Soccer Dad

The money primary

via memeorandum

Neil DeGrasse Tyson argues in Vote by Numbers that the Democrats made a mistake in choosing Sen. Obama over Sen. Clinton.

IT appears that Hillary Clinton is going to suspend her presidential campaign this weekend, at the urging of Democratic Party leaders and superdelegates. Before that happens, Mrs. Clinton and the superdelegates might want to know this: if the general election were held today, Barack Obama would lose to John McCain, while Mr. McCain would lose to Mrs. Clinton.

This conclusion comes not from wishful thinking but from a new method of analysis on the statistics of polls that has been accepted for publication in the journal Mathematical and Computer Modeling. The authors, J. Richard Gott III, a professor at Princeton, and Wes Colley, a researcher at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, are not political scientists. They are astrophysicists. And one of the tasks of scientists is to clarify the apparent complexity of the universe by using the language of mathematics.

The problem is that there is some wishful thinking going on Dr. Tyson's premise. The point is that polls are just a snapshot. If the election were held today, but it isn't, it will be held a little more than 5 months from now. So the question isn't who would win today, but who has the better chance of winning in November.

That's not too say that the method he outlines for predicting the outcome of the race is wrong. It might very well work in November, but using June's polling results to predict November's decision doesn't make sense.

(I'd like to point out that similar to the method Dr. Tyson points out, RCP correctly predicted the electoral result for every state in 2004 except for Wisconsin. But again, it was using the latest polling from November 2004.)

Why is Sen. Obama better positioned that Sen. Clinton to win in November? He's done a much better job of raising money and put an excellent organization into place.

(Let me just say, I'm not writing this because it makes me happy. I disagree with Sen. Obama on nearly every issue that I can think of and dread the prospect of his presidency. It just looks like he has a strength that is going to be difficult to beat.)

Jeanne Cummings wrote in Politico (via memeorandum):

OK, that's not going to happen. But campaign finance experts and Democratic fundraisers say a conservative estimate of Obama's general election fundraising potential hovers around or above $300 million.

Such a massive financial advantage will allow Obama to compete in more states than McCain and force his rival to defend states that should rightfully be Republican wins.

Obama's use of such tactics has already been on display in the primary.

Pennsylvania was a must-win for Clinton and, given its large population of working-class Democrats and women, was a long shot for Obama.

Still, he spent $10 million advertising in the Keystone State. Why? He forced Clinton to spend all her money and much of her time there to ensure she pocketed a 10-point win.

We're starting to see evidence that this is exactly Sen. Obama's strategy.

Instapundit notes that Sen. Obama intends to compete in Virginia.

Barack Obama reveled Thursday in his newfound status as the likely Democratic nominee and signaled that Republicans face a fierce fight over Virginia this fall, a state long held by the GOP.

"I'm proud of America for giving me this opportunity, but we've still got work to do," the Illinois senator told a crowd in this Southeastern city of about a 20,000 on the Tennessee border. The last time Democrats won Virginia in a presidential election was 1964.

More generally, (via memeorandum)   Obama Is Mapping a Nationwide Push in G.O.P. Strongholds

Senator Barack Obama's general election plan calls for broadening the electoral map by challenging Senator John McCain in typically Republican states -- from North Carolina to Missouri to Montana -- as Mr. Obama seeks to take advantage of voter turnout operations built in nearly 50 states in the long Democratic nomination battle, aides said.

On Monday, Mr. Obama will travel to North Carolina -- a state that has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 32 years -- to start a two-week tour of speeches, town hall forums and other appearances intended to highlight differences with Mr. McCain on the economy. From there, he heads to Missouri, which last voted for a Democrat in 1996. His first campaign swing after securing the Democratic presidential nomination last week was to Virginia, which last voted Democratic in 1964.

In March 2007, I hypothesized that having an early cash advantage would be a predictor of the eventual nominee in each party. (There is not much of a track record to go with.) It worked out on the Democratic side, but not on the Republican side. (At the time 1-2 in each party were Obama-Clinton and Romney-Giuliani.)

Despite the evidence I boldly predicted. (I should have predicted Obama/Romney):

When the FEC releases the financial information of the 2008 Presidential candidates for the first quarter of 2007 in a few weeks, I expect that Giuliani and Clinton will be the big winners money-wise in their respective parties. I also believe that over the next year many sub-plots will be written. Those sub-plots about the election will be nothing more than noise. In the summer of 2008 the Democrats and Republicans will choose Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani to represent their respective parties in November for the general election for President.

I speculated that the reason the early leaders in fundraising ended up as nominees was because to raise the funds required donors to vote early (with their pocketbooks):

Convincing a donor to give money to a campaign is a more difficult task than getting a voter to vote. In order to convince a potential donor to give of his money to a candidate the candidate has to present the donor with enough information to show that they believe enough of the same programs, policies and positions that the donor will want to help the candidate spread his message. Arguably, the candidate who connects with the greatest number of people will raise a lot of money. Convincing more people to give more money is a preliminary sign of political success. (What if a candidate has raised more money but from fewer people than another candidate? I suspect then, that there'd be a weakness in his position.)

Perhaps, in doing their fundraising, Romney and Giuliani didn't reach enough people. (Romney, like Clinton, self-financed his campaign.) I've read that Obama used President Bush's fundraising strategy from 2000.

So perhaps it isn't so much the sum of the early fundraising that makes the difference but the number of people the candidate reaches in raising those funds.

There's an opinion that Sen. McCain was the only Republican who could win in November in the current political climate because he has practiced bi-partisanship and has distanced himself from an unpopular incumbent on a number of issues. In a different way, he may be the absolutely worst candidate for the Republicans because of his fundraising disadvantage.
Posted by SoccerDad at June 8, 2008 12:52 AM