UGA Campaign Discussion Group – October 10, 2012

Channeling Paul at his ironic best, we declared “Well we can all agree that Obama clearly won the debate, but debates don’t really matter!” We did poorly in our projections last week, although Steve did say two weeks ago that Romney would do better than anyone would expect. We need to go back to predicting the past.

While our consensus was a clear Romney victory last week, not all of us thought it was as strong a victory as widely perceived. Romney clearly won on style, but there was no single sound-bite you could point to that was a knock-out punch. Romney’s answers were clear and crisp; whereas Obama’s answers were not. His answers became longer and more rambling as the debate went on. His failure to respond to appear to be engaged, looking down when not talking and failing to challenge Romney’s statements led to the judgment that he was the loser. Although the optics did favor Romney, he has a habit of bobbing his head when talking that tends to fail Paul’s turn-off-the-sound test. It was clear that Obama was rusty and the team apparently was overconfident despite the conventional wisdom that the first Presidential debate tends to favor the challenger to the incumbent and the person on offense over the person on defense. These are lessons that Ford, Carter, Reagan, the two Bushes and now Obama have learned the hard way. Only Clinton avoided this trap as the incumbent. We rejected one reason cited by pundits that Obama’s poor performance was due to being surrounded by yes-men. Rahm Emmanuel and Michelle have been willing to talk back to him. Just before the debate the story from Bob Woodward’s book was that Obama was not getting proper deference because he was not respected. The same pundits who spewed that line then are largely the ones talking about the yes-men now. Also, it was these pundits who were condemning Romney for putting so much time into debate prep and encouraging him to pull his money out of Ohio. Brett clearly stated then that Ohio was crucial to Romney and the Republicans, and it was far too early to talk about pulling out of Ohio. 

We agreed that the Obama post-debate offensive led by Big Bird was not helping his campaign as it tends to remind voters of the poor debate performance. We could not come to agreement on the Libya situation. One view was that it is not receiving that much news time. Another was that if the same event had happened this time last year, it would be a big thing for a short time and then fade away, but coming just before the election it becomes a major liability for the administration. The third perspective is that it represents an indicator of a failed Obama foreign policy. The Libya situation appears to be contributing to the slide started by the poor debate performance and may have been less consequential if he had done well. The Middle East is a dangerous place. It is not clear if the Romney ticket pushes the situation in Syria if that will help or hurt them. Erdogan from Turkey was suggested as a model leader in the region by one of us, but not everyone was convinced.

We went through the numbers we have been following since mid-August. There has been a definite Republican bounce since the debate. Ohio has been moved from the Obama camp back to a toss-up. Obama’s lead last week in the RCP average went from 3.2% to a 0.7% advantage for Romney. Obama’s favorable ratings have gone up but not as much as Romney’s favorable. The Intrade bets have plummeted from a 73.9 to 26.0 advantage Obama down to 62.5 to 37.5 narrowing the gap 22.9%! This bounce was bigger than the one induced by Bill Clinton’s speech and the Democratic convention. Interestingly, the RCP average for the President’s job approval has not wavered, running between 49.2 to 49.9 over the last 5 weeks. Intrade is a leading indicator while job approval may be a trailing indicator. We discussed the upcoming VP debate scheduled tonight. Although it will be less consequential than the Presidential debate, it is important for Biden to stop the slide. Cheney was able to perform this function in 2004 against Edwards. Regardless what happens this evening, Obama will need to perform better next week or he is in real trouble. He may be in the same situation at this point that Romney was two weeks ago.

We also looked at the Berry and Bickers forecasting model for this election (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8700619&fulltextType=BT&fileId=S1049096512000984). It is a state-by-state model which has an excellent record in forecasting electoral-college outcomes in past elections back to 1980 with less accuracy in those elections featuring credible third-party candidates. It incorporates past voting outcomes and unemployment numbers in states. The model predicts 213 Electoral College votes for Obama, significantly less than many other models. It will be interesting if they are right and so many others are wrong. We will revisit this and other models the week before and the day after the election.

We identified Ted Olson and Chris Van Hollen as the two VP stand-ins. Trivia question this week is what person has been a stand-in during debate preps for three (VP/ Pres) candidates? The candidate he helped won all three elections.

The answer to last week’s trivia question was Harvard Professor Archibald Cox who was sitting next to Jackie Kennedy watching the first debate on a rented TV placed on John Winthrop’s desk with a listening party.