By Kevin S.

October 11, 2008 6:34 AM | Link to this

I share your frustration. And posting about the keys on a politics-obsessed (though not primarily political) message board doesn’t even generate a good debate. It’s amazing how people can just explain away the fact that two debate ties (or possibly even one minor victory for McCain) still bounce Obama’s poll numbers. Will it take some sort of nasty October surprise that still ends in an Obama victory to get people to seriously consider this approach? The media hacks love the correlation-causation fallacy, so it would take an Obama victory in the face of no good developments for his campaign to make a dent. Maybe not even then. Maybe they’ll just buy the Fox News line that ACORN was responsible for the entire margin of victory both nationally and in every swing state.

By Tom Q

October 13, 2008 3:00 PM | Link to this

Needless to say, I’m on board with everything here. Kevin S., I’ve been there when it comes to mentioning the Keys on political discussion boards — it’s astonishing how little credence they’re given by people who claim to eat/drink politics. I’m usually told “This year is different because McCain’s not the incumbent” (ignoring that the system has worked for many non-incumbent races). I was once actually told I was arrogant for believing in a system that, by definition, had only been applied to a finite number of cases. I can accept that, spinning out to hundreds of simulations, you might find an exception (but I’d think it would have to be in a 5-6 point Key race, not in a laydown like this years). But what really struck me is this: how is it LESS arrogant to say that all elections are existentially different and that anything can happen — that, essentially, history has not one thing to teach us? Martin, what you say about the economic thing is dead on. People seem to be ignoring the fact that, out in mainstream America, there was widely thought to be an economic downturn by late winter. The current scary stories are, in fact, obscuring items that would otherwise (i.e., five weeks ago) have been headlines proving recession — the near-500,000 new jobless claims every week, the continued contraction in manunfacturing/construction etc. The economy as it was in August was plenty — along with the many other fallen Keys — to secure an Obama victory. But the press must have its myths, and the idea that “the last shiny object I saw was the decisive one” is the most persistent.

By Martin Gottlieb

October 13, 2008 10:45 PM | Link to this

For anybody who wonders what we’re all talking about here when we denounce the conventional wisdom here is a link to an example of it. It’s your basic horse-race story from the New York Times from over the weekend (Oct. 11). It’s all about how the Republicans are fretting that McCain is blowing it. ==============================================(I’m using the equal signs to indicate paragraph breaks, because otherwise there are none in the comments, only the orginal post.) The NYT story meets all the good criteria of good journalism: the reporters talked to a lot of people who qualify as experts in politics, and it quotes them.=========================================================== What they have to say is approximately worthless. So is the piece. This not because they’re all idiots, but because they are all in the grip of an assumption: that campaigns count. It seems obvious to them. The opposing view would seem flaky. The rest follows naturally from that unexamined assumption. ========================================================== The piece is linked here just to show how breathtakingly wrong the experts are, as a class, all the time. There’s nothing exceptional about the Times piece. In fact, I choose the Times not because it is exceptionally bad, but because in so many other ways it is exceptionally good. ====================================================================== If the link doesn’t work, you can go to the Times site and search for “McCain” and “advisers” and pick the story with the headline that says roughly, “After a bad weak, McCain’s supporters are worried that he’s blowing it.” Here’s the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/us/politics/12strategy.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=mccain%20and%20advisers&st=cse&oref=slogin

By Tom Q

October 17, 2008 3:49 PM | Link to this

AS soon as I saw that Times headline, I knew it would be an Adam Nagourney piece, and fairly worthless. (I’m just glad he’s contrained from his standard “Democrats in disarray” story, which he generally churns out bi-monthly….. (My version of the paragraph break) I’ve given up on persuading those who appear to have an emotional stake in preserving the “anything can happen/three weeks is a lifetime in presidential politics” myth. I think Rachel Maddow is mostly a positive addition to the pundit fray, but last night she seemed to be begging Claire McCaskill to make Obama start throwing mud, because she was sure McCain’s attacks were going to start working despite the fact they hadn’t at all so far….. But, as I said a while back, the person who does seem to at least intuively understand what we’re preaching is Obama himself. He’s resisted every call to change his strategy/take the gloves off/fight fire with fire etc. And, while the pundits may not reward him (note how they all judged McCain to have scored heavily in Wednesday’s debate by being “aggressive”) the voters apparently are — as evidenced by the overwhelming post-debate polling.

