TPM: still clueless in CA

Talking Points Memo has been doing a superb job covering the races in Kentucky and Pennsylvania. Josh Marshall's posts on Rand Paul have been particularly insightful. You really ought to take a look.

That has nothing to do with the main point of this post but I feel guilty hammering away at TPM and I'm afraid it's time to pick up the old nine-pounder again and start swinging at this:

Whitman's support has fallen in large part due to Democratic attacks over her connections to Goldman Sachs -- the Dems would prefer to face Poizner in the fall. There may also have been a backlash against her big personal spending on the race, which has reached $68 million so far, and a tightly controlled media operation in which she has avoided directly answering questions from reporters about the issues -- a fact that is frequently noted in media reports.

As statisticians, we are constantly being asked why something happened. We don't like the question (the subject of causality makes us nervous) but it's not something we can avoid so we approach it as rationally as we can. We look at correlations, of course, but we also look at timing, magnitudes, precedents. We consider the implications of the different hypotheses (for example, if bad weather caused a shift in behavior, that shift should be limited to certain regions). We seek out the opinions of informed sources while taking pains not to get sucked into conventional wisdom. We survey the situation on the ground and use that most important of statistical tools, common sense.

I'd like to say that the final step is testing the hypothesis, but that's not usually the way it works. When it comes to questions of causality, the final answer is usually just an educated guess. Fortunately, most of us have gotten to be pretty good guessers.

How does the Goldman Sachs hypothesis stand up to this (admittedly unscientific) approach?

For starters, the timing is all wrong.


(I'm assuming these are mostly likely-voter polls)

The Goldman Sachs-Whitman connection came out in February. The Abacus scandal hit big in mid-April. Poizner's Vulture ad was released at the end of April. Which of these would you associate with an inflection point in Whitman's support?

By comparison, the news for much of April had been dominated by Arizona's immigration law (which passed their house on April 13th) and since March, Poizner had been running ads attacking Whitman as being soft on immigration.



How about magnitude and precedent? Whitman took a fifty point lead down into the single digits. Immigration and RINOism are huge issues for the California GOP. Either could easily kill a campaign. The Goldman Sachs story, on the other hand, is abstract, relatively minor, and only tangentially related to the issues California conservatives care about.

And has anyone EVER burned off forty-plus points of lead because of this kind of business deal?

And finally, do any of the major players, the ones with access to internal polling, actually believe this hypothesis? Poizner clearly doesn't or he'd be making more than passing references to Goldman Sachs. Meg clearly doesn't or she wouldn't be spending her time insisting that she supports neither amnesty nor Senator Boxer. Hell, even the CDP doesn't or they wouldn't pick Peter Coyote to pitch their case. (I'm not saying that the CDP ads are ineffective; I'm saying they are targeted at the general election.)

To make this even less scientific, here's my good ol' boy take on what happened. It's the old story of an out-of-towner walking into a bar, hearing a couple of locals bragging and believing every word. ("You mean you really took down a $70 million dollar campaign?" "Yep, and we did it with just one little website.")

I suppose there's no harm in a little boasting (and it's not something that Democratic operatives get to do that often in California). I just hope that the people at TPM are a bit more worldly the next time the situation comes around.

And to close out the subject of nine pound hammers (and get our minds on something more pleasant than politics), here's a mental health break from a friend of mine:



Update: Ed Kilgore has a good analysis of the race here. I think he gives too much weight to the Goldman Sachs story but I may still just be stuck in argument mode as a reaction to TPM.

Does Talking Points Memo know what it's talking about?

When it comes to California, apparently not. TPM (along with TNR) is one of my two favorite political sites but like many news organizations they tend to be NY/DC-centric and their quality tends to drop as they get further from home.

Here's the opening sentence from today's story:

Last week, California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman released an ad that called Republican opponent Steve Poizner that dreaded "L" word -- liberal.

My first thought was that TPM was under the impression that Whitman just started calling Poizner a liberal; my second thought was that my first thought couldn't be right so I checked previous TPM stories on the race. Here's how they described the ad on May 11th:

Whitman Ad: My Conservative Opponent Is A Liberal!

California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has a word she'd like you to associate with her GOP primary opponent: liberal.

In a new Whitman ad aimed at state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, a narrator ominously asks, "How liberal is Steve Poizner?" before rattling off a long list -- He supported Al Gore! He supported higher sales taxes! -- before the narrator declares:

"Liberal on taxes. Liberal on spending. Just another liberal Sacramento politician."

As we reported earlier, a new poll shows Whitman's lead over Poizner in California's June 8 Republican gubernatorial primary at a very thin 39% to 37%.

How badly out of the loop was TPM here? For over a month, Meg Whitman has been running, in mind-numbingly heavy rotation, an attack ad with the tag line "Way more liberal than he says he is." As for that "long list," it wasn't very long, particularly considering that it is the exact same list that Whitman has been running (and running and running) in every single attack since February.

The TPM story suggests that these charges were a reaction to the race getting close despite the fact that they started when (according to TPM's own poll tracker) Whitman had a lead of over forty points and she pulling out further ahead.

It would have taken less than fifteen minutes of research to catch these problems. This is not the kind of reporting we expect from Talking Points Memo.

