The Answer is Yes

For the first time this year since Bobby Jindal gave the Republican response to President Obama's speech before a joint session of Congress, Sarah Palin searches have been surpassed by another (now former) prospective Republican presidential candidate. Last night FHQ asked aloud whether Mark Sanford's searches, once they were incorporated into Google Trends, would settle in between where John Ensign searches were a week ago following the Nevada senator's announcement and where Palin searches have been post-Letterman or surpass Palin. They seem to have passed Palin and then some. In fact, the first of the two Palin spikes in June is the highest the Alaska governor has been all year and that is around the same height Jindal reached in the pre-/post-response period.


The Sanford data has not been fully implemented in the main Google Trends search, but is working with our tracker for whatever reason. The F in the screenshot above denotes where Sanford admitted to the affair and we can also see the first of the two Palin spikes in June there as well and that it rivals the Jindal jump in February.

Needless to say, Sanford searches over the last few days have outpaced both Palin and Jindal by far in 2009. And that says something about what we see in these trends and what that tells us about the candidate emergence tracker in general. First, none of these search spikes are for "good" reasons. The tracker's intent is to pick up an organic movement toward a particular candidate -- to see a candidate emerge. And it is not a good thing for the Republican Party overall or the tracker generally that all the movement thus far is being triggered by scandal-related or other negatively-identified moments.

But I'll have more on that tomorrow when I look at the state of the 2012 race for the GOP nomination.


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State of the Race: New Jersey Governor (6/25/09)

It has been a couple of weeks, and things still don't really look any different in the race for New Jersey governor. Jon Corzine still trails Chris Christie by nearly ten points in FHQ's graduated weighted average of the race even after a new Strategic Vision poll was released last night. And while that isn't necessarily a death knell for the incumbent Democrat, the fact that all three post-primary polls have had Christie above the 50% mark does not bode well for Corzine. Of course, conventional wisdom continues to tell us that Democrats and some independents will come home to roost in time for the November election. Time will tell. [Recall that the state silhouette above gets bluer/redder depending upon how the average fluctuates. With no decided change since the original version, the color stays as red as it was two weeks ago.]

In the meantime, here is a graphic that ties together the first two iterations of the averaging on this race's polling. As was the case in the Virginia version, this one will look better once we have more polls come out. You have to start somewhere though. Unlike the Virginia example, undecideds in New Jersey are actually following the pattern we'd expect: decreasing as the election draws closer. But we have more polls in the New Jersey race than for Virginia's.



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DNC to Provide Coverage of Democratic Change Commission Meeting on Saturday

From the Democratic Party's web site:

Introducing the Democratic Change Commission

The Democratic Change Commission will be having their first meeting, open to the public, on Saturday June 27th in Washington, DC. We will provide highlights of the meeting here on the blog.

Following the Democratic Presidential primaries and caucuses of the 2008 presidential nominating campaign the Democratic National Convention Rules Committee, at the request of then Senator Obama, drafted a resolution calling for a commission to review and recommend changes to the 2012 nominating process. That was adopted on August 25, 2008 by the full Democratic National Convention and thus created the Democratic Change Commission.

The first part of the resolution outlines the structure and purpose of the Commission. According to the resolution, the DNC Chair has to appoint 35 members, who must represent the diversity in our Party, to sit on the Change Earlier this year Chairman Kaine announced the 37 Commission members, including two co-chairs. These members are grassroots activists, local and federal elected officials, labor leaders and a wide range of other backgrounds. Here is a full list of the commission members and their biographical information. We will be introducing several members from the Commission throughout our coverage of the Commission's work. We welcome questions you would like to ask them and we will try to present several of the top ones during upcoming interviews.

The resolution's next sections outline the areas the commission will be charged with improving. The first area the Commission must review is the nominating calendar, the scheduling and sequence of presidential nominating events (primaries and caucuses). The Commission is charged with making recommendations to significantly reduce the number of unpledged delegates (also know as super delegates). Finally the Commission must consider ways to improve caucuses to increase the ability of Democratic voters to participate.

During the 2008 nominating process the Democratic Party was able to bring its ideas and messages for improving government to every state in the country. We were able to reach new voters and engage many long time voters. This success was critical to our victory this past November. We learned a lot from the nominating process and believe through improvements we will be able to continue to reach new Americans and build on our success.

We look forward to providing you access and coverage of the work of the Commission. If you have questions please share them in the comments.

Good to know. Plus, with the meeting being open to the public, I can't imagine a scenario where C-SPAN doesn't cover it in some way. As of now though, the network's Saturday schedule isn't really up yet.


