Wow. The pundit class is in full swing, interpreting the meaning of NY-23. "What's it say about Obama's administration?" "What's it say about the state of the Republican Party?" "What's it say for the upcoming health care debate?" So many questions. I'll do my best to answer them, each in turn.

Nothing, nothing, and nothing!

I'm sorry to disappoint (I'm not sorry!). I know we're all excited to have a dramatic election to ponder - so I hate to be the party pooper (I relish being the party pooper!). No doubt the twists and turns have been dramatic. But sometimes drama has a deeper meaning - like in Hamlet. And sometimes it doesn't - like in the Young and the Restless.

This is the Young and the Restless. There are few, if any, broader inferences to draw from this race about the national political climate.

Here are five reasons why:

(1) Dede Scozzafava was selected by the Republican Party in an extraordinary way. This should pour a bucket of cold water on the idea that there is some internal revolution happening in the Republican Party. Most Republican nominees have to go through a primary process in which the "base" evaluates candidates. This did not happen, and that created two big problems: (a) a candidate too moderate for the Republican base was chosen (b) in a process that does not have the legitimacy that primary elections have. If Scozzafava had to compete in a primary, she either would have lost (most likely scenario) or, had she won (less likely), she would have been able to claim a legitimacy that she could not claim. Because most party nominees are chosen by primaries, it means you cannot extrapolate from NY-23 to the broader party.

(2) Dede Scozzafava was a TERRIBLE candidate. Her people called the cops on John McCormack. Seriously. She held a press conference in front of Doug Hoffman's campaign office, and enabled the Conservative Party candidate to produce this lovely bit of free publicity:

Scozzafava didn't drop out only because Hoffman was on the rise. She dropped out because she was running out of money. I wonder why. Suppose you're a donor to Scozzafava. You're a Snowe-Collins-Specter type Republican, convinced that you're the future of the party and so on and so forth. Still, your money is as hard earned as any buck held by a tea-partier. Are you going to give it to this woman? I doubt it. That's what we call chasing good money after bad.

If Dede Scozzafava was a substantially worse candidate than your average Republican nominee in a competitive race - and she clearly was - then we cannot generalize from her fate to the fate of Snowe-Collins-Specter type nominees.

Incidentally, I don't know why pundits are so obsessed with northeastern Republicans. Hasn't anybody noticed how many seats from the South the GOP has picked up in the last 20 years? That seems to me to be an extraordinarily beneficial tradeoff for the Grand Old Party. The Northeast has been shedding seats decade after decade. In the last thirty years, the Mid-Atlantic region has lost 18 seats. And they're going South - Florida and Texas have picked up 18 seats in the last 30 years. If, in 1976, the Ghost of William McKinley (the quintessential Republican) had been offered the following deal: "Decline in the Northeast but rise in the South, or stay the same in both regions"...wouldn't he have taken the swap? Maybe not at first - but after the Ghost of Mark Hanna had told him all about the upcoming demographic changes in both regions - I bet he would!

Relatedly, it seems to me that the Republican Party - being a party that stretches across all regions of the country - should weigh its attention according to population. And, in that kind of analysis, more focus should be dedicated to fielding good candidates in the Midwest and especially the South than in the Northeast. That's where the most potential pickups for the GOP are. So why so much attention given to the Northeast? (Partial answer: Most people encouraging the GOP to focus on the Northeast rarely if ever vote Republican. E.g. David Axelrod's recent advice for how the Republican Party can build a majority. But that's a column for another day!)

(3) New York has long-standing third party options. One purpose of the New York Conservative Party is to act as a check on the Republican Party. Most states do not have this, and if this race had occurred in, say, Pennsylvania - where there is no such third party - Hoffman would not have had the kind of opportunity he found in the Conservative Party.

This makes a big difference. This was a real three-way race because New York has real third parties. Most states don't. Again, this makes it really hard to generalize from NY-23 to the rest of the country.

(4) Turnout could be really, really low. The NY-20 special election had about 160,000 people vote in it. Compare that to the more than 287,000 who voted in the general election in NY-20 in 2008. The special had just 57% of the turnout that the general had. This makes a huge difference.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that turnout in NY-23 will be 57% of what it was in the 2008 general. That would put it at about 125,000, meaning that you'd need 62,501 votes to win a majority. I'll posit that there are this many potential Hoffman votes in the district and this many potential Owens votes, too! What matters is who actually comes out to vote. That's the dominant factor in low-turnout special elections.

