Daniel Larison

Some Thoughts On The Paul Campaign

Hope For The Future?

By Daniel Larison • March 12, 2008, 10:08 AM

With all the appropriate caveats in mind (i.e., this poll does not predict what will happen, the election is far away, many things can change, and so on), here is some information from the latest Rasmussen Michigan poll. McCain leads both Clinton and Obama by three points. Only 65% of liberals express support for Obama with 19% going for McCain and 11% for ”some other candidate.” McCain has a weak hold on conservative voters (74%), but holds on to more of them than Obama does with liberals. Obama trails narrowly among independents and gets just 67% of Democrats. 7% of Republicans support him, while 17% of Democrats back McCain. There are slightly fewer “Obamacans” than Republicans who would opt for Clinton over McCain (13%). That is not what is supposed to be happening.

My generation must be pretty cynical, because they seem to react very negatively to Obama all over the country. His unfav rating among voters 18-29 is 56%, which is by far the highest unfav of any age group. He trails McCain among the 18-29 group by 23 points (33-56), but he managed to remain competitive or tie in every other age group. This age group rallies to Clinton more than any other even though she has an unfav rating over 50% with this group: she still gets 54% of the 18-29 group to McCain’s 41%. The story we keep hearing about the enthusiasm for Obama among the young does not reflect the attitudes of a majority of young voters. The generational trend towards the Democrats that we have been hearing about is apparently real enough, but it seems to collapse when Obama is the candidate.

12 Responses to Hope For The Future?

adam says:

March 12, 2008 at 10:16 am

Weird. 3 Rasmussen polls you have linked to (NM, NJ, and now MI) all show the same dynamic with youth voters. Maybe *all* of Obamas youth voters are attending his rallies but this just strikes me as counterintuitive…

“Obama trails narrowly among independents and gets just 67% of Democrats.”

This one I can actually believe. One month ago if you were to ask Clinton or Obama voters what would happen if the other candidate won, huge majorities said they like and could support the other candidate, but that is wilting under the racial/gender themed attacks as of late. Could McCain win if Clinton voters (especially older women stay home, and McCain beating Obama in the alpha-male “who would you rather have a beer with” primary? If you had asked me just a few weeks ago if I thought McCain could be the next president, I would have answered “no” without any hesitation. Now I’m not so sure.

In other Michigan politics news:

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-dems12mar12,1,3048049.story

“Looking toward the general election, labor strategists were alarmed by polls and focus groups of undecided union members that showed McCain doing well in match-ups with either Democratic candidate, said Karen Ackerman, political director of the AFL-CIO.”

Either Obama or Clinton will need to carry union households by solid margins to win Michigan. That doesn’t seem to be happening.
LMaggitti says:

March 12, 2008 at 3:32 pm

Rather than repeating my prior comments on similar threads (which agreed to an extent but also disagreed to an extent with Daniel’s analysis), I’ll simply note that all of this analysis may be moot, in that anything current polls can tell is about the election is swamped by the facts on the ground in the current Democratic race: if Clinton spends the next 7 weeks (or longer) going at Obama like she has recently, then the winner of the nomination will be a fatally damaged candidate and McCain will win in a walk.
conradg says:

March 12, 2008 at 4:52 pm

What these things show is that Hillary’s campaigning has not helped her one bit in terms of making her a stronger democratic contender, but it has definitely hurt Obama. In previous head to head matchups with McCain, she used to win a little. Now she loses by a little. Obama, on the other hand, used to win by double digits against McCain. Now he loses or is at best tied. So Hillary has improved her standing against Obama somewhat, by hurting him more than she has hurt herself, but overall, she’s actually hurt her own chances, and not meaningfully changed the dynamic within the Democratic party. The only positive outcome for her from all this is a possible spot on MCain’s ticket as VP, seeing as she’s definitely an effective GOP attack dog.

The one good thing about this for Obama is the likelihood that this will all end, and that Obama will have lived through the inevitably backlash early enough that it is no longer a factor in the general campaign. I think we should all recall how horribly Bill Clinton was doing in early polls by in 1992, when he was actually in third place behind Ross Perot in the spring and early summer. He too suffered badly in the primary period, and seemed like a very weak candidate for the general. But his outstanding campaigning skills turned all that around. Likewise, for Obama. He’s suffering some blows now, but by summer it will seem that’s all past him, and his superior campaigning skills will carry him through. This guy is not an empty suit, and he will survive this stuff, and rebound.
LMaggitti says:

March 12, 2008 at 6:37 pm

conradg,

You are kidding yourself. Have you been reading the same blogs and news reports I’ve been reading? The only real question is whether this mess merely dooms the Dems in this presidential election, whether it dooms the whole party for this election, House and Senate included, or whether it completely destroys the party.

