CSDP Election 2008

What the 2008 Election Meant: Politics and Governance

2008-11-21T15:39:01Z

On Friday, November 14, CSDP and the Brookings Institution co-sponsored the final seminar of the Election 2008 series:

Panelists

John Harwood

Chief Washington Correspondent, CNBC; Political Writer, New York Times

Gary Jacobson

Professor of Political Science, University of California, San Diego

James Stimson

Raymond Dawson Professor of Political Science,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Moderators

Larry Bartels

Director, Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University

Thomas Mann

W. Averell Harriman Chair and Senior Fellow, Governance Studies, Brookings

THOMAS MANN: The previous sessions have covered topics such as parties and partisanship, the fundamentals of the election, including the economy, the war, and the President’s standing. Our third session looked to see how issues get involved in elections, how ideology or ideological proximity might or might not matter, race, gender, and the traits of candidates. And then last time we looked at, more specifically, at campaign effects, money, ads, and mobilization.

Today we’re going to look back on that, look at the election results, and ask, “What do they portend for politics and governance in the days and months and years ahead?” Partly what we’re going to be doing is seeing what we can add, subtract, and amend to the analyses that have been offered up in the last ten days.

The order of our presentations will begin with Larry Bartels, who, as I said, is co-directing and organizing this session with me. Larry, for those who haven’t bought it yet, you must, his book is called Unequal Democracy. And then we’re going to follow with my long time friend and colleague, Gary Jacobson, who is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California San Diego, who has always written definitive work on congressional elections and money in elections, but whose recent book was a book about the Bush presidency, A Divider, Not a Uniter....

Click here for the entire transcript and mp3 audio of the event

How Obama Survived the Culture War

2008-11-11T21:12:35Z

Much of this year’s Republican presidential campaign consisted of a series of blistering attacks portraying the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, as an elitist, a celebrity, a socialist, a pal of domestic terrorists, and a stranger to “real America.” It would be hard to imagine a campaign better suited to appeal to the culturally conservative working-class white voters depicted in Thomas Frank’s 2004 best seller, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”

Obama himself seemed to exacerbate the culture clash when he suggested back in April that “bitter” small-town folks on the losing end of economic change “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” He added that they “don’t vote on economic issues, because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them.” If that was true—either before Obama’s comments or because of them—then the Democratic ticket seemed poised for big losses among the sorts of people Frank described.

So how did voters respond? According to the exit polls, Obama outpolled the previous Democratic nominee, John Kerry, among people from small towns and rural areas and among gun owners. He also did better than Kerry among white males, white Protestants, and white evangelicals. In short, the culture clash seems to have fizzled among many of the people supposedly most alienated by the cosmopolitan bent of the contemporary Democratic Party.

Of course, Obama was greatly advantaged by voters’ economic distress and by the remarkable unpopularity of the incumbent president. Perhaps white men, gun owners, and other stereotypical “backlash” voters were simply swept along reluctantly in this year’s Democratic tide.

The exit poll results strongly suggest that there was more to it than that. Obama actually recorded some of his biggest gains among white voters in some of the most culturally conservative parts of the country. He outpolled Kerry by 6 to 10 percentage points among white voters in Indiana, North Dakota, Utah, Montana, Nebraska, and—yes—Thomas Frank’s Kansas. In contrast, exit polls recorded smaller gains for Obama among white voters in bastions of elitism like New York, Connecticut, and California.

Obama did better among lower-income white voters than among those with higher incomes—a familiar pattern for recent Democratic presidential candidates. After months of hand-wringing punditry about his problems with the white working class in the distressed industrial Midwest, he won majorities among white voters with below-average incomes in West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, and a near-majority in Pennsylvania. (John McCain won a majority of more affluent white voters in all those states and 27 others.)

The election of our first black president constitutes “a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history,” as Adam Nagourney put it in the Times. It has prompted hearty self-congratulation all around regarding the broad-mindedness of American voters. The perception that white Americans succeeded in transcending racial antipathy is reinforced by the fact that only 9% of voters in the exit poll said that race was a major factor in their decision, and they mostly voted for Obama.

However, there is a good deal of circumstantial evidence suggesting that racial resentment eroded Obama’s support among white voters. His gains relative to Kerry were significantly smaller in states with large numbers of African-Americans—a pattern disguised in the overall vote totals by his strong support among African-Americans themselves. In the former Confederacy he gained only slightly over Kerry among white voters, despite making big gains in two key swing states, North Carolina and Virginia. The only states in the country in which he lost more than a point or two of white support were Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi.

The notable resistance of southern whites to Obama’s candidacy continues a half-century trend sparked by the demise of the unnatural southern Democratic monopoly of the Jim Crow era. From 1952 through 2004, the average level of support for Democratic presidential candidates fell by more than 15 points among white southerners while increasing slightly among whites in the rest of the country. This year’s pattern reinforces that long-term shift, underlining the extent to which the Democratic Party’s much-discussed “culture” problem is really a regional problem rooted in white racial resentment.