This matters to some extent in general elections, but not nearly as much. Accordingly, it is very difficult to generalize from a special election result to the sentiment of the entire district, let alone the country at large!

(5) The 2010 midterms are a year away. I'll make two observations about many of the pundits tut-tutting about NY-23:

(a) They'll admit that a year is a "lifetime" in politics, but this only ever serves as a C/Y/A cliché rather than a fundamental truth that informs their analysis.

(b) They'll have forgotten about NY-23 a year from now.

A year is a long time in American politics. In November, 2008 Barack Obama won the presidency of the United States. A year prior, he was trailing Hillary Clinton badly and under fire from his own supporters for not wasting his money as HRC was. A year before that, few people even knew who he was. In November, 1991 George H.W. Bush's job approval stood at 62%. A year later a folksy governor from Arkansas had unseated him. In November, 1938 Republicans picked up nearly 100 House seats in the midterm election, and FDR looked to be finished. A (little less than a) year later, Germany invaded Poland and the prospect of world war made FDR the center of the political world once again. In November, 1928 Herbert Hoover was elected in the third consecutive Republican landslide in what really looked to be an enduring majority. A year later...well, you get the idea.

***

So, am I interested in the results of NY-23? You bet I am. But I'm a political junkie, and I find this stuff highly entertaining. That doesn't mean that it carries with it any particular meaning. You can be entertained by Hamlet and Y & R, but only one of them means anything.

Fellow junkies, I implore you: let's see this contest for what it is - simple, meaningless entertainment - and stop pontificating on its broader implications!

Posted by Jay Cost at 09:05 AM | Permalink

Gallup's breakdown of Obama's job approval by age was illuminating.

First off, note Obama's drop-off among young people. Young people were supposed to be a critical component of the new Democratic majority. Granted their approval is still slightly higher than the other groups, but it has far and away been the most volatile, dropping more than any other. This should not come as a huge surprise. Baby Boomers were partial to McGovern in 1972, but swung around to Reagan in the 80s. Young people's political dispositions are still being formed.

Yet, Obama's worst poll number here is actually his share among seniors. I'm guessing it relates to the health care debate. The White House should be very concerned, and for one simple reason: seniors vote.

Here are some empirics on that claim. I looked at states that featured hotly contested midterm Senate elections in 2006. I counted ten: Maryland, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Virginia. For each of these, I pulled out the share of the electorate that was 65 and over for President in 2008, Senate in 2006, and President in 2004.

First off, there was not a noticeable drop-off among senior voters from 2004 to 2008. Only Ohio shows a significant change, and it has an increase. About half have a slight increase and half have a slight decrease. That's consistent with national polls, which have seniors contributing 16% of the total electorate in 2004 and 2008.

Second, notice 2006. In seven of the ten states, seniors accounted for a larger share of the electorate during the midterm. In several of them, the differences were substantial. At least in the hotly contested Senate elections, the 2006 electorate was noticeably older. This corresponds with national data as well. The national House exit poll in 2006 found 19% of the electorate was 65 or older, compared to 16% in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections.

One reason for this might be that there is a lot of stimulation to vote in a presidential election - especially the last two matchups, which were hotly contested - but that stimulation drops off for the midterms. Thus, you're left with an electorate voting more out of habit, rather than being drawn to participate by the excitement of the spectacle. That could give seniors an advantage.

If Obama's numbers with seniors stay in the cellar, this could mean midterm problems next year for the Democrats. The silver lining here for the White House is that most of the drop-off occurred recently, which suggests that Obama might be able to win at least some of these people back. If he can improve his overall standing on the health care issue, he'll probably pick up with seniors.

Posted by Jay Cost at 11:16 AM | Permalink

Presidential mandates are inherently political, as Sean Trende and I argued in January: "Though they are cloaked in the language of democratic theory, they are more a matter of what adroit politicians can claim for themselves in the face of the opposition..."

In a few instances instances, politicians can feasibly claim a mandate to implement a particular policy. The election of 1896 revolved around a clear policy debate, thus implying a policy mandate for McKinley (at least on gold). More often, mandates cannot be linked to actual policies, but to problems like recession. The election of 1932 is an example of this. That's where politics can play a big role. Of course, many elections imply no mandate whatsoever. The election of 1988 is a good example. The vote that year was more an endorsement of the past eight than an indication of what should happen next.

