About that Santorum Campaign Delegate Strategy Memo

FHQ got several requests yesterday to comment on the memo outlining the delegate strategy that Politico posted yesterday from the Santorum campaign. Most of those discussions were via phone, but I did exchange emails with Pema Levy at TPM (see her story here) on the matter and here is the long form version of my back of the napkin response:

There is both fact and fiction in the Santorum memo. 

First of all, even when I was generous to Santorum and assumed that he got 50% of the vote the rest of the way (both statewide and in the congressional districts) and gave him all of the unbound delegates, he just barely got over 1144 (see here).¹ And that particular dynamic just isn't going to happen. I get their point about winning unbound caucus state delegates at the state conventions, but they are likely overstating just how many delegates Santorum will be able to claim. 

Secondly, they are just plain wrong about the April 3 contests. DC is winner-take-all (and Santorum is not on the ballot there), but Maryland and Wisconsin are both winner-take-all by congressional district. As we saw in a similar case in South Carolina, even a sweeping victory like Gingrich's there did not net him all of the delegates in the Palmetto state. Romney won a congressional district. Theoretically, a candidate could win all of the delegates from those states, but it would take a win that Santorum is unlikely to get.² [What's funny is that California should later be considered winner-take-all as well according to the Santorum campaign definition. It is also winner-take-all by congressional district.] 

This whole strategy is predicated on the race going to the convention. But it is going to be tough for Santorum and Gingrich to only argue that Romney shouldn't get to 1144 (to their supporters and donors) as Romney is likely to keep growing his delegate advantage and inch closer and closer to 1144. That is an easy argument to make when you have possible wins ahead of you in Mississippi or Alabama, but doesn't hold water when your candidate is losing throughout April. 

This memo is very casual with the discussion of delegates being elected at state conventions. Their claim is more valid in caucus states where the delegates will not be bound, but they fail to adequately -- in my eyes at least -- mention that the delegates elected at conventions in primary states (and some caucus states) are bound according to the results of the primary. 

Finally, the memo is big on telling everyone that Santorum will do well in particular states without telling us very much about how they will ultimately make that happen. The contention that Romney will not necessarily do well in the northeastern states on April 24 because of past precedent is particularly puzzling. Connecticut, Delaware, New York and Rhode Island were all Super Tuesday states in February 2008 and McCain won them all.
The fact that they seemingly don't fully understand the rules (see Maryland/Wisconsin claim above), are organizing on the fly and aren't (fully) on the ballot in some additional states gives me pause about the effectiveness of this particular strategy. 

They are absolutely correct to question the Romney team's ability to get their candidate to 1144, but Santorum's argument is only going to work as long as he is winning and cutting into Romney's lead. If Romney does well in April, then the task becomes all but impossible for Santorum. Romney winning and approaching 1144 is not a good environment in which to make a "keep Romney from 1144" argument. That may serve as the tipping point in this race.

--
Now, I completely understand the Santorum campaign argument that the former Pennsylvania senator is the passion candidate in this race and that they are trying to portray Romney as the moderate, monied candidate. This is the classic heart versus mind discussion that has been going on within the Republican Party since late one early November night in 2008. But to attempt to substitute that particular narrative for the Romney delegate math storyline in this race is very reminiscent of the Clinton campaign effort to push back against the Obama inevitability narrative as well (see here). The bottom line is that it all comes back to the math and the Santorum campaign is up against it on that one.

--
¹ The Gingrich delegate angle is one I hadn't considered, but I wouldn't safely count on those delegates if I were in the Santorum camp.

² And to be fair, Romney is not necessarily likely to have that sort of victory in either of those states either.


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Race to 1144: Super Tuesday, Kansas/Territories

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Visual Representation of the Argument from Non-Romneys, Post-Florida

1144 delegates needed to win.

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Newt's Challenge & Problem: Becoming Huckabee+

On the heels of the South Carolina primary, FHQ speculated that one of the main questions that emerged from the Gingrich win/Romney loss was the Southern question. Romney did not win the South Carolina primary and even if could win in Florida -- It is something of a foregone conclusion at this point that the former Massachusetts governor will win tonight in the Sunshine state. -- and use that as a springboard to wins in contests in hospitable areas in February, that Southern question remains. Romney will not have another opportunity to win in the South until March 6.

