R or D, you’ve gotta give it up to the Obama campaign for pushing the envelope on new technology in the campaign. Today, TechPresident posts about a new Iphone application that is supposed to work as your personal GOTV organizer. Among the features it has is the ability to organize your contacts by state of importance, quick access to Obama’s policy positions, and a database of local Obama events in the area.
The value of this app is to facilitate the “neighbor to neighbor” elements of GOTV efforts that proved so successful for the Bush campaign in 2004. The Obama IPhone application was actually volunteer created and ultimately adopted by the campaign. It’s a testament to the open source nature of some (not all) aspects of the campaign that its volunteers take such ownership over the campaign process.
Something interesting is popping up in recent swing state surveys. Obama is underperforming among black voters. According to Survey USA, John McCain is garnering a significant chunk of Black voters in critical swing states: 15% of Ohio African-Americans, 17% of Indiana African-Americans, 20% of New Jersey African-Americans,
21% of Florida African-Americans
These numbers seem remarkably high given the fact that George Bush got only 11% of the Black vote in 2004 and that was a marked improvement from 2000 when Bush got only 9% of the Black vote against Al Gore. How do we make sense of this?
This might be a particular phenomenon among Black voters in swing states. I went back to 2004 to compare Kerry’s performance to Obama at the same time in the race. According to Survey USA, these were the percent of Black voters who were supporting George Bush in early October of 2004.
Florida — 10/1 – 16%
Indiana — 10/3 – 16%
Ohio — 10/3 – 20%
New Jersey 10/3 15%
These figures are slightly lower than McCain’s totals at the same time in 2008. This given the fact that a) Obama is a Black candidate and b) 2008 is a much more favorable climate for Democrats.
More surprisingly, this represents a drop In support for Obama from June, when Survey USA was in the field in these states here were the results:
This raises a few interesting questions. Why is McCain’s support growing among Black voters in swing states? One answer might be fear of what an Obama president might do for race relations? The Boston globe had a headline reading “WHite Supremacists Hope Obama win Creates Backlash”
Another interesting question is whether a chunk of these voters “come home” to the Democratic party. To understand this, I looked at each state’s final exit poll and found some migration back to the Democrats.
With the deepening economic crisis and the overall gravity of this election, why am I (and others hung up on how Sarah Palin will perform in the Vice Presidential debate on Thursday night?
The main reason, I think, is that the Katie Couric interview I saw scared me so much that I’ve been on a fact-finding mission to determine if this woman is for real. I’ve watched some of her 2006 gubernatorial debates and her interview with Janet Napolitano on Charlie Rose. My conclusion is that she’s definitely more politically adroit than she revealed in the Couric interviews, but there’s something unsettling about watching even these, more polished, appearances. She seems to be gliding through these appearances with no one really questioning her core beliefs.
This might be patently unfair, but after watching these videos, Palin’s rise reminds me of Peter Sellers’ character in Being There.
In the movie, Sellers plays a gardener who works tending a rich man’s garden. he lives a relatively sheltered life and thus learns about the outside world through television. When his employer dies, Chance must go out on his own. Through a series of misunderstandings and chance encounters, he becomes an adviser to the U.S. president and a celebrity. The media celebrates his “folksy wisdom” and he is ultimately tapped to be president.
Of course, Palin has more political skill and is actually conscious of her state of affairs, but her appeal strikes me as similar to that of Sellers’ character. Her very anti-intellectualism is seen as a boon to those whose political ideology she shares. For the rest who are not ideological, she’s an every woman. Judith Warner refers to Palin as tapping into the “inner Elle Woods” of lots of women (and probably men).
But this is a scary proposition. take for instance this incredibly insightful article by Andrew Halcro, an independent gubernatorial candidate who debated Palin twice in 2006. He recalls comparing notes post debate with Palin when she offered this observation:
Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I’m amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, ‘Does any of this really matter?
While we all can relate to instances where we felt “over our heads” and it is appealing to turn to “simplicity” as a response to a complex world, but it strikes me as a great dice roll to elect people to high office based on “folksiness.” I’ll be watching Thursday with great interest.
But 1) does it create a backlash among working class white women who identify with Palin and 2) does it set expectations for this week’s debates so low that a string of coherent sentences become a triumph. Keep in mind that this woman beat an incumbent establishment Republican in her gubernatorial primary and beat an established Democrat to become governor. She had to have done something right in her debates to get there.
The Sunlight Foundation brings us a nifty data animation presentation detailing the increase in contributions from the financial sector over the last two decades (HT: TechPresident). it’s worth a look. Particularly because it provides visual representation for the relationship between the increase in contributions to Congress and passage of the 1998 Glass-Stenghal legislation that deregulated the financial services sector. While political scientists debate the direction of the causal arrow: does money effect member ideology or does member ideology affect contributions, it does provide important context for understanding where we are today. let me know what you think.
In reading the McCain campaign’s latest gambit to suspend his campaign, cancel the debates, and fly to Washington to solve the financial crisis, my mind wanders to a conversation I had with a university president in which she references High Point University’s newly created Director of WOW! According to an NPR story on the school’s initiative:
The campus now features ice cream trucks, valet parking, a concierge desk, a hot tub and free snacks. Classical music wafts through the grounds.
While academics scoff at the “bread and circus” elements of this initiative, it certainly does help break through the clutter of universities competing for students. I think the McCain campaign understands that to break through the noise of popular culture, you need a “wow” campaign. The pick of Sara Palin was a WOW! pick. The move to suspend the campaign and cancel the debates is a WOW move designed to break through the noise.
