Oklahoma Bill to Have Parties Pay for Presidential Primaries is Done for 2009

With the Oklahoma House calling it a year last Friday (May 22) and the Senate belatedly following suit this past Wednesday (May 27), legislative action in the Sooner state came to a close until 2010. [Both chambers closed up shop prior to the May 29 deadline for legislative adjournment.] The end of the session means that legislation stuck in committee remains in limbo to some extent. The legislature rules allow for such legislation to carry over from an odd-year session to an even-year session, but it is unclear as of now as to whether HB 1340 will be one of those bills.

As we've talked about since January, this bill would shifted the financial burden of the presidential primary system in Oklahoma from the state to the state parties. The parties would set the candidate filing fee at a certain level in order to fund the election. This isn't a first, but it does go against the trendline on this particular issue. The movement has been toward primaries; specifically primaries operated on the state's dime. South Carolina had been the only remaining party-run primary until 2008 when the state legislature over-rode Mark Sanford's veto. That bill allowed state funding of the contest but let the parties determine when they were to be held (a provision that allowed the Palmetto state to maintain its first in the South status) and is what continues to differentiate the South Carolina primary from other primaries. HB 1340 would have made Oklahoma similar to South Carolina pre-2008.

Again though, this bill could be resurrected during the 2010 session and may find more support if the economy continues to stagnate. Then again, if the economy was an issue in this decision, it is hard to fathom why action was not taken during the 2009 cycle.


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No Split in Springfield...Illinois

Not this year anyway.

The efforts in Illinois General Assembly to split off the state's primaries for statewide and local offices from the presidential primary looks to have failed. Last Friday (May 22) was the last day for House bills to receive a third reading in the Senate (and likewise Senate bills in the House) and be passed before the Assembly adjourns on May 31 (this coming Sunday). Neither of the efforts to move the state primaries to March or June made it out of committee.

For now that keeps Illinois' congressional primaries in February; the earliest such primaries in the country. The US has obviously become more accustomed to lengthy presidential campaigns, but the Illinois congressional general election campaign lasting nine months was a record in 2008. At issue are the savings the state gains from holding the two sets of primaries together. And in this economy, state legislators are hesitant to sign off on any measuring that would see the budget balloon any further.

Of course, around the state there has been some level of displeasure with the burden the early date and even earlier filing deadlines places on prospective challengers to incumbents in these primaries. But that fact has been outweighed by the need to save money in a difficult economic climate.

[Hat tip: Ballot Access News for the Lake Forester editorial link about the burden on challengers.]


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The 2012 Presidential Candidates on Twitter

The real reason FHQ now has a presence on Twitter is because I wanted to check out the involvement the top contenders for the 2012 Republican nomination have on the service. To me, that was the easiest way to answer the "How much is Twitter worth?" question. And the resounding answer to the question was, "A lot." With some caveats, all of FHQ's Elite Eight candidates for 2012 have a Twitter account and use them with varying levels of frequency. For instance, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee tweet quite a bit -- multiple times a day and every one of those Elite Eight (plus Bobby Jindal, John Thune, Haley Barbour and John Ensign) have at least put something up in the last week.

But who's watching? A Twitter presence obviously doesn't amount to much if no one is paying attention. Newt Gingrich, for instance, just yesterday made a couple of Sotomayor-related comments (here and here) that netted the former Speaker an additional 5000 followers. That is a drop in the bucket compared to his total number of followers, but that influx amounts to about a fifth of the total number of followers of the next highest prospective candidate, Sarah Palin.

To what extent, then, are the potential 2012 candidates being followed on Twitter?
As of yesterday around this time, Newt Gingrich had about 344,000 followers of his Twitter feed. For the sake of comparison, Barack Obama has about 1.3 million followers and FHQ has 1. Gingrich's total dwarfs all the other possible candidates and skews an otherwise nice figure. As such, let's remove the former Speaker and look at the remaining nine likely possibilities.
Basically, you have the troika of Palin, Jindal and Huckabee and then everyone else. Those three all offer relatively frequent contributions -- though Jindal has been quiet in May compared to April -- and that certainly helps augment their follower totals. Sure, Mitt Romney is there too, but that feed has but one tweet and overall is likely hampered by that fact -- in terms of Twitter at least. Charlie Crist is also hurt by the fact that he has started a feed to coincide with his Senate run announcement. In other words, that one has only been active for a couple of weeks.