[Sidenote follow up to that Southern question:
The way that post seemed to be interpreted by those that built off it was that FHQ was saying Romney couldn't wrap things up until that point at the earliest. I suppose that is part of it, but it is deeper than that. What I meant was that Gingrich and Santorum could use that as a rallying point for voters and more importantly donors. But that has a shelf life. If Romney wins in the South -- and he's guaranteed at least one win in Virginia where only Paul is on the ballot opposite him ¹ -- then that argument disappears. Support and contributions to the campaign also likely disappear or at the very least begin to drop off at that point. And keep in mind, FHQ is discussing this without accounting for any intra-party pressure on the candidates to drop out. In the past, those three things -- waning support, lower fundraising totals and pressure from the party -- often happen nearly simultaneously. That may happen this time as well. But it isn't about Romney wrapping things up so much as the way in which the others start to drop out, or arguments to stay in begin to disappear.]

The Gingrich campaign is mindful of this Southern question. In fact, the memo the campaign circulated on Monday about how a protracted primary battle might look was very heavy on the former Speaker doing well in the upcoming March contests in the region. And therein lies the trouble for the Gingrich campaign. Their hope is that a series of wins across the South evens the delegate total heading out of the contests. That may happen, but if that is the case, the Gingrich folks are going to run full on in a stiff wind. How is that any different than the strategy Mike Huckabee had in 2008? The former Arkansas governor came close to sweeping the region in 2008 and that got him nowhere. It had him out of the race in early March when McCain won on Huckabee's turf in Texas and in the process crossed the 50% plus one delegate threshold to become the presumptive nominee.

Now sure, the Gingrich folks would counter that the calendar is vastly different in 2012 than it was in 2008. There is no mammoth Super Tuesday a week from today's Florida primary like there was four years ago. However, Gingrich is going to have to find a way to win in a Romney state to effectively brush off the Huckabee comparison. February's line up of contests does not seem to offer too many opportunities for Gingrich and if Romney sweeps them all, the pressure is going to increase on the non-Romneys in that scenario to consider bowing out (...in the face of the Southern question for Romney).

If we are trying to game this out moving forward look for Gingrich wins in Romney states (as a signal of a protracted battle) and Romney wins in the South (as a signal that the process is winding down). As it is, Romney is playing the McCain part from 2008 and if the South is the only thing standing in the way, it won't be enough to stop a Romney nomination. The goal for Gingrich is to become Huckabee, but Huckabee plus.

--
¹ This will be an interesting test case of the Romney/not-Romney theory that has been floated around about this Republican nomination race. If there is a significant protest/anti-Romney movement within the Republican primary electorate, and the field has not winnowed anymore by that point, then that two-person Virginia primary becomes the best possible test.

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Mindful of Huckabee in 2008, Will Romney Go on the Attack in 2012?

Michael D. Shear at The Caucus asks:

Is it time for Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, to turn his firepower on Representative Michele Bachmann?

Four years ago, Mr. Romney’s shot at the Republican nomination was dealt a nearly fatal blow when Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, emerged late in the game as a favorite of conservatives to win the Iowa caucuses.

Well, for the answer, we can go in a couple of directions. First of all, 2012 is not 2008. Mitt Romney's strategy for 2012 is fundamentally different than the direction the former Massachusetts governor's campaign took in 2008. Iowa was a big part of the 2008 strategy, and while the Hawkeye state is not completely off the radar for Romney in 2012, the state has been deemphasized. Romney will take his trips to states like Iowa and South Carolina, but his campaign has taken a calculated risk in deemphasizing them. If he can win them, great, but the Romney camp is betting that Romney can raise a boatload of money and win New Hampshire and Nevada (and perhaps rogue Florida and rogue Michigan as well), and if that doesn't winnow the field down to Romney and some token opposition, those wins (and money) will propel him into Super Tuesday.

Secondly, the political science literature tells us that it is a fool's errand for a frontrunner to go on the attack (see particularly Haynes, Flowers and Gurian, 2002). Why? There's no need to stoop to the level of your opponents' level. It is a sign of vulnerability. Now, this isn't to say that a frontrunner won't respond/attack if attacked, but generally we see that frontrunners act as if they are above the fray. Leave the attacking to someone else.