Obama himself resisted the notion that antipathy to his candidacy was “simply racial.” Asked during the campaign about his trouble winning support from white men with lower incomes or less education, he answered, “It’s more just that I’m different in all kinds of ways. I’m different even for black people.”

Perhaps so. Nevertheless, black people responded enthusiastically to his candidacy, easily surpassing their already-high levels of support for previous Democratic candidates. What is more surprising is that so many culturally conservative white voters in the Midwest and West also found their way to Obama, rejecting a Republican campaign that was largely devoted to stoking fears of difference. However, in the most racially conservative parts of the white South fears of difference often prevailed.

Judging from last week’s election results, then, not much seems to be the matter with Kansas; but Louisiana may be another story.

This entry also appears as a guest post today on Ezra Klein's blog on The American Prospect.

Election Debriefing

2008-11-06T21:18:58Z

I’ve already seen lots of excellent political science post-mortems on the election. John Sides has had a particularly good series of posts at Monkey Cage attempting to debunk various myths about what happened and why. Here are a few points along the same lines, from today’s CSDP roundtable on the election.

First, as always, much of the focus of commentators in the immediate aftermath of the election has been on the quality of the two candidates’ campaigns. The New York Times made Obama’s campaign the lead, headlining their main morning-after analysis (by Adam Nagourney, Jim Rutenberg and Jeff Zeleny) “Near-Flawless Run Is Credited in Victory”. On the other hand, my Princeton colleague Julian Zelizer put the focus on McCain in a Newsweek piece headlined “Worst Campaign Ever?”. (Julian may be this year’s winner of my quadrennial award for first use of the phrase “worst campaign ever”; I believe the last time there was no award was in 1976.)

Of course, it is very hard to know—or even how to know how we would know—which candidate ran a better campaign. Many decisions on both sides were significantly shaped by the fundamental contours of the election year. It seems well worth noting, however, that the result turned out very much as one would have expected based on political scientists’ early forecasts—and this despite Obama’s big fundraising advantage and the “fortuitous” timing of the financial meltdown, which focused voters’ attention even more single-mindedly on the economy than would otherwise have been the case.

There is certainly plenty of evidence in the exit polls suggesting that the election was primarily a referendum on the state of the country under President Bush. In the country as a whole and in several key swing states, half the voters thought national economic conditions were “poor,” and they went for Obama by 2-to-1 margins. A similar number strongly disapproved of Bush’s performance, and they went for Obama by even wider margins. With 90 to 95% of the votes he needed to be elected coming from people who strongly disapproved of the incumbent government, Obama didn’t have to win much support from the other half of the electorate (many of whom disapproved of Bush’s performance, but less strongly) in order to win.

Retrospective Voting in 2008 Exit Polls

	National Economic Conditions Poor (Obama Margin)	Strongly Disapprove of Bush’s Performance (Obama Margin)
U.S.	49% (66-31)	51% (82-16)
Florida	53% (66-33)	52% (82-16)
Indiana	43% (66-32)	43% (86-13)
North Carolina	49% (64-35)	47% (84-15)
Ohio	53% (68-30)	52% (83-16)
Pennsylvania	44% (72-27)	53% (86-13)
Virginia	43% (67-33)	50% (84-15)

There has also been lots of talk about whether the election outcome marks a major shift in the standing of the parties and the nature of their supporting coalitions. The detailed presentation of election results in today’s New York Times was headlined “In a Decisive Victory, Obama Reshapes the Electoral Map.” A piece by John Judis in The New Republic is even bolder, announcing that “Obama’s Victory Marks a Radical Realignment in American Politics”. This, too, is a common theme in commentary whenever either party wins an election by more than a few percentage points—and it, too, is often much-overblown.

In a brief pre-election post I suggested looking at the continuity of state-level election returns from 2004 to 2008 as a way to gauge whether this election produced any major political shifts. The simple answer turns out to be that, by this measure, nothing very unusual happened. The following table reports the slope, intercept, and standard error of the bivariate regression of 2008 popular vote margins on 2004 vote margins in the 50 states and DC. (Omitting DC, or Hawaii, which is a notable outlier, makes no real difference to the statistical results.)

Shifts in State-Level Voting Patterns

	2008	1980-2004 (Average)	1932
Continuity of Previous Partisan Pattern (regression slope)	1.00	.94	.66
National Swing (regression intercept)	8.97	8.15	28.62
Local Forces (standard deviation)	5.66	5.31	16.45

In every respect, the results from 2008 look much like those from other recent presidential elections. The slope of the regression line is 1.00, which suggests that 100% of the existing partisan pattern of support from 2004 persisted in 2008. The intercept reflects a national swing of 9 points (remember, these are vote margins rather than vote shares)—only slightly larger than the average for elections since 1980. And the standard deviation of the regression (a measure of how much specific states departed in either direction from the national vote swing) was less than 6 points, again well within the normal range for recent elections.

For purposes of comparison, the table also shows the corresponding regression results from 1932, a genuine realigning election. In that year, one-third of the previous partisan pattern disappeared, the national swing in the popular vote margin was 29 points, and the standard deviation was 16 points—all vastly larger numbers than in 2008 or any other recent election. If 1932 was a realigning election, 2008 was one-third of a realignment—but then, most elections are.