CA election update -- the ad Meg Whitman didn't want to run

It's been almost a week since my last post on the subject and things have been moving along at a nice clip.

Goldman Sachs continues to show up in the discussion though mainly among Democrats. It has the makings of a potent issue in the general election but it's still a minor one in the primary.

The big issue for Republicans at the moment is the very one Whitman wanted to avoid: immigration. This is not a great issue for Poizner (he'd also like to hold onto the Latino vote), but it represents his best chance for a primary victory and he's hammering away at it and forcing Whitman into the never desirable "am not" mode of campaigning.

This weekend I was in a shop in Southern California where I heard the following ad over the radio:

Announcer: Meg Whitman on illegal immigration.

Meg Whitman: Don't be fooled by misleading ads, my position on immigration is crystal clear. Illegal immigrants are just that, illegal. I am 100 percent against amnesty for illegal immigrants. Period. As Governor, I will crack down on so-called sanctuary cities like San Francisco who thumb their nose at our laws. Illegal immigrants should not expect benefits from the state of California. No driver's license and no admission to state-funded institutions of higher education. And I'll create an economic fence to crack down on employers who break the law by using illegal labor.

Pete Wilson: This is former Governor Pete Wilson. I know how important it is to stop illegal immigration and I know Meg Whitman. Meg will be tough as nails on illegal immigration. She'll fight to secure our border and go after sanctuary cities. Please join me in supporting Meg Whitman for Governor.

Announcer: Paid for by Meg Whitman for Governor 2010. Meg2010.com.

The clientèle was largely Hispanic.

Another failure for the blitzkrieg strategy? -- updated

This is getting interesting. There's a new poll out in California that shows Meg Whitman leading Steve Poizner 39 to 37. Now it's always nice to be ahead (even if it is within the margin of error) but there are two small details that might undercut Whitman's sense of triumph:

1. She spent $70,000,000 establishing that two point difference;

2. It was a forty-nine point lead when she started.

This has been a fun campaign to follow (who among us is above a little schadenfreude at the sight of an arrogant billionaire getting blindsided?), but it has also been interesting from a strategic point of view, raising all sorts of neat questions about the best way of runninga campaign for a compound election, particularly if you happen to be a Republican in a blue state in 2010.

Strategies in simple elections are, well, pretty simple: you pick the course of action that gets you the most votes. There are actually two goals here -- you want to maximize both the size of your mandate and your chances of winning -- but they generally line up so well that we can treat them as one.

Strategies for compound elections are anything but simple. For starters you can no longer count on chances of winning and size of mandate lining up. Mandate becomes a secondary goal that has to be somehow weighed in. Worse yet, the probability of winning is now the product of the probabilities of winning two different elections, each of which has a different (in some cases radically different) optimal strategy.

Richard Nixon solved this problem with a hard pivot strategy -- run as far to the right as you can during the primary, then run as fast as you can to the center in the general election. He based this on the observation that Republicans tended to be much more loyal to their candidates. Once you had the primary under your belt, you could generally count on their votes. (Nixon had also seen what happened when Goldwater had gone hard right and stayed there in '64.)

Nixon's insight was brilliant. It was not, however, all that robust. Republican core voters will no longer tolerate movement to the center, even when their candidate is trailing badly. This leaves GOP candidates in blue and purple states with a serious problem. The Nixon strategy is forbidden; the Goldwater strategy is hopeless.

For a while, it looked like a blitzkrieg strategy might work. This approach involves coming in with a big war chest and a stack of endorsements, establishing a huge lead as early as possible, marginalizing primary competitors, and running a campaign for a de facto simple election. Charlie Crist and Meg Whitman both tried this approach and though it is possible that either or both might end up winning in the general election, it is safe to say that the blitzkrieg failed.

Crist has adopted what you might call a Gordian-knot strategy and skipped directly to the simple election. I don't see that option for Whitman. She can continue carpet-bombing the state with ads while not taking a position on anything that doesn't involve tax-cuts. No polls to date show Poizner ahead. It's possible she could scrape by without a course change.

Or she could try a hard right turn and match Poizner's positions on gay marriage and the Arizona immigration law, but it's awfully late in the game to try to win over social conservatives and these stances will be hard to live down in a general election. Still, if the trend lines continue to hold, she may not have a choice.

Update: Talking Points Memo has a completely different take on Poizner's surge, crediting it mostly to Whitman's association with Goldman Sachs. I suspect that the difference has a lot to do with geography. TPM is based in New York where it's easy to imagine the world revolving around the financial services industry. I'm sitting in Whittier, where I've noticed the following:

1. Various groups have been trying to push the Goldman Sachs story for months;

2. By contrast, the Poizner campaign has only gone into high gear recently (just before Whitman started to slide);

3. Goldman Sachs continues to play a small role in the campaign. The "Vultures" ad (which debuted April 30) is not in particularly heavy rotation. It's hard to see how it could have slashed Whitman's lead in about a week;

4. People seem to be paying more attention to more prominent ads featuring immigration, McClintock's endorsement, and Arnold Schwarzenegger morphing into Meg Whitman.

TPM is still my favourite place for politics, but I think they got this one wrong.