Clinton-Obama: Old vs New in the Democratic Party
I had promised myself to lay off the US election race for a day or two, but whatever else it does, it continues to make for interesting stories.
Today, the Washington Post carries a story amplifying the Clinton campaign line that Obama's victories are in states that don't really matter.
Democrats in Wyoming will hold caucuses today and -- following what is now a familiar pattern -- are expected to give Sen. Barack Obama the majority of their 12 pledged delegates.
The Illinois Democrat's strength in a Republican state that has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964 is the latest example of an ingenious strategy that neatly addresses the advantage Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) enjoys in Democratic strongholds where she and her husband have long-standing ties.
But Obama's losses Tuesday in Texas and Ohio -- coupled with his Feb. 5 defeats in California, New York and New Jersey -- have not only shown the strategy's downside. They have also given supporters of Clinton an opening for an argument that winning over affluent, educated white voters in small Democratic enclaves, such as Boise, Idaho, and Salt Lake City, and running up the score with African Americans in the Republican South exaggerate his strengths in states that will not vote Democratic in the fall.
If Obama becomes the Democratic nominee but cannot win support from working-class whites and Hispanics, they argue, then Democrats will not retake the White House in November. "If you can't win in the Southwest, if you don't win Ohio, if you don't win Pennsylvania, you've got problems in November," said Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), a Clinton supporter.
There are a number of problems with this rather simplistic view of the primary results versus the general election chances of the candidates, and fester did a good job of laying the main ones out.
Al Gore won the 2000 New Hampshire Democratic Primary. George W. Bush lost the 2000 New Hampshire Republican Primary. One would assume that if primaries are good predictors of general election results that Al Gore would have won New Hampshire in the 2000 General Election. That is not the case.
. . .
. . . the goal of a general election is to achieve a plurality of all votes cast within an electoral college voting group. . . . In a primary between two popular figures, there is a decent chance of stealing significant elements of the other's base coalition . . . while there is a minimal chance of Clinton/Obama stealing significant support from McCain in the 'bomb everyone to the stone age' crowd. Two very different objectives with two very different sets of initial moves and therefore countering moves.
Now if you want to argue based on a combination of demographics, policy, persona and organization, generic issue trends etc... that Clinton has a higher probability of beating John McCain in Ohio than Barack Obama, then that is a legitimate and interesting argument. But a linear extrapolation from a primary to the general election is an extraordinarily weak argument.
Of course, if a weak argument is all you've got . . .
As it turns out, that really important measure, the one about how the two candidates stack up in an election versus John McCain, got a nice bit of juicy data for the gristmills yesterday, complete with colourful maps.
At the moment, Barack Obama is the better general election nominee. Period. Full stop. He will have to spend less time defending blue states. He's competitive in a larger number of red states. And he's more competitive in states that have Senate elections. Barack Obama: because this is the year to bust the map wide open.
But there is more going on in this debate than just the general election prospects of Obama or Clinton, though that is the current venue where the debate is taking place. This is about the strategy the Democrats will be using going forward. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story about the fund-raising efforts of the two party's leadership committees. A fair bit of the story focused on what the DNC has been doing under its new leadership:
Party officials maintain that the D.N.C. is cash poor partly by design, reflecting a strategy by Howard Dean, the party’s chairman, to invest in building a party infrastructure rather than amassing a huge war chest.
Since he became chairman after the 2004 election, Mr. Dean has begun what he called the 50-state strategy, opening offices and hiring staff members in every state, even ones that are traditional Republican strongholds. He has also invested in a huge voter database — one that is designed to rival the Republican Party’s sophisticated voter file — that he hopes will pay off this year and allow Democratic candidates to find likely voters and make specific pitches to them.
How the costly 50-state strategy — and the cash shortfall that it has created — play out over the coming election will be a referendum on the tenure of Mr. Dean, who has had a prickly relationship with many of the party’s top officials. Under Mr. Dean’s tenure, D.N.C. fund-raising has steadily climbed, along with its expenses. So far, Mr. Dean has spent $170 million since the last presidential election to turn his vision for the party into a reality, with nearly $60 million of that raised in the last year alone.
“He’s doing the job of the party chairman in a very different way,” said Elaine C. Kamarck, a D.N.C. member and lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
“And people don’t like that,” added Ms. Kamarck, who wrote a paper “Howard Dean’s Fifty-State Strategy and the 2006 Midterm Elections.”
. . .
By contrast to the R.N.C. and its fund-raising success, the D.N.C., by many accounts, needed to be shaken up when Mr. Dean took over. For years, it had tapped a small group of wealthy donors and poured money every two or four years into battleground states, while ignoring the rest of the nation as unwinnable. There was little infrastructure aside from the party’s office in Washington.
. . .
Leaders of the Democratic Party will be watching to see if Mr. Dean’s strategy pays off.
I touched on this a little bit yesterday. Obama's primary strategy and Dean's 50-state strategy are mirror images in some respects. Their goal is to fight for every vote in every state.
Clinton, on the other hand, mirrors the traditional Democratic approach of focusing on the "important" states while writing off the rest as unwinnable and irrelevant.
Which bodes better for the Democratic party's future chances, do you think?