A Few Questions for the President-Elect

2008-11-06T20:01:34Z

Two days after Senator Obama’s historic victory, the President-Elect has begun assembling the men and women who will guide his decision-making for the next four years. These decisions are among the most important a president can make, and they should be informed by a thorough appraisal of the issues, domestic and foreign, that an Obama administration will likely face. Here are a few to consider:

Regarding Russia. Yesterday, Russian President Medvedev threatened to place ground-to-ground missiles on its western border, install electronic jamming mechanisms to counter new U.S. antimissile systems in Eastern Europe, and end plans to disable Russian nuclear weapons. Is he bluffing?

Regarding Afghanistan. Yesterday, Afghan President Karzai demanded that the U.S. end civilian casualties after a U.S. air strike allegedly killed 39 people at a wedding. NATO forces in Afghanistan routinely use air power to assist counter-insurgency operations. This reduces the number of NATO soldiers killed, which lessens political pressure on host governments to withdraw their forces, but the use of air power under such pressing battlefield conditions and difficult terrain may result in the unintentional deaths of civilians at times. How should these competing priorities be reconciled?

Regarding Guantanamo Bay. During the campaign, Senator Obama pledged to close the U.S. detention facility located there. Roughly 255 detainees remain incarcerated in the facility. Some are hardened terrorists; others are likely innocent. Among the innocent are about a dozen Uighurs, Chinese Muslims who are believed to face persecution if they are returned to China. What should be done with them?

Regarding labor unions. The highest priority for labor unions, one of the Democratic Party’s strongest supporting groups, is passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow unions to organize without a secret ballot election in the workplace. Given that secret ballot elections are accepted everywhere else in American democracy, why should union organizing be any different?

Regarding campaign finance reform. Senator Obama’s historic victory was enabled by historic fundraising, which would have been impossible if not for a historic decision to forgo public financing of the general election campaign. Is it reasonable to expect future presidential candidates to do the same?

The writer is a second year graduate student in public policy and international relations in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from Nevada, Iowa. His blog on religion and politics can be found at http://thomasniblock.blogspot.com/.

Campaign Effects in the 2008 Election: Money, Ads, and Mobilization

2008-11-05T18:32:10Z

On Friday, October 31, 2008, CSDP and the Brookings Institution held the fourth of five seminars on this year's election: Campaign Effects in the 2008 Election: Money, Ads, and Mobilization.

Moderated by LARRY BARTELS, Director, Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, and THOMAS E. MANN, Senior Fellow, Governance Studies, The Brookings Institution, panelists were: MIKE ALLEN, Politico; ANTHONY CORRADO, Colby College; DIANA MUTZ, University of Pennsylvania; and LYNN VAVRECK, UCLA

Following is a small sampling of intriguing comments -- for the full transcript, click here.

Tony Corrado: With 3.1 million donors, a number that is continuing to grow substantially, [Obama's] in a position now where he will have more than twice as many donors as any presidential candidate in the past. In fact, he’s at a point where he has more donors to his campaign than the national parties each have as donors to their national party. So essentially he has become a party unto himself.

Larry Bartels: I think [the money is] something that worries many Americans. It doesn’t worry political scientists and I think shouldn’t worry people. If you think about the scope of governments and what’s at stake, the amount of money that we’re spending to decide who’s going to run the thing is really pretty modest, right. So we’re spending a billion dollars or $2 billion to decide who’s going to be in charge of a $700 billion bailout plus lots of other stuff that the government does. So I think in any absolute sense, or by comparison with the amount of money that major corporations spend on trying to sell you trivial stuff, the amount of money that’s spent on politics is really not problematic.

Lynn Vavreck: I’m going to start with a number, 80 percent. This is the number that I want you to think about. That’s the percentage of election outcomes you would get right if your guess depended only on the change in GDP from the quarters close to the election. Okay. So if you knew only that, only that single number, you would get the aggregate election outcome right 80 percent of the time. That's the puzzle -- what role can campaigns play in an environment where the structure is so powerful?

Diana Mutz: We found a very nice, very clear effect during the course of the pre- to post-primary season, where peoples level of cynicism about the influence of money on politics and political outcomes became far less cynical. And this was equally true among Republicans and Democrats, and interestingly, it makes some sense when we think about the course of the primaries, that is, the candidates who were best funded at the very beginning were not the ones who ultimately walked away with the nominations. And that fact seems to have registered with the American public.So when we ask them questions about whether the best funded candidate wins or the best candidate wins or some mix of the two and so forth, although the American public is still cynical about the influence of money, at least as of the end of the primary season, the beginning of the general election season, they were far less so.

Mike Allen: If exactly what happens over the next four days is what we expect, it’ll be the first time in eight years, right, nothing leading up to this election has happened the way we thought.