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What Scandal Does to the Candidate Emergence Tracker

No, the Mark Sanford numbers aren't actually factored into the archived Google Trends data on the FHQ Candidate Emergence Tracker yet, but the numbers from John Ensign's affair announcement may give us some indication of where Sanford may end up.
Who is represented by that orange line? That's Sarah Palin. Well, Sarah Palin and David Letterman. That particular bump dwarfs the Ensign announcement bump in purple. Both those incidents and where Mark Sanford searches end up underline one important point about the tracker: That the influence of news coverage has to be accounted for in some way.

As we've pointed out several times since we began working with this data, there is a certain recursiveness to this relationship. Candidates drive the media and the media drives candidates. What we have to be on the lookout for in this data is the extent to which news story triggers a bump and then decays over time. Does the trend decay to the point that the earlier equilibrium of searches for that candidate resumes or do we see the emergence of a new equilibrium with a higher/lower search volume. If the track is upward, especially three years away from the next election, we may be seeing the organic, grassroots emergence we originally hypothesized about.

The somewhat unrelated question for now, given that the South Carolina governor is likely out of the 2012 White House sweepstakes, is whether Mark Sanford surpasses Palin/Letterman or settles in between that level and Ensign's announcement last week. I'll update as soon as that becomes apparent on the tracker.


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The Group That Might Change It All? A Closer Look at the Democratic Change Commission's Membership

Earlier today in a post about the Democratic Change Commission's first meeting -- set to take place this weekend -- I set myself the goal of finding out how many superdelegates from 2008 were among the group's members. The logic there is that if the group is made up entirely of former superdelegates, then the likelihood of that portion of the nomination equation being changed drops significantly. But there are three points on the commission's to-do list. Let's look at them again and then examine how the members' backgrounds may influence the commission's ultimate recommendation to the DNC:

1. The window of time in which presidential nomination contests are held
   
2. The impact of superdelegates
3. The caucus system

So, if superdelegates comprise a majority of the group, that [hypothetically] negatively affects the chances of that issue being meaningfully reformed. And that logic holds for the other two issues as well. If caucus states are overrepresented on the commission relative to primary states, that affects action on the system of caucusing. Also, if earlier states are represented in higher proportion on the commission, they may be more likely to protect the status quo.

Before we turn to the numbers, let's revisit my back-of-the-napkin analysis from when the commission was named in March.

The Membership

My first inclination is to look not at who specifically these 37 commission members are, but to focus on where they are from and what that says about the group collectively. Let's look at it by the numbers:

• 37 members (2 co-chairs and 35 members)
• Representing 26 states (plus DC, Puerto Rico and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe)
• 7 members are from 7 red states
• 24 members from 19 blue states (and four more from DC)
  
• Of the 15 states within ten points in the presidential election, 13 are represented on the commission (only Indiana and North Dakota are excluded)
• All of the January 2008 Democratic contest states are represented (Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, Nevada, South Carolina and Florida)
  

Now, what does any of that have to do with the changes this commission may bring about? Well, it has a "take care of your own" feel to it. The membership hails from the Obama coalition of states and of those outside that coalition, most are states that were within ten points last November. These states won't necessarily have privileged positions on the 2012 calendar but they will be represented on the commission. Part of the Obama success story was primary season organizational efforts that paid dividends in the general election. The flip side here is that the membership isn't a reflection of future goals (in terms of states to target), but represent states where those organizational efforts were the strongest/most vital.

First, let's augment this with a look at the caucus states representatives on the Democratic Change Commission (DCC). Of course, we should probably start this by noting that proportionally there are far fewer caucus states than primary states. About a quarter of the states (12) held Democratic caucuses in 2008. On the DCC, six of the members are from caucus states and that amounts to just under a sixth of the total membership.

Prognosis: The likelihood of some change to the caucus system -- uniforming the process across caucus states, for example -- actually has few obstacles.

How about superdelegates? How many former supers are on the DCC? From the 2008 cycle, 12 former superdelegates are among the members of the commission and that is roughly a third of the membership. However, just because there are a fair number of superdelegates on the commission doesn't necessarily mean that they'll stand in the way of some change to the superdelegate formula.

Prognosis: Perhaps less likely than a change to the caucuses, but the chances for change are not bad on the whole.

