#InvisiblePrimary: Visible -- Running for 2024, but Running in 2024?

For years now, FHQ has trotted out a fairly simple question during the candidate emergence phase of the invisible primary. Increasingly that emergence occurs -- or more accurately can be seen occurring -- earlier and earlier. But then as now the parsimony of the question creates a powerful lens through which to view (prospective) presidential candidate activity long before primary voters begin to weigh in on just who each party's nominee will be.

Back in 2009, FHQ asked if anyone thought that Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) was not running for the 2012 Republican nomination and followed that up with another distinction. The former Minnesota governor could run for the 2012 nomination in 2009 but the question at that point was whether Pawlenty would actually be running in 2012.

As it turned out Pawlenty did formally announce a bid. But there was more: trips to Iowa, the formation of an exploratory committee, early biographical ads from aligned political action committees. And outside of the candidate's and his campaign's (direct) control there was early polling and general chatter in Republican circles about a Pawlenty bid.

But for all of that activity, Tim Pawlenty never made it to any of the primaries and caucuses in 2012. Instead, his run was derailed by a third place showing in the August 2011 Ames Straw Poll, an event made all the more important because the Pawlenty team had made the Hawkeye state make or break for the former governor. 

Now, why the reminiscence about Tim Pawlenty?

Well, aside from the origin story for the running for but not necessarily in maxim, it speaks to how one should observe the action of (prospective) candidates in the increasing visible but still invisible primary. Candidates run all of the time and many do not get as far or do as much as Tim Pawlenty once did from 2009-2011. Furthermore, candidates need not formally announce as Pawlenty did to have been considered a candidate running for a party's nomination. Take the journey of Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) in 2018-2019. There was never any announcement that he was going to seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. But there was PAC activity, hiring and trips to the usual nomination haunts. There no doubt was other activity that happened more quietly, signals that Brown got from other elites (donors, DNC members, etc.) that did not see the light of day in any reporting. But Brown ran for the 2020 Democratic nomination before ultimately passing.

And there are already signs that this is happening already in the 2024 presidential nomination cycle. There has been no lack of questions about whether both President Biden and former President Trump will run in 2024. In fact, Dave Hopkins had a wonderful piece up just yesterday in response to a Washington Post article about Biden advisors "working under the assumption that he [Biden] will once again top the Democratic ticket in 2024."

As Hopkins said, of course he is. 

And that decision, formal or not, has implications for how other prospective candidates will behave. That is true on the Republican side with respect to what Trump might do. It is not, for example, a secret that former South Carolina governor, Nikki Haley, is running for the 2024 Republican nomination. It just is not. And while Haley may give speeches this and next year and work through her PAC toward electing Republicans across the country in the midterm elections in 2022, none of that guarantees that she will be running in 2024. And that may or may not be because Trump throws his hat back in the ring. 

Yet just because a candidate does not run in any contests does not mean that they did not run for the nomination in that cycle. It just means that roadblocks appeared in any number of forms during the invisible primary instead of voters directly rejecting that candidate in Iowa or New Hampshire or in some other state on down the line on the primary calendar. 

But yes, there are candidates who are running for 2024 even now, three years out.

Recent posts:

If It Was So Easy to Change Then It Would Have Changed By Now

 

The Week the Calendar Wars Heated Up

Early Signs: Nebraska Electoral Vote Allocation Likely to Stay the Same

Follow FHQ on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook or subscribe by Email.

See more on our political/electoral consulting venture at FHQ Strategies.    

#InvisiblePrimary: Visible -- Hawley and Shermanesque/Sherman-ish Statements

"'No, I'm not running,' Hawley told Insider in a brief hallway interview on Tuesday at the US Capitol before ducking into an elevator. He didn't elaborate."

Not exactly, Shermanesque. #InvisiblePrimary #GOP24https://t.co/k4VK7hfyJh

— Josh Putnam (@FHQ) January 27, 2021

--

Yesterday, Business Insider ran with a scoop that Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) had briefly answered that he was not running for president in 2024. Now, on the surface that is both a splashy comment and scoop from someone who had since the 2020 election neither been shy about his 2024 intentions nor inactive on what one might call the invisible primary front. And even if neither of those are exactly true, Hawley's name has been bandied about in 2024 chatter and his actions -- particularly around the electoral vote tabulation in a joint session of Congress -- have been interpreted through a 2024 invisible primary lens as an attempted play at the Trump end of the Republican Party spectrum.

But here is the thing: This is not Hawley's first time saying no to a 2024 run. CNN asked him that question back in November 2020. His response? "I'm not."