Election Night 08 in Robertson Hall, Princeton University

2008-11-04T19:31:56Z

Professors predict Obama landslide

By Sophia Jih
Contributor

Published: Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 in The Daily Princetonian

A panel of four Wilson School and politics department faculty members correctly predicted Tuesday evening that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) would win the presidential election by a landslide in an event titled “What We Expect to See Tonight, and What It Will Mean.” The panel, led by Wilson School professor Larry Bartels, discussed the probably reasons for Obama’s likely advantage on election night.

The 2008 election centered on the economy, Associate Wilson School Dean Nolan McCarty said, citing this as a reason for Obama’s lead in the polls.

Bartels said that it has historically been hard for the incumbent party to win an election when the economy was “in bad shape” and that the American electorate has a tendency to “get tired” of a party when it is in office beyond a certain length of time.

Jim Leach ’64, a visiting Wilson School lecturer and former Republican congressman from Iowa, emphasized the importance of a presidential candidate’s campaign advisers.

Obama has the best team of foreign policy and economic advisers “in the history of the American campaign,” Leach said, explaining that a presidency is about both the president himself and the people around him.

Similarly, the candidates’ choices of running mates also worked to Obama’s favor, the panelists said. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s nomination to the Republican presidential ticket “turned off” undecided voters, Bartels explained.

Leach said he expected that the youth vote would rise dramatically this election year. Bartels agreed and added that a majority of the youth vote would go to Obama.

Though Republicans have had a large funding advantage in recent elections, Obama out-raised McCain this election season, he added.

The media analysts would not be quick to call the results Tuesday night, however, Wilson School professor Christopher Achen said. He explained that television networks would be “particularly cautious” about calling states based on exit polls. Television stations often attempt to project that a certain candidate will win a state based on exit polls. This is usually the case for states where previous polling indicates a large lead for one of the candidates, Achen noted. Achen said he expected the networks to be conservative in their projections on Tuesday night because polling tended to be biased toward Obama during the campaign.

Another major question was the number of congressional seats the Democrats would win, McCarty said, predicting that Democrats would take 58 Senate seats and 265 seats in the House.

The Democratic and Independent senators who align with the party need 60 Senate seats to prevent Republicans from blocking legislation by filibuster.

“I think [the presidential race will] be closer than the panelists think,” said Benny Padilla, a graduate student in the Wilson School.

Enbo Wang, a graduate student in the economics department and native Australian, said in an interview that Obama appeared to be favored among international students and that, though he felt McCain had good ideas, “this is not the moment for him.”

“America wins when people vote,” Leach said during the panel. He added that he thought the election was a step of “profound dimensions” for the United States.

http://blogs.princeton.edu/election2008/assets/ElectionNight_0104.jpg

Historical Comparison: Where Have All the Clinton Voters Gone and What Does Race Have To Do With It?

2008-11-04T15:51:46Z

Recently, Marty Gilens asked about the association between racial resentment and vote choice in this election compared with previous presidential elections, as a comment on Lynn Vavreck's previous entry on this blog.

A historical comparison of the effects of racial resentment on vote intention does indeed provide considerable analytical leverage in figuring out whether Kinder and Sander's racial resentment scale is tapping into anti-black affect or is merely the product of non-racial ideological conservatism. As the figure indicates, the striking difference in effects of racial resentment between the all white presidential contests of the past and early McCain vs. Obama trial heats (the 2008 data is from March strongly suggests that racial resentment is in fact measuring racial predispositions. All else being equal the average effect on GOP vote intention of moving from least to most resentful between 1988 and 2004 was 25 percentage points. Moreover, we see below that the effect of racial resentment on McCain vs. Clinton trial heats fits perfectly in place with this average impact. The McCain vs Obama line, however, shows a 72 point difference between least and most resentful, with the other model variables fixed at their means. While Obama is doing noticeably worse than previous Democratic nominees among the most racially resentful, we see the biggest disparity taking place on the left-hand side of the spectrum. This makes intuitive sense. For if all else really is equalized by the controls, Obama in 2008 is the perfect storm for racial liberals. Not only do they get they get to vote their affective orientation towards African-Americans, but they get to retrospectively vote the Republican Party out of office too.

Same Old, Same Old?

2008-11-03T21:30:33Z

One of the things to watch when the election returns (finally!) come in tomorrow night is how the voting behavior of specific states and demographic groups differs from what it has been in recent elections. In a 1992 book chapter on "The Impact of Electioneering in the United States," I used a scatterplot of state presidential votes from 1984 and 1988 to underline the importance of enduring partisan loyalties in voting behavior. In a 1998 piece in Electoral Studies I showed that the stability of voting patterns from one election to the next has been greater since the 1980s than in the previous several decades.

A recent post by Andrew Gelman shows the corresponding scatterplot for 2000-2004, which shows very modest deviations despite the intervening 2000 election controvery, massive redistributive tax cuts, 9/11 terrorist attacks, and war in Iraq. Gelman also compares Obama's standing in recent state polls with Kerry's performance in 2004. Not surprisingly, there is a considerable upward shift, but also a good deal more scatter. How much of that is due to noise in the polls, and how much to shifts in the underlying partisan landscape? The answer to that question may provide an early clue to whether 2008 will mark a significant departure from the evenly balanced, highly polarized electoral status quo of the past 20 years.