Last year seems to fall into that middle range. There was no crucial policy choice made - nothing like gold over silver - but President Obama can feasibly claim some kind of mandate to get the economy out of recession. I'd base this conclusion on a few data points. The first is the trajectory of the horse race. Gallup showed a dead heat when the Democratic National Convention began - and after the Republican National Convention, McCain jumped out to a modest lead. Then the financial market began to crumble, and that was essentially the end of the campaign:

There was very little change after this. The exit poll indicated that the economy was the decisive factor. A comparison of 2004 to 2008 is instructive.

There was no single issue that dominated in 2004. Voter concerns were distributed evenly around Iraq, terrorism, the economy, and moral values. Additionally, those issues cut in opposite directions: two favored Kerry, two favored Bush. The election of 2008 was different. Voters' concerns centered on the economy - and they broke to Obama by the same rate as the whole country did.

The 2008 election is a typical American response to economic woes. The country has been voting for out-parties during economic slowdowns since 1840, when it tossed Martin van Buren out on his duff. The United States votes for prosperity. It always has. It always will.

That's why I have been so perplexed by the Obama administration's legislative strategy this year. The contrast between the stimulus bill and the health care debate is especially peculiar. It's a strange sight to watch continued gloomy numbers trickle out from the economic pulse-takers on the one hand, and Congress debating a "public option" and fretting over CBO scores on the other.

The following is Keith Hennessy's analysis of the stimulus bill:

The President's mistake was in largely deferring to Congress on the composition of the stimulus bill. Rather than allowing Congress to pump hundreds of billions of dollars through slow-spending and inefficient bureaucracies, the President should have insisted that Congress instead send all the funds directly to the American people and let them spend it quickly and efficiently. Given his policy preferences, he could have directed a large share of those funds to poor people who don't pay income taxes...

The final 2009 stimulus law broke down like this:

The problem is that only 11% of the first line (discretionary spending) will be spent by October 1 of this year. In contrast, 31-32% of the entitlement and tax cuts lines will be out the door by that time. (I have questions about the speed of the entitlement part. The bulk of that is Medicaid spending, and it's not clear to me that a Federal payment to a State means the cash is immediately flowing into the private economy.)

If we extend our window to October 1, 2010, then less than half the discretionary spending will be out the door, while almost 3/4 of the entitlement spending and all of the tax cuts will be out the door and affecting the economy. The largest part of the stimulus law is therefore also the slowest spending part. This is fine if you're trying to increase GDP growth over the next 2-4 years. If you're going for short-term GDP growth, it makes no sense.

What's odd is that when the stimulus bill was under consideration, the President said there was no time for a real debate. Why the need for speed if the bill wouldn't begin to take effect for months? This seemed like a rhetorical trick designed to deflect criticism from what was a questionable bill.

Relatedly, Republican concerns were brushed aside, with the implicit claim that they were rooted in bad faith. The problem with this argument is that the Republican House caucus was unanimously opposed to the bill. Members like Bono Mack, Castle, Kirk, Lance, LoBiondo, McHugh, Reichert, and Smith all voted nay. That's significant. These members voted in favor of Waxman-Markey, so minimally we can conclude that they are open to Democratic ideas. Additionally, Obama tapped McHugh to be Secretary of the Army, so he can't be a Republican hack. There are certainly fewer moderates in the Republican House caucus now than there were in 2005 - but some are still in the lower chamber. The fact that they were unanimously opposed to the bill suggests that perhaps there was something wrong with it.

All in all, the process that produced the stimulus bill was not a good one. Rather than use his enormous political capital to construct a bill designed to confront the economic crisis head-on, the President left its construction mostly up to Congress, which is inclined to particularism and waste. It was then rushed through the legislature without a full review. The opposition to it was painted as politically motivated. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the final product was a bill that will not produce much effect until some time in the future - and now some are calling for a second stimulus.

Meanwhile, the President and Congress are moving forward carefully and deliberately on health care. There's a robust debate that includes congressional committees across both chambers, the President, members of both parties, and the public. The President has clearly indicated that this is his top legislative priority, and he intends to do what is necessary to get a good bill that he can sign into law. Over the next few months, Washington's focus will squarely be on health care, even though it sits well below the economy on lists of public concerns.

This seems backwards to me. It's as if the economy was a secondary concern that had to be dealt with quickly so attention could shift to the rest of the President's domestic agenda. Why so much focus on health care and so little focus on the economy? Perhaps it's because Obama - like many Democratic Presidents before him - wants to be the next Franklin Roosevelt. For whatever reason, they seem to dream of getting themselves into the pantheon of leaders who expand the federal government's role in the provision of social welfare. And health care is the white whale of the Democratic Party's social welfare agenda. The President who finally delivers is guaranteed the spot next to the Squire of Hyde Park.