Neither blunt denial, however, is all that Shermanesque. "No, I'm not running," and "I'm not" are not definitive declinations. Both leave the door wide open to, if not a change of heart, then to simply saying something along the lines of "I wasn't running then, but I am now," later on down the line. The trick for the Shermanesque statement is always whether one can effectively add "yet" to the end of the turndown response.

Compare "No, I'm not running," with Sherman's "I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected." A "yet" can be added to the former but is much harder to tack onto the latter. Hawley, then, was not Shermanesque in either his November or January responses. 

But was he Sherman-ish? 

That is a different question spurred by a variation on the Shermanesque statement that gained some notoriety around the time of the 2018 midterms when the candidate side of the 2020 invisible primary was beginning to heat up. It was around that time that both Beto O'Rourke (D-TX) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) responded to 2020 questions with answers that looked like some variation on, "I intend to serve the full six years of my [Senate] term." Now, obviously, in O'Rourke's case that was rendered moot when he lost the election to Texas' incumbent, junior senator, Ted Cruz (R). But when he said it -- before the election -- serving the full Senate term was still at stake. 

But for Gillibrand, the statement, before and after the 2018 midterms, was not a clear denial. However, it, on the one hand, kind of painted her into a corner, but on the other, kept the door open to at least "exploring" a run for the 2020 Democratic nomination. The lengths of that exploration can be wide ranging. In her case, Gillibrand ran for 2020 -- and with a formal entry -- up until August 2019. But she never ran in 2020.

The key in the Sherman-ish statement is that "painting oneself into the corner" bit. It is not a definitive "no," but it does potentially set up roadblocks to entry later. No one wants to start a campaign off by having to answer "why did you change your mind/why are you abandoning your word and/or constituents to run?" questions (not that that is any serious obstacle).

The true measure of running or not running is less what the prospective candidates say and more about what they do. Follow those actions and one will get a much better sense of what is happening in the invisible primary. 

In Hawley's case, the statements have been neither Shermanesque nor Sherman-ish, but his actions have maybe pointed elsewhere. Yes, that includes his very public position-taking on the electoral college tabulation. But it also includes things like out-of state fundraisers (like the one that got canceled in Florida in the wake of the events of January 6).

Recent posts: 

A Presidential Primary in Lieu of Caucuses in Nevada?

Iowa, Democrats and 2024

The 2020 Electoral College Spectrum

Suggestions Needed: Who Should Replace Mike Huckabee on the Candidate Emergence Tracker?

Now that Mike Huckabee is out of the race for the 2012 Republican nomination, there is an open slot on the FHQ 2012 GOP Candidate Emergence Tracker. I'm leaning toward Mitch Daniels, but the comments section is open to your suggestions.

Have at it.

[Yes, sadly there are only five items that Google allows to be embedded.]

Recent Posts:

Louisiana House Committee Favorably Reports Bill to Move Presidential Primary to March

Missing the Point: A Follow Up on the Bill to Move the North Carolina Primary to March

Amendments to Connecticut Presidential Primary Bill Would Move It Back to April

Are you following FHQ on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook? Click on the links to join in.

Tim Pawlenty: Book Sales, Low; Google Searches, Up ...Briefly

But hey, Chris Christie is surprisingly and consistently heavily searched (compared to some of the other top tier Republicans*). Maybe there is something (else) to being asked on a regular basis whether you're running for president.

Former Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty, is off to a slow start selling books, but his rounds on the pre-presidential campaign memoir circuit have people searching for him at a higher rate on Google.

...for a little bit anyway.

*No, Sarah Palin is not included. Her search volume always dwarfs all the other candidates'.

Are you following FHQ on Twitter and/or Facebook? Click on the links to join in.

Is Next in Line a Myth?

...or has FiveThirtyEight's Ed Kilgore taken what he calls an oversimplification and applied a very narrow definition to it as means of mythbusting?

The concept in question -- the myth regarding the GOP selection of presidential nominees based on who is next in line -- certainly is a simplification, but the best theories are parsimonious: simple while being powerfully explanatory or predictive. The best way to disprove any theory is to narrowly define its concepts. All this just seems like a measurement issue to me. If you narrowly define someone's next-in-line status as simply having run before (and done reasonably well), then sure, you'll be able to find instances where that "was trumped" by having been a vice presidential candidate or having name recognition or money or grassroots support.

