As I’ve suggested with reference to a lot of the speculation that goes along with the interpretation of polling, a lot of it wouldn’t survive much of a confrontation with actual data. There’s an interesting story to be told about the Democratic primary campaign as well in this context. The American punditocrats had a rare moment of introspection after Hillary won New Hampshire when they suddenly had to deal with the complete nonsense they’d written about her chances.
Props to the American media, though, for actually acting as if people would notice - something that rarely occurs when Australian mainstream political commentary turns out to be egregious nonsense. Unfortunately, though, a lot of the narratives that took off after New Hampshire were wrong or misleading - including some of the assumptions about the demographic basis of Hillary Clinton’s support. Perhaps one of the most interesting was the emerging story that Hillary’s campaign had been doomed from the start, that it was particularly incompetent, and so on. It’s never hard to find stories of dissension in losing campaigns, but some suspicion should also be directed at narratives which suggest an excellent candidate was let down by hopeless strategists.
Tim Watts over at Tree of Knowledge has been writing about the Obama campaign and in a post about the post mortem on the primaries, points out that many of the errors of the media’s “soothsaying” have been replicated in what’s now being written. This can be neatly illustrated with a graph:
As Tim points out, the tale of this graph is that Hillary didn’t lose the campaign, Obama won it. As Watts writes:
Her share of the vote was remarkably resilient, and hardly suggestive of a campaign that blundered away its support.
What was decisive for Obama, he argues correctly, was the way his strategy worked to garner so much support in caucus states, and leverage it through what he describes as an “open source” campaign. His previous posts on that topic are well worth a read for anyone interested in what actually happened in “a revolutionary” strategy Hillary’s people didn’t “see coming”. Particularly since once all the dust has settled, the entrails of this year’s primaries will be pulled apart for years to come to dissect what exactly can be learned from it. And it’s without doubt that we’ll see some of the lessons applied in elections in other countries.
Sorry to point this out, Mark - but she did lose. She is not the nominee which was surely to point of raising millions and spending even more.
Obama won by becoming the viable anti-Hillary candidate. As your graph shows her support was 45% (plus or minus the margin of error) the whole way through. All that campaigning was just enough to keep the support steady - nothing more.
All this talk about how a democrat primary contest fought down to the wire will prove exactly the opposite of the truth.
Obama’s got the momentum; every week he’s building up his core vote by picking up the undecideds or those who supported other candidates and he will win easily in November.
A really good point Mark, and one I wish more commentators would make (wouldn’t even hurt the Obama camp to try to highlight this more).
To overcome a well-resourced, very well-known favourite who at the start had wide media support is an extraordinary achievement. Obama has been in front for so long that he lost the underdog tag, which has meant there is nowhere near enough recognition of just how big an upset this is and just how strong a campaign he ran against very strong opposition. At the end of 2007, the US punditry was saying Clinton was a shoo-in.
Of course Clinton’s campaign made mistakes - most campaigns do. Some of her mistakes were quite serious, but she still had a very strong base as you point out and she did well - albeit by campaigning in a more traditional say whatever it takes way - to maintain her support for so long when her mathematical chances of winning were clearly so minimal. Even if Clinton is not to my taste, there’s no doubt she was and is a strong candidate, and it was a mighty effort to overcome the odds and defeat her.
Given how well planned and well disciplined his campaign was, I have a lot of confidence he will win well come November, as long as they can effectively move on from the animus with the Clintons that came out of the primary battles.
While the contest with McCain has a whole different dynamic too it - not least different constituencies and different voting rules - it gives me great confidence that he will perform strongly there too. For all the dubious labelling of McCain as a maverick, he does not look to me to be a strong candidate. His own base is ambivalent about him and his visual performances are frankly terrible - almost as bad as mine sometimes. My main concern is the so-called Bradley effect - latent racism, which by definition is hard to measure.
Somewhat tangential to what Obama may be able to achieve, but interesting in light of his desire to move beyond partisan politics: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2008/06/two-cheers-for-westminster-or-why-president-obama-wont-be-able-to-change-much-at-all/
John Stewart did a good segment on this last night, highlighting all the corporate media “experts” who said many months ago that Hillary was completely undefeatable (watch the video if only to see McCain’s extraordinarily creepy TV train-wreck).
Remember that Rupert Murdoch personally came out in support of Hillary, over a very long period. The US media repeatedly slammed Obama over a string of over-hyped “scandals”. And he still won.
Juan Cole says Obama should be hailed as the first Web 2.0 candidate, rather than the first black one.
Spaminated, alas.
@3 re: Bradley effect
Yes, that’s a huge concern. I have a business acquaintance that claimed that if Clinton didn’t get the nomination she’d vote for McCain. I asked her why and she said she didn’t trust Obama. Personally I think it won’t matter, I expect Obama to win in a Ruddslide, but if McCain does win it will be because of people like her.
All the sisters who voted for Clinton and say they won’t vote for Obama, might care to reflect on whether they would rather Obama or McCain make appointments the Supreme Court, and hence decide the future of abortion rights in the United States.
Spiros makes a point that will certainly be forcefully made by Obama’s people over the next few months.