Now, what does all of this mean? Well, tracking Twitter followers is interesting, but as is the case with Google Trends data, not without shortcomings. The main issue is whether those followers are active or if they are Twitter quitters. Gingrich has a solid total, but what if, say, a third of those followers aren't actively following anymore? [Well, that still beats everyone else, doesn't it?] Of course, it is more damaging when you consider the 60% drop off Nielsen found. Still, I think this is another layer that can be added in to the candidate emergence picture.


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FHQ Now on Twitter

To quote Fred Flintstone, "That's the camel that broke the straw back."

FHQ has finally broken down and joined the "tweeting" ranks. It may in fact just be a fad, but I can no longer justify shrugging the service off because of its overly short messages. In real time, nothing is more powerful for dispersing messages quickly and that has distinct ramifications in the political realm. We saw that with the Oklahoma Republican convention a few weeks ago. The mainstream media was not covering the GOP chair battle in Oklahoma -- the one that potentially would have had the party adopt a presidential caucus over the state-funded primary.

Plus, the political world seems to have adopted Twitter as well (see picture to the right). All of the possible candidates mentioned for the GOP nomination in 2012 have at least some presence on Twitter. In fact, you can now see their up-to-the-minute updates in FHQ's left-hand sidebar below the blogroll (Yes, way down there.). To go to the candidate's Twitter page simply click on the "about _ hours/minutes ago" link or just follow along here. I'll have more on this tomorrow, but for now a few notes about the sidebar gadget's functionality will suffice.

As for FHQ, you can add our Twitter feed (@FHQ) if you are so inclined (There is a link to the feed in the right sidebar above the Blog Archive). For now, my contributions will be confined to automatic postings of actual FHQ posts with attendant URLs, but that could change in the future. My feeling is, why deprive loyal FHQers of the opportunity to follow the site in a more mobile format if that's what they prefer.

Like I said, though, I'll have more on this tomorrow. In the meantime, have fun with the new gadgets.

NOTE: Also, please let me know if you experience any lags in site loading time when you're here. Adding these gadgets has slowed things down some and I want to keep tabs on that. Thanks.


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Does the Sotomayor Choice Make Texas a Swing State?

Matthew Dowd thinks it might, depending on how Republicans in the Senate handle the Sonia Sotomayor nomination to the Supreme Court by President Obama.

“If they don’t get back to a place where they are getting roughly 40 percent net of the Hispanic vote, there is no way they can ever win,” [Dowd] said.

Now, Dowd was talking in national terms when mentioning that 40% barrier, but let's look at this within the context of Texas. Hispanics made up a shade more than a third (36%) of the Lone Star state's population in 2007 according to the Census estimates and comprised approximately one-fifth of the 2008 electorate there (based on exit polls). In raw data terms, that's 8.8 million Hispanics in Texas, 1.6 million of which voted. In November, Obama won 63% of the Texas Hispanic vote while losing by just shy of one million votes to John McCain overall in the state. That left Obama with a +450,000 vote "Hispanic margin." In other words, despite beating McCain by nearly half a million votes among Hispanic, the president still lost by one million votes in Texas.

But the question is: How many Hispanic voters would be energized by a controversial Supreme Court confirmation process involving the first potential Hispanic justice, and would that be enough to overcome that one million vote deficit? Possibly. On one hand, Texas is growing at a pretty good clip and a lot of that growth is Hispanic growth. But on the other hand, Texas, in a more competitive environment, would likely see increased turnout. The former is much more difficult to simulate than the latter, but let's look at turnout first and see if we can get at least half way to an answer to this question.

First, let's construct a model based on the 2008 election data we have. If we regress FHQ's final polling margin averages by state, number of electoral votes, and a state's party lean (a dichotomous variable where 1 = Democratic lean and 0 = Republican lean)* on the final turnout figures from 2008, we get a decent model for the purposes of prediction (The R-squared isn't great -- .3 -- but let's keep this simple.). In reality, Texas had a 54.7% (voting eligible population) turnout rate in 2008. Under this model, however, the Lone Star state is predicted to have had a turnout rate of 57.6%. In other words, we have some error present; most likely due to some level of omitted variable bias. Again, though, simplicity is the goal here, not elegance. That said, if we assume that Texas was a dead-heat in the polls leading up to the election (I dropped the +11.66 McCain advantage in the polls down to a +0.66 McCain lead), the turnout rate would have increased to 60.1%.