But this is where I differ with Kilgore. All those other factors are part of this. The theory isn't next-in-line (as I supposed it has sadly been dubbed and poorly described) so much as it is heir apparent; someone who has been there (whether as a vice president, vice presidential candidate or presidential nomination candidate), and has some name recognition, money and grassroots support because of it. And this is how I've approached this concept when I've brought it up in this space in the past; as something more broadly defined.

And I bet you're saying to yourself, "This heir apparent sounds an awful lot like a frontrunner." That's because it is. It's the same thing. And as William Mayer has pointed out time and time again, frontrunners usually win in the post-reform period (the McGovern-Fraser reforms that served as the impetus for the system of presidential nominations our country's two major parties employ). [Yes, there are exceptions to that rule as perhaps you were able to glean from the title to Mayer's article.]

Fine, but what does this have to do with the so-called next-in-line theory? Well, much of this has to do with the choices given voters when the primaries and caucuses begin anew every four years. Kilgore alludes to this in his post, referring to the "psychological assertions about the nature of Republicans as opposed to Democrats." But this next-in-line, or heir apparent or frontrunner or whatever you want to call it theory incorporates (or should) what's happening in the invisible primary period between presidential elections because a lot this has to do with what the party establishment is doing behind the scenes before the first ballot is cast in Iowa. This isn't about voters so much is it is about the rules and/or actions of the parties' elites (see Cohen, et al. -- The Party Decides -- for more on the latter).

The thing that separates Republicans from Democrats in this area is the combination of a more homogeneous base of elites and the winner-take-all rules in the delegate selection events. The Republicans just haven't had as much of a "big tent" issue among the various factions of their party as the Democrats have over the last nearly four decades. Have there been divisions at the elite level around particular candidates vying for any given Republican nomination? Yes, but they have been more muted than on the Democratic side. [Again, there are exceptions. 2008 comes to mind.] But Republican candidates who "have been there" have just been better able to take advantage of their greater number of connections to those elites (and the elites vice versa), their endorsements and the attendant financial windfall. Republican elites simply line up behind those they know, whether that means a consensus behind George W. Bush (that's how the former president fits into this) or a slim plurality for John McCain. There's a relationship there. The candidate knows he or she needs the elite level support to win the nomination and the establishment within the party needs a candidate who can get elected and push the agenda of the party.

So this isn't a question of narrowly defining "next-in-line" so much as it is about how that status works in concert (and overlaps) with other factors (like electability in McCain's case) to make Republican's who are "next-in-line" more likely to emerge as presidential nominees than Democrats in the same situation. That status, though, is the tie that binds the contested nominations of the post-reform era together on the GOP side.

What does that portend for 2012? Both Romney and Huckabee (and even a lagging Palin) have a leg up on others that will contend (or are already quietly contending) for the nomination. All three are logical heirs to the next-in-line label. If, however, the party decides, as it did in 2000, that Romney and Huckabee and Palin are dispensable in the way that Alexander and Forbes and Quayle were, the party is likely to gather around someone who has some institutional strength within the party (Dare I say Haley Barbour? Not without repercussions, I guess.).

As of right now, though, those who are next in line have the best shot at the nomination in 2012.

...unless...


Recent Posts:
On the Agenda at the Democratic Change Commission Meeting

GOP Governors in the White House?

The Answer is Yes

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.


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

DNC to Provide Coverage of Democratic Change Commission Meeting on Saturday

What Scandal Does to the Candidate Emergence Tracker

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.


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

Democratic Change Commission Meeting This Weekend

Why the Sanford Thing Matters

How Not to Emerge as a GOP Darkhorse, Part II

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.


Recent Posts:
Tale of the Tape: Health Care Polling

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

State of the Race: Virginia (6/18/09)

2012 GOP Candidate Emergence Tracker

The new, embeddable Google Trends Gadget will come in handy I think. I'll still put together the monthly posts (Where is that April one again?), but this gives everyone the chance for one-stop, do-it-yourself searching on the possible contenders for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

The plusses are obvious, but let's talk a bit about the minuses with the gadget.

• First, just like the Google Trends application, you are limited to just five search terms. When we're talking about 8 or 10 or 12 possible candidates, though, you've got a problem. Fortunately, there's a something of a work-around. Don't like Tim Pawlenty occupying that fifth spot? Fine, click "edit" in the upper right corner of the figure and substitute Bobby Jindal or Kay Bailey Hutchinson or John Huntsman [oops] Thune/Ensign. This is where the monthly aggregations of this data will be helpful: putting everyone -- all 10 or 12 candidates -- side by side.
• I would also like to have this thing up and refreshing in the sidebar in real time, but the parameters of the gadget make it too large to fit there. My attempts to resize it only altered the frame size, not the graph itself. The smaller I made it, the more the frame zoomed in on the upper left corner. The proper dimensions for the sidebar left me with Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich's names and a couple of Sarah Palin's peaks from the line graph. Not an ideal visual representation. What I'll do then is similar to what I've already done with the primary calendar maps in the left sidebar. I'll put one of the graph pictures in its own sidebar widget and make the picture a live link to this post/gadget so you can have an updated look. I'll also periodically update the picture (weekly?), so that it doesn't stagnate.

