One View from the Right on the 2012 Field

Matt Mackowiak, doing a guest spot over at CQ, has an early look at the GOP's field of candidates for 2012. The former Senate press secretary doesn't affix numbers to the candidates' names, but it is hard for me to read it any other way. Thirty months out from the start of primary season 2012, this reads like a rough ranking. Here's his list:

1. Mitt Romney

2. Newt Gingrich

3. Tim Pawlenty

4. Mark Sanford

5. Bobby Jindal

6. Sarah Palin

7. Eric Cantor

8. Mike Huckabee

9. Jon Huntsman

10. John Thune

11. John Ensign

12. Mike Pence


Thoughts?

• I can buy Palin and Huckabee that low simply from an organizational standpoint. And when I say organization I mean the ability to win over party elites within the Republican Party. Despite both having at least some modicum of support at the grassroots level (Palin being Palin and Huckabee in polling), there's still the thought that neither has much of a link to the elite level of the party. You can get away with that in a Democratic nomination race (see Carter, Jimmy or Dean, Howard P. -- where the P stands for pre-scream), but that really doesn't happen on the Republican side. That's why those top two look so good.

• Bobby Jindal. I still see the Louisiana governor as the Mark Warner of this cycle -- dropping out before the race starts and eying another cycle. In fact, let's pencil those two in for the 2016 general election and be done with it. Nah.

• Eric Cantor. Look, I haven't said much about the Virginia congressman, but boy has his name been dropped a lot lately in the context of a presidential run. I don't know. I could be proven wrong, but I really see him as aspiring to the Speaker's position. The guy wouldn't turn down a chance at the GOP nomination, I'm sure, but I doubt he makes that jump unless he really feels like he can win it. His last name isn't Bush, so I don't see him queue-jumping around the "next guy in line" method of presidential nomination for the GOP.

As always, time will tell.


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More Texas-less Fun

As long as we're messing with Texas...

Actually, since I put up a Texas-less version of the electoral college map in my post on the Texas frontloading bill last week, S.D. has been after me to do more with the map than just simply remove Texas. So, let's take those reapportionment numbers from FiveThirtyEight and put them into a map. And while we're at it, let's give Utah its fifth electoral vote back and bump the Beehive state up to 6 after the sans Texas reapportionment. [And no, I have absolutely no room to talk. Just take a gander at the comments to the electoral college by congressional districts post.]

[Click Map to Enlarge]

As Nate, said, the GOP is likely to lose ground on the presidential level, but gain at the congressional level without Texas on the map. But, I've got to admit that I can't just swipe those numbers and put them on my own map without making some original contribution of my own.

To wit...

What would happen in two years' time with the post-census reapportionment if Texas had in fact seceded from the United States? I'm glad you asked. It might look a little something like this (dark gray means seat gains, dark red equals losses):

[Click Map to Enlarge]

Based on the Election Data Services data I used to put together these post-2010 census maps, I reallocated each state's congressional seats without the Lone Star state. This reflects the projection based on the population changes witnessed between 2000 and 2008. Arizona, Florida and North Carolina are the beneficiaries of Texas' departure, gaining two seats apiece and the funny thing among the states that lose seats -- the usual Rust Belt suspects -- is that most of them, after gaining from the hypothetical Texas secession, revert to their pre-secession, pre-2010 census numbers. Ohio's back to 20 electoral votes. Pennsylvania's back to 21. New Jersey's back to 15. Michigan's back at 17. New York and Illinois luck out and actually gain a seat over where they are in reality now. The basic trend we are likely to see in 2010 is upheld here with or without Texas. The Sun Belt would gain electoral college clout at the expense of the states in the Rust Belt and stretching into the northeast.

For the sake of comparison...
Instead of the 389-147 win without Texas (pre-census), Obama would have managed a 381-155 victory over John McCain under the electoral college vote distribution of this map.

So no, I didn't resize the states to match their new electoral vote totals, but I think we'll have something to talk about regardless.


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Democrat out, Democrat in.

Ah, if only it were that easy. Of course, that's all most will remember of this until the rematch between Murphy and Tedisco heats up in the fall of 2010, if then. For now though, Scott Murphy is the new congressman from New York's 20th district following Jim Tedisco's concession this afternoon. Murphy currently leads by 399 votes.

I think it is safe to say that this one is marked by both parties as one of the most competitive House races for 2010. And I'll say this: The special election has been welcomed respite from all things unelectiony since November.

[Yeah, I just made that one up.]

Up Next?

June 2: New Jersey Gubernatorial primary

June 9: Virginia Gubernatorial primary

July 14: CA-32 special election

See, we'll have a few things to tide us over until the general election campaigns this fall.