If that happens, we will truly be living in interesting times, as the Republicans are not well poised to take advantage of the situation. Maybe the fantasies of the media elite will come to pass, and a “centrist” party will be formed, socially center left, economically center right, and realist/hawkish on foreign affairs. That pretty mush defines the locus of elite opinion these days. Heck, Clinton, Lieberman, McCain, Bloomberg would jump at the chance to join such an assembledge. It sure as hell wouldn’t be MY party, or yours, or Daniel’s, but I could see it dominating the political landscape against vestigial Democratic and Republican parties.

That really may be the hard lesson here – many of us unhappy with the current parties may get just what we are asking for, though not in the form we want. A new, dominant, third party combining all of the worst aspects of the current parties.

If that sounds far fetched, ask yourself this – if I’m right about the Dems (and the last few days they certainly have had the look of a party tearing itself apart), what other option do you see? The Republicans (a) don’t seem poised to take advantage of the Dems collapse, and (b) even if they were, their current coalition is strained enough without adding a large chunk of current dems, many of whom are quite socially liberal.

Who knows, that could even be good news, of a sorts, for the paleos. They might be well positioned to take over the shell of the Republican party.
kitstolz says:

March 13, 2008 at 3:56 am

Interesting comments, but I think head-to-head polling (or head-to-head-to-head polling) at this point can’t be taken seriously, because it’s all personality driven — issues are inherently obscured. Heck, McCain himself admitted last week that if the war in Iraq went south this year, as it did in 2006, his candidacy would be doomed. (His advisers quickly shut him up on that point.)

Not to mention rising oil prices, rising unemployment, an economy heading into a likely recession, with a downturn in housing that may be the worst any of us have ever seen. Maybe McCain’s heroism will convince the electorate that he’s the right candidate to take on these problems, or maybe Obama will crash and burn, but history suggests that because McCain supports the incumbent who got us into this mess, he will have to pay the price for that, just as Hubert Humphrey had to pay a price for standing with LBJ, and Ford had to pay a price for standing with Nixon.

Sometimes politics is a simple game: this may be one of those years. But I do agree with LMaggitti that the paleocons might inherit the shell of the Republican party, especially if McCain is routed, with the argument that McCain lost because he wasn’t conservative enough.

For Democrats, this would be manna from heaven.
conradg says:

March 13, 2008 at 9:40 am

Lmaggitti,

I think you are panicking based on a skirmish that will, by November, be long forgoteen. If Obama suceeds in getting the nomination, he will emerge as a shining hero who defeated the ugly Clinton dragon, something no Republican thought possible. Yes, he will have gotten dirty in the process, but winning will redeem him from that, and his battle wound will only enhance the glory of the victory.

You are ignoring the facts on the ground, which strongly favor the Democrats in any head-to-head battle with the Republicans. Right now we don’t have a head-to-head battle, so the polls are essentially meaningless. McCain is an incredibly vulnerable nominee who is currently immune simply because neither Dem can take their eye off the other and address him. When they do, McCain is going to suffer badly. His so-called media invulnerability is going to crumble, and he will have to answer questions he has refused to deal with his whole life.

As I see it, the only possibility the Republicans actually have is for Hillary to become the nominee. That will both alienate many dems and energize many republicans. McCain will indeed capture many independents against Hillary.

If Obama can’t get the nomination cleanly, or it seems his candidacy seems too damaged to defeat McCain come September, the only answer I can see is for the superdelegates to band together around Al Gore. A Gore/Obama ticket would probably destroy McCain before he even got started.
adam says:

March 13, 2008 at 10:41 am

” If Obama suceeds in getting the nomination, he will emerge as a shining hero who defeated the ugly Clinton dragon, something no Republican thought possible. Yes, he will have gotten dirty in the process, but winning will redeem him from that, and his battle wound will only enhance the glory of the victory.”