Let's put those two pieces together now. If Iowa has been downgraded strategically within the Romney campaign, then why go on the attack there? Nominal or not, Romney is the frontrunner in the race for the 2012 Republican nomination (as of June 2011 -- That could certainly change.). It just does not make a whole lot of sense for the former Massachusetts governor to attack Bachmann or anyone else in Iowa or anywhere else. Iowa is much more important to some other candidates. If anyone is going to attack Bachmann, it should probably be Tim Pawlenty or anyone else gunning for a caucus win in the Hawkeye state. And that's why Romney won't attack Bachmann. This isn't 2008 and Bachmann is not Huckabee. She doesn't represent to Romney what Huckabee did in 2008 anyway.

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The Links (3/9/11): Ohio

Is there something unique about Ohio and the race to 270 electoral votes in the presidential general election?

William Galston says yes at least in terms of Obama's reelection chances.

Others agree but disagree:

Dave Weigel maps it.

Jonathan Bernstein says the Buckeye state is just like any other close state: in an election that favors one candidate over the other, most of the swing states are likely to break for that favored candidate.

Nate Silver parrots Bernstein and adds that "as the nation goes, so goes Ohio".

Ohio is like any other state in the middle column of the figure below (The figure reflects the 2008 results but with 2012 electoral vote numbers.):

The Electoral College Spectrum*
HI-4 (7)**	ME-4 (153)	NH-4 (257)	GA-16 (166)	NE-4 (58)
VT-3 (10)	WA-12 (165)	IA-6 (263)	SD-3 (150)	KY-8 (54)
RI-4 (14)	MI-16 (181)	CO-9*** (272/275)	ND-3 (147)	LA-8 (46)
MA-11 (25)	OR-7 (188)	VA-13 (285/266)	AZ-11 (144)	AR-6 (38)
NY-29 (54)	NJ-14 (202)	OH-18 (303/253)	SC-9 (133)	AL-9 (32)
DE-3 (57)	NM-5 (207)	FL-29 (332/235)	TX-38 (124)	AK-3 (23)
IL-20 (77)	WI-10 (217)	IN-11 (343/206)	WV-5 (86)	ID-4 (20)
MD-10 (87)	NV-6 (223)	NC-15+1**** (359/195)	MS-6 (81)	UT-6 (16)
CA-55 (142)	PA-20 (243)	MO-10 (179)	TN-11 (75)	OK-7 (10)
CT-7 (149)	MN-10 (253)	MT-3 (169)	KS-6 (64)	WY-3 (3)
*Follow the link for a detailed explanation on how to read the Electoral College Spectrum. **The numbers in the parentheses refer to the number of electoral votes a candidate would have if he won all the states ranked prior to that state. If, for example, McCain won all the states up to and including Colorado (all Obama's toss up states plus Colorado), he would have 275 electoral votes. McCain's numbers are only totaled through the states he would have needed in order to get to 270. In those cases, Obama's number is on the left and McCain's is on the right in italics. ***Colorado is the state where Obama crossed the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the presidential election. That line is referred to as the victory line. ****Nebraska allocates electoral votes based on statewide results and the results within each of its congressional districts. Nebraska's 2nd district voted for Barack Obama in 2008.

It will blow with the partisan winds like any other state, but Ohio isn't anymore unique than other competitive states like Colorado or Virginia or Florida or North Carolina. The Buckeye state ended up in Obama's column in 2008 but is not a necessary part of the president's electoral vote calculus in 2012; not anymore than any other competitive state anyway.

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Rick Davis on New Media

This is part two in a series of posts on Rick Davis' recent visit with political science students and faculty at Wake Forest. See part one for some of Davis' thoughts on Sarah Palin's selection as McCain's vice presidential running mate.

The most underrated portion of the hour with Rick Davis this past Tuesday was his discussion of running a presidential campaign in the era of the 25 hour news cycle. [FHQ likes to add an extra hour for emphasis.] But to the McCain campaign (and I'd assume any other campaign for president or House or Senate or governor), this is something that has changed dramatically in the internet age. What he described taking place made me think of the masters of rapid response, the Clinton campaign in 1992, or more to the point, how they would have fared sixteen years in the future with Gennifer Flowers' and Paula Jones' accusations. It would have been completely different than simply going on 60 Minutes prior to New Hampshire.

Needless to say, Davis seemed to conjure up a vision from the campaign's perspective of both apprehension of and flat out animosity toward new media. Honestly, you can't blame him; it made his job more difficult. But Davis did seem to echo some of the same sentiment that came out of the White House earlier this week concerning liberal bloggers*. Davis called them, "guys who don't comb their hair and work from mom's basement." [Of course, I took exception to this as a blogger. I'll let you decide my ideological persuasion. I've certainly had the liberal label thrown at me. When I asked him my strategy question later on, I introduced myself as "Josh Putnam, Visiting Assistant professor ... and blogger. And (touching my head) I'd like to think I combed my hair this morning. I have a class to teach after this." He laughed it off and said I looked good. I'm so insecure.]

