Obama and His Base

I like Ben Smith a lot. He writes a lot of good stuff. This is bad stuff. Really stupid to be honest.

Smith argues Obama is about to "screw his base" because Obamacare is going to raise health care costs for the young (Obama's base) and reduce health care costs for the elderly (they vote for the other guy - ANY other guy). Ezra Klein points out various reasons Smith is just wrong. But the worst part of it is this:

Imminent elements of Obama's grandest policy move, the health-care overhaul known as ObamaCare, are calculated to screw his most passionate supporters and to transfer wealth to his worst enemies.

What in the world are you talking about Ben??? Obamacare is "calculated to screw his most passionate supporters?" Come on. And he's transferring wealth to "his worst enemies?" Obama is not Nixon. Old, sick people are not his "enemies." The provisions Smith is referring to are a BADLY needed fix the health care system needs. Young people need to pay in when they are healthy and they have been behaving as free riders. It is a collective action problem. Obamacare fixes it.

And guess what else? Young people hope to someday ... ya know ... be old. They get the benefits of Obamacare back then.

This is horserace, slice-and-dice politics at its worst. Awful Ben. Just awful.

There Are Facts

It turns out the polling was accurate all along. Amazingly accurate as it happens.

As I wrote on Sunday, the polls were unequivocal. The only chance Romney had to win was if the polls were somehow displaying some kind systemic polling bias. I explained that that was possible even if it was not likely. Not likely was right. The polls were just right on the mark.

As a side note, not that I'm out for anyone losing their livelihood or something, but I do think there should be some accountability for some of the pundits that were just silly, silly wrong. For goodness sake, take Dick Morris off the air. Seth Masket is right about Peggy Noonan.

Anyone (including the Romney campaign) who considers Pennsylvania to be a swing state should be shut out of the discourse. They're not living in the fact-based world. I continue to defy anyone to show me something insightful Mark Halperin has said. Gallup Poll meet lack of credibility. Lack of credibility, this is the Gallup Poll.

There are facts. Thank goodness.

With Regard to Zingers

The Romney camp's big plan for Wednesday night's debate is to have a lot of different "zingers" ready to go that Mitt Romney can deploy to throw the President off-balance and, ultimately, fundamentally re-make the race.

This is what they told the New York Times. And this tells you everything you need to know about the Romney brain-trust. Here's some problems with the plan:

1) Romney is not good at zingers. If you can name one zinger Romney has used in his political career that was memorable enough to affect any race, I'd like to know what it is. Indeed, the fact that the Romney camp is referring to them as "zingers" as opposed to "great points" or "strong arguments" tells you what year they're living in. Imagine you needled your friend with some particularly good line and someone said, "Wow, great zinger!" You'd have no choice but to say, "Zinger? Really?" Romney is a character from 1950 and his campaign reflects the man.

2) Zingers don't win presidential elections. If you think about the most famous zingers is presidential/vice-presidential debate politics, you'll see what I mean. Reagan's, "there you you go again" did not change that race. Reagan's great joke about Walter Mondale's "youth and inexperience" did not change the election. Lloyd Bentsen's "you're no Jack Kennedy" did not change the race. George H.W. Bush looking at his watch (not really a zinger but a widely-discussed debate moment) didn't actually affect the race. Did Al Gore's sighing affect the race? No, there's no evidence it did. John McCain's use of "Joe the Plumber" was much-discussed ... but it had no effect.

3) The whole idea of a zinger is that it took everyone by surprise. You know ... as in ... ZING!!! If you tell the New York Times ahead of time, the zinger doesn't zing. It falls flat. Moreover, you've now raised expectations. Everyone is expecting and anticipating the well-rehearsed line. It can't possibly live up to expectations. There is now considerable danger that the zinger will fall flat. Finally, you've yet again allowed Obama to play the role of adult in the room. And, predictably, the Obama campaign is talking about how they aren't going to have any zingers and they are going to talk about their ideas. Oy.

All of this points to a campaign that is just not reading the public mood properly. As Ezra Klein points out, the Romney campaign still believes they just need to point out that the economy is very bad and that will be enough to win.