And primary/caucus timing? It'll never happen. Frontloading is here to stay. I'm kidding, but when you look at the numbers there may be a significant obstacle here. This, after all, is the most difficult plank on this three-pronged platform to change. How can we quantify this, though. For our purposes, I'll look at DCC members from states that held contests prior to March. [Yes, I know. That's over half the country.] And there are 28 members from pre-March states out of the 37 person group. That's quite a few. But the obstacle theory doesn't necessarily hold here. If all or most states are already early, as they were in 2008, those early states are more likely to be amenable to just moving everything back a month if no one is better or worse off for the move. Texas and Ohio and the other handful of March states get something of a boost (Well, that's debateable given the likely March logjam. But it isn't a given that at 2012 or 2016 race would play out and last as long as the race in 2008.) and all those February states just shift back a month. Basically, things would, on the Democratic side, revert to their pre-2004 levels.

However, we could also see members complain about the difficulty of pushing such a shift through unreceptive (read: Republican-controlled) legislatures. In other words, state legislators wanting their constituents -- the Republican ones at least -- to have an influence over the 2012 Republican nomination would basically thumb their noses at the Democratic rules if they asked for there to be such a February to March shift. In fact, such legislators may even see that as an opportunity to keep their state in a less crowded, more advantageous position on the calendar.

One final thing we can look at here is how pre-2008 February states are represented on the committee. By this logic, new early state's in 2008 may be more willing to go back to the way things were with the 2004 calendar. This seems less likely now that I'm typing this out, but I've got the numbers and I'll go ahead and share them. Instead of 28 members from pre-March states, there are only 16 (a little less than half) that were from pre-March states in 2004.

Prognosis: There are a lot of early states represented on this commission and that may or may not bode well for some reform on this particular aspect of the group's plan. However, this group was handpicked (possibly making the above numbers moot), so if they desire to make a change -- like the February to March shift -- then they are likely to be able to push it through. But they'll have to tackle the issue of the problems that could create with the RNC. There have been some contacts kept between the parties on this, but without bipartisan action, it is unlikely that we'll see any sweeping reform to the system.


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Democratic Change Commission Meeting This Weekend

According to this article in the Helena Independent Record, Montana secretary of state, Linda McCulloch, is off to Washington for a meeting of the Democratic Change Commission. The commission was formed to examine three things:

1. The window of time in which presidential nomination contests are held. [This is where frontloading would be a part of the broader discussion.]
2. The impact of superdelegates
3. The caucus system
   

None of the problems will be fixed this weekend and may not be by the summer of 2010 when recommendations are likely to start emerging. But this is a starting point nonetheless.

McCulloch departs for Washington with some fairly specific ideas.

On Montana's position in 2008 and before:

“Last time, Montana was a player,” McCulloch said, “Now that we’ve been a player, I want to see it continue.”

McCulloch questioned the fairness of having some states holding their primaries and caucuses first every year, referring to New Hampshire and Iowa, and others holding their elections last, as Montana does.

[Montana did try unsuccessfully to move its 2008 presidential primary into February or March. The bill, coincidentally enough, would have given the secretary of state the power to set the date of the state's primary in either of those earlier months. After passing the House in the state legislature, though, the bill died in committee in the Senate. It should be noted that she was not secretary of state at the time. Montana Republicans, in fact, held a caucus and held it on Super Tuesday. But...]

On caucuses:

McCulloch said she prefers primary elections to caucuses in presidential races.

“I’m not a big fan of the caucus procedure, because it includes a few people rather than all the people,” she said. “My focus is to make sure more people vote, more people participate.”

[So, it would appear that circumventing the state legislature by holding a caucus -- as Montana Republicans did in 2008 -- is not the secretary of state's preferred method of dealing with this. It is good way to avoid the partisanship problems that tend to plague state legislatures attempting to shift their presidential primaries, however.]

And on superdelegates...

She’s also not wild about designating top party officials, senators, congressmen and governors as “superdelegates” by virtue of the positions. They automatically become delegates at the national convention.

“It goes against the grain of my belief that everyone should have an equal vote and be equal,” McCulloch said. “In voting, everyone is equal. Everyone is a superdelegate.”

[I need to look at how many former superdelegates are on the Demcratic Change Commission.]

With 37 members, there are going to be a fair number of opinions on what to do about any or all of the three issues above. The process starts Saturday and this will continue to be something to track as we move into a midterm election year next year.


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Why the Sanford Thing Matters

This whole Mark Sanford has been over-hyped to some degree. The disappearance is fine (Well, not when called a disappearance. How about trip?), but the communication is what has been completely botched. Ideally things would have gone like this:

1) Sanford's Press Office: "Yes, the governor likes to take some time off at the end of tough legislative sessions and has decided to hike some of the Appalachian Trail this year. We have not been in contact with him, but he is scheduled to return on Wednesday. We have a plan in place in the event that an emergency should arise."