But Davis went on to describe the dilemma the McCain campaign was in and what most presidential campaigns must face these days. Bloggers and their "breaking stories at 2 in the morning" were only part of it. They had a warroom of sorts set up to monitor blogs and an in-house studio to respond nationally or to a targeted media market affiliate at the drop of a hat. The big deal, though was the media pool that was with them on the Straight Talk Express or on the campaign's plane en route to the next campaign stop. Davis drew a line between the Express of 2000 and the 2008 Express; that in 2000, the insurgent campaign and the bus were a novelty worth following. As such, they career journalists following them. But in 2008, in the new era and after old guard journos of 2000 had either retired or been laid off, they were being followed by a group of folks whose "average age must have been 25" and who were "carrying these little handheld cameras."

It was this latter point that Davis stressed the most. The campaign was just not ready for the changes since 2000. Senator McCain was fine, but without make up "looked like Caspar the Friendly Ghost" or "looked a hundred years old" on the tape shot on those cameras. What compounded matters was that the Obama campaign or their surrogates would quickly "release statements after one of these videos appeared on the news/web saying 'McCain looked frail today.'"

"That really bothered me," Davis said. [All the while I had two thoughts going through my head. One serious: The 2008 campaign really had a delicate nature to it in the face of two historic candidacies. Much was made of Barack Obama's race and even though it received attention, McCain's age often took a back seat. But there really was this weird racism/ageism undertone to the race. And one not so serious: Bobby Bowden knows how McCain felt.]

So the McCain camp, Davis in particular, had a dilemma: "Ban them [the reporters]" or "spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to rip seats out of the plane and put in a small studio" so McCain could do those interviews. They chose the latter.

What all this really drove home was the idea of the standard presidential candidates are held to. It isn't falling down stairs or eating unshucked tamales anymore. No, those are things you can kinda sorta help. But age or race or weight or baldness aren't things you can help (or help easily sometimes -- Sorry Chris Christie. I tried.). It's a different era and that came through in what Rick Davis spoke about.

*"And for a sign of how seriously the White House does or doesn't take this opposition, one adviser told me today those [internet left fringe] bloggers need to take off their pajamas, get dressed and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult." (from John Harwood at NBC, via Ta-Nehisi Coates)


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This is part one in a series of posts on Rick Davis' recent visit with political science students and faculty at Wake Forest.

On Palin...
Davis mentioned that the campaign was keeping tabs on what the Democrats were doing over the summer; not necessarily in terms of their vice presidential selection, but poll position among various demographic groups. Beyond that, the McCain camp came up with a list of about 50 names that was ultimately whittled down to about 20. That was the serious list. At that point, Davis sat down with McCain with the names and the numbers and discussed the selection. Davis prefaced this by saying (I'm paraphrasing), "Because, you know, the candidate has some input, too."

To that point, the campaign seemed to be targeting possibilities that would help them sway Hillary Democrats (or are those Reagan Democrats?), but people like Joe Lieberman and Michael Bloomberg were not moving the needle in a positive direction for the Arizona senator among those folks in particular or overall. It was at this time that McCain proposed the idea of looking at women, but as Davis suggested, the reality was (and is) that there just aren't that many female Republican options. Admittedly, I was hoping during this point in the talk that Davis would name names of other Republican women considered, but all he said, in addition to the slim pickings comment, was that women in politics and business were considered. On the business front, I can't help but assume that both Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman had their names come up, but don't know how seriously either was considered.

Part of the problem for Republicans in 2008 was that it was just plain hard to run with an R next to your name unless you were representing a ruby red state or congressional district. What was vexing the McCain campaign, though, and what led them to consider a woman for the number two position on the ticket, was that they were facing a tremendous gender gap among their core of white voters. In the end the only one who significantly closed that gap (and was someone who McCain could live with) was Sarah Palin. Among those white voters, she took an approximately 40 point gender gap and shrunk it to single digits. [Something that I really wanted to ask in follow up to this point is what Davis thought about the fact that the 2012 polling done thus far has consistently shown Palin trailing her male Republican counterparts relative to Obama in terms of the gender gap. Alas, I didn't have the opportunity.]