The idea that this election can be reshaped by a zinger speaks to a deeper problem in the Romney campaign’s fundamental view of the race. As they see it, Obama’s record is an obvious disaster and their job entails little more than pointing that out over and over again. That the polls haven’t seemed responsive to this theory hasn’t dissuaded them.

This thinking is wrong. And it is one of the reasons Romney is in such a deep hole right now.

How Can Obama Be Doing So Well?

A lot of different pieces from a lot of different angles seem to be making similar arguments and asking a similar question.

The argument: Obama shouldn't be in good shape, yet he seems to be ahead.
The question: Why is Obama ahead?

I've been pointing out for some time that Obama seems to be in better shape than the national horserace polls suggest. For instance, almost two weeks ago, I pointed out that swing state polls seem to be better for Obama than his national polls. About a week ago, I highlighted a couple of electoral models, one put together by Nate Silver and one put together by Ezra Klein, John Sides, Lynn Vavreck, and Seth Hill that each suggested Obama was a favorite to win even with some mildly pessimistic assumptions about job approval and economic performance.

But there's more.

1) Two days ago, Nate Silver wrote a sophisticated piece looking at Obama's "magic number" on jobs. Three months earlier, Silver had written an article arguing that the President needed to average about 150,000 jobs created per month in order to win reelection. Now, Silver argues Obama's "magic number" seems slightly lower, closer to 125,000 jobs created per month. In effect, Obama seems to be doing better with less-than-robust jobs numbers than Silver had anticipated.

2) A couple of days before that, in a guest post by John Sides posted on Silver's blog, Sides asked "Is Obama More Popular Than He Should Be?" Sides finds that Obama is indeed more popular than he "should be" using a model of expected job approval based on a bunch of variables including economic performance, scandals, and other significant events that affect job approval. Sides speculates that Obama is "more popular" than he should be because of personal traits (he is likable) and because more voters continue to blame George W. Bush for the weak economy than Obama.

3) Yesterday, Mark Blumenthal posted an article pointing out that Obama seems to be running stronger in the key swing states of Ohio, Florida, and Virginia today than he was at a similar juncture in 2008 when he ... ya know, won those swing states. This is true despite the fact that he is running behind his 2008 numbers in the national horserace polls.

4) Finally, a number of observers have pointed out that the Electoral College math seems to favor the President. Chris Cillizza made this argument well about a week ago. Today, Michael Cooper of the New York Times wrote about nine swing states deemed "critical" to the presidential race. If you put all 9 of these states in the "tossup" category, Obama would have 217 electoral votes that are fairly solidly his. Romney would have about 170. But, as Cooper points out, all 9 of these states are states Obama won in 2012. More importantly, polls currently show Obama with leads (some significant) in a number of these states including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Virginia, and even Ohio. The inclusion of Pennsylvania strikes a particular nerve with me. Every four years, everyone talks about Pennsylvania being a "swing state." The problem with this argument is that it doesn't "swing." In 2008, Obama won Pennsylvania by 11 points while winning nationally by about 6.5 points. Pollster.com's current polling aggregator shows Obama ahead there by 7.6 points. The last Republican to win Pennsylvania was George H. W. Bush ... 24 years ago and he only beat Mike Dukakis by 2.3 points. So, if we just take Pennsylvania off the list of "swing" states and give it to Obama, he's just 33 electoral votes away from victory with a lot of different paths through the remaining 8 "swing" states to get to 270. Then, add in a couple of other states that are very competitive that Cooper doesn't mention (Arizona, North Carolina) and you see that ...

... Obama seems to be doing surprisingly well for someone with job approval numbers under 50%. Why is this?

One big reason was hit upon by John Sides in pointing out that the President seems more empathetic, etc. than Mitt Romney. While the President's job approval numbers are borderline for an incumbent, people seem to "like" the President, at least more than they "like" Mitt Romney. The President's favorability rating is 47.8%. Romney's is 37.0%. Here's an interesting mental exercise to demonstrate the importance of these numbers. Run back through the last 10 presidential elections and the two major party nominees in each one. Which seemed like the more likable personality? My answers would be Obama, Bush, Bush, Clinton, Clinton, 1988???, Reagan, Reagan, Carter, 1972??? I put question marks for 1988 and 1972 since both candidates "seem" equally unlikable to me in those elections but the winner in every other case is the more likable personality. The one who you can imagine smiling more, the one who you can bear having on your television screen for the next four years, the one you can stand. That's who tends to win. Is that Obama or Romney? I think it is Obama.