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Obama vs. Four Prospective 2012 GOP Candidates: Huckabee Does Best

Public Policy Polling has a new poll out pitting President Obama against four potential competitors in a series of 2012 general election trial heats. Among the four Republicans, Mike Huckabee polled the best against Obama and was the only match-up where the president was under the fifty percent support mark. Here are the results from PPP's national survey of 686 voters over the weekend (April 17-19):

Obama - 49%
Huckabee - 42%
Not Sure - 9%

Obama - 52%
Gingrich - 39%
Not Sure - 9%

Obama - 53%
Palin - 41%
Not Sure - 6%

Obama - 50%
Romney - 39%
Not Sure - 11%


Let me add a couple of notes here:

1) This poll, like PPP's 2012 poll in March surveyed less than 700 respondents. Again, for a national survey you'd prefer 1000 responses, but beggars can't be choosers for 2012 polling data this far in advance. I'm sure the good folks at PPP would rationalize the number since it is based on voters and not the population at-large.

2) Palin improved her share while Obama's share dropped when compared to the previous poll. Not to diminish how well the Alaska governor stacks up against Obama, but this poll was done on the heels of Palin's appearance at and subsequent news coverage of the Right to Life Dinner last week in Evansville. Still, knocking eight points off the president's advantage over her in a month's time isn't too shabby.

3) The unsures also aren't all that surprising. I think it is safe to say that Palin is in Hillary Clinton territory now: People either like her or they don't, but they do know (or think they know) about her and have an opinion. That's a situation where the "don't knows" drop. The differences aren't great across all four candidates on the not sures, but I was still surprised that Mitt Romney was bringing up the rear. That's both a good and bad thing for the former Massachusetts governor. Good because his number is likely to increase (as would anyone's) upon entering the race, but bad because some of those unsures are also likely to go to Obama (already at the 50% mark).

4) The unsures on the favorable/unfavorable for each of the Republicans is also worth looking at. Palin is the only one of the four to have a not sure percentage in the single digits. The other three Republicans have not sures on that measure of 20 or more percentage points. That's pretty significant.

Still, Mike Huckabee does the best against Obama. That's certainly news to me. News I'm hard-pressed to figure out. My conception of the GOP field broadly was that Huckabee and Palin occupied a similar, though not identical, area: similar on social issues, but different on economic matters. But now that I've typed that out, I get a sense potentially of why Huckabee did better against Obama than the other three. In the midst of a time when the role of the federal government on a host of issues is increasing, Huckabee is the Republican answer. And if the US is going in that direction, "why not have one of our own in charge of it," might be the Republican thinking. Of course, the argument could be made that George W. Bush was that type of president and some Republicans weren't particularly thrilled with the expansion of government under the Bush administration.

Then again, I could be reading way too much into a poll concerning a race that is still three years away. Interesting results, though.

Hat tip to GOP12 for the poll link.


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Texas Frontloading Bill Goes Public

Last week FHQ happened upon a bill in the Texas House that would move the Lone Star state's presidential primary (and all other primaries) from the first Tuesday in March to the first Tuesday in February in 2012. Given the widespread adoption of that particular date by a host of states prior to 2008, this still doesn't qualify as big news.

What's more is that Texas has done this before, moving from May to March for the Southern Super Tuesday in 1988. However, the state maintained that position for each of the elections between 1988 and 2000. Prior to 2004, the legislature moved to shift the primary up from the second week in March to the first week in March, but later postponed that move until 2008. Texas, then, technically just frontloaded its presidential primary for 2008 and is eying a more substantial move for 2012.

Well, parts of the Texas legislature are eying such a move. As I said last week, the bill -- HB 246 -- is a Democratic sponsored bill in a Republican dominated state government. In this case, though, the in-party (the state GOP) is the party that will have the contested nomination race in 2012. Whether that actually causes state Republicans to act is beside the point. The real issue is that the Republicans in control have at least some motivation to move the largest red state inthe US to a more advantageous position for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination race.

And now, some of these Republicans may begin to hear about the virtues of such a move from a group other than their Democratic colleagues in the state capitol. No, HB 246 hasn't been passed -- the bill is still in committee -- but there will be a public hearing held for it and a whole laundry list of other proposed elections legislation on Monday, April 27. HB 246 is first on the agenda though.