Now, if we assume the same exit poll distribution among racial categories prevailed in the Texas electorate -- 20% Hispanic, 63% of which voted for Obama -- the president would have inched approximately 50,000 votes close John McCain. That's a drop in the bucket when compared to a nearly one million vote deficit. But if we assume that the GOP caucus in the Senate balks at the Sotomayor nomination, damaging the party's standing with Hispanics even further, that mere drop in the bucket may turn into a tide against the GOP in state's with a dense Hispanic population. For example, if we assume, based on 2008 population and turnout statistics, that the Texas electorate was 25% Hispanic (instead of 20%), 75% of whom voted for Obama (up from 63%), the president would have increased his Hispanic margin from 450,000 votes to over one million votes relative to McCain. That half a million vote difference would have cut McCain's statewide advantage in half assuming all other racial categories behave as they actually did (in terms of percentages of the electorate) in the 2008 election.

The problem here is that this simulation is done in terms of the 2008 election; an election that is obviously in the history books. What's missing, then, is an accounting of the population growth to occur between now and 2012 (Oh, and the actual level of incitement a fight over an Hispanic Supreme Court nominee triggered. But that's a different story.). If you look at the Election Data Services estimates (Table B), it looks as if Texas has gained between 400,000 and 500,000 people every year since 2000. That would place the state's population at somewhere around 26 million people in 2012. If the same 60.8% of the population was voting eligible at that point -- and that doesn't include latent Hispanic voters activated by a court nomination fight -- there would be approximately 16 million voters in Texas in 2012. One thing to note is that we are assuming uniform growth across all categories of ethnicity. In other words, the expansion of the Hispanic margin between the Democratic and Republican candidates would be counteracted by a similar increase in the white margin. As noted above, though, the population growth will not necessarily be uniform.

If, then, we further assume the same 20% of the electorate is Hispanic, 63% of whom vote for the Democratic candidate, the Democratic Hispanic margin over the Republicans would grow to around one million votes. Assuming a 25%/75% split, as was done above, would increase that Hispanic margin to about 2 million votes. But is that bar too high or too low to account for active Hispanic voters moving over to the Democratic column or latent Hispanics being activated by a partisan battle over Sotomayor?

And, as always, will it even matter three years down the road when the next presidential votes are cast?


*The hypothesis here is that Democratic states -- especially solid Democratic states -- would see increased turnout regardless of competitiveness while solid Republican states would witness lower turnout rates.


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Two Huckabee Slips in One Day?

First, the "Maria" Sotomayor blunder and now an apparent endorsement of Marco Rubio in the Florida Senate race (Man, I've got to read those Huckabee emails more closely!). Huckabee'll have to clean this sort of thing up some before 2012 if he intends to run. Not a good day for ol' Huck. At least he isn't biting into unshucked tamales yet.

Hat tip: GOP12


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Is Charlie Crist Running for Senate or Vice President?

Obviously, the current Florida governor is running for Senate, but give me a chance to explain my thoughts on the vice presidency. [Then you can decide whether the link between the two is a stretch.]

First, we'll need to assume a couple of things.

For starters, everything below assumes that the primary calendar and rules will remain virtually unchanged between now and January 2012. We can argue all day about the likelihood of major reforms to the primary process, but for the sake of this exercise, let's assume that Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada lead the way followed by Florida and then Super Tuesday.

We also need to assume that Charlie Crist not only takes the GOP nomination for Senate in the Sunshine state, but wins the general election as well.

At this point, these assumptions have a better than 50/50 shot of being the political reality in 2012 as I see it. [Likelihood of disagreement with those odds? 100%.] With that said, how does this get Crist closer to the vice presidency and why doesn't that improve the Florida governor's chances of gaining the GOP presidential nomination?

Well, all this started as a brainstorm that emerged from the comments to the Palin post the other day. The discussion there stretched from recent vice presidential nominees later running for presidential nominations to the importance of the 2012 primary calendar. And that got me thinking about Charlie Crist. As was the case in 2008, Crist's endorsement will be very much sought after in the race for the GOP nomination in 2012 due to the importance of Florida. But let me explain why I think that is.