2) Sanford's wife: "Oh, Mark likes to clear his head from time to time, especially after such a contentious session with the legislature. We talked and I told him to take advantage of the time over this fathers day weekend for that prupose. It's his day after all."

But it hasn't played out like that.

The press team has constantly updated its story making it appear as if there is something to cover up -- whether there is or isn't -- and his wife's not knowing his whereabouts is completely beyond me. I don't mean she needs to have him tagged and can track him with GPS. But she should at least be able to say, "Mark's hiking and will be back in a few days."

The communication network has broken down at so many points that it makes the situation appear much, much worse than I'm sure it actually is.

But this is politics. Perceptions matter and can cement very quickly. For example...

McCain is a Maverick. (2000)

McCain is erratic. (2008)

Kerry is a flip-flopper.

Is "Sanford is flaky" next? We'll see. The thing that we talked about some here at FHQ last fall is this idea of a narrative. If you can construct a simple narrative for your opponent and continually shoe-horn all or most of his or her actions into that narrative, you'll be in good shape.

Kerry is a flip-flopper was an easy one. The Massachusetts' senator's time in that body and his own penchant for sticking his foot in his mouth made the Bush reelection effort much easier. It wasn't necessarily the deciding factor, but there's no denying the fact that it was part of the reason.

Well, how about McCain is erratic? That, too, was an easy one. McCain's position in the race -- the underdog -- forced the Arizona senator to make some decisions that may have been different if he was ahead in the polls and not behind Obama. Once the "erratic" narrative emerged, it was simple to place the Palin as VP selection or his suspension of his campaign due to the economic crisis or his call to postpone the debates into that "erratic" box.

So no, this Sanford episode, if you want to call it that, is silly in the grand scheme of things. It is is summer news fare (as RedState rightly points out). It's Chandra Levy. It's shark attacks. But it does matter in that this is an event from which the sort of narrative alluded to above can emerge. And if Sanford seeks to run for another and/or higher office, his opponents will likely take a second look at whether this "flaky" narrative has legs.

Of course, candidate response factors into this as well and we've yet to hear from the governor himself for his version of what happened.


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What is going on with the prospective GOP presidential nominees for 2012? First Jon Huntsman joins a Democratic administration, then John Ensign (was blackmailed?) admitted to an extramarital affair and now Mark Sanford has apparently taken a tour of Dick Cheney's undisclosed location. And this doesn't even take into account all of Sarah Palin's "issues" since the Alaska governor burst on the scene last September.

Who is responsible for this? Other Republicans vying for the 2012 nod? [I knew that Mitt Romney had a suspicious look about him.] The Obama administration trying to "hand-pick" a GOP patsy? [Chicago politics at its finest.] Lee Harvey Oswald? [From the grave. Take that Warren Commission.] I don't know. What I do know is that I spend my life looking for patterns like these and one has definitely surfaced here. Lightning striking the same place three times is not a coincidence.

...not anymore.

One thing's for sure: If you're thinking about a run for the GOP nomination in 2012, keep that thought to yourself until this thing blows over.

Oh, this just in from New York. Residents of the Empire State are blaming David Paterson for this rash of GOP troubles. Poor Paterson.


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NOTE: FHQ doesn't typically wander into the area of policy polling, but I'm in the midst of a unit on sampling and survey research in my summer course political science research class and I'm looking for examples for illustrative purposes. At the moment, the contradictory findings from NY Times/CBS and Resurgent Republic offers the perfect example.

Depending on who you're listening to, the Obama adminstration's efforts to push meaningful (perhaps, "meaningful" as that is certainly in the eye of the beholder) health care reform through Congress is either going swimmingly or is a complete non-starter. [Actually, the sense I get from my view up in the nosebleed section -- definitely not on the sidelines -- is that the obstacles appear more daunting now than they did prior to health care officially being placed on the agenda.] You will find no better example of this than in the divide between the latest New York Times/CBS News and Resurgent Republic* polls (both pdfs) released in the last few days on the matter. Now, these aren't identical polls, but there are a few questions that offer a glimpse into the true contrast here. First, let's focus on question wording on the overlapping questions before we look at the underlying demographics of each poll's sample. For example:

On higher taxes and health care funding...
NYT/CBS:

Would you be willing or not willing to pay higher taxes so that all Americans have
health insurance they can't lose, no matter what?

57% Willing, 37% Not willing

RR:
Would you prefer a health care reform plan that raises taxes in order to provide health insurance to all Americans, or a plan that does not provide health insurance to all Americans but keeps taxes at current levels?

