The Calm After the... Well, It Wasn't a Storm.

...not in 2009, at least.

As we saw recently the clock is ticking on the frontloading bills proposed during 2009. The year's legislative session has ended in most states and the crucial cross-over deadline has passed in still more. That particular deadline is typified by what was witnessed in North Carolina in May. For example, a bill has to have passed in its originating chamber and have crossed over to the other legislative chamber for consideration by a particular point in the session. Bills that don't pass by that point are dead for the session.

And this rule came into play in several other states considering primary-shifting legislation in 2009. The catch is that there are several other states, like Georgia, where legislation is allowed to carry over from one legislative session to the next. The table below updates the one from FHQ's original post by adding in the cross-over and carry-over information.

Frontloading Bills (2009 Legislative Session)
State	Bill	Status	Session Adjourns/Cross-over Deadline	Description
Arkansas	HB 1021	passed	May 1/none	moves presidential primary from first Tuesday in February to the Tuesday after the third Monday in May
Florida	HB 759/SB 2304	died in committee	May 8/none	moves presidential primary from last Tuesday in January to the second Tuesday in March
Georgia	HB 848	carried over to 2010 session	April 4/March 12	moves presidential primary from first Tuesday in February to first Tuesday in March
Illinois	HB 2308/SB 46	in committee/could carry over to 2010	year-round May 31/April 3	moves state and local primaries from first Tuesday in February to third Tuesday in March/first Tuesday in June
Indiana	SCR 28	passed Senate, no action in House	April 29/Feb. 26	forms commission to investigate moving presidential primary
Minnesota	HF 31/SF 157	in committee/could carry over to 2010	May 18/none	creates presidential primary and moves to first Tuesday in February
New Hampshire	HB 341	in committee/could carry over to 2010	July 1/ March 25	allows only Iowa caucus to precede presidential primary
New Jersey	A 2413	in committee	year-round/none	moves presidential primary from first Tuesday in February to first Tuesday in June
North Carolina	S 150	in committee/could carry over to 2010	early July/May 14	moves presidential primary from first Tuesday after first Monday in May to first Tuesday in February
North Dakota	SB 2288	passed	May 2/Feb. 20	eliminates state involvement in presidential preference caucus
Oklahoma	HB 1340	in committee/could carry over to 2010	May 29 22/March 12	shifts financial burden of presidential primary from state to state parties
Oregon	SB 412	in committee/cannot carry over to 2010	late June/none	moves presidential primary from third Tuesday in May to first Tuesday in February
Texas	HB 246	in committee/cannot carry over to 2010	June 1/May 15	moves presidential primary from first Tuesday in March to first Tuesday in February
Source(s): National Conference of State Legislatures, MultiState.com

With the cross-over information added, New Jersey and Oregon are the only states remaining with active bills to frontload their state's 2012 presidential primaries during the 2009 session. The drawback is that the bill in Oregon will have to be acted upon before the end of the session at the end of June. Otherwise the bill will die, and without a carry-over provision in place, similar legislation will have to be reintroduced the next time the legislature convenes. And though the Texas legislature has adjourned, the Lone Star state is in a similar position to Oregon in that there is no carry over there. The New Jersey bill, meanwhile, was already carried over from 2008 to 2009 and will expire when the members of the legislature stand for reelection in November.

However, in several states, 2009 legislation could carry over like Georgia's did. Illinois, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Oklahoma could all have presidential primary-related legislation revived in 2010, though it is less certain in each than in the case of the Peach state.

All in all, it was a quiet cycle for frontloading. The legislature in Arkansas successfully repealed the Natural state's separate presidential primary and Hawaii Republicans adopted a February caucus to replace the Aloha state's May convention. But for the year after an election, that isn't all that surprising.


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Past is Prologue? The New Jersey Governor's Race

I get the sense from the reading I've been able to do on the now-set New Jersey governor's race, that Democrats are of a mind that Jon Corzine will be able to come back and win the race in November. That idea isn't that far-fetched. New Jersey is a blue state, after all, and currently has a Democratic governor, two Democratic US senators and an 8-5 advantage in number of congressional districts held. Democrats outnumber Republicans there 33% to 19% among registered voters (with 46% remaining unaffiliated).

On top of that are the recent polling trends at the presidential level. At various points during the last two presidential campaigns (2004 and 2008) the Republican candidate has led or been tied in Garden state polling. George W. Bush was tied with John Kerry in a handful of New Jersey polls in October 2004 before Kerry won the state by seven points. Despite the fact that Kerry had dominated the polling there throughout, the margins -- or lack thereof -- fueled the perception that Bush and the Republicans were closing the gap there. Oppositely, John McCain was able to keep Barack Obama's lead in New Jersey within an arm's length early on, but that margin ballooned as the 2008 race headed down the stretch. Once October hit and the economy seemingly bottomed out, Obama's lead in polls grew to the mid- to upper teens and that is where the race ended up: Obama winning the Garden state by 15 points.

But what does any of that tell us about the 2009 gubernatorial race in New Jersey? Does the same sort of trend hold? Do we see Republicans doing well only to ultimately fail once ballots are cast? The first place to look is the 2005 race. Sure, the circumstances are different. That was an open seat race for example, but Jon Corzine will have competed as the Democratic candidate in both races. Just looking at the raw data, Corzine led throughout in the polling of the race. That lead fluctuated but was consistently in the upper single digit/lower double digit range for the duration. And once November hit, the current governor won by a little more than ten points.
So 2005 was not indicative of the small margin early/big margin late polling phenomenon witnessed in the 2004 presidential race. The striking thing as you look back beyond 2005 -- in terms of gubernatorial races -- is that there has not been a Democratic incumbent reelected governor of New Jersey since Brendan Byrne in 1977. The last Democratic incumbent that stood for reelection was James Florio, who lost to Christine Todd Whitman in 1993. Governor's races in New Jersey, then, may not be where the aforementioned pattern is witnessed.