I think that's it. Happy candidate tracking.


Recent Posts:
North Carolina Won't Be Frontloading for 2012 During 2009

Who Had May 15 in the Office Pool for Jon Huntsman Joining the Obama Administration?

FOX News Poll: 2012 is All About Huckabee and Romney

2012 GOP Presidential Candidate Emergence

Now that FHQ has had a look back through the lens of Google Trends at Democratic (here and here) and Republican (here, here and here) presidential candidate emergence in 2008, I thought we'd cast an eye toward 2012. As was made clear in Sunday's post on frontloading bill trends since 2001, there is a cyclical pattern to this process as well. All is relatively quiet in terms of presidential candidate Google searches in years one and two of any four year presidential election cycle, but once the midterm congressional elections hit, the more candidate-specific searches begin to climb in number (just as in the case of the number of bills to shift a state's presidential primary). That's exactly the pattern that was witnessed between 2005 and 2008.

In other words, the expectations for this current period in the presidential election cycle should be quite low. Hey, we just finished an election! Why think about the next one? Well, some of us are much to the chagrin of others. The bottom line is that we have to take these trends with a grain of salt this far out. But just for the heck of it let's take FHQ's Elite Eight for 2012 and add Bobby Jindal and Ron Paul. Now, it could become necessary to add (or subtract) someone in later (FHQ has had an internal debate raging about whether to include John Thune, for instance.), but I'll leave it at these ten for the time being.

How, then, do things look for these ten prospective candidates in terms of Google search volume three years ahead of primary season 2012? FHQ, always a bastion of information, has adopted a more is more (as opposed to the less is more) strategy in this instance at the risk of visual overload in this one post. I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but I think that it is important to look not only at the complete time series for the year thus far (January - March at least), but to glance at the monthly snapshots to get a clearer picture of the daily fluctuations. Yes, daily. That's where this series of posts (Yes, they'll go on on a monthly basis.) will be superior to the week-by-week structure of the 2008 posts. I'll also augment the complete time series and monthly snapshots with Bobby Jindal omitted due to his Republican Response spike in late February when President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress. Jindal's data is supressed simply because it dwarfs (and even that may be understating the effect) the fluctuations for the other nine candidates. [And I'll bet you thought it'd be Sarah Palin hovering so far ahead of her other prospective Republican primary opponents.]

To the trends!

[Click to Enlarge]

There you have it. See, I told you that Jindal spike skews the data. All you can really see from that is the Louisiana governor having a really good day, Sarah Palin with a comfortable advantage over everyone for all but about a week, Ron Paul claiming a steady middling position and then everyone else clustered together. What's that really telling us other than Bobby Jindal was the talk of the town for about a week? Not much.

So let's look at that January to March period without Jindal.

[Click to Enlarge]

Ah, now there's a trend. It's still Sarah Palin, then Ron Paul and everyone else, but the trajectory that the Palin line is following is oddly similar to the cautionary tales the punditocracy was weaving in the days after last November's election. The onus was always on Palin to stay in the news and politically relevant from the far reaches of the Last Frontier. Relative to her other prospective competitors, the Alaska governor has basically come back down to earth. She's still in an advantageous position, but not like she was. If you draw a straight line from point A (1/1/09) to point B (3/31/09), Palin has lost what amounts to ten points in relative Google search volume compared to the other, in this case, eight candidates. Yes, there has been a rebound of sorts in April due to the Levi Johnston controversy and last week's right to life gathering in Indiana, but FHQ will get to that once April is complete. [For the time being, I'll leave it at this: The former had more of an impact on Palin searches than the latter.]

Palin's one thing, but what about some of these other candidates? Let's zoom in on the first three months of 2009 individually.

[Click to Enlarge]

Mike Huckabee had some significant spikes across the month of January.

[Click to Enlarge]

But he comes back to the pack in February (see appendix for a February chart with Jindal included). In the first two months of the year, a subtle (very subtle) advantage can be detected for both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich and there are some Mark Sanford (stimulus package-related) jumps as well.

