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Why Is Primary Punditry So Bad?

If you believe the conventional wisdom of Internet punditry — and at this point Internet political commentary is conventional wisdom, as surely as print and television commentary used to be — the Republican primary race has been a real rollercoaster, with Perry and Cain in turn rising to seemingly insurmountable heights only to come crashing […]

If you believe the conventional wisdom of Internet punditry — and at this point Internet political commentary is conventional wisdom, as surely as print and television commentary used to be — the Republican primary race has been a real rollercoaster, with Perry and Cain in turn rising to seemingly insurmountable heights only to come crashing to the ground. And now Newt Gingrich is finally at the top, and he’s just invincible: unless he self-destructs, he’s sure to crush Romney in Iowa and New Hampshire, and then he’ll take the nomination. This is being reported as not only a probable scenario, but a nigh inexorable one.

Well, it’s not. The new conventional wisdom isn’t entirely false, but it’s not the complete truth, either. The polls on which so much of this commentary has been based for the past six months have largely been polls of registered voters or of mere “adults” — categories that must be understood as “unlikely voters” where any primary or caucus is concerned. Less than half of adults are registered to vote, and although the numbered of registered voters who bother to turn out for primaries and caucuses varies from cycle to cycle and state to state, the figure rarely gets much above 60 percent. (A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the record turnout for the 2008 New Hampshire primaries, which included open contests in both parties, was about 62 percent of registered voters.) The “likely voters” polls do count, and many of those have Newt soaring, but a great deal of skepticism still needs to be applied. Look at the RealClearPolitics polling average for Dec. 7, 2007: at this time in the last presidential cycle, Rudy Giuliani had an almost seven-point lead over his next closest rival, Mike Huckabee. McCain trailed in third. A month later, Giuliani finished sixth in Iowa and fourth in New Hampshire; McCain and Romney were the top finishers in the Granite State. The December polls accurately picked up on Huckabee’s surge, but overall they were a poor guide to the shape of the 2008 primary season.

So how much better are the polls and attendant hype this year? Rather worse, I suspect, since my impression is that the hype is much greater this time around, with pundits frenzied by dubious upticks in Perry, Cain, and Newt support. (Meanwhile, the hard groundwork of campaign building, which Romney, Paul, and seemingly Huntsman have been focusing on, has been deprecated.) A Nate Silver would have to crunch the numbers for us to know with more confidence, but it looks to me as if the instability of the Republican pre-primary season has been largely a creation of the media. Not entirely: Romney doesn’t excite the base, and Tea Party activists high on passion and low on experience may indeed be swept up by crazes for comedy candidates like Cain and Newt. But a reality check is in order.

Republican voters in 2012 are above all going to be interested in who can beat Obama. The greatest number of primary voters and caucus goers are going to be GOP regulars who aren’t highly ideological — the people who historically nominate Bushes, Doles, and McCains — and the second largest group will be religious voters who aren’t thrilled about either Romney or Gingrich. The Tea Parties are a wild card; my best guess is that because no single candidate galvanizes them, they simply won’t organize and turn out in large numbers. In New Hampshire, voters prefer candidates they’ve seen in person and who’ve invested real time in the state, a predilection that favored McCain in 2008 and probably favors Romney come January. It’s hard to see how there’s a storyline for Gingrich in any of these campaign-reality fundamentals. A story derived from polls of people who won’t vote just isn’t worth much, yet that’s the story we’re hearing incessantly.

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