Of course, being that this hearing is happening on a Monday, that it is one amongst a bevy of other bills, and that this is not a time (right after an election) when the public is particularly concerned with the next election, we may not see much action on HB 246. I suspect that on one side, someone representing the local elections officials, who would most be put out by the shift (deadlines and elections preparation would be pushed over into the previous year), would be in attendance as would potentially some conservative groups (on the other side of the issue) interested in insuring that Texas Republican voters have a say in who the national party's nominee will be.

Regardless, it will be interesting to see what, if any, testimony is offered on Monday concerning moving the Lone Star state's presidential primary for 2012. I'll keep you posted as the hearing's details become available.


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Political Boundaries vs. Virtual Boundaries

There has been a series of discussions over the last week across a few political science blogs (see here, here and here) over the level at which voting is best analyzed. Obviously, if the goal is to look at the outcome of the electoral college, then examining voting at the state level makes the most sense. But that's not really what this discussion is about. It's more about the perception at the individual level of community -- large and small. As Seth Masket at Enik Rising asked,

"What's the best level to analyze the vote? Should we be looking at individual data? County returns? State returns? There's no obvious right answer here. Yes, individuals, not counties or states, are the ones that cast votes. But people are not islands. They often think as members of communities and evaluate political events in terms of their impact on their geographic area."

[Click to Enlarge]

In other words, voting takes place on the individual level, but one's sense of community and geography influences that.

[Click to Enlarge and Here for Original Source]

Voters are certainly more likely to latch onto fixed boundaries rather than those lines that are apt to change every ten years.

[Click to Enlarge and Here for Original Source]

But it goes beyond the simplicity of congressional districts vs. counties. People aren't necessarily tied together because of lines drawn in the sand or boundaries between county and county or state and state. The map below, for instance, from the CommonCensus Map Project is based on respondents' senses of spheres of influence -- of what major city has the most cultural and economic impact on the area you are in.

[Click to Enlarge and Here for Original Source]

And that opens up an entirely different set of questions or at least an alternate unit of analysis: the virtual boundaries of these spheres of influence. As was mentioned by Jim Gimpel over at the Monkey Cage, but without the visual, this ends up looking an awful lot like the various media markets across the country. And there's some truth to that.

My natural inclination is to look at one of two places first: North Carolina and Georgia. In the case of the Tarheel state, there is a fair amount of overlap between the virtual spheres of influence boundary and the media market boundary. That's just the fragmented nature of the state; between the mountain, piedmont and coastal regions on the one hand and the three major urban areas (within the piedmont) -- Raleigh-Durham, Greensboro-Winston Salem and Charlotte -- on the other. Those boundaries hold up across the spheres map above and the media markets map below.

Georgia, though, is a different story. The state is divided into several media markets, but Atlanta subsumes those in terms of influence across the Peach state.

[Click to Enlarge and Here for Original Source]

Interestingly, Brian Arbor in the comments to Gimpel's post draws a comparison between the idea of political/cultural spheres of influence and the loyal followings of various sports teams.

"When I lived in San Jose and Sacramento, you would see the Sharks and the Kings everywhere. This did not seem to be because people in those cities were massive hockey or basketball fans, per se. They were fans of a professional team that had their city’s name on their chest. In San Jose and Sacremento, this helped create an identity beyond being just a bedroom community to San Francisco. Common Census has a Bay Area map among its regional maps, and shows some of this effect."

Whether politics, major cities or sports, though, this CommonCensus idea is an interesting one that forces us to reconsider the definition of boundaries -- thinking of them less in terms of lines and more so in terms of what ties groups of people or voters together.

[Yeah, you're right. I just wanted an excuse to put another set of maps together.]


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Too Good Not to Mention: Coach K on Obama

As I made abundantly clear during March, I like basketball. Growing up in North Carolina (and now returning!) will do that. But it is even better when there is an intersection between politics and basketball. I quite enjoyed, then, Obama filling out NCAA brackets or NPR constructing a bracket for prospective GOP presidential candidates in 2012.

So when Coach K enters the political fray (even if not too deeply), I take notice. The Duke coach commented on Obama generally and the president's short tenure in office on Morning Joe this morning. And that certainly qualifies as such an intersection between basketball and politics. And a good one at that considering my position in the Carolina/Duke rivalry.

Here's the clip:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

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FHQ has been offered and has accepted a job at Wake Forest University starting this fall. No, not on the janitorial staff; in the actual political science department. [See above for my reaction.]

Oh well, no more red state perspective from a life-long red stater. It is nice to go back home to the Tarheel state, though.