[Click to Enlarge]

Once we zoom in on March and bring Jindal's data back into account, a Jindal/Gingrich/Romney grouping of candidates in the middle emerges with everyone else struggling to occasionally break from the no search barrier. That latter group includes Huckabee, Pawlenty, Crist, Huntsman and Sanford.

Now, this is all something of a fool's errand in 2009. That I'll admit. However, there are two things to take home from this:

First, all that you see above is true to what we would otherwise expect for this period in a presidential election cycle. One election ended and most just have not started thinking about the next one. The argument, then, that most of the (subtle) fluctuations are based on media cues is a valid one. But...

This Palin trend is one worth tracking. Her potential candidacy is one that could spur a huge grassroots effort. It is also true that latent grassroots support turned active could make her decision as to whether to enter the presidential race in 2012 that much easier. Still, her success will be measured by the extent to which the Alaska governor is able to, as I've said already, stay in the news and remain politically relevant. No one excites the Republican base better than Palin at the moment, but that excitement has to be met with the construction of some national level policy bona fides without which she'll be hard-pressed to convince Republicans mindful of her chances in the general election that she can win. That, though, is a story for another day.


Appendix: Bonus Charts
Below are a few more charts I put together but didn't fit in with the discussion above. But who am I to deprive FHQ's loyal readers of the visuals? There are three additional graphs. The first shows the February snapshot with the Jindal spike included and the final two show a January/February, two month snapshot -- one with the Jindal spike, one without.

[Click to Enlarge]

[Click to Enlarge]

[Click to Enlarge]

Recent Posts:
Trends in Frontloading: Bills Proposed and Passed Since 2001

The 2012 Presidential Primary Calendar (4/19/09)

Jones Reelected OK GOP Chair: 2012 Primary Seemingly Safe

2008 GOP Candidate Emergence, Part 3

This is part three in a series of examinations of the fluctuations in the volume of Republican candidate Google searches during the 2008 presidential election cycle. You can find part one (the invisible primary trends among the top six candidates) here and part two (the invisible primary trends minus the Ron Paul skew) here.

Last week FHQ had a look at the development of GOP presidential candidate searches in Google throughout the 2008 invisible primary period (2005-2007). When the 2008 search data is added to the full time series a much deeper glimpse at the significant jump John McCain made heading into the 2008 contests is gained. Also, Ron Paul's 2007 gains peak once primary season commences and then decay rather quickly as a McCain nomination becomes highly likely following the Super Tuesday contests on February 5.

When the Paul numbers are suppressed (see figure above), we see that the two tracks argument mentioned in the previous post (a Thompson/Huckabee track and a McCain/Romney track) breaks down as the contests get underway. Recall, that once Thompson's candidacy failed to take off, Mike Huckabee essentially filled the void entering 2008. But that more social conservative track peaks and collapses after the Iowa caucuses, leaving a two person battle (in terms of Google searches) among the moderate/fiscal conservatives on the McCain/Romney track. Until...

Super Tuesday. Once we zoom in to look at just the 2008 portion of the time series, it is apparent that (again, in terms of Google searches) Huckabee's inability to back up the Iowa win with anything prior to Super Tuesday hurt the former Arkansas governor's chances at the nomination. Romney, despite the money spent, didn't win Iowa but was able to manage victories in several states (Wyoming, Michigan Nevada and Maine) between that point and Super Tuesday. That seems to have kept him viable in Google searches until Super Tuesday when Romney bested McCain in an Obama-esque run through the caucus states while falling further behind McCain in the delegate count because of the Arizona senator's wins in larger, winner-take-all states. The former Massachusetts governor's searches plummet after that point, coinciding with his withdrawal from the race.

In that intervening Iowa to Super Tuesday period, though, the race was on that McCain/Romney track in regard to Google searches. And though Romney dropped below Huckabee upon his withdrawal, Huckabee was more an afterthought in comparison to McCain at that point anyway. We don't, for instance, see Huckabee's search levels go up following Romney pulling out of the race. And that's what we'd expect given the way these nomination campaigns have gone in the recent past: a nominee quickly emerges and everyone else falls by the wayside.

Just for a bit of perspective, let's zoom in a bit further and include just the January to August data (dropping the general election search data). McCain searches don't reach the point at which Ron Paul was at the beginning of 2008 until after the GOP convention. But what is really striking is how much that Paul presence online deteriorates as McCain is sealing the deal on the nomination (Super Tuesday to March 4). Yes, both candidates are quite similar in their search trajectories over that period, but the key is looking at where each began the year. Once the contests started McCain searches took off and Paul searches dropped precipitously.