First, 2012 will be a referendum on Obama. If the 44th president is well-liked, Republican primary voters will either vote for someone who can, in a Downsian sense, capture the ideological middle of the electorate or someone who offers a stark contrast with the current president. In other words, the GOP will either run toward the middle or go off toward the right. If we assume that the calendar remains the same, then, my bet is on the latter. And I'm not putting it past Obama's team or some surrogate(s) to cast a choice for the former -- at least during the primary phase -- as a choice for Obama-lite, a choice I think most Republican primary voters would potentially find unpalatable. [Of course, that could potentially ward off many of the more moderate candidates anyway. And it isn't as if that wing of the party is doing all that well at the moment in what should be dubbed the Specter War.]

That aside, though, why is a more conservative candidate more likely to emerge from the Republican side due to the calendar? Iowa and it's very conservative caucus electorate will be hugely important and will have a large say in who the nominee is. Yeah, that's not saying much. Iowa always has a disproportionate influence over the process given its position. But depending on who runs, Iowa could have an even greater impact. If Huckabee runs, he'll be expected to turn the same trick he did in 2008. If the former Arkansas governor opts out to wait on 2016, then Iowa becomes more important.

Here's why: If Mark Sanford runs, South Carolina's impact will likely be minimized. Nevada faces the same issue if Sen. John Ensign decides to run as well, but Nevada has to worry about timing as well. If the Silver state's primary coincides with South Carolina's primary again, that'll be a double whammy against GOP caucus-goers in Nevada.

Well, what about New Hampshire? Ah, the Granite state. Romney is far from a favorite regional son (former governor of neighboring Massachusetts, but with roots in Michigan and Utah), but my hunch is that Romney will be expected to do well there and will likely be positioned well enough to do so. Does that mean a win is a sure thing? No, but he'll be in good shape to claim the primary.

Any one of those states could have an unbiased influence on the states to follow minus their favorite sons or past winners (and not all will be viable if they choose to run), but there are reasons to believe there could be a massive split heading into Florida.

• Huckabee could very well win Iowa again.
• It isn't a stretch to see Romney winning New Hampshire either. He did place second there in 2008.
• Sanford is still seen as a legitimate dark horse right now and could become just legitimate by 2012.
• And it isn't out of the question for a local candidate to do well among a small caucus electorate like Ensign in Nevada. Would the senator even be considering this if Nevada wasn't so early in the process?
  

There are any number of combinations from the above possibilities, but let's assume that all that comes to pass and Florida becomes the de facto tie-breaker heading into Super Tuesday the next week. If you're Charlie Crist, what do you do?

"Hey! Florida is the decisive state here. I could win this thing!"

or...

"Hey! Florida is the decisive state here. I could win this nomination, face a tremendously popular president and never be heard from again."

or (and this is the reason for the post)...

"Hey! Florida is the decisive state here. I could have a real influence over who becomes the nominee

...again."

First of all, the influence of endorsements (whether by political actors or newspapers) has still received a far smaller share of attention in the political science literature than it should have (...as Rapoport, et al. (1991) pointed out), and the literature that does exist provides mixed results. But during the valuable invisible primary period, Cohen, et al. (2008) have recently found that endorsements matter as much if not more so than polling (though that is not statistically significant) to fundraising and subsequent electoral success. Regardless, it was the timing of Crist's endorsement of John McCain -- just prior to the Florida primary -- that made it so potentially powerful. And McCain's "just prior to the primary" endorsements -- Schwarzenegger and Crist among them -- seemed to have at least coincided with more primary success than, say, Barack Obama's endorsements from the likes of Ted Kennedy.

And Crist will likely have another chance to influence the nomination. Now, he could throw his hat in the ring himself, but he might be better served by throwing his weight around, successfully endorsing someone and parlaying that into a vice presidential nomination or a prime spot in the 2016 sweepstakes. My money is on the latter there. Crist is, at the very least, politically shrewd. Even if it takes some time, he has shown that he will pick his spots in order to advance his position politically. And 2012 may not be one of those spots. If he is so shrewd, he may want to avoid the vice presidential slot unless victory is a sure thing. Losing vice presidential nominees just have not done that well in winning their party's presidential nomination in subsequent cycles.

This isn't really about Crist and the vice presidency so much as it is about underlining the important role Florida -- and its high-profile Republican politicians -- will play in determining the next GOP nominee.


...if the calendar stays the same.

[Plus, such a post title is usually good for getting people's attention after a long holiday weekend.]