RAISE TAXES/HEALTH CARE FOR ALL.....................39%
NO TAX INCREASE/NO HEALTH CARE FOR ALL....52%
DON'T KNOW...................................................................10%

On the federal government versus private health care... (And no, these questions do not necessarily offer an apples to apples comparison.)
NYT/CBS:

Do you think the government would do a better or worse job than private insurance
companies in providing medical coverage?

50% Better, 34% Worse

RR:
Which would you prefer: (ROTATE: a system where most Americans get their health care coverage through the federal government, or a system where most Americans get their health care coverage through a private insurance company)?

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.............................................31%
PRIVATE INSURANCE....................................................60%
DON'T KNOW.....................................................................9%

Now, the first set of questions provides us with a much better direct comparison than the second set, but the nearly diametrically opposed numbers from each poll is eye-catching, to say the least. Question wording in each case, of course, may have a lot to do with this, but let's look at the partisan breakdown just for the heck of it. It wasn't all that long ago -- over this past weekend in fact -- that Nate Silver cautioned that these NYT polls typically trend Democratic in terms of sampling (He further adds that the ten point spread isn't all that extraordinary in the grand polling scheme recently.). And it also may not surprise you that a polling outfit called Resurgent Republic would have a more Republican-leaning sample. But let's have a look under the hood, shall we?

Samples (by party ID)...
NYT/CBS:

GOP: 24%
DEM: 38%
IND: 31%
DK: 8%

RR:

GOP: 32%
DEM: 38%
IND: 26%
DK: 3%

The dispute isn't over the Democrats, where both polls have an equivalent proportion, but among the percentage of Republicans and Independents included. How does this stack up against the national poll average over the last six months (via Pollster)?
That NYT/CBS sample appears to be closer to the current D-R polling gap than the Resurgent Republic sample.** But does that mean health care reform is a done deal? Well, we'll have more polls over the next few weeks and months to tell us whether it is or isn't.

...not to mention some action or inaction on Capitol Hill.


*Incidentally, here is the scoop on Resurgent Republican for those interested.
**It should be pointed out that RR had 1000 cases while NYT had a sample size of 895.


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Not That You're Reading Too Much into the PA Senate Polling, but...

I take issue with some of the "wide lead" talk concerning Arlen Specter's position in the Democratic primary polling relative to Joe Sestak. This isn't a new development: that I have an issue or that the media is talking up the numbers without digging terribly deeply into them. And for the record, Political Wire is technically right. It is a wide lead.

But is that what we should be focused on at this point in the race?

The margin isn't what matters. At this point, Specter's position in the polls relative to the 50% mark is what's important. And the Republican-turned-Democrat is hovering just over that point currently. The other thing to eye is the fluctuation in the level of undecideds in this race. That number is important because of a few things that are likely to keep the number higher [than they would be minus these factors]. First, this race involves a Republican-turned-Democrat. Secondly, Sestak has not "officially" entered the race. And finally, it is very early in the process.

So early in fact, that polling wasn't conducted nearly so soon in the cycle the last time an incumbent Pennsylvania senator was challenged in a primary. And for that information you have to stretch all the way back to 2004 when a political unknown, Arlen Specter, was challenged in the Republican primary by Pat Toomey. What pattern can we glean from that data?

First of all, polling on the Specter/Toomey race did not begin until the fall of 2003 before the April 2004 primary. Polling in May and June of 2009, then, precedes that point in the senate electoral cycle. The starting point is largely the same for the candidates in the polls, though. You can see the trendline here (see "Matchup Poll Graph" on the right side). But what OurCampaign provides is the polling without verification of the sources and without that undecided number. So let's look at the polling data and a better graphic of the trends from the fall of 2003 through primary day in Pennsylvania in late April of 2004.



The thing is that Specter jumped above the 50% mark in a few polls but for the most part was stuck just under 50% throughout. All the movement, not to mention momentum, was with Toomey across the five months of polling in the campaign. The more undecideds decided, the more Toomey gained on Specter among likely (Republican) voters in the closed Pennsylvania primary.

[Click to Enlarge]

If we contrast that with the average Pollster has for the six polls conducted in the last month and a half on this hypothetical Democratic primary race, we see that Sestak has already cut further into Specter's advantage without having even formally announced his intention to run. The 17 point advantage Specter now holds is more than half of what it was in the week after his switch to the Democratic party and all the Sestak talk began (The average of the three polls conducted during the first week in May had Specter up by 41 points.). The kicker is that that is with less than ten points having been cut off the undecideds value (The average undecided mark in those same three polls mentioned above was 21 points with the latest Rasmussen poll showing 13% undecided). In other words, Sestak is taking away from Specter more than he's picking up undecideds.

And it's still early (for polling in this race and for the levelling of wide lead charges).


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