raise on their own, and it delivers it too late.

Turnout

In California, the 2008 campaign does not seem to have left a legacy of civic engagement. From the LA Times:

Voters streamed to the polls in November, lining up from before dawn until after nightfall, a tableau of involvement that cheered fans of democracy whether or not they supported the winners.In California, almost 80% of registered voters turned out, the highest percentage in 32 years. In Los Angeles, almost 83%. If not as dramatic as Iraqi citizens confirming their rights with ink-stained fingers, it was enough to suggest heightened interest in things political.Not so fast. Last week in parts of Los Angeles, voters were called to the polls once again, to elect a state Senate replacement for Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Democrat who had moved to the county Board of Supervisors. Little more than 6% showed up.It was not an anomaly: When the area's first post-presidential election, the Los Angeles mayor's race, was contested earlier this month, a muted 17% of the city's registered voters turned out ...

Robert Cole was the director of Obama's get-out-the-vote effort among African Americans in California, which succeeded dramatically. Last Tuesday, he was the third-place finisher among Democrats in the state Senate race. Rather than inspire heightened turnout, he said, Obama's campaign appeared to have left many voters burned out. "They felt they had performed their civic duty by voting for Barack Obama for president," he said.

Pasadena also had low turnout. (More from the very useful Election Administration Research Center at Berkeley.)

Plouffe Speaks

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe recently spoke at Pomona College in Claremont. From one local news account:

Plouffe. speaking to a more than three-fourths full audience at Bridges Auditorium, said the campaign also challenged conventional political wisdom where "almost every time we did we profited," Plouffe said.

"The belief that somehow if we win Iowa, it would reset the entire campaign and give us the ability to make up 20 to 25 point deficits in less than a month against Sen. (Hillary) Clinton in other states. The belief that states like Idaho, Kansas and Nebraska were an important part of securing the nomination. when all the press
focused on bigger states like California, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Even if it was done quietly, and no one probably appreciated what we were doing, that our effort would pay off."

Another story on the same talk here.

Race and the Election

In a paper at the recent annual conference of the Western Political Science Association, Phil Klinkner argues:

An analysis of election results and NES data for 2008 shows that Barack Obama underperformed expectations, indicating that his race, while not enough to prevent his victory, did significantly reduce his expected margin of victory.

Full text of the paper here.

The Politics of Acreage

In analyzing House elections, political scientists do not pay enough attention to district characteristics. In that light, it is useful to think about some data from CQ:

Obama defeated McCain in 92 of the 100 congressional districts with the smallest land areas, according to a CQ Politics analysis that matched the election results with Census Bureau data on the square mileage of congressional districts. Democratic candidates for the U.S. House also cleaned up in these high-density districts, winning 87 of 100.

The more wide-open spacious a congressional district, though, the better McCain did. McCain defeated Obama in 73 of the nation’s 100 largest districts by land area. These areas also tend to be less racially and ethnically diverse and more conservative on cultural issues than the nation as a whole, and are virtual polar opposites of the tightly compact inner-city districts where Obama ran up the score.

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The President and Catholics

Writing of controversy surrounding President Obama's upcoming commencement address at Notre Dame, MSNBC notes: "Despite the protests by some, it's worth pointing out that Obama won Catholics 54%-45% in the 2008 general election. Bush won them, 52%-47%, in 2004 over Kerry, a Catholic."

True, but incomplete.

In both elections, the Catholic vote closely tracked with the overall popular vote. Nationwide, President Obama won 53%-46% while President Bush won 51%-48%. Moreover, Obama did well among Catholics because he had strong appeal to Hispanics, who were voting on a variety of issues, not just "Catholic" ones. McCain won white Catholics 52%-47%, whereas Bush won them 56%-43%. As a Pew analysis shows, Democrats made their biggest gains among voters unaffiliated with a religion: 75% for Obama compared with 67% for Kerry.