I don’t know that I have a solid opinion of whether periodically shocking a voting public with brazen measures has a negative effect on American politics. I do wonder what effect it has on governance? The problem with the WOW! factor is that it’s short lived, fleeting and not akin to building sustainable governing coalitions. It might be able to sway a close election if a WOW! move happens days before an election, however
A big hat tip to my students in my Race and Politics class this semester for providing a set of outstanding resources on gentrification. For those interested in the topic, here are some useful tools to broaden your understanding. Please feel free to add any links you find:
This article from the Winter 2007 edition of On Common Ground, a publication seemingly associated with the National Association of Realtors, has a nice introduction to the debate over gentrification.
An interesting article from designer Charles Hughes Smith on the process of “de-gentrification” or neighborhood decline.
This video on the gentrification of the Echo Park/Silverlake area in Los Angeles highlights the tensions inherent in improving a neighborhood while maintaining demographic stability.
This passage from an L.A. Weekly article on the phenomenon draws an interesting analogy:
Perhaps the best way to understand gentrification is to view it as something akin to a weather pattern, like a tsunami, a hurricane or a driving rainstorm. Like the storm systems that pass through Los Angeles each winter, gentrification starts with the ocean, where buyers have shown themselves willing to pay outrageous sums to live near the water. The most expensive property in Los Angeles — and in the United States as a whole — is along the coastline, where properties routinely run in the seven figures.
La Voz de Atzlan provides some wonderful maps on the geographic dispersal of the Latino population in Los Angeles over the last sixty years.
New York City is the perfect example of diversity functioning well,” he said in an interview. “It’s an exciting place that produces lots of innovation and creativity. It’s not a coincidence that New York has so much energy and also so much diversity.
The University or Michigan Political Scientist recently wrote a book making the case for the productivity benefits of diversity. This research underscores a growing body of literature extolling the benefits of diversity. University of Illinois-Chicago’s Cedric Herring summarized in the Washington Post findings from his study of diversity in corporate America. he found:
those companies that have very low levels of racial and ethnic minorities have the lowest profits and the lowest market share and the lowest number of customers.
It’s undeniable that all sorts of institutions are better because of diversity. Sam Sommers at Tufts came to a similar conclusion about the role of diversity in group settings (per the same Washington Post Article):
Sommers asked all-white and diverse groups to read short passages and then asked them to answer SAT-style questions about the passages. When the topics touched on race — affirmative action, for example — whites who were part of diverse groups answered more questions correctly than people in all-white groups.
Page suggests that groups produce these better outcomes because diverse groups are more flexible at problem solving:
What the model showed was that diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups of the best individuals at solving problems. The reason: the diverse groups got stuck less often than the smart individuals, who tended to think similarly.
Their core argument is that the conventional view of economists and political scientists that we calculate costs and benefits in making decisions and choose those paths that maximize our utility is flawed. Sunstien and Thaler suggest that we have both a reflective rational brain and an impulsive emotional brain that often overwhelms our rational tendencies. For example, people often overemphasize recent events when assessing risk (think of fear of shark attack after the movie Jaws) Sunstien and Thaler invite us to consider doing social science by assuming that the impulsive emotional brain is making decisions. Sunstien uses the example of Homer Simpson trying to buy a gun and hearing about a three day background check and responding to the clerk “but I’m angry now!”
The idea that we are persuaded by emotional appeals might be nothing new for sociologists steeped in frame analysis. But in political science and economics, this is indeed a revolution. In popular parlance, Frank Luntz’ successful re-framing of the estate tax as the “death tax” is a classic example of the effect of the emotional brain at work in making policy assessments.
Sunstien and Thaler advocate the idea of constructing “choice architectures” that take people’s irrationality into account and creates policy systems that make people more likely to engage in beneficial behavior. A policy design in this vein is an automatic “opt-in” to a 401K plan that is voluntary because it can be opted out of but starts with an automatic withrdawal for retirement as a default rather than expecting people to deliberately put aside money for retirement.
Austin Goolsby, Obama’s chief economic adviser, is an adherent of this type of behavioral economics. It is a subtle change in our public policy approach, but has a great power to create effective outcomes. I do wonder if it’s smart politics to say that the public is irrational and thus we should structure policy to work again the public’s worst impulses.
An AP poll found that more people wanted to watch a football game with Barack Obama (50%) than John McCain (47%). More than any other data point from this election, this reflects a serious changing of the guard. Since 2000, the Republicans have owned the affect war. In 2004, a Zogby poll found that 57% of respondents preferred having a beer with President Bush than with John Kerry. Why the shift in four years? Is Obama just that much “cooler” than Kerry. Probably, but here’s the money quote from the AP story:
Women, minorities, younger and unmarried people were likelier to prefer catching a game with Obama while men, whites, older and married people would rather watch with McCain.
Ruy Teixeira has repeatedly made the argument that Democrats have demography on their side. The U.S. Census department estimates that by 2050, self-identified whites will only account for 46% of the U.S. population. Latinos and African-Americans have consistently voted for the Democratic party and while both are socially conservative on many views, they tend towards fiscal liberalism.
I wonder what the football question would yield if it were Biden v. Palin?
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More than any other data point from this election, this reflects a serious changing of the guard. Since 2000, the Republicans have owned the affect war. In 2004, a