The other thing we gain from this is that 2008 on the GOP side provides us with a case not of invisible primary candidate emergence, but of primary season candidate emergence. And that's not something that Americans have been able to witness too often in the post-reform era. It is too bad we don't have comparable data for the Ford-Reagan race in 1976.


Recent Posts:
GOP Going the Caucus Route in Oklahoma in 2012?

No Caucuses? North Dakota in 2012

2008 GOP Candidate Emergence, Part 2

2008 GOP Candidate Emergence, Part 2

This is part two in a series of examinations of the fluctuations in the volume of Republican candidate Google searches during the 2008 presidential election cycle. You can find part one (the invisible primary trends among the top six candidates) here.

As the figures in part one showed, once we get to the 2007 segment of the invisible primary time series, the exponential growth of Ron Paul's search volume detracts from our ability to see the trends among the viable Republican candidates vying for the GOP's 2008 nomination. When the Ron Paul data is suppressed, Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee appear to be bigger players. Both at various points during the latter half of 2007 tower over their remaining competitors in terms of their Google search traffic. You can see that in the full (2005-2007) figure above, but the 2007 snapshot below is more indicative.

In many regards we can see both candidates spikes as inter-related. Huckabee didn't jump all that much after his win in the September Iowa straw poll, but his win there coupled with the failed roll-out of Fred Thompson's candidacy seemed to boost Huckabee's profile entering the caucuses in Iowa. Essentially though, we have two tracks going here; one representing each side of the Republican Party (in its simplest binary terms). Huckabee and Thompson best typified the social conservative wing of the party; the segment of the Republican base that seemed least represented by and least enthusiastic about this pool of candidates. So much of the Republican invisible primary was about either how McCain was attempting to appeal to those voters or who the alternative would be. Through that lens, Thompson/Huckabee was that alternative.

But there was another track here as well; a more moderate or economic conservative track. This was a three person race between McCain (once the Arizona senator's campaign hit the wall in the summer of 2007), Giuliani and Romney. Giuliani's progression throughout the year though isn't all that variable, and as such, this was more of a two person battle between Romney and McCain.
[This is where Glenn's point on polling the other day is interesting: Giuliani was leading many of the polls during 2007 (see below), yet had basically flatlined in terms of search volume.]

[Click Figure for Link to Actual Polls at Pollster.com]

And what we see in that 2007 Google search snapshot is that Romney rises and passes McCain as the Arizona senator is falling throughout 2007. The former Massachusetts governor, then stays ahead of McCain until the calendar turns and the contests begin. With those two simultaneous trends, the GOP side is a little more interesting from a candidate emergence perspective than the Democratic side. And that the search time series doesn't comport with the polling going on during the 2007 portion of the Republican invisible primary raises some questions for us to pursue here in the future, especially regarding Giuliani. Why is it that America's mayor was polling so well, but got so little interest online?

There seems to be a better match between the two metrics concerning the other candidates. Yes, there is a Huckabee lag from search data to polling and Romney is consistently behind, though, close to McCain during the final quarter of 2007. On the whole though, the rising and falling of each candidate roughly corresponds across both measures (it is a matter of shifting the whole line that differs across both) with the exception of Giuliani, whose numbers are widely divergent between the two.

These data are designed to elicit questions rather than answer them, and I think we've got that here.

Up Next: the GOP candidates in 2008


Recent Posts:
2008 Republican Presidential Candidate Emergence: The View Through Google Trends

What About 2008? Democratic Presidential Candidates Through the Lens of Google Trends

From One Contest to Another: Ohio Redistricting Competition

2008 Republican Presidential Candidate Emergence: The View Through Google Trends

To avoid chart saturation here, I'll break this examination of 2008 GOP candidates into three parts. The first part will focus on Republican candidate emergence during the invisible primary, the second part will drop Ron Paul in the context of 2007 to better ascertain search volume shifts during the latter half of that year, and finally part three will look at how things changed once primary season began.

As I mentioned in the series of posts investigating the shifts in Democratic candidate search volumes, the early speculation following the 2004 election and entering the 2008 invisible primary centered on a potential John McCain-Hillary Clinton general election. Well, the US got half of that last November, but early on Google searches favored both the New York senator and the Arizona senator overall. On the Republican side, though, there certainly is McCain red hovering over the other colors across much of the 2005-2006 period. And that's somewhat in keeping with the "next one in line" nominations that the GOP has had more often than not throughout the last generation.

