UGA Campaign Discussion Group – November 5, 2012

A day before the election! We looked at Josh’s Electoral Spectrum with Ohio still as the pivot state. Paul gave his assessment of the election, predicting an Obama victory with 290-300 electoral votes. The numbers we have been following since mid-August suggest that Romney peaked before Sandy, contrary the media’s narrative that Sandy stopped his momentum.

An OpEd appeared in the NY Times advocating the abandonment of the Electoral College and moving it by Congressional District. We agreed that this move would currently disadvantage Democrats and would lead to more polarization rather than less in the general population. Rather than focus on swing states, there would be a focus on swing districts. There is a general agreement that a popular vote decision would be more fair than the electoral college, but the counterargument is that the battle would shift to the largest media markets to run up the vote totals in highly populous areas. A popular vote would probably tilt the election toward the Democrats.

Next, we turned to the polls. Obama looks to be the favorite unless there is a systematic bias in the state-by-state polls. Possible explanations for such a bias include the Bradlee Effect, but we generally discounted it as a factor. The commentator, Alex Castellanos, suggested that a vote for Obama is a cool vote, but not necessarily the real vote. We also noted that there could be last-minute movement toward or away from one of the candidates that the polls have not detected. We talked about the closeness of the polls and being within the margin of error. When looking at a single poll the margin of error is relevant. When looking at multiple polls, however, margin of error is not as consequential as the consistency of different polls and trend lines over time. Frontloading HQ had an excellent article on the differences between national and state polls indicating that which set is right or wrong is the wrong emphasis. Rather, a post-election analysis will help develop better projections in the future. See 

http://frontloading.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-electoral-college-map-11312.html

We went back to the potential effect of Sandy on the election. We generally agreed that the electoral vote will probably not be affected, but the popular vote in NJ & NYC could be suppressed by the disruption by the storm.

Obama has the reputation for a get-out-the-vote effort, but Ralph Reed is apparently rallying the evangelicals, particularly in Ohio. The advertising strategy seems to be very different by the two campaigns. Romney’s strategy has been more aimed at the mass media in a swing state with Obama involved in more micro-targeting of his ads. Apparently, Romney has outspent Obama in ads, but Obama has run about twice as many ads by buying up time early and in smaller markets. Josh indicated that Eisenberg has stated that the Obama campaign is light years ahead of Romney in micro-targeting. This situation seems strange when Karl Rove was so successful in the 2004 Bush campaign in micro-targeting. Apparently, Karl Rove took his secrets with him when he left, and Romney was not interested or able in tapping into his expertise.

Last week there were two commentaries directly opposed to each other on projecting the election. Jay Cost predicts a Romney victory because he is leading among Independents and the issue of jobs and the economy is the most important one on voter’s minds.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/search/?cx=%3C%3F%3D%24cx_value%3B%3F%3E&cof=FORID%3A9&ie=UTF-8&q=jay+cost+november+2012&sa.x=0&sa.y=0&siteurl=www.realclearpolitics.com%2Fsearch%2F&ref=www.realclearpolitics.com%2F&ss=9406j14017830j16

Charlie Cook predicts an Obama victory due to his election ads in July and August. He indicates that we are dealing with two elections – that in the swing states where Romney was savaged by the Obama ads and the other states that have been spared these ads. He contends that Romney has not been able to overcome those swing-state ads.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/search/?cx=%3C%3F%3D%24cx_value%3B%3F%3E&cof=FORID%3A9&ie=UTF-8&q=charlie+cook+november+2012&sa.x=0&sa.y=0&siteurl=www.realclearpolitics.com%2Fsearch%2F&ref=www.realclearpolitics.com%2F&ss=2845j1423675j12

We talked about the media and their penchant for being wrong in predictions. In a sense the media sets itself up to be surprised as that becomes news. The media also wants to keep the story going. It served as a megaphone for the Romney momentum after the first debate. The Democrats and the Obama campaign added to that momentum by misplaying the results of the first debate.

Will the minor party candidates affect the outcome? We generally agreed that it was unlikely that Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, would affect the outcome in any state. We disagreed as to whether Virgil Goode could affect the vote in Virginia. Third party votes can affect elections as what happened in FL in 2000 where Ralph Nader collected 100,000 votes with a 537-vote margin between the two primary candidates. VA is a key state, possibly critical for Romney to get to 270, but there are other possible paths to the Presidency. If Obama wins, there may be some electors who cast their vote for Ron Paul rather than for Romney.

In closing we addressed two questions. How will the election turn out? We all picked Obama to win with anywhere from 286 to 332 electoral votes. Also, will we know who won by the time we meet at 11:00 on Wednesday morning? We had a 60-40 split with the majority saying yes and the minority not sure. An uncertain outcome by the next meeting time would indicate that Romney would be doing better than expected. We also noted that a 269-269 tie would result in a President Romney possibly governing the country with a Vice-President Biden.