Inequality and the 2008 Election

2008-11-03T17:13:56Z

On October 21, Larry Bartels and Theda Skocpol spoke at a public forum on Inequality and the 2008 Election sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy in Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government:

Election Night 08

2008-11-03T15:10:25Z

For those members of CSDP's extended (and extensive) scholarly community who will be in Princeton this election night, please join us in Robertson Hall on the university campus. Election night activities at the Woodrow Wilson School begin at 7pm in Dodds Auditorium with a panel offering predictions, insights, and analyses: What We Expect to See Tonight and What It Will Mean, featuring comments from: Christopher Achen, Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences, Professor of Politics; Larry Bartels, Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs, Professor of Politics, and Director of CSDP; Rep. James Leach, John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs Visiting Professor; and Nolan McCarty, Susan Dod Brown Professor of Politics and Public Affairs, and Associate Dean, Woodrow Wilson School.

Watch this site as the evening wears on -- WWS MPA students will post their real-time reactions as the votes come in and states are called, on the CSDP Election 2008 blog.

Where have all the Clinton Voters Gone and what does Race have to do with it?

2008-10-27T14:20:16Z

It’s the question on everyone’s minds in the last week before the election. Are these poll numbers real? Another way to ask this is to ask: what would have to be true for us to believe that Obama is enjoying this level of support from the American electorate? And, what does all of this have to do with race in America?

Simon Jackman and I are the Principal Investigators of The Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP) and we are in a unique position of having data that helps to answer these questions. CCAP is a six-wave panel study of 20,000 registered voters. The survey started in December of 2007 and will end after the election in November. It is a cooperative project of 30 universities and nearly 75 scholars.

During the last weeks of March and September we asked people to answer a battery of questions to measure racial antipathy toward African Americans. We also asked people whom they thought they would vote for in the election.

To measure racial antipathy, we use the traditional racial resentment battery (Kinder and Sanders) that asks people questions about affirmative action, work ethic, and government assistance for African Americans relative to other racial groups. The four racial resentment items are scaled using IDEAL. In the primaries, the distribution of the racial antipathy scale for voters casing ballots in the Democratic primary for Clinton or Obama looked like this:

Distribution of Racial Resentment Scale, Clinton and Obama Primary Voters

(Measured in March 2008)

How does this scale relate to Democratic primary voters’ choices between Clinton and Obama in the primaries?

The results are striking. Increasing levels of antipathy toward blacks are strongly related to vote choice even within the Democratic primary. This result is robust to demographic controls such as gender, age, income, race, ideology, and party ID.

RACE AND THE CLINTON/OBAMA CHOICE

In the primary election, this means that people with higher levels of antipathy toward blacks were more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton. These are the now infamous group of white, lower income voters living in the Mid-western regions of the country that we heard so much about during the primaries. Another interesting finding to emerge from this relationship is that white voters with very low levels of racial antipathy are voting for Obama in very strong numbers. This relationship among racially tolerant people is much stronger for Obama than it has been in the past for other African American candidates such as Jesse Jackson (Tesler 2008).

Level of Racial Antipathy

WHERE HAVE ALL THE CLINTON VOTERS GONE?

When Obama clenched the Democratic party nomination, many (31%) of these Clinton supporters said they would not vote for Obama and would instead vote for John McCain.

In September, over 2/3rds of those Clinton supporters who said they would defect have come home to the Democratic party. Only 19% (of the 31%) of Clinton supporters who said they would vote for McCain continue to hold this position. Another 20% of the 31% are still undecided.

RACE AND THE McCain/OBAMA CHOICE

Racial antipathy toward blacks remains a strong predictor of vote choice in the general election match-up between McCain and Obama. Using all white voters this time, here is the distribution of racial resentment among white, general election registered voters by their vote choice. These data come from our September wave of the survey.

Distribution of Racial Resentment among White Voters by Vote Choice

Once again, as antipathy increases the probability of voting for Obama decreases. Among people who voted in the Democratic primary, however, the relationship is mitigated by the power of party identification. Nearly all Democratic-primary voters are predicted to vote for Obama based on their levels of antipathy toward blacks as a group. This explains the difference between the two lines below.

Levels of Racial Antipathy

To underscore these findings, we asked people whether race was a factor in their vote decision. Roughly 7% of registered voters voting against Obama reported that Obama’s race was a reason they would vote against him. We estimate that this number is understated by a factor of 1.6. Through a series of experiments described below, we conclude that nearly 11 percent of registered voters who are not supporting Obama are voting against him because of his race.

Conversely, 12% of registered voters supporting Obama said they were voting for Obama because of his race. Using list experiments we estimate that this number underestimates the true value by a factor of 3. We believe more than a third of registered voters supporting Obama are attracted to him because of his race.

Methodology:

Basic List Experiment with 3 Conditions

We randomly divide the sample into groups that receive different survey questions. The first group (OPEN LIST) is asked to tell us WHICH conditions are important as reasons to vote for (or against) Barack Obama. We provide a list of items.