By Tom Q

October 29, 2008 3:40 PM | Link to this

Six days and counting till judgment day, it seems we ought to say something around here. It strikes me there are different basic moods out there about what’s coming, divided by party: most Republicans, on and off the record, see a big defeat they pray doesn’t turn into a blowout. And many Democrats, while encouraged, keep saying they “expect it to tighten”, and on some level fear they’re being set up for huge disappointment. Some of this, of course, is natural —for fans of a trailing baseball team, a 1-run lead can feel like an unscalable mountain, while for the team ahead it can feel tissue-thin. And part of it is the relative amount of success/failure experienced by the parties over the past 4 decades…many Democrats are like Cubs or pre-‘04 Red Sox fans, forever expecting the boom to fall on them. But part of it, surely, is an inability to understand presidential elections in the way Lichtman (and a few others) have defined them. Many a Democrat out there right now is saying “It looks good — but I thought that 4 years ago, too!”. Not being able to tell the difference between a 4 (or at most 5) negative Key election and an 8 or 9 one leaves you fatally liable to irrational pessimism (and agita with every new poll reading)…. Something else I’d like to raise here, because it’s such a common topic in pundit land: the impact of Sarah Palin on this election. You may have seen the NBC poll from last week, which said that more voters (34%) were voting against McCain because of Palin than because of Bush (23%). This follows the initial pundit position, still vocalized by many, that the September addition of Palin to the ticket energized McCain and brought him briefly into the lead. I think the latter is rebuttable (if not necessarly in a way the commentariat will accept) by pointing out that all tickets improve post-conventions, so attributing an (ephemeral) bump to Palin is poor statistical reasoning. But what about the former — that Palin is a fatal drag on an otherwise winnable race? The Lichtman theory is that, Dan Quayle be damned, v.p.’s have zero impact on voting. Is that big anti-Palin number just a smokescreen — allowing people already inclined to vote Dem an easy explanation for their vote? Or is the singular unpopularity of the lady from Alaska something we need to think about when considering how inclusive the Keys system is? Should some measurement of such a negative voter response play into this? Two possibilities I can come up with: Were this a good incumbent re-election year — say, 1988 — I believe people eager to vote McCain would somehow manage to rationalize their misgivings about Sarah, so the number in that regard is insignificant. My second thought…remember the contest Key? The one we were uncertain whether to turn against McCain, based on the suddenness of the GOP primary finish? There was no sense whatever that McCain had won ovder the party — evidenced by multi-victories Huckabee and Romney kept recording even while the press told us the race was over. But Lichtman’s “2/3 on the convention ballot” guideline made us reluctant to turn it downward. However…what if McCain’s selection of Palin by itself turned the Key negative — in that, picking someone so representative of the far right of his party (and passing on the more center-appealing Ridge or Lieberman) showed he had no confidence he’d locked down his party base? In some way did he turn they Key downward on himself, and does the disastrous pick thus end up figuring in the Keys analysis after all?

By Washington Township

October 29, 2008 6:03 PM | Link to this

Recent events from a 13 Keys POV: the “meltdown” turned the iffy (in the summer) short term economy key hard in Obamas’ direction (he already had the long term economy key). So Obama was going to win anyway, but that key turning just made it more solid. Now the only thing to talk about is really the popular vote point spread and who carrys what state (which Lichtman doesn’t predict).

