Campaign Strategies Released

The last several weeks have seen both John McCain and Barack Obama rolling out their respective paths to electoral victory in November.  Obama’s path is much easier, as nearly all national polls released since he officially clinched the Democratic nomination earlier this month have shown him with a moderate lead over McCain, one that extends to many swing states as well.  However, upon close analysis of both electoral strategies, I believe some key flaws can easily be found.

 

Perhaps the most poorly formulated is John McCain’s, outlined in a web “briefing” at http://www.johnmccain.com/pathtovictory/.  If this seriously represents the McCain camp’s strategy, than he is clearly in trouble, because it’s totally delusional.  First, the numbers don’t even add up.  It lists 66 electoral votes as “leaning Democrat”, but shows only New Jersey as falling into that category.  More significant is the fact that Virginia and North Carolina are listed as “solid GOP”.  Recent polling demonstrates that this is clearly not the case, with Obama even leading Virginia in some of the most recent polls.  Furthermore, the Obama campaign is clearly focusing on  these two states, along with Georgia, which were targets in a recent add buy.

 

Of the states listed as “tossup”, Pennsylvania, Maine, and Washington are included.  This is not the case.  Obama has something around an 8 point lead in Pennsylvania right now, and at least that in the other two.  McCain is going to have to invest significant amounts of time and money in each of these three states to have a chance at a win, which appears more and more unlikely.  These are but a few examples of the myopic view that McCain seems to be taking towards the electoral map.

 

The problem, of course, with this is that the McCain campaign’s delusions (and presumably the delusions of many supporters) are clouding what will certainly be a difficult election, and possibly precluding any chance he may have of victory.  As the Bush-Rove team demonstrated in 2000 and 2004, elections are won by grassroots organizations and knowledge of the electoral map down to the district level.  If McCain’s strategy team can’t even grasp electoral strategy at the state or in some cases regional level, precinct and district organization must be utter chaos.

 

On the flip side of this coin is Barack Obama, flush with a commanding lead in the polls.  Undoubtedly, if the election were held today, he would score a commanding win.  That said, his campaign strategy includes question marks as well.  As reported in a recent Politico article, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0608/11320.html, Obama is not content to focus merely on the presidential election, but wishes to influence races down the ticket as well.  To this end, he plans on adopting something of a fifty state strategy for the fall, making concerted efforts to court voters in places like Texas in the hopes of helping Democratic senate and house candidates.

 

Furthermore, in Texas especially, he hopes to lead the Democrats to victory in the state senate and house, securing a narrow Democratic majority.  As the article points out, Texas redistricting will occur this term, and if the Democrats can control the process of redistricting, he feels they can make further gains.

 

While no one would deny that he is the current front runner, his election is not certain.  There is a long time to go until November.  As many commentators have picked up on, this strategy is extremely risky.  If it works, it could go a long way to establishing a lasting Democratic majority in Washington.  But if it stretches Obama too thin for him to remain in front in several key swing states, it could cost him the election.  I think the bottom line here is this: it’s been 8 years since a Democrat held the presidency, and many, many years since one as liberal as Obama held the presidency.  They have some HUGE advantages this election cycle with the sour attitude most voters have towards the Bush administration.  As long as he doesn’t do something increadably stupid, he should win.  But as John Kerry found out, anti-Bush rhetoric alone will not get the job done.  Therefore, the Democrats ought to be cautious, and in this atmosphere, Obama’s strategic decision seems to be at best over-energetic and at worst arrogant.

 

Primary Lessons

Now that the 2008 Presidential Primary season has come to a close for both parties, the media, public, and politicians themselves are turning to analysis of the General Election.  However, before doing so, it seems appropriate to step back and take stock of the things that the primary season has taught us.

 

Beginning in December of 2006, we were told that this primary season would be unlike any other.  First, there was no incumbent president or vice-president running.  Second, the campaign season began earlier than ever before.  Third, the frontloaded primary schedule seemed to indicate that both party’s nominees would be decided by Super Tuesday.  Finally, the quantity of money involved promised to be greater than ever before.  Not knowing what was going to happen, analysts batted around a number of theories about how the primaries would turn out.  Let’s analyze one of them now.

 

Question: With the new, frontloaded primary system, how much should candidates concentrate on the traditional states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and to a lesser extent, South Carolina?

 

Theories:

 

There were a number of these.  Primarily, they can be divided into two camps.  One school of thought held that Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina would take on increasing importance in the abbreviated system.  The other school of thought held that importance would be diffused to the larger states voting on and just before Super Tuesday i.e. Florida, California, New York.