What Andrew said - from this distance, Obama looks far better placed than McCain. Even foreign policy will work against McCain now, the Repubs are (mostly rightly) being blamed for the economic malaise, and the Clintonistas are far too smart not to fall in line behind Obama - expect Hillary to give us an ingenious explanation of her harsh words.
But then the septics are a funny lot - you never can tell.
Good points Mark.
Age article today makes a similar point from a different angle
Team Obama chose their strategy brilliantly. Clinton more or less stuck with the traditional ‘big gun’ states, which normally might’ve been enough (steady at about 45%), except for the extraordinary Obama strategy. By the time Clintonistas realized what was happening it was a bit late to shape a new direction, and the negative hits probably backfired.
Still a huge challenge ahead, given inherent racism and likely negative personal hits, but you’d have to think the Obama lot were smart enough to rise above them. Leaving foreign relations and the economy in a shambles is going to cost the repubs, and though McCain might get a bit of sympathy for a “I’m not George Bush” line it won’t win many votes - maybe save a few deserting. Plus McCain is very pedestrian without much money.
You’re exactly right Mark. This piece by the excellent Karen Tumulty of Time. Obama’s campaign has done a brilliant job against a formidable foe and he gave great leadership.
More ramblings from me about this here
The flatness of the Clinton graph is a little deceptive. From her peak in Oct 2007 she lost voters to Obama, offset only by gains from other failed candidates. She then fought with Obama for a bloc of swing voters that she also ultimately lost.
nathan, I think it’s a bit misleading to look at the polls from last year before the voting actually started. There was a lot of fluidity, so voters Hillary “lost” at that point may never really have been gained.
Mark this is a rather annoying post from my point of view - annoying because you are probably right. I have no trouble at all giving credit to Obama and his campaign team . I think both have mostly been brilliant and I loved this article http://www.theage.com.au/us-election-2008/how-obama-won-20080605-2m8u.html
Still, Hilary’s campaign manager was the evil Mark Penn. I want to believe it was his fault she lost. I don’t want to hear that there might have been nothing he could have done.
I’m going to go and behave like a Republican confronted with evidence of global warming and put my fingers in my years.
feral, one of the commentators in the wash up said she chose to emphasise experience and competence, which left her rather backward looking while Obama emphasised hope. This led her into using fear, as in, who would you like to answer the red phone at 3 am? Hope trumps fear, for Democrat voters, at least. It was her call.
That was one view. Another said the key thing was the money. Obama’s way of raising it was effortless on his part and it gave him the resources to put more people on the ground in every state, not just the big ones.
On the Bradley effect, one commentator says you can deduct 10 points from any national poll involving a black candidate. That’s how many people will lie about their voting intentions when there is a black candidate. Or so it was said.
In any case, Obama started with only 20% name recognition. I think everyone knows who he is now. A brilliant result.
Looking forward Wallerstein reckons the Democratic Party has to organise its campaign around class issues, which are delicately called issues of “the economy.”
Re the Bradley effect, 10% has to be an overestimate. We’ve certainly seen it in recent Senate races, but more of the order of 4% I think. Which is still a worry of course.
And thanks for the support for the notion that Penn was at least partly to blame. I wasn’t being ironic in the use of the word “evil”. I’d truly love to see this one pinned on him.
Hillary Clinton failed to build on her existing support base. It was always clear both that she had a significant support base and that she lacked the ability to build on it.
In 1974, Billy Snedden denied that the Coalition lost the federal election - they just failed to win enough votes. If you can accept that Billy Snedden lost the 1974 federal election in Australia, you can accept that Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic candidacy for US President in 2008.
She says herself that someone has to win, and someone has to lose - by her own standards, she lost.
A while ago, some smart blogger (can’t remember who, but somebody clever and funny) made the prediction that Obama would indeed beat Hillary, by citing the iron law of American politics (and American culture too, broadly speaking) that Bugs Bunny always defeats Daffy Duck. I think they had a point. Obama has spent the last year saying the most utterly fatuous hooey imaginable, but he just kept skating away clean from it, while Hillary was left standing there, blustering, going, “but, but — don’t you SEE?! How he’s not correct?! What’s the MATTER with everybody?!” etc. She got nailed to the wall over that silly sniper business, while Obama gets a free pass on issues that go to the very core of his identity, etc. He gives one of the silliest speeches I’ve ever heard in my life, and the press applauds him as the new Lincoln. It’s been quite a thing to watch.
The interesting thing about all this is that although Obama did run a pretty smart campaign against Hillary, it was basically a battle between two slightly different brands of the same flavor ice cream. So style and packaging counted for a lot, because there really wasn’t much else to argue about. But now, it’ll be a long dry second act between here and November. Yes yes sure, the “Springtime for Hitler” number was hilarious, but whaddaya got for act two? McCain may not be Fred Astaire, but’s he’s no Daffy Duck, and he’s not Yosemite Sam, either — it’s within his wheelhouse to usurp the Bugs role, if he can be crafty about it. I guess we’re going to find out just how many catcher’s mitts, wigs, dynamite sticks, megaphones, and suddenly-appearing telephones Obama has got up those capacious sleeves of his.
She lost because of her war vote and her refusal to admit it was wrong. She basically pissed all over the Democratic base, thinking they had nowhere else to go. None of the pundits want to mention this.