In the second group (CONTROL), we simply ask people to tell us HOW MANY of the things are important as they make up their minds. People respond with a number from zero to five. In this group, we leave one item OFF THE LIST – the item mentioning Obama’s race. Note that people do not have to tell us WHICH THINGS, only how many.

In the third group (TREATMENT), we do the same thing as in group two, but we include Obama’s race as an item in the list. People in this group respond with a number between zero and six.

The difference between the average value in Group Two and the average value in Group Three is the percentage of people who added Obama’s race to the list of reasons to vote for or against him. For example, if the average value in Group Two is 3.1 items and the average in Group Three is 4.1 items, we know that everyone (100 percent) included the race item in Group Three (because all the other items are the same and the groups are randomly assigned.)

This methodology allows people to anonymously reveal when socially undesirable considerations (things they don’t want to admit to) are important to them. Results are below.

REASONS FOR VOTING AGAINST OBAMA

Which things matter?

Economic Plan 38

Party 33

Iraq Policy 57

Health Care Plan 52

Speaking Ability 16

He’s black 7

How many things matter?

(CONTROL GROUP)

Economic Plan

Party

Iraq Policy

Health Care Plan

Speaking Ability

AVERAGE # MENTIONS:

2.64

How many things matter? (TREATMENT)

Economic Plan

Party

Iraq Policy

Health Care Plan

Speaking Ability

He’s black

AVERAGE # MENTIONS:

2.75

Difference between CONTROL and TREATMENT = 11%

REASONS FOR VOTING FOR OBAMA

Which things matter?

Economic Plan 74

Party 61

Iraq Policy 76

Health Care Plan 79

Speaking Ability 64

He’s black 12

How many things matter?

(CONTROL GROUP)

Economic Plan

Party

Iraq Policy

Health Care Plan

Speaking Ability

AVERAGE # MENTIONS:

3.9

How many things matter? (TREATMENT)

Economic Plan

Party

Iraq Policy

Health Care Plan

Speaking Ability

He’s black

AVERAGE # MENTIONS:

4.2

Difference between CONTROL and TREATMENT = 30%

We conclude from these data that many people may not be comfortable expressing that race is a factor in their decision to vote against Obama, but many more voters are uncomfortable saying that race is a factor in their decision to vote for Obama. This relationship works in both directions. To underscore this, among black respondents (almost all voting for Obama) 25% tell us in the open list (Group One) that race is a factor in their decision to vote for Obama. But, the list experiment shows that 75% of African Americans reveal that race is a factor in their decision to vote for Obama. The open list results underestimate this number by a factor of 3. In other words, even black respondents are reluctant to admit openly that race is driving their vote.

We ran the same type of experiment for McCain’s age and found dramatic results. Many more people list McCain’s age as a reason to vote against him when they can do so anonymously than list Obama’s race as a reason to vote against him.

For more information on these data and analyses contact:

LYNN VAVRECK, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

(650- 305- 9424 LVAVRECK@UCLA. EDU)

SIMON D. JACKMAN, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

(650- 387- 3019 JACKMAN@STANFORD. EDU)

"Socialism" in the 2008 US Election

2008-10-22T20:01:45Z

On Friday, October 24 at 11:00am EDT, Nolan McCarty and Rick Valelly will be discussing, on WHYY Radio, "socialism" in the upcoming election (91FM in Philly area). Radio Times welcomes your phone calls during the morning live broadcast. The number is 1-888-477-WHYY (1-888-477-9499)

Live webcast and subsequent podcast available on the Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane website.

Issues, Ideology, Gender, and Race in the 2008 Election

2008-10-22T13:16:49Z

On Friday, October 17, 2008, CSDP and the Brookings Institution held the third of five seminars on this year's election: Issues, Ideology, Gender, and Race in the 2008 Election.

Moderated by LARRY BARTELS, Director, Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, and THOMAS E. MANN, Senior Fellow, Governance Studies, The Brookings Institution, panelists were: SUNSHINE HILLYGUS, Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor of Government, Harvard University; DARON SHAW, Associate Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin; and SHANKAR VEDANTAM, Columnist, Washington Post

Following is a small sampling of intriguing comments -- for the full transcript, click here.

Thomas Mann: ...the first two sessions of our seminars have talked about the powerful forces of partisanship, the economy, and the President’s political standing, and leading to a huge advantage for the Democratic Party. This was evident in our last seminar three weeks ago, which was really before the financial meltdown.

But we now know that after the most recent and dramatic economic developments and the four debates, three presidential and once vice presidential, the campaign narrative seems to be reinforcing the election fundamentals rather than diverting from those fundamentals. So a natural question to ask is, could that change in the remaining days of the campaign?...

Larry Bartels: ...We expect the candidates to tell us in their speeches and their ads about their positions on a whole range of issues. We expect voters to listen carefully to what the candidates say and weigh the candidate’s positions in comparison with their own convictions and make a choice of candidates on the basis of their issue position. And then we expect the election to enforce responsiveness by having put the candidate in office who’s closest to the voter’s issue positions, who then implements those policies, and so people get policy outcomes that are close to what they wanted in the way of policies with respect to all the issues that they care about.