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2012 GOP Presidential Candidate Emergence

Now that FHQ has had a look back through the lens of Google Trends at Democratic (here and here) and Republican (here, here and here) presidential candidate emergence in 2008, I thought we'd cast an eye toward 2012. As was made clear in Sunday's post on frontloading bill trends since 2001, there is a cyclical pattern to this process as well. All is relatively quiet in terms of presidential candidate Google searches in years one and two of any four year presidential election cycle, but once the midterm congressional elections hit, the more candidate-specific searches begin to climb in number (just as in the case of the number of bills to shift a state's presidential primary). That's exactly the pattern that was witnessed between 2005 and 2008.

In other words, the expectations for this current period in the presidential election cycle should be quite low. Hey, we just finished an election! Why think about the next one? Well, some of us are much to the chagrin of others. The bottom line is that we have to take these trends with a grain of salt this far out. But just for the heck of it let's take FHQ's Elite Eight for 2012 and add Bobby Jindal and Ron Paul. Now, it could become necessary to add (or subtract) someone in later (FHQ has had an internal debate raging about whether to include John Thune, for instance.), but I'll leave it at these ten for the time being.

How, then, do things look for these ten prospective candidates in terms of Google search volume three years ahead of primary season 2012? FHQ, always a bastion of information, has adopted a more is more (as opposed to the less is more) strategy in this instance at the risk of visual overload in this one post. I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but I think that it is important to look not only at the complete time series for the year thus far (January - March at least), but to glance at the monthly snapshots to get a clearer picture of the daily fluctuations. Yes, daily. That's where this series of posts (Yes, they'll go on on a monthly basis.) will be superior to the week-by-week structure of the 2008 posts. I'll also augment the complete time series and monthly snapshots with Bobby Jindal omitted due to his Republican Response spike in late February when President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress. Jindal's data is supressed simply because it dwarfs (and even that may be understating the effect) the fluctuations for the other nine candidates. [And I'll bet you thought it'd be Sarah Palin hovering so far ahead of her other prospective Republican primary opponents.]

To the trends!

[Click to Enlarge]

There you have it. See, I told you that Jindal spike skews the data. All you can really see from that is the Louisiana governor having a really good day, Sarah Palin with a comfortable advantage over everyone for all but about a week, Ron Paul claiming a steady middling position and then everyone else clustered together. What's that really telling us other than Bobby Jindal was the talk of the town for about a week? Not much.

So let's look at that January to March period without Jindal.

[Click to Enlarge]

Ah, now there's a trend. It's still Sarah Palin, then Ron Paul and everyone else, but the trajectory that the Palin line is following is oddly similar to the cautionary tales the punditocracy was weaving in the days after last November's election. The onus was always on Palin to stay in the news and politically relevant from the far reaches of the Last Frontier. Relative to her other prospective competitors, the Alaska governor has basically come back down to earth. She's still in an advantageous position, but not like she was. If you draw a straight line from point A (1/1/09) to point B (3/31/09), Palin has lost what amounts to ten points in relative Google search volume compared to the other, in this case, eight candidates. Yes, there has been a rebound of sorts in April due to the Levi Johnston controversy and last week's right to life gathering in Indiana, but FHQ will get to that once April is complete. [For the time being, I'll leave it at this: The former had more of an impact on Palin searches than the latter.]

Palin's one thing, but what about some of these other candidates? Let's zoom in on the first three months of 2009 individually.

[Click to Enlarge]

Mike Huckabee had some significant spikes across the month of January.

[Click to Enlarge]

But he comes back to the pack in February (see appendix for a February chart with Jindal included). In the first two months of the year, a subtle (very subtle) advantage can be detected for both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich and there are some Mark Sanford (stimulus package-related) jumps as well.

[Click to Enlarge]

Once we zoom in on March and bring Jindal's data back into account, a Jindal/Gingrich/Romney grouping of candidates in the middle emerges with everyone else struggling to occasionally break from the no search barrier. That latter group includes Huckabee, Pawlenty, Crist, Huntsman and Sanford.

Now, this is all something of a fool's errand in 2009. That I'll admit. However, there are two things to take home from this:

First, all that you see above is true to what we would otherwise expect for this period in a presidential election cycle. One election ended and most just have not started thinking about the next one. The argument, then, that most of the (subtle) fluctuations are based on media cues is a valid one. But...

This Palin trend is one worth tracking. Her potential candidacy is one that could spur a huge grassroots effort. It is also true that latent grassroots support turned active could make her decision as to whether to enter the presidential race in 2012 that much easier. Still, her success will be measured by the extent to which the Alaska governor is able to, as I've said already, stay in the news and remain politically relevant. No one excites the Republican base better than Palin at the moment, but that excitement has to be met with the construction of some national level policy bona fides without which she'll be hard-pressed to convince Republicans mindful of her chances in the general election that she can win. That, though, is a story for another day.


