Net Negative (Is Sort of an Understatement)
But so what?
Graph via Andrew Rudalevige and the Monkey Cage (and Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group).
UPDATE See also John Sides:
At this point, I would say there is suggestive evidence that Mr. Romney’s advantages in advertising helped him win in Florida – but it qualifies as circumstantial. The longer the campaign goes on, and the longer Mr. Romney’s advertising advantage persists, the more data we will accumulate to test these effects.
Speechless. Someone please scale these donors.
An update on candidate-centered elections, circa 2011. The Citizens United ruling has led to the creation of Super PACs with very few legal restrictions. Several of these PACs are each operating for the presumed interest of single candidates while being led by one of that candidate’s old allies and/or staffers. From Nicholas Confessore for the New York Times:
“There’s not a big difference between these candidate-specific Super PACs and candidate campaign committees,” said Paul S. Ryan, associate legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center. “I think it’s a joke. What they are doing is abiding by the very meager restrictions on coordinations on expenditures and solicitations. But that leaves a wide swath of activities that can be fully coordinated under present law.”
Expanded party? More like the expanding party.
Wisconsin 2010 Gubernatorial and 2011 State Senate Recall Elections
In sports, I’m against the idea of a moral victory. But I don’t think the Wisconsin Democrats earned a moral victory yesterday. Across the 6 state senate districts, the Democratic challengers facing incumbents took an average of 2.33 percentage points off of the vote share that Scott Walker won in 2010 in the face of Barack Obama’s approval numbers going from 47% in November 2010 to 41% this week (according to Gallup). National conditions don’t suggest a favorable climate for Democrats right now.
This wasn’t a random sample of Wisconsin districts. The deck was stacked against the Democratic challengers by current national forces, by the presumed quality of the incumbents that were being faced (Republicans who won elections in the Democratic climate of 2008), and the relatively conservative nature of the districts they were competing in. The Democrats might not have taken control of the State Senate, but they certainly over-performed reasonable expectations we might have had for them.
N.B. I grabbed this bit of data from Craig Gilbert who runs a table heavy, but still great blog about Wisconsin politics.
UPDATE See also Charles Franklin who looks like he has more precise data which suggest that districts 8 and 10 were also both districts that improved for the Democrats.
UPDATE 2 The New York Times gets it.
My colleague Tom Holbrook analyzes the 1948 to 2008 data and warns against using current (fifteen months out) economic conditions and presidential approval polls in forecasting the 2012 election:
Look, it’s perfectly natural to gnash your teeth or get all giddy about your party’s prospects based on how things are going now. I certainly do that. The point is that you should spare yourself the emotional energy and wait until we get closer to the election. Then, you can start to worry (or celebrate), depending on how things are going.
Let’s all just chill out a bit until we figure out who won Republican nomination. Worry about the Red Sox and the MVP award or other fun stuff.
Vote Today.
No one can accuse the Journal Sentinel of mincing words on this one.
