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Meltdown, schmeltdown

By Martin Gottlieb | Friday, October 10, 2008, 06:34 PM

(This kind of expanding on a couple of posts by Tom Q in the string below this one.)

If this blog had audio, the sound you would be hearing would be the gnashing of my teeth.

Maybe I should be pleased that the guy who The Keys say is supposed to win is ahead in the polls. But that’s a minor victory.

What I’m looking for is complete capitulation, wherein every single member of the media, every member of Congress, everybody who works for Congress or works in any political campaigns anyplace signs a confession saying they were wrong all along about everything, that, in fact, campaigns don’t count, in the sense of determining who wins.

But, of course, everybody in the above list has forgotten that some people said all along that it was simply a Democratic year.

Obama’s lead is universally attributed the fact that this is a Democratic month.

Well, yes, of course, the historic financial crisis has been a problem for the incumbent party.

But the crisis is a matter of a bad situation for the nation getting hugely worse. Even if the meitdown hadn’t happen, the badness of the situation would have been enough to cause Obama to prevail when all was said and done.

Let the record show that the poll bounce that McCain got from the Republican convention had ebbed before the financial crisis hit, and Obama had taken a tiny lead, or moved into a tie. It’s clear now that McCain had shot his wad and that the rest of the campaign would have been a matter of the young guy growing on people and becoming an acceptable alternative, which is all it would have taken.

Unfortunately, we are the only ones who know that.

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Lichtman Logic Triumphs

By Martin Gottlieb | Tuesday, September 16, 2008, 05:55 PM

Good points being made here, in the string below. Glad to see it. I’d like to address some of them, in due course.

For now, though, what’s really on my mind is this (a point I just made in my column for my day job):

Seems to me that what’s happening is the triumph of the Lichtman logic. The strategy of both parties is built around it entirely.

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Where we stand:

By Martin Gottlieb | Friday, September 12, 2008, 11:42 AM

This post came in from Tom Q., for the string below this one. But I think it merits its own string. (It also merits paragraph separations, which are not possible in responses to posts.)

I will respond.

He says:

Okay, to move beyond the charisma question, a few other thoughts:

1) Whether you think the number of Keys lost this cycle is 7, 8 (including recession) or 9 (including charisma), it’s an easy call. Yet out there in journalism/blogosphere land, there’s widespread “McCain surging/Obama doomed!” feeling.

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Lichtman on Charisma and More

By Martin Gottlieb | Saturday, September 6, 2008, 12:03 AM

The Washington Post had an article about Lichtman in late August (by the science writer, not a political guy), and then Lichtman did a chat session. Rather than list interminable urls here, I think I will suggest that you go to WashingtonPost.com and search for “Lichtman.”

In the Q. and A. the charisma issue came up. Here’s the passage:

Q: Professor Lichtman: How do you deal with the question of subjectivity for the two charisma keys? While I support Obama, I don’t find him particularly charismatic, though I can see where some would. McCain seems to me not charismatic at all, but surely others see him as an exciting “maverick” and “war hero” and so on.

Allan Lichtman: The charisma keys are the most subjective or the most judgmental of all 13 keys. No election has ever turned on the charisma keys and this one does not. The point, however, is that there are always individual voters and some voters groups that will find particular candidates charismatic or inspiring. To reach the threshold for charisma under the Keys system, however, the candidate must be broadly recognized as inspirational. Such candidates are very rare. In recent decades only John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan have reached the threshold.

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Obama Charisma Star Still Rising?

By Martin Gottlieb | Tuesday, August 19, 2008, 06:10 PM

Let’s start this thread with a comment that came in on another string. You’ll see why I wanted to do that.

First, however, a word: This blog is monitored. I decide which comments get posted. I am not posting comments that are arguments for or against a candidate. That just isn’t what we’re doing here. Plenty of other places are doing it. I can understand why my post about race was seen by some as pro-Obama. But that wasn’t the idea. Please try to remember that the predictive system in use here predicted Bush on ‘04, not to mention all the other Republican popular-vote victories in recent decades.

OK, here’s the comment. It’s a couple of weeks old. Sorry about that.

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Obama and Ohio: Race Comes Down to Race

By Martin Gottlieb | Friday, June 20, 2008, 02:27 PM

Here’s a piece that I just wrote on my day job with the Dayton Daily News. It kind of enlarges on a subject already touched on here. Starts now:

This column has already done everything possible to make clear that Barack Obama will win the national popular vote in November. It’s a Democratic year. The predictive system that is always right (pretty much) says so.

A reader might be tempted to assume that a prediction of an Obama win nationally implies a prediction of an Obama win in Ohio. After all, Ohio has been the decisive state lately (pretty much).

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The Factor to Watch? Race

By Martin Gottlieb | Friday, June 6, 2008, 07:29 PM

Where we stand as Obama wraps it up:

This post is partly in response to a comment posted on the string below. A writer suggests that the Lichtman keys are missing the intensity of the Democratic split this year. She says that intraparty wounds could, indeed, hurt Obama, even if divisions in an “out” party havn’t hurt a candidate in the past.

A response: Maybe.

But, in truth, in every election there seems to be something that has never been present before, something special that will upset the keys because of its intensity.

In the 1988, it was, among other things, “The Wimp Factor.” George H.W. Bush, having been a Uriah Heepish V.P. for so many years — having looked SO tiny compared to Reagan — was now the subject of newsweekly cover stories saying he was just too wimpy to be elected president.

But nature took its course: He started delivering Peggy Noonan’s manly lines (“Read My Lips: No Knew Taxes”), and the Republican convention featured film of him landing on an aircraft carrier as the youngest fighter pilot in WWII or something. And was that. A factor that has seemed dominant for a year disappeared in an instant. Poof.

In ‘92 it was Clinton being an adulterer and a Vietnam war protester in England and a draft dodger and having a feminist wife.

There’s always something. But so far nothing seems to have upset the keys.

Having said that, I have to also make a periodically-necessary disclaimer: The system will be wrong someday. Lichtman has never presented it as foolproof.

My own sense though is that the Democratic divisions are too close to ordinary to have any impact.

There’s nothing ideological here. I’m mean, there’s nothing about the direction of the country. By comparison, when Eisenhower beat Taft in 1952, the Republican conservatives — the base, even then — were bitterly disappointed.

Other, earlier elections saw multi-ballot conventions turning candidates who won in November: 1920, 1932.

The one factor that does give me pause (and Lichtman, too) this year is race.

We are talking, after all, about a predictive scheme that is based on historical precedents. And there is certainly no precedent for a black candidate.

You might noticed that the Lichtman keys make no mention of the demographic characteristics of the candidates. This does not mean that anybody is saying that such characteristics are irrelevant. It only means that if a given characteristic doesn’t keep a candidate from winning the nomination of a mainstream party, it is apparently not all that problematic.

This year certain characteristics would prevent an election in November: being a Muslim, certainly. Gay. Atheist. Mormon? But they would prevent a nomination first.

Being black does not seem to be in that category. However, one can’t help but notice that the Democratic nomination came down to TWO candidates of unprecedented demographic characteristics. So maybe the fact that one won isn’t so meaningful.

Not that I’m hedging. The prediction is in. I’m just making another prediction: If the prediction is wrong — which it won’t be — race will be the reason.

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