Appendix: Bonus Charts
Below are a few more charts I put together but didn't fit in with the discussion above. But who am I to deprive FHQ's loyal readers of the visuals? There are three additional graphs. The first shows the February snapshot with the Jindal spike included and the final two show a January/February, two month snapshot -- one with the Jindal spike, one without.

[Click to Enlarge]

[Click to Enlarge]

[Click to Enlarge]

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Trends in Frontloading: Bills Proposed and Passed Since 2001

FHQ does an awful lot of talking about current bills before state legislatures that would shift the dates of presidential primaries, but that is a service often done without much context. Sure, we're likely to opine on the delegate-richness of a state or whether that state holds its presidential primary concurrently with its primaries for state and local offices, but there is often less discussion about the overall success rate of frontloading bills that are proposed in various state legislatures or when in a particular presidential election cycle we would witness the most success.

Using data from the National Conference of State Legislatures' Election Reform database, I tracked the frontloading bills proposed and passed in the time since 2001 (the point to which this particular database dates back). This examination only relates to frontloading bills, and not a wider look at any bill that would shift the date of a state's presidential primary. It should be noted, though, that the incidence of so-call backloading are few and far between during this period. There is also a distinction that needs to be made in terms of the longeity of legislation. Bills introduced, not acted upon and carried over to the next legislative session are not counted in the total column until they get an up or down vote on the floor or die in committee. New Jersey and Pennsylvania, for example, had a lot of frontloading bills that appeared in multiple sessions (same bill number across sessions). A similar situation happened recently with the bill to move Georgia's presidential primary back to March in 2012. The final caveat is that this only applies to states where the state legislature is charged with setting the date of the presidential delegate selection event. That obviously excludes caucus states, drawing down the overall number of frontloading states in the process. Still, as the results charted below show, there is a pattern to be gleaned from the primary data that will, in most cases, apply to caucus states as well.

[Click to Enlarge]

During this decade, then, we see that most of the movement in state legislatures on the frontloading front takes place in the year prior to a presidential election. As is the case with the public, legislators are not terribly concerned with the next presidential election until it is almost time for the next go-round. In terms of frontloading bills passed, this is an easy trend to track: There is a spike of successful activity (red line above) in the year before an election that dies down to nearly nothing during the election year (when many state legislators are thinking about their own reelection races) and then gradually grows over the next couple of years before spiking again just before the next presidential election year.

That trend does not necessarily hold overall for proposed legislation (blue line above). In the case of introducing a bill, we see that the most activity is still in the years immediately prior to a presidential election year, but the activity does not tail off in the same way as it does for bills passed. For proposed legislation, there is seemingly a flurry of activity following a presidential election year. If we think of presidential election years as year one in the next cycle of frontloading, then we see some legislative activity (bill introductions) in the year of the presidential election (with the next primary cycle in mind and the just completed primary cycle experience still fresh) and that gradually trails off before bottoming out in the year of the midterm congressional elections.

All that leaves is a simple relationship: The closer those two lines are to each other, the more successful state legislatures have been in moving their primaries to earlier dates. To get a better idea of this, let's superimpose the percent success rate over that previous graph.

[Click to Enlarge]

Now, we're getting somewhere. The biggest overlap between the original two lines is (bills proposed and bills passed) is in the years immediately prior to a presidential election year. That success rate drops off to nothing (or nearly nothing) during a presidential election year and in some cases the year after before building up again as the next primary season approaches. At its height, the success rate across this period still only approaches about 40%. In other words, the success rate improves in those years just prior to a presidential election year, but only about two out of every five frontloading bills is passed and signed by a governor in a good year.

What does all of this mean? Well, for starters, all this talk about North Carolina and Oregon and Texas moving forward in 2012 is a bit premature in 2009. 2011? Yeah, they may have a better chance of succeeding then. But a lot of other states may be (and probably will be) considering moves by that time; states that are in better positions to move in the first place. It could be that what we're are seeing here are two groups of states: Those with comfortable unified partisan control waiting to move because they can, and states where divided government or governments controlled by the party in the White House continue to see legislators attempting to gradually gather support for a frontloading bill by continually reintroducing versions of it. Of the three states above, North Carolina and Oregon fall into the latter category. Texas, however, fits the former, but has a bill being pushed by a member of the minority party (which is the same as the party controlling the White House). All told, Rep. Roberto Alonzo might actually see some Republican support for the frontloading bill in Texas should it carry over to a future session or should he reintroduce it in the future (say, 2011).


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