But the full invisible primary (2005-2007) time series does not really provide us with the true nature of McCain's search volume relative to his most viable competitors for the nomination (for reasons that seem obvious simply by looking at the charts, but that FHQ will get into momentarily). If we zoom in on each of the three years individually, though, we get a better glimpse of what McCain's real advantage was. Again, McCain's volume is ahead of the other five candidates through 2005 (other than when Fred Thompson shot up in the summer when Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement from the Supreme Court and the former Tennessee senator was named by the Bush administration as the head of an informal group to guide her replacement, John Roberts, through the confirmation process.). Now, it is important to note here that there are no doubt endogeneity issues here as the media coverage of events in the political realm certainly has an impact on the volume of search traffic for a particular keyword. In other words, a search for anyone of these candidates is not necessarily a presidential run-related search.

However, that certainly changes somewhat as attention shifts toward the presidential race at the conclusion of the 2006 midterms (see above). All six candidates see at least a modest jump following the elections that brought the Democrats back into control of both houses of Congress. Again though, McCain is ahead across much of that year.

Heading into 2007 that progression continues. Mitt Romney's stock rises and finally surpasses McCain during the summer 2007 low point for the Arizona senator's campaign. More interestingly, though, Fred Thompson's search volume increases upon the formation of his presidential candidacy exploratory committee. The online chatter behind his potential candidacy continued into the summer months. As McCain's prospects waned, Thompson's grew. But Thompson's strength was as a potential candidate. Upon officially entering the race in September 2007, the former Tennessee senator quickly underwhelmed hopeful conservatives, losing ground online.

Of course, much of this Thompson spike is -- which is really quite an interesting case of candidate emergence -- is clouded by the sudden and consistent growth of Ron Paul online. The Texas congressman's close in 2007 dwarfed even Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's heading into the election year. And those were two of the top three candidates in a Democratic field most Democratic voters were very enthusiastic about. Despite the following online (and this was something the power of which FHQ readers were recently reminded of), Paul just wasn't a serious candidate, and his numbers affect our ability to see the movement among the other five candidates who were all viable options heading into 2008.

Before examining the 2008 context, though, we'll look at the GOP invisible primary sans Ron Paul. Fred Thompson searches will appear much more significant and we'll better see the movement around other candidates (especially Mike Huckabee after his Iowa straw poll win and Fred Thompson's false start.). That's where we'll turn our attention next.


Recent Posts:
What About 2008? Democratic Presidential Candidates Through the Lens of Google Trends

From One Contest to Another: Ohio Redistricting Competition

Newt on 2012: "We'll See"

What About 2008? Democratic Presidential Candidates Through the Lens of Google Trends

Yesterday, FHQ looked at the Google Trends search volume for the 2008 Democratic presidential candidates between 2005 and 2007. The goal was to look for the emergence of the candidates during the invisible primary. And what happened, on the Democratic side at least, was more a case of candidate displacement than candidate emergence. Barack Obama basically overtook John Edwards as the Hillary Clinton alternative.

Invisible primary aside, though, what does the search volume look like for each of the top five candidates once primary and caucus contests begin providing tangible results in January 2008?

Well, for starters, tacking on that extra year and the election day spike really dwarfs some of the earlier data. What's important, though, is that red line (Obama) spikes in early 2008 and stays above the yellow line (Clinton) through mid-June when Clinton's volume trails off. Sure this gives us some scale, but that election day jump for Obama is deterring us from seeing some of the changes from the invisible primary.

If we cut off the data at September 2008 -- just after the Democratic convention -- we lose some of the skew from that election day spike. Instead of one multi-colored line running across the bottom of the time series from January 2005 to November of 2006, we can actually see Hillary Clinton hovering above the other potential candidates instead of appearing to be one in the crowd (while still appearing to be at the top).

The picture is clearer still when just the 2008 data is isolated. Obama still is clearly ahead of Clinton throughout the time series, but there are certainly some fluctuations given the events on the ground. The space between Obama and Clinton is widest following Super Tuesday in early February and Obama's streak of wins to close out the month. Wright, bitter-gate and losses to Clinton in Texas and Ohio in March, however, closed that gap. Obama, though, maintains that lead, diminished though it is until the nomination contests end and Clinton withdraws.