I wouldn't say they thought her selection was a no-brainer, but their were advantages to her having been picked. Even Steve Schmidt is drawing a distinction between 2008 Palin and potential 2012 Palin; calling her potential nomination in 2012 "catastrophic," but adding just today that her selection was defensible. ["I believe to this day that had she not been picked as a vice presidential candidate, we would have never been ahead, not for one second, not for one minute, not for one hour, not for one day."] The lead Schmidt references there was something Davis touched on as well: That in national polls, McCain was ahead after the Palin pick. Now granted, that was during that unprecedented string of events from the close of the Democratic convention on Thursday night, to the introduction of Palin on Friday to the Republican convention the following week. The lead may have been due to a Palin effect, but there very likely was at least something of an interactive effect between that and the convention bounce.

The McCain folks apparently are of a mind that it was Palin and not the convention though.


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Rick Davis at Wake Forest: A Series of Postscripts

On Sunday, I solicited FHQ readers for questions to pose to Rick Davis, who was visiting campus here at Wake Forest on Tuesday. The former 2000 and 2008 McCain campaign manager had an hour to speak and field questions from political science students and faculty here and offered a unique glimpse inside the McCain operation.

I'll skip over his prefatory comments, which focused on his past in the College Republicans in Alabama in the late 1970s. Those points were really only interesting for the description of his agree-to-disagree relationship with Karl Rove that found its origin not in the McCain-Bush divisions of the 2000 Republican nomination race (and infamously South Carolina), but in their College Republican days (Rove in Washington, Davis in Alabama).

Again, that was informative, but the meat of the event was the Q&A session. And believe it or not the "Palin question" did not lead. I was shocked; Davis was too, and said so when he got the second question, which happened to be about the former Alaska governor. One thing that was clear was that Davis has certainly spent some time around politicians. His answers were long, debate-style walls of talking points. I don't particularly have a problem with that (As I said, it was an informative hour.), but it had the effect of limiting the number of questions that were asked in a short period of time. In the end, beggars can't be choosers, though.

What did Davis have to say? I'll have a series of posts up throughout the day dealing with several different topics with which Davis dealt. Up first? Sarah Palin.


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Rick Davis

FHQ Readers:

John McCain's 2008 campaign manager, Rick Davis, is going to be on campus here at Wake on Tuesday. He's going to meet with the political science faculty and some students while he's here. I thought I'd give all our regular contributors a chance to pose a question that I can then attempt to have answered. If you have any questions about the 2008 presidential campaign, especially the approach of the McCain camp, just drop a note in the comments section below. Oh, and I'm guessing the Sarah Palin question will be asked, so you may want to go in a different direction.

Thanks,
Josh


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A November Surprise Scenario

Over this past weekend we had a discussion going about the effect the presence of early voting in a state would have on the McCain campaign's home-stretch strategy. The basic hypothesis was that states with early voting -- where Barack Obama would have some votes in the bank heading into election day based on the advantage the Illinois senator has enjoyed in early voting -- would not be focused on as heavily as states where early voting and absentee voting were minimized. In other words, if something were to happen to change people's minds in some way, you'd get more bang for your buck if you were campaigning the hardest in states with as little early voting as possible. States like Pennsylvania and Virginia.

But we can push this concept a little further. And, in fact, SarahLawrenceScott has done just that. If we were to look at the early voting information we have access to so far in this cycle and gauge whether that looks like it is on track to surpass the numbers from 2004, we can then make some basic assumptions that may give us a better idea of why the McCain folks are focusing where they are focusing.

First, let's look at the assumptions Scott has put together:

1. Assume something triggers a 4% loss for Obama (this was roughly the size of the Rev. Wright/McCain clinches drop, the Palin drop, and Obama's "soft" support in current polls) whether an Obama revelation or some geopolitical. We'll call it a November surprise.
   
   
2. Assume a 2.5% overperformance for Obama in early voting. In other words it is not that a greater proportion of his supporters vote early, but rather that GOTV would push his numbers up in a state that had 100% early voting.
   
   
3. Assume 50% of undecideds who vote early go for Obama.
   
   
4. Assume that after the surprise, just 20% of election day undecideds go for Obama.

If you start off with the Pollster averages for each state and combine that with the above assumptions you end up with something like this:


If we take these new, post-November surprise state margins and apply the three-category thresholds that FHQ employs -- >7% = strong, 3-7% = lean, <3% = toss up -- we end up with a map that has toss ups that look an awful lot like the targets the McCain campaign has.