Another reason Obama is doing well is that he has paid a lot of attention to key swing states like Ohio since he was elected in 2008. Last November, the Wall Street Journal pointed out that Obama has visited swing states more than any of his predecessors did as president. Yesterday, the President kicked off his campaign officially with stops in two states - Ohio and Virginia. From this perspective, the 2008 campaign never ended for Obama in these states.

Whatever the reason, the President is currently ahead by a variety of measures. Political pundits and journalists appear baffled by this for two reasons: 1) They want it to be a close race and 2) It makes no sense to them that the President could be ahead given that the economy is as weak as it is and given that the 2010 election was as bad as it was for the President and his party.

The election will be close. At a minimum, it will be close in the national horserace numbers. But it is also the case that the President has some built-in advantages described above and I'd rather be holding his cards than Governor Romney's. My one plea to everyone is just this ... can we stop calling Pennsylvania a swing state? Please?

Forecasting the Election

John Sides, Lynn Vavreck, Seth Hill, and Ezra Klein created a model for Klein's Washington Post blog to forecast the election outcome based on just 3 variables - incumbency, economic growth, and presidential approval. Since incumbency won't really "vary" for the 2012 election, there's effectively only 2 variables here. The model is similar to others like the one put together by Alan Abramowitz in advance of the 2008 election and the one put together by Nate Silver last November.

This new model is a bit more simple than Silver's model (the main difference is that it leaves Romney's ideology out of the equation) and it is quite a bit more simple than Abramowitz's model (insert math here).

The other interesting difference is the conclusions to be drawn from the Klein model. To put it most simply, Klein's model yields some pretty happy results from the Obama campaign's perspective. This is because Klein's model seems to count incumbency as more of an advantage than the other two. Just to give a sense of this, if we plug in some conservative (or even pessimistic) assumptions about the state of the economy (say 1.6% growth) and the President's job approval (say 46%), the President is a 78.4% bet to be reelected. Even at 0% growth and a 44% approval rating, the President has a 45.6% shot at re-election in the Klein model. The comparable numbers from Silver's model are 40% and 19%. Obviously, more optimistic scenarios (say, 3% growth and a 51% approval rating) make the President a very solid bet to win in either model (95.3% in Klein's model and 71% in Silver's model).

Are these models useful and, if so, which is likely more accurate? If you're having trouble sleeping at night because you have to know the outcome of the November election right now, these models are not going to help you. Even if they are done perfectly, they are only probabilities. And as someone who drafted Albert Pujols with the second overall pick in my fantasy baseball draft because he was a "very good bet" to be a fantasy monster, I would like to remind everyone that an event that has a 5% likelihood of happening like say, Albert Pujols hitting no homers in April, does happen ... roughly 5% of the time. But these models can tell us something useful. One useful piece of information is that, even though the models don't totally agree on the absolute likelihood of Obama being reelected under various circumstances, they do vary in roughly the same way. In other words, presidential approval and economic growth seem to have the same effect across these models as they move up and down.

As for which of them is most accurate, we really won't even know that after the election because (as these models demonstrate by providing probabilities) there are other variables that can and will affect the outcome. But I will say that Klein's model seems slightly closer to reality to me. One reason Klein's model seems like a better forecast is that Obama has some built in advantages in some of the key swing states like Ohio. I discussed this in more detail a couple of weeks ago and Chris Cillizza wrote about the problems Romney faces in the electoral math just yesterday. In addition, the incumbency effect that seems to be weighted more heavily in Klein's model really does matter. The President is, after all, the President. He has a really cool backdrop (the White House, the presidential seal, Air Force One, etc.) everywhere he goes and he has real presidential kind of accomplishments he can point to. As Mel Brooks would say, it's good to be the king.

Right now, Obama is ahead and Romney needs something to change whether it is the economy, some other intervening variable, or maybe a "game changing" VP pick. And since I have yet to see a single historical example of a VP pick delivering victory to a presidential candidate, I'm gonna rule that third option out.