There are, however, some interesting lessons to be learned from those particular races. It is fortunate that the Eagleton Center at Rutgers has a robust archive of the polls conducted on the gubernatorial races since 1973. Now granted, this is just one poll, but the series of them gives us some indication of what conditions were like during these election years. Ideally, we'd be able to get a sense of both what general polling looked like in the race as well as the approval level of the incumbent. In 2009, Corzine's approval -- or lack thereof -- will play a large role in determining the outcome of the race in November. And polling, relatedly of course, has favored the Republicans, specifically Chris Christie, throughout.

The Byrne example from 1977 is actually an interesting parallel. In May of that year, prior to the primary, only 27% of New Jersey voters supported Governor Byrne for reelection and 42% preferred the generic Republican. When Byrne was removed and it was a question pitting a generic Democrat against a generic Republican candidate, the Democrats had a 45%-20% advantage. Later on, in July, once Raymond Bateman became the GOP nominee, Byrne continued to trail in the Eagleton poll. By November, though, Byrne had completely reversed the trend and won by nearly 15 points. [You can read a much more thorough treatment of the dynamics of the race over at Blue Jersey from back in April.]

The 1993 race also offers some insight. In Florio's case, you have an incumbent Democrat who was in much better shape in the polls than Brendan Byrne was a decade and a half earlier. In the Eagleton polls conducted, Florio hovered around the 50% mark across all three polls with Christine Todd Whitman lagging behind, closer to the 40% level. The measure to take note of here, however, is the change in the undecideds. Contrary to what might otherwise be expected in a race involving an incumbent, the number of undecideds in the series of Eagleton polls rose as the race came to a close. That typically isn't the greatest indication of incumbent success heading down the stretch of a reelection effort. After all, incumbents are more a known quantity than their challengers are. And in this race, those undecideds seemed to have broken for Whitman in the end, or at least enough to tip the balance in her favor in a one percentage point victory.
Still, the Byrne example seems a better match in this case if only because the number of undecideds is likely to be rather small in a race with an unpopular incumbent. Either you still like him or you don't. A Byrne-like comeback is possible in 2009 as well, but it will be dependent upon Jon Corzine performing a balancing act between "defining" Chris Christie and smearing Chris Christie. The governor obviously has plenty of cash and is already on the air trying to do the former, but maintaining the perception that he is defining Christie and not trying to drag the former ambassador down to his (approval) level will be the true test; one made all the more difficult when the prevailing sentiment regarding the governor currently is negative. Christie is in the driver's seat, but he (or his campaign) has to be the one that is defining the race. "Not Corzine" may be enough, but we'll have to see how the race develops. Regardless, this one will be fun to track.


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No Move is Good Move: Texas Won't Change 2012 Primary Dates in 2009

Yesterday was the final day of the Texas legislature's 2009 session, and with the adjournment came the death knell for one of the handful of frontloading bills (HB 246) proposed in state capitals during the year. The legislation would have moved the state's presidential primaries as well as those for statewide and local offices from the first Tuesday in March to the first Tuesday in February in 2012 and beyond.

Unlike the case in Oklahoma (and several other states, for that matter), though, bills cannot be carried over from one session to the next. So, while the potential is there for the Oklahoma bill regarding parties paying for presidential primaries to have new life breathed into it in 2010, the frontloading bill in Texas will have to be reintroduced altogether. And it could be that since 201o is a reelection year for Texas legislators, they may opt to deal with issues other than the presidential primary; pushing that one on the backburner for another year until the issue is more salient in 2011. As we've mentioned here several times, Texas is still a Republican-dominated state politically and it would be hard to imagine a scenario where the Lone Star state allows the next GOP nominee to be chosen with out sharing its opinion first. HB 246 was a Democratic-sponsored piece of legislation, but it is certainly a measure that could very easily find Republican support down the road.

For the moment, though, we can go ahead and mark Texas off the list of prospective frontloading states for this year.


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The Democratic primary seems like a done deal, as embattled incumbent, Jon Corzine, is being challenged in the primary (just not seriously) while seeking a second term. On the Republican side, US Attorney, Chris Christie may also be a done deal in a primary match-up mainly against Steve Lonegan, among others.

This would set up an interesting general election, especially since Christie has been leading Corzine in the trial heat polls conducted thus far. In a blue state, though, November is a long way off. The office would be a major grab for Republicans if they can clinch it then. Curiously, the race was left off the latest Line on The Fix (with no comment on the reasoning, mind you). The race actually was taken out of the top ten gubernatorial races most likely to switch (partisan) hands in either 2009 or 2010. The polls tell me otherwise on this one. My question: Are there actually ten other races that are more likely to switch parties than New Jersey? Feel free to chime in on that in the comments section.

FHQ will be back later in the day with more (sometime) after the polls close at 8pm eastern. There won't be a run-off, so go ahead and cross that possibility off your list. Recount? It's possible, I suppose, but I wouldn't think it'd be expected in this case. Next week in Virginia may be a different matter.


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...sans mouse ears.

FHQ is checking out a very limited area of Alan Grayson's district this week. The highlight thus far? Someone wearing a Reagan/Bush '84 t-shirt (Liberal friends, get your credit cards ready.). I never want to be someone who take the shirt off another man's back, but in this case, I was tempted to request/barter/buy said shirt. I suppose an '80 version may have been better, but that was a heck of a memento there. I may have been the only one to fully appreciate it.

Anyway, this is a long way of telling everyone that I'm not entirely certain how this will affect posting this week. Though, between juggling the parks and dissertation writing, it probably won't result in increased posting. We'll see.


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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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