[Click Map to Enlarge]

Virginia would flip back to McCain. Pennsylvania would be much more competitive than what the polls show, as would Ohio. And Florida and Wisconsin would look like dead heats. It could be argued that, well, those are the toss ups anyway. Well yeah, except Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin don't really fit the bill according to recent polling in each of those states. However, the goal is to consider not only the potential effect early voting has, but to ascertain whether strategically, the McCain campaign is hedging its bets, hoping for something akin to the George W. Bush drunk-driving revelation (Though, perhaps it would have to be bigger) that broke during the final weekend of the 2000 race, happening in this race. Maybe, maybe not, but the decision to focus resources on the three states I just brought up looks more rational in this light than it does on the surface.

NOTE: I want to thank Scott for putting this material together and sharing it will me. It really adds to the earlier early voting discussion we had.


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Early Voting and McCain's Home-Stretch Strategy

In the comments section this morning, SarahLawrenceScott brought up what I think is a major reason or why we are seeing what we are seeing from the McCain campaign from a strategic standpoint lately. Why let it come out that you are potentially pulling out of Colorado? Well, for starters, it telegraphs where they are focusing, or have to focus: Pennsylvania. But why target Pennsylvania instead of Colorado? The latter looks closer now than the former -- at least by FHQ's measure.

Well, here's what Scott had to say:

"I just came up with what I think may be the explanation for a lot of what seems to be irrational behavior by the McCain campaign in their choice of states to allocate resources to.

Think, for a moment, what is the most likely victory scenario for McCain in terms of electoral votes. Just move up the Electoral College Spectrum until you get to 270?

No. The problem is that some of those states have already voted in large numbers. For McCain to win, he has to have the state of the race change nationally. But if that change occurs late (say, something equivalent to the Bin Laden tape of 2004 the weekend before the election), then its effect is tempered in early voting states.

Here's the map of states with early voting:

[Click Map to Enlarge]

McCain's best chance of winning is to get some of the states on Obama's side of the partisan line that don't have early voting.

Those are:

MN, WI, VA, MI, DE, PA, NY, CT, RI, MA, and NH.

Start by throwing out the deepest of the blue states. Now we've got, in reverse order of their position on the spectrum,

VA, NH, MI, PA, WI, and MN.

Looks an awful lot like where McCain is concentrating his resources, doesn't it?

The one exception there is Michigan. And if they're actually thinking things through (which I admit doesn't seem to be the case), then in the event of one more game-changer they can sweep into Michigan and try to launch a surprise attack of sorts. McCain has enough resources to do that in one largish state, and in the mean time he can save money and resources by leaving it off the list.

The other mystery is why he seems so fixated on Iowa. That I can't understand.

But at least this explains why the interest in Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, and even Ohio seems a little tepid. McCain needs to defend his states up through Florida, early voting or no (and thus we do see plenty of activity in North Carolina and Florida). That brings him to 227. Assume a major game-changer in the last week. He now adds the non-early-voting states of Virginia, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. He's at 265. McCain now wins if he can somehow pick off Nevada or Ohio (early voting, but pretty close), or Michigan (no early voting, but would need a last minute blitz).

It's a long shot, but that's the point. To win, McCain has to assume something crazy goes his way, and then be ready to capitalize on it if it does. Going after Pennsylvania, rather than the western states, is the best way to do that.

So the football analogy is no longer the hail Mary pass. Now it's down by 16 with under a minute to go and no time outs. If you can score a touchdown, the plan is clearly to go for a two point conversion. Not because that's the high percentage play--in fact, it's likely to make the defeat worse in point terms. But because if lightning strikes (in the analogy, recovering an onside kick), then at least you're poised to take advantage of it.

That's hypothesis one. Hypothesis two is that they're just clueless."

This is the exact same conclusion we came to yesterday in our weekly campaign discussion group meeting. I absolutely reject the notion that the typically top-notch campaign strategists the GOP has in its fold are clueless. They just don't have a favorable political climate in which to operate and that makes message consistency that much more difficult. We have to look no further than four years ago to see a similar contrast in message consistency. John Kerry never to did find the proper balance on how to deal with the Iraq war just as McCain has been back-peddling since the economic crisis hit. As Scott says, an early voting strategy is a long shot, but if the polls we have seen lately are accurate, then that is all the McCain campaign really has.