Possible, but I think what this is missing is the fact that the Democratic race is not just “dirty” or “tough”, it is fracturing the party along racial/gender lines. I’m not sure what magically happens to ‘redeem” Obama in the eyes of the hard core Hillary supporters (white women and especially older white women that any Dem has to carry by large numbers. Hillary can and probably will take PA, KY, WV, and Puerto Rico, maybe IN, NC, SD & MT are probably Obama’s. If the superdelgates were to, en masse, come out and support Obama, Hillary’s hard core of supporters (white women, especially older white women) would spend the next 7 1/2 months fuming about how the “old boys club” threw the 1st viable female candidate under the bus. If Obama’s voters would neither ‘forgive nor forget’ a back room deal that wrong-footed their candidate out of the nomination, there is no reason to think that Hillary’s base would be ok with such a deal either.

I have an equally hard time seeing Gore stepping down from his perch as environmentalist philosopher king, wading into a bloody convention battle, stripping away all of the superdelegates, a majority of the pledged delegates and claiming the nomination for himself. If Obama’s supporters would be (rightly) outraged if Hillary were to be given the nod in some sleazy backroom deal, what makes you think that his supporters (especially black voters/delegates) would acquiesce into Gore parachuting in and essentially doing the same thing?

The facts on the ground do favor the Democrats, and I do expect them to keep and expand their majorities in both the House and Senate this November. The caveat being, of course, that the hard core supporters of both candidate decides en masse to put aside all of the ugliness and divisiveness we’ve been seeing, let bygones be bygones, and unite for the general.
conradg says:

March 13, 2008 at 3:06 pm

I guess I have a harder time seeing how Hillary’s supporters will carry a beef against Obama into the general. He’s certainly not playing an old boy’s club campaign, and has never raised the slightest hint of anti-feminism or any implication that Hillary being a woman is a disadvantage, now or in the general – when, let’s face it, being either black or female is a definite disadvantage in the general for either of them.

If Hillary can retake the pledged delegate lead, it would be different, or if she can overtake the popular vote lead (not including MI and Fl, unless they revote). But so far, Obama is winning fairly against the establishment candidate, so while I know a lot of women are very attached to Hillary, they are also core democrats, and I don’t think they will blame Obama for playing fair and winning on his own merits.

As for the party splitting along racial and gender divides, I think this is really nonsense. Hillary is playing the race card to be sure, and that is certainly alienating black voters, but it’s not the party that is splitting, it’s Clinton herself. Obama has won plenty of white states, and Hillary is doing well with Hispanics, but there’s no serious divide there. Hillary certainly has dug a deep whole for herself, which is why I think she simply can’t win the nomination. A lot of people in the party simply won’t forgive her for what she’s done. But that’s not a racial divide, that’s a racism divide. Everyone in the party agrees that racism is bad, the only question is whether Hillary’s tactics amount to racism. Her supporters think they don’t, but lots of Obama supporters think they do. Hillary is exploiting the ambiguity with typical Clintonian triangulation tactics. But I see no lasting damage to the party, unless Hillary gets the nomination, which seems very unlikely. Yes, there are some wild-ass scenarios where she wins, but they are unlikley.

I agree that the Gore option is far fetched. I just think the option of Hillary robbing Obama has to be stopped somehow, and if it comes down to it, in the event of delegate split insoluable by any means both sides would consider fair, Gore is probably the best option. Whether he’d accept it is hard to say, but if the party leaders begged him, I think he’d agree to it. And Obama would be a natural VP in that case. But like I say, I don’t think it will come to that.

Now I could be wrong, but I just don’t see what isse Hillary’s supporters have that makes them find Obama so unpalatable that he’s not getting their support in the general. Women have been favoring Democratic men against Republicans for decades, why would that change now?
LMaggitti says:

March 13, 2008 at 5:30 pm

Conrad,

The simple fact is that Clinton can make attacks on Obama that, as unfair as it may be, have a salience coming from her, given her (unmerited) remaining stature in the Democratic party, that would not have the same salience coming from a Republican. She has all but announced (see the odious Mark Penn today) her intention to destroy Obama’s electability. I think that few politicians could come out of 2 1/2 months of that unscathed, especially from someone as expert in the politics of personal destruction as Clinton, and, even more to the point, when the person making those attacks is from the person’s own party. That doesn’t even take into account the fact that, however “unfair” it may be, it is quite apparent that many of Clinton’s supporters are taking her defeat very, very badly.