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Memorial Day Travel and the 2012 Bumper Sticker Battle

The influence of bumper stickers on election outcomes can certainly be questioned (They have an effect?), but if my trip from Georgia to North Carolina and back (through early primary state, South Carolina, mind you) is any indication, then 2012 will be fought between Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin.


Mitt had some support in the Charlotte area...


















...and Sarah had her's on an Alabama RV in the Gaffney area of northeastwest South Carolina.








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GOP Temporary Delegate Selection Committee in Place

Here's the press release:

RNC CHAIRMAN MICHAEL STEELE ANNOUNCES APPOINTMENTS TO TEMPORARY DELEGATE SELECTION COMMITTEE

WASHINGTON – Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Michael Steele today announced the appointment of Ohio National Committeeman Bob Bennett, Wisconsin National Committeeman Steve King, Florida National Committeeman Paul Senft, former Maryland Secretary of State Mary Kane, former Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis, former Office of Personnel Management Director Kay James, former Iowa Republican Party Chairman Brian Kennedy, former White House Spanish media spokesperson Mercy Schlapp, and former New Hampshire Attorney General Tom Rath to the RNC Temporary Delegate Selection Committee.

“I am proud to announce the appointments of this impressive group of people to the RNC Temporary Delegate Selection Committee. They are all exceptionally qualified people and I look forward to working with them in the future,” said Chairman Steele.

The RNC Temporary Delegate Selection Committee serves to review the timing of the election, selection, allocation, or binding of delegate and alternate delegates to the Republican National Convention. In accordance with The Rules of the Republican Party, the RNC Chairman appoints three RNC members and six non-members to the RNC Temporary Delegate Selection Committee, which is already comprised of four elected RNC members.

Notes:
1) Was the GOP trying to keep this quiet? By releasing this on a Friday -- the Friday before a holiday weekend no less -- this news was bound to receive less coverage than if it had been broken on almost any other day. That certainly seems to have been the case. The Democratic Change Commission's announcement garnered more coverage than its Republican counterpart. Granted, I'm on the road and wasn't as on top of things today as I usually am, but still, I had to search for mentions of this announcement. Color me perplexed.

2) Take a look at the new members of the committee. All nine are from blue states. Ohio, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Iowa, Florida, Michigan and Maryland are all represented as are Virginia (Kay James) and Florida again (Mercy Schlapp). Most importantly -- to them at least -- Iowa and New Hampshire have a seat at the table, but so do upstarts Florida and Michigan. Ohio GOP chair, Bob Bennett has been pushing the Ohio Plan for a while now (see here for more). But where are Texas and South Carolina, or for that matter, any southern state? This provides at least some indication of the direction Michael Steele will take the party. It is a nod to the need to expand the party outside of the South. But to have no southern states represented? That's certainly a break from the past.

The full committee is due to issue a report with recommendations on the rules of the 2012 primary season next summer and FHQ will have an eye on the progress between now and then.


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Public Policy Polling has another set of 2012 presidential trial heat polls out and what stands out this month is that Obama has stretched his leads over all four Republicans polled. Mike Huckabee still fares the best, but none of the four prospective candidates even clears 40%. There's not really much to add, but here are the numbers and the real attraction is that I've added a visual to accompany the numbers. Now that we have multiple polls we can track the trend(s). That doesn't mean much with two polls -- it's just a couple of contour-less lines -- but Obama-Palin was polled in March as well, so we have three polls for that match-up. [Links to past PPP polls are under the May numbers.]

Obama: 56% Palin: 37%

4/23/09
3/18/09

Obama: 53% Romney: 35%

4/23/09

Obama: 52% Huckabee: 39%

4/23/09

Obama: 53% Gingrich: 36%

4/23/09

Notes:
1) As I mentioned in the Palin post the other day -- and as Jack reiterated -- Palin is purported to be a grassroots candidate, but her support in the polls seems to be dropping off. Political insiders v. the masses? Maybe not. It could be insiders/masses v. Palin supporters. Of course, the Alaska governor drew more support than the candidate FHQ has tabbed as the favorite for the GOP nomination [but what do I know?].

2) Is Romney doing worse with Huntsman out of the race? Sure, that's a coincidence, but the drop off isn't anything to sneeze at. And with the debate shifting in recent days to foreign policy (Gitmo in particular), Romney, the economy candidate, is pushed further out of the picture.

3) It is early, early, early, but it is still nice to have some data to look at.


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