That’s mostly not what happens. This progressive ideal that dates back for a century in American politics conflicts with most of what we’ve observed about the way voters actually behave and about the way the political process and the connection between elections and policy actually works....

Daron Shaw: ...Obama has just put together an organization like none we’ve ever seen. And it really is striking for a person who’s not an incumbent and who doesn’t have the backing of an incumbent political party. He’s put this together on his own, and it’s a stunning campaign. And I don’t – as a matter of fact, I think – and we talked a little bit about this last night at dinner, I think that whatever race effect there is, there’s a good chance it will be offset by the ground game and the campaign organization that Obama has put in place.

Now, I don’t want to underestimate race, it’s obviously historically and traditionally such a dominant factor in American politics, but I’m not so sure that you’re not going to see these things sort of balance out, so we end up getting a result that looks a lot like the polls we see the night before the election.

Sunshine Hillygus: ... most people don’t know about the whole range of issues, that oftentimes those issues do not necessarily align with their party affiliation, and so they begin the campaign with a bit of a dilemma. They might agree with one candidate on one issue, they might agree with the other candidate – affiliate with the other candidate’s party identification, or agree with the other candidate on a different issue. And so the role of the campaign is to determine, of these tensions, which one wins out. And so you have the small business owner who might be a member of the Sierra Club, the pro life Catholic who also wants increased spending on the poor, the union member who owns a gun, and what they have to do is, over the course of the campaign, decide which of their considerations, which of these important considerations are going to win out.

In estimating the size of these kind of torn or cross pressured people, I estimate them about a third of the electorate. And so that very much is a large enough number of people to make a difference.

And again, these are people who agree with each of the candidates on something they care about. The view of the persuadable voter is actually quite different from what you read in the headlines....

Shankar Vedantam: ... I spent a lot of time this last weekend in a town in northwest Pennsylvania. I’m going to tell you about two voters....Both Joe and Jill were in their late ‘60’s, they’ve been straight Democratic ticket voters for about 40 years, both of them very blue collar town with very strong union instincts, it’s been decimated by the economy.

Joe works at a light bulb factory that has really gone downhill over the last 15 or 20 years. You know, the number of people employed at this light bulb factory has dropped by an order of magnitude in about 20 years. Joe is very strongly against free trade -- he wants the country to erect trade barriers and impose tariffs on products coming in. He is very concerned about outsourcing. And when you look at these issues, it would seem to be a no brainer where he should stand on this particular campaign between Obama and McCain.

Similarly, Jill has spent several decades as a union organizer, and has also been a straight Democratic ticket voter for about three or four decades. She cares intensely about the abortion issue and is intensely pro choice.

What I found striking is that both Joe and Jill told me that they were extremely ambivalent when it came to this election, and were torn between the two candidates. And I tried to press them and tried to understand where they were coming from, because it seemed to me, at least from where I was coming from, that – it didn’t seem very complicated how they should think about these two candidates and I was trying to understand how they were thinking about it.

So Joe told me his concerns about Obama were that he just didn’t know where Obama stood, he just felt that he couldn’t trust where Obama stood, he wasn’t quite sure where Obama stood, he didn’t have a good feel for Obama, which I think had something to do with race, even though he explicitly said that race was not a factor in his thinking at all.

Jill actually said that race was an explicit factor in how she was thinking about the race. And she said she was particularly concerned that if an African American man became president, she was afraid that whites would now have to go to the back of the bus, as she says that blacks had historically been at the back of the bus, but now whites would have to go to the back of the bus.

And this was really interesting. She said she had a long conversation with her sister, who was an Obama supporter, and they were having this debate about who to support. The sister’s argument was, remember, Obama is half white, and if he’s half white, that must mean he must care at least some about white people, which means he’s not going to send all the white people to the back of the bus, because, you know, he’s half white. And this argument appealed tremendously to Jill, and she said, yes, if he is half white, then maybe he’s not going to discriminate against white voters, and it’s prompted her to generally feel that she’s going to support Obama, although she doesn’t feel passionately about it....

Why the Economy Fares Much Better Under Democrats

2008-10-21T03:59:00Z

John McCain is a maverick and Barack Obama is a postpartisan problem-solver. But you wouldn't know it by looking at their economic plans. Both candidates' proposals faithfully reflect the traditional economic priorities of their respective parties. That makes the track records of past Democratic and Republican administrations a very useful benchmark for assessing how the economy might perform under a President McCain or a President Obama. The bottom line: During the past 60 years, Democrats have presided over much less unemployment and much more robust income growth.

The $52.5 billion plan Senator McCain announced last week includes $36 billion in tax breaks for senior citizens withdrawing funds from retirement accounts and $10 billion for a reduction in the capital gains tax. Those are perks for investors, most of whom are relatively affluent. (McCain is also proposing a two-year suspension of taxes on unemployment benefits, but that's a fraction of the plan's cost.) He also favors broader tax cuts for businesses and wants to extend President Bush's massive tax cuts indefinitely, even for people earning more than $250,000 per year.