By Martin Gottlieb

October 30, 2008 7:09 PM | Link to this

Yes, it does seem like we should be saying something here. I appreciate the help.———————- First of all, your obedient blogger is a Cubs fan. Lifelong. More precisely, I am the oldest person in the world whose team has never been in a World Series, in the category of people whose teams have been around all along. I was born in early 1946. THE oldest. Chicago born and bred. And, no doubt, the most bitter. ========================= So you might not be surprised to learn that I, myself, have had doubts about the election this year. (After all, there was no chance in Hell the Cubs would lose 3 straight bad games to the Dodgers.) ======================= The thing is, Lichtman himself doesn’t guaranteed that the Keys will ALWAYS work, just because they always have. Indeed, he guarantees there will come a year. Given that the system is based on historical precedent, it was reasonable to wonder if something so unprecedented as a black nominee could upset the system. Then, too, McCain’s strategy of trying to grab the “change” mantle was exactly what one would do if one were to base a strategy on the Keys and wanted to upset the keys.====================== What I mean is, though I would go to the extreme of writing a book praising the Keys, I wouldn’t bet my house. On, the economy, yes, that Key finally turned. I’m glad you didn’t say that the turning made the winning margin bigger. That’s not the idea of the Key. It just made the flat prediction all the flatter. ======================== As for guessing what the popular or electoral margin might be, I will first admit that knowing the Lichtman system doesn’t make me any better at predicting stuff the system doesn’t cover than anybody else. However, I did say many months ago that we shouldn’t assume the election would be close. It seemed to me that everybody else was fighting the last war on that count. Maybe I was influenced by the fact that the Keys weren’t particularly close.====================== On party unity: Seems to me that if McCain had picked a pro-choice candidate, the party would have been disunited by any reasonable standard. (Picking Lieberman would have blown the roof off the building.) ============================ But, if all McCain had to do to unite the party was pick a true-blue conservative, then he really didn’t have much of a problem. I mean, uniting the party is almost always a concern of some level (at least when the presidential nominee isn’t the incumbent). Reagan, the hardcore conservative, picks somebody who isn’t hardcore. Carter, the southern moderate, picks a northern liberal. Dukakis, a northern liberal, picks a southern moderate. ======================= The Keys say pretty much that the victory goes to the party, not the person. But that doesn’t mean the person is TOTALLY irrelevant. He can’t be a political idiot. Almost by definition, he is not. After all, he won the nomination of a major political party. He must have SOMETHING going for him in the way of smarts. But McCain would have had to part with his senses to pick a pro-choice running mate.I know there were people who took that possibility seriously. And I know McCain loves Lieberman. But, in the end, it just couldn’t happen. ====================== On Palin (as elsewhere), you make some good points. But since the keys picked McCain to lose anyway, I guess the easiest question becomes: What if Obama had picked a Palin? Would that have upset the keys? ========================

By Tom Q

November 1, 2008 4:33 PM | Link to this

I believe Lichtman glancingly mentions that popular vote should go roughly in accord with the spread in the Keys — but he doesn’t push it, and with good reason. There are obvious times of correlation: ‘32, ‘52 and ‘80 were all 8 negative Key elections and were blowouts; ‘36, ‘56 and ‘84 were 2 Key elections that led to easy re-elections. Conversely, however, 1976 and 1960 were 8 and 9 Key elections, respectively, yet were tight as a tick at the end (‘68, as well, but the Wallace candidacy played a major role in that one). And ‘72, though an unexceptional four key race, was one of the greatest landslides ever. I think in this particular case, it helps to look at polling — not the match-up polls to which so many have become addicted, but presidential approval polls. In 1960, despite the 9 fallen Keys, Ike maintained seriously good approvals (presumably reputation-based) and that seemed to help Nixon. Similarly, in ‘76, Ford, though suffering the backwash of Watergate and recession, held a roughly 48% approval, and got more or less that at the ballot box. By contrast, Truman ‘52 and Carter ‘80 had among the lowest approvals ever seen; though it predated polling, we should assume Hoover would have been in the same boat. Given Bush’s all-time-low ratings, the analogy to this year is of course those last three races rather than Ford or Nixon. Obama by 7-10%…. Condolances on being a Cubs fan. I’m a 56 year old Yankee fan, so I’ve already had more good times than anyone deserves. Perhaps it enables me to be more optimistic… As far as “Could Obama have chosen a Palin?” — as you say, it’s a counter-factual, because Obama and McCain are different people, and it’s hard to imagine Obama selecting…I don’t know… Dennis Kucinich? But I’d still expect people inclined to choose Obama in this ghastly environment would in the end submerge their doubts about the veep and go the direction the Keys took them (as they did when Quayle was the factor).

By Tom Q

November 6, 2008 11:15 AM | Link to this

Come on — put a new post. We need a space to comment on how right we were. (And of course we can take the never-too-early look at Pres. Obama’s prospects for the Keys 4 years hence)