I understand why President Obama might feel this temptation. Democrats see themselves as members of the progressive party, and their leaders are expected to make progress on issues of social welfare. Their overwhelming numbers in the legislature augur well for a bill - so shouldn't Obama and company give it a try? Yet, there are other factors to consider. FDR guided Social Security through Congress in 1935, after he had already dedicated the government to massive relief and recovery efforts, after GDP had stabilized, and after the public had validated his initial efforts in the 1934 midterm. LBJ pushed for the Great Society in the mid-60s, a time of immense prosperity. Expanding social welfare requires a meeting of the man and the moment, which helps explain why some well regarded presidents (Truman and Clinton) failed in their attempts.

This moment is calling for a focus on the economy. That's why Barack Obama has the top job. It's not because of cap-and-trade, not because of health care, not because of his magnetic presence on the campaign trail - but because the economy was shrinking at a 6.1% annualized rate by Election Day. Americans were voting against recession by voting for him. This gives him a claim to a mandate, which not every President enjoys. He now has an opportunity to put his stamp on the country's economic policy in the name of recovery. Yet he's not doing that. He encouraged the Congress to rush through a poorly designed stimulus package that he had little involvement in; now he has focused the legislature's time and attention on health care, which is a secondary concern right now.

I think this is a strategic mistake. My scan of the history of American politics does not indicate that we've been governed so much by "alignments" - the systems of 1860, 1896, 1932, 1968, and so on. Instead, I see a country that votes for growth. That's the true American ideology. Left, right, or middle - the average American wants prosperity. When the majority party fails to deliver growth after having been elected to do so - the electoral consequences can be significant.

Posted by Jay Cost at 12:00 AM | Permalink

That's what TNR's John Judis thinks, and he concludes the tie is good news for the President.

Special elections in the first year of a new president are important because the parties turn them into national referenda. And this election was no exception. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden campaigned for Murphy in the closing weeks; Murphy, who was relatively unknown in the district, based his campaign largely on his support for and Tedesco's opposition to Obama's stimulus plan...

Murphy's election night edge doesn't suggest that the Democrats will romp in 2010. Too many things can happen in the meantime. But if Murphy had lost by a significant margin--say 56 to 44 percent--it would have shown that within a district that Obama carried in 2008, there was a significant undercurrent of discontent with his presidency and his policies. That would have emboldened Obama's opponents.

So, is it?

Answer: not necessarily.

In an article written in 1999 for Legislative Studies Quarterly, Keith Gaddie, Charles Bullock, and Scott Buchanan ask "What is so special about special elections?"

They look at special elections over a 26 year period, 1973 to 1997. They try to predict the outcome of special elections based on six distinct factors:

(a) Presidential job approval
(b) Whether the candidates held previous elective office
(c) How much money each candidate spent
(d) The racial and ethnic composition of the electorate
(e) The normal partisan vote in the district (i.e. the average GOP presidential vote in the last two cycles)
(f) Time

They run the same model for special elections and open seat, regularly scheduled elections - and they find that presidential job approval is not a statistically significant factor in special election outcomes. Generally, they conclude:

In the context of congressional elections in general, special elections are as vulnerable to the constituency characteristics and candidate-specific attributes that structure other open-seat outcomes. In that respect, then, special-election outcomes that change partisan control can be viewed as the product of normal electoral circumstances and not referenda on the administration.

This conclusion is similar to the one that Frank Feigert and Pippa Norris draw in their 1990 study of special elections (also in LSQ) in the U.S., Britain, Canada, and Australia. Like Gaddie et al., they infer that candidate-specific factors are more in play.

Now, this doesn't mean we can draw a firm and final conclusion. There are reasons why presidential job approval might not have been a factor in the Gaddie/Bullock/Buchanan model but actually mattered in NY-20. The insignificance of presidential job approval in their model might be a statistical blip. Additionally, special elections have not received much scholarly study - so our conclusions must remain tentative. Also, the nature of these special elections might have changed since 1997, making them more "national" and a kind of referendum on the President. This election in particular might have been a referendum because of the salience of national news at this point (the bank bailout, the recession, etc).

However, these findings should give us pause before we go along with Judis's conclusion. There is evidence that special elections, while generally mimicking the factors that influence open seat contests, are not referenda on the President.