McCain's proposals reflect the traditional Republican emphasis on cutting taxes for businesses and wealthy people in hopes of stimulating investment – "trickle down" economics, as it came to be called during Ronald Reagan's administration. But will proposals of this sort really "stop and reverse the rise of unemployment" and "create millions of new jobs" as McCain has claimed? The historical record suggests not.

President Bush's multitrillion-dollar tax cuts, which were strongly tilted toward the rich, could not prevent (and may even have contributed to) significant job losses. On the other hand, when Bill Clinton raised taxes on affluent people to balance the federal budget (while significantly expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit for working poor people), unemployment declined substantially. Under Clinton's watch, 22 million jobs were created.

Prefer a broader historical comparison? In the past three decades, since the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries oil price shocks of the mid-1970s and the Republican turn toward "supply side" economics, the average unemployment rate under Republican presidents has been 6.7 percent – substantially higher than the 5.5 percent average under Democratic presidents. (The official unemployment rate takes no account of people who have given up looking for work or taken substantial pay cuts to stay in the labor force.) Over an even broader time period, since the late 1940s, unemployment has averaged 4.8 percent under Democratic presidents but 6.3 percent – almost one-third higher – under Republican presidents.

Lower unemployment under Democratic presidents has contributed substantially to the real incomes of middle-class and working poor families. Job losses hurt everyone – not just those without work. In fact, every percentage point of unemployment has the effect of reducing middle-class income growth by about $300 per family per year. And the effects are long term, unlike the temporary boost in income from a stimulus check. Compounded over an eight-year period, a persistent one-point difference in unemployment is worth about $10,000 to a middle-class family. The dollar values are smaller for working poor families, but in relative terms their incomes are even more sensitive to unemployment. In contrast, income growth for affluent people is much more sensitive to inflation, which has been a perennial target of Republican economic policies.

Although McCain portrays Senator Obama as a "job killing" tax-and-spend liberal, the new $60 billion plan Obama unveiled last week also has a tax break as its centerpiece – a tax break specifically tailored to create jobs by offering employers a $3,000 tax credit for each new hire over the next two years. Obama's proposal would also extend unemployment benefits by 13 weeks for those who remain jobless, as well as match McCain's in suspending taxes on unemployment benefits.

Obama's new proposal complements $115 billion in economic stimulus measures he had already announced, including $65 billion in direct rebates to taxpayers and $50 billion to help states jump-start spending on infrastructure projects. All of this is squarely in the tradition of Democratic presidents since John F. Kennedy, who have relied on public spending and tax breaks for working people to stimulate consumption and employment during economic downturns.

These and other policies have produced not only lower unemployment under Democratic presidents but also more economic output and income growth. In fact, over the past 60 years, the real incomes of middle-income families have grown about twice as fast under Democratic presidents as they have under Republican presidents. The partisan difference is even greater for working poor families, whose real incomes have grown six times as fast under Democratic presidents as they have under Republican presidents.

Of course, past performance is no guarantee of what will happen when the next president takes office. However, given the striking fidelity of both presidential candidates to their parties' traditional economic priorities, the profound impact of partisan politics on the economic fortunes of American families over more than half a century ought to weigh heavily in the minds of voters.

This entry is also posted on the Christian Science Monitor website, csmonitor.com, October 21, 2008.

Down But Not Out

2008-10-16T04:20:00Z

Debate impressions from Robertson Hall on the Princeton University campus

To begin tonight’s debate, Senator McCain expressed his sympathy for Nancy Reagan, who fell and broke her pelvis last week. The former First Lady is undergoing painful physical therapy, but she is reportedly “in good spirits”.

It’s an apt metaphor for Senator McCain’s campaign. He was spirited and forceful in tonight’s debate, criticizing Senator Obama’s economic and social policies and keeping the Illinois Democrat on the defensive for most of the evening. Still, Senator McCain’s presidential aspirations are suffering right now.

Senator Obama did well. He does a good job of agreeing on agreeable points, such as school vouchers, with his opponent. It reinforces his campaign theme of finding common ground with the other side and makes him seem more presidential. After all, bringing both sides together, adopting the best ideas from each, and crafting policies in the nation’s interest is what presidents do. Senator Obama’s performance tonight will convince some in the wandering center that he is up to the challenge.

For the first time in three debates, the abortion question emerged. The moderator tried to ask it without really asking it, using Supreme Court nominations as a proxy, but he was not nearly as circumspect as Rick Warren in the Saddleback Civil Forum On National Leadership , who asked the profoundly simple question, “When does life begin?”

The abortion question is perhaps the most frustrating issue in American politics. On no other issue is so much demanded and so little returned. Neither candidate can alter the policy, except through marginal changes. Yet the question remains of foundational importance, which is why audiences, like the one in Robertson’s basement, revere it so (the room was silent as both candidates talked).

But it is not abortion that will decide this election. It is the economy, which leads McCain’s supporters to pray for recovery and Obama’s to pray for recovery in time. In 20 days, we’ll have our answer.