 

When we examine the candidates, we find that they were divided almost in half.  For instance, John Edwards and Mike Huckabee developed early on as one trick ponies, basing their support almost entirely in Iowa.  They were betting that the bounce from an Iowa win would propel them all the way to Super Tuesday.  For Mike Huckabee, this theory seems to have been correct, although not in the way he anticipated.  It wasn’t his win per se that catapulted him.  Rather, it was the increasing media coverage of his campaign that resulted from his rise in the polls there.  Analyzing data from the Real Clear Politics poll averages, we can clearly see that although Huckabee rose first in Iowa, that prompted him to rise in New Hampshire and other states before the actual Iowa Caucuses.  Thus, while the ultimate success of Mike Huckabee is not attributable to the classic Iowa bounce, he ultimately owes his rise to his early success in Iowa.  The ability of Iowa thus to elevate Huckabee from the second to first tier seems to vindicate the early state strategy.  Edwards, on the other hand, was never able to sufficiently expand his base beyond Iowa, and thus was much less successful than Huckabee.

 

Rudy Giuliani is typical of the other school of thought.  He completely abandoned the Iowa caucuses and the several states voting shortly thereafter in favor of a total campaign blitz on Florida, which was where he wanted to make his last stand.  I need not remind readers that this failed utterly.  But why did this fail?  Giuliani was banking on no clear frontrunner emerging from the early primaries.  Best case scenario, each of his four main challengers would have won at least one state by the time Florida voted, leaving a disorganized party with ample room to accommodate a win by him.  To some extent, this seemed to be the case when Huckabee, McCain, and Romney had all won by the time of South Carolina, which was predicted to be a bloodbath.  But here Giuliani miscalculated.

 

Ideally for him, Thompson would have won South Carolina, destroying McCain and Romney’s momentum and completely throwing the race into disarray.  Indeed, Thompson launched a massive bus tour in South Carolina and rose rapidly in the polls in the final days.  But then, the worst possible outcome happened.  On election day, Thompson and Huckabee split the hard core conservative (read anti-McCain) vote.  With Romney abandoning South Carolina in the final days, this left McCain in position to walk away with a narrow victory and the momentum to go on to Florida and unseat Giuliani in his last stand.

 

Conclusion:

 

Had Thompson, or even Huckabee, won South Carolina, Giuliani’s strategy may have worked.  But they didn’t.  Instead, McCain came into Florida with a full head of steam.  Since he was the most ideologically similar candidate to Giuliani, he stole many of his votes there and ultimately prevailed.

 

From this information, we can clearly see that the Huckabee strategy (also practiced by Romney and others) of concentrating on at least one early state was proven superior to the Giuliani strategy.  As sad as Giuliani’s miscalculation is, the only sadder thing is that the Clinton campaign did not learn from it.  After fighting Obama to a standstill on Super Tuesday, she promised to make her next stand in the far off primaries of Ohio and Texas, more than a month away.  Thus, like Giuliani, she failed to contest the next several primaries, several of which (like Wisconsin) were certainly winnable for her.  The result: 10 consecutive post-Super Tuesday wins for Obama, and a delegate lead she would never overcome.  Those who don’t learn from history…

 

 

 

Welcome

Welcome, and thank you for visiting the Solutions Report.  The primary goal of this blog is to provide analysis of developments in American political trends, with forays into international politics as well.  In the short term, I will primarily be concerned with the 2008 US election by analyzing polling trends and related material for both the presidential and congressional races.  This blog will not, for the most part, delve into the arena of policy prescriptions. 

Because of the nature of the material, I feel it is necessary to provide readers with some personal background.  My name is Lucas.  I am a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying Political Science and History.  While I will try to be as objective as possible in my commentary on this blog, I feel it is important to disclose my political leanings up front.  I consider myself to be a conservative, with certain very significant libertarian leanings, specifically on economic issues.  I initially supported Fred Thompson in the Republican Primary, and now support John McCain for president.

Regarding my political experience, I have been analyzing the present election substantially for almost a year.  I had a somewhat minor role in canvassing voters for the Republican party during the year following the 2004 election.  Most of my experience, to be honest, is in policy.  I have worked in several positions in the Wisconsin State Legislature over the past 2 ½ years.

If you have any further questions, feel free to post them here.  That said, welcome to the Solutions Report.