Posted by Jay Cost at 11:11 AM | Permalink

In my recent discussion with Ruy Teixeira, I argued that true ideologues constitute a relatively small percentage of the public. But that is not to say that the broad middle of the nation does not have a core set of values that guides its political decisions. Among other things, it believes firmly in the idea of economic growth, and it isn't hesitant to punish politicians for weak economies.

The relationship between the electorate and the politicians is akin to Darth Vader and his lieutenants in The Empire Strikes Back. When the underlings failed Vader, he impatiently struck them down without a second thought, moving on to the next in command. Similarly, when politicians fail to deliver growth, the judgment of the electorate is just as swift and almost as brutal.

A Gallup poll conducted in 1999 found that 71% of the country approved of George H.W. Bush's job as president. Yet Mr. Bush had the misfortune of presiding over a downswing in the business cycle. Though the economy had been growing for six straight quarters by Election Day, unemployment was above 7%. He won just 37% of the vote. That 1990/91 recession also hurt his successor. In the early Clinton years, the economy grew and unemployment fell, but growth in real per capita income was slow to rebound. By the midterm, just 43% of voters approved of Clinton's handling of the economy, and the Democrats lost 52 House seats.

How's that for brutality? One (relatively mild) recession, and the public delivers harsh punishments to both parties years after growth returned. "Apology accepted, Captain Needa."

There are three lessons for today's politics. First, the country is impatient about growth. Recessions are virtually immoral in this country - and if growth is slow to return, or if its effects are slow to be felt by the average voter, the public will not take it lightly. The top line GDP number is not enough. If other indicators - like unemployment and real income, metrics that speak to how people are experiencing the economy - are still weak, the public's response can be just as wrathful.

Second, the public's diagnosis of the economic problem need not be enlightened. Imagine you lost your keys on a dark street. You'll look for them under the nearest streetlight - not because that's where they are, but because that's where you can see. That's how the electorate makes judgments about complicated subjects like the economy. It focuses on what it understands, whether or not that gets to the real issues. Recall the political damage George H.W. Bush suffered because he hadn't seen a price scanner before. Somehow, this meant he was out of touch, and thus not suited to bring the economy to recovery.

Third, Walter Shaprio recently suggested that Republicans will not gain from any populist backlash. I wouldn't be so sure. Out parties can make substantial, recession-related midterm gains despite having been led by unpopular presidents. Perhaps the best example is 1938. Amidst the "Roosevelt Recession," the country turned to the party of the reviled Herbert Hoover, who still had a negative rating in 1944. FDR's majority in the subsequent Congress depended entirely upon the old Confederacy - meaning that the GOP was the country's first choice outside the one-party South.

This links into the second point. The public lacks economic expertise, yet it must still assign blame for the struggling economy. It is unsurprising that - regardless of whether he deserves it - the President is often the recipient. After all, he is the most visible politician in the country. Additionally, Presidents are quick to accept credit for a flourishing economy, so inevitably they take the blame for when it languishes. When you blame the President and want a change, the opposition party is the only viable option.

While the current focus on Timothy Geithner, the Treasury, and the financial markets is understandable - this will probably not be the script of the broader political battle over the next 20 months. Assuming that the financial system is brought under control, the political debate will focus relentlessly on recession and recovery. Though the Administration, the CBO and the Blue Chip forecasters project modest growth in 2010 (ranging from 1.9% to 3.0%), all of them expect high unemployment (7.9% to 9.1%) and an economy performing below peak capacity. If these predictions are true - the corresponding public dissatisfaction will define the campaign of 2010, and the legislative battles that precede it.

Both sides will struggle to pin blame for the weak economy on the other. Republicans will indict President Obama, arguing that his policies failed to improve things. President Obama will remind voters of the previous administration, arguing that congressional Republicans advocate the same policies that brought about the recession. The public lacks the technical expertise to arbitrate based on the merits - so the outcome will depend in part on how bad the economy actually is (the worse it is, the worse for President Obama), and which side shows the greatest political acumen.

If you find this to be a dispiriting commentary on democratic accountability, think of it this way. Electoral justice might be rough, but it's also consistent: bad economies mean electoral defeat for somebody. Thus, those who are still in office when the dust settles learn a valuable lesson: grow the economy, or next time it could be you. In the long run, the public gets what it wants - a government dedicated first and foremost to growth.

Posted by Jay Cost at 12:00 AM | Permalink