Good stuff, Scott. Thanks. I should also extend a thank you to Rich Clark who brought this to my attention yesterday.

Credit where credit is due: The map comes to us courtesy of Wikipedia (plus some FHQ alterations).


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Rules Matter...but Luck Does Too

The Providence Journal's, Froma Harrop, ran a column of Clinton talking points this morning. In all the talk (both from her and separately from the Clinton campaign) of all the different metrics of nomination success, Florida and Michigan voter disenfranchisement and the undemocratic nature of caucuses, one thing continues to be underdiscussed in this Democratic nomination battle.

The bottom line is that RULES MATTER. We see the effects of those rules in a close race, but also see how adaptable each candidate's campaign is to those rules. Obama's campaign was better at foreseeing how the race would progress. PERIOD. Was that by design? Yes, but to a large degree there is some luck involved there. He had to have all the chips fall in just the right place for that plan to work. So while there may have been discussions within an Obama campaign still in its infancy then about a caucus strategy as early as last summer, they still needed Iowa or New Hampshire or Nevada or South Carolina to help even get his campaign to that point (the caucus phase between Super Tuesday and Wyoming a month later on March 8). Those Obama successes in Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina were anything but given even at the outset of the 2008 calendar year.

Foresight and luck are the marks of a long shot winning the nomination. Arguably Obama is not, in 2008, the long shot that Jimmy Carter was in 1976. Both, however, were effective at navigating through the rules of the game. And things worked out the way both campaigns expected; both by design and through some luck. Carter needed early success in Iowa and New Hampshire to set him up for an elimination contest against George Wallace in Florida. He needed that elimination to claim the mantle as the southern (albeit more moderate) candidate in the race for the Democratic nomination.

In 2008, Obama needed a win, any win, among the early states to be seen as viable in the overall contest and heading into Super Tuesday on February 5. That he got a win in mostly white Iowa was certainly better than having broken through in South Carolina, where African Americans made up over half of the primary electorate. But his win in Iowa signaled to African Americans that he was viable to an audience broader than simply African Americans. Without that signal, the race may not have played out the way it did in South Carolina. The polls in the state prior to Obama's Iowa win showed a tight race between Clinton and Obama. And even then the endorsement of the influential, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), was still sought after by Clinton, Edwards and Obama to put any one of them over the top. But it was just before It wasn't until after South Carolina that the strained relations between the Clintons and the black community began to appear. Obama's campaign emerged from both state victorious and proved their knowledge of the rules by gaining one more delegate than Clinton in Nevada, despite losing the popular vote (That knowledge of the rules extended to subsequent steps in the Nevada process as well.). Obama's path, then, was not necessarily a clear one.

On the other hand, at the outset of the contests, Clinton's path to the nomination was the clearer one. But luck runs both ways and Clinton had some bad luck. Her campaign leaned way too heavily on the approaches to the presidential primary process of the past. But we all did. Why wouldn't both parties' nominations be settled by Super Tuesday? That's the way it had been in most nomination contests since 1988. [Of course, the Clinton campaign didn't fall back on those approaches enough to take her name off the ballot in Michigan for that state's non-sanctioned primary. That decision was curious at the time given her status as front-runner.] The Super Tuesday or bust strategy was fine, in and of itself, but they never had a Plan B in place if the states that held contests on February 5 didn't hand her enough delegates for the nomination. And they certainly didn't foresee Obama building a firewall in caucus states.

The message, as always, is that rules matter. And if your knowledge of them is anything less than full, then you are vulnerable to defeat. The discussion, then, is not one of whether caucuses are democratic, or popular votes should be the metric by which a nominee is determined, or of Florida or Michigan. That's a discussion that can be had by both parties when and if they seek to reform the process between now and 2012. The discussion is about a campaign that thought primary season would go one way and later discovered (the hard way) that they had guessed wrong.



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The Boston Globe has a great retrospective look at the Obama campaign's strategy for the first phase of the primary season (Super Tuesday and before) and its focus on growing the grassroots in caucus states. Paul has often said during our discussion group meetings that luck is a part of this game. Often that luck boils down which campaign correctly forecasts how primary season will progress. And the advantages Obama planned for before and took away from Super Tuesday are the root of his lead over Clinton in terms of delegates and the percentage of the popular vote won.

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