In terms of Obama’s electability, it does not matter that Clinton is hurting herself even more than she is hurting Obama (which IMO she is). No, if anything I was too optimistic yesterday.

As for the party writ large, if recent blog threads mean anything (they may not), this has become much more than a personal battle between Clinton and Obama. No, it’s good bye Democratic party. I wouldn’t mourn, except that I fear it may be replaced by something even worse.
conradg says:

March 13, 2008 at 9:04 pm

Lmaggitti,

I’m prevented from agreeing with you over the damage this is doing to Obama’s chances in the general by my own desire to see him win. I don’t think I can be completely objective there. So I am simply falling back on the fact that its way too early to tell, and projecting forward from such short-term circumstance is rushing to judgement. But I admit things look bad. I certainly think this has the potential to destroy the Democrats’ chances this year, but I don’t see how this changes the basic dynamics of the party itself. This isn’t “women versus blacks” it’s “the Clintons verses everyone not in favor of the Clintons”. In other words, it isn’t a battle of interest groups, it isn’t an ideological split, it’s purely a split between Clinton loyalists and everyone else. One way or the other, Clinton is done after this. I don’t see any way she is elected in November. I don’t see, if Obama is the nominee and loses in November because Clinton sabotaged him, that she comes back in 2012 as the nominee. She’s destroyed herself as much as she’s destroyed Obama. Sure, that doesn’t help Obama any, but it does mean that the party is done with the Clintons. And aside from that, what rift is there in the party?
adam says:

March 14, 2008 at 6:15 am

“This isnâ€™t â€œwomen versus blacksâ€ itâ€™s â€œthe Clintons verses everyone not in favor of the Clintonsâ€. In other words, it isnâ€™t a battle of interest groups, it isnâ€™t an ideological split, itâ€™s purely a split between Clinton loyalists and everyone else.”

The 13 odd million votes she has received thus far makes it a little strange to call her support “Clinton loyalists” All of the exit polling I have seen makes it increasingly clear that the party is splintering along ethnic/racial/gender lines, not ideological ones (very little daylight between Obama and Clinton on any issue). If this goes at least until Puerto Rico for the next 2 1/2 months, more and more people will be more and more invested in their candidate, and come to beleive the worst of the other candidate. I would agree that if by some miracle she gets the nomination, McCain will beat her handily, and if not, she has flushed her 2012 hopes down the drain by virture of the sheer ugliness of the campaign she has run.
conradg says:

March 14, 2008 at 1:07 pm

I must have seen different exit polling than you. There was no racial divide in the white states Obama won. Yes, there’s a racial divide in Mississippi – who knew? And yes, there’s a racial divide in some border states with the Scotts-Irish ethnic thing – the Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky region.Certainly Obama is now getting almost all the black vote, but it didn’t start out that way – Clinton originally had the black vote in her pocket, and then lost it as she began dissing Obama more and more, and played race politics to try to stave off his advances.

THe female vote is NOT heavily Clinton. The only genuine gender divide in politics is between Dems and Reps – women vote strongly democratic, and men vote strongly republican, though less so. THis means that 58% of the voters in the democratic primaries are women. This is why Hillary is even surviving. She doesn’t even have to get a majority of women to do well. That she is not doing well, that she is actually behind in the voting, tells us that she’s not been successful in splitting the party along gender lines. She’s only been successful in alienating blacks, and courting some blue collar Archie Bunker type Dems. Is that going to change the party forever? No. Is Obama trying to split off the black vote? No. It’s not as if anyone thought race had left democratic politics entirely. We all knew that a black candidate would have a tough time. Obama has been far more successful than anyone thought, not because he’s black, but in spite of it. And he’s helped move the party, and the country, in a more racially tolerant direction.

But yes, there’s certainly some strong identity politics at play here, and emotions are running high. I agree that playing this out more and more is not good for anyone. Clinton seems not to comprehend that. She needs to go home. But, as Christopher Hitchens said, she can’t do that, she needs this shit, she’s the kind of person who never wants the meeting to end, the battle for power utterly fascinates and energizes her. Her problem is that she’s just not very good at it. She’s been outplayed by a better candidate, and now she’s just hurting them both, and doesn’t seem to care. Like I say, this is a Clinton problem, not a widespread fissure in the party itself. If she goes away, the problem goes away – simple as that.