Again though, much of this tracks with the events that were happening in the contest at the time, but Glenn does raise an interesting point. What does polling look like during this period? That's obviously another layer to add into this; one that Cohen, et al. (cited in original post) considered. In the original study, (actually Karol et al. 2003), they found that endorsements had three times the impact on polls than polls had on endorsements during the invisible primary period. No, that doesn't answer the question in the context of the primaries and caucuses, but it does indicate that polls (like the data here) are likely next in line on the causal chain behind events in the nomination race.


Recent Posts:
From One Contest to Another: Ohio Redistricting Competition

Newt on 2012: "We'll See"

2008 Democratic Presidential Candidate Emergence: The View Through Google Trends

2008 Democratic Presidential Candidate Emergence: The View Through Google Trends

The other day I speculated about value of watching Google search trends as a means of tracking presidential candidate emergence. As I said in that post, it is one thing to look at that in real time, but quite another to look at how this looks over the course of an entire invisible primary period. Fortunately Google Trends has archived search data back to January 2004 and that affords us the opportunity to put this idea to the test in the context of 2008 presidential candidate emergence.

Now, keep in mind that this is an idea still very much in its infancy (and it may stay there given the limitations of the data and other complications). First of all, what you'll see below may not be tracking an organic growth and solidifying of support behind a candidate (or viability behind a candidacy) so much as a media-triggered urge to go find out something about a candidate. If we're looking for a causal chain, then, it may be something like:

endorsement/fundraising total --> news story --> internet search

In the context of a modern campaign built on social networking (via technology especially) the chain of events isn't as clear and regardless, all of the points in that chain have something of a recursive relationship anyway.

The other caveat is much more easily accounted for. Obviously, we'd expect the volume of searches to go up as a presidential election year approaches. That kicks the chain of events (in whatever order) into hyperdrive.

All caveats aside, though, how did this look in the context of the Democratic field of candidates as they emerged, announced and ran for the Democratic nomination between 2004 and 2008?

The expectation going in is that Hillary Clinton would dwarf all the other included candidates (and I just included FHQ's estimation of the top five candidates on the Democratic side) and at some point be passed by Barack Obama. And that is generally what we see in the full chart at the top. But it is easier to see Clinton's lead in search volume across all of 2005 and well into 2006 in the yearly snapshots. Around the time of the midterm elections in 2006 we see Obama's searches shoot up. The Illinois senator's numbers increased most likely because of his appearance on Meet the Press, where he discussed the possibility of a White House run. You'll also note that Edwards numbers also jump at the end of 2006 when he announced he would be seeking the 2008 Democratic nomination. There were similar spikes for Clinton and Obama when they announced during the first couple of months of 2007.

We don't see candidate emergence here so much, but we do see some candidate displacement. Hillary Clinton was very much a factor in the 2008 presidential campaign. In conversations I had here at UGA as early as 2005 the discussion centered on a Clinton-McCain general election in 2008. To some degree then, the story is more about the emergence of an alternative to Clinton. For instance, John McCain emerged as the alternative to George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican primaries. Edwards actually runs ahead of Obama through 2005 and 2006 (minus the Obama MTP blip), but once Obama announced his bid, he consistently ran ahead of Edwards for most of 2007. Obama, then, displaced Edwards as the Clinton alternative and that was solidified by Edwards opting into the federal matching funds system for the primaries in the late summer/early fall of 2007.

Now, we are limited by this data to some degree. These are weekly snapshots of the candidates' positions relative to each other in terms of their individual search volumes. Daily accounts are available and would provide us with a richer story (especially vis a vis the "which came first the news or the search" conundrum), but that's a something for another day.

Up next? The 2008 GOP candidates.


Recent Posts:
And Your 2012 GOP Presidential Nominee Is...

TARHEELS!

76,914-76,817 77,017-76,934: Murphy Tedisco Leads in NY-20

Presidential Candidate Emergence: An Alternate Measure

I had this link come into my inbox the other day and it really got me thinking about using this Google search data to track presidential candidate emergence during the invisible primary.

[Image Courtesy of irregulartimes.com. Click to Enlarge]

Now sure, Google itself warns against using their Labs-designated (read: not quite ready for primetime) Trends tool data for heavy duty research, which this isn't, so I couldn't help myself. The good folks at Irregular Times got the ball rolling on this in terms of tracking the 2012 Republican candidates' emergence in real time, but that only tells us a little bit of the story. Google Trends stretches back to January 2004 and that affords us the opportunity to track the fluctuations of the 2008 candidates on both sides as a baseline for comparison.

But here's the thing: I actually prefer the Google data over the Cafe Press search data. Yes, Irregular Times makes the point that Google search data pulls in all the search data regardless of whether you were looking up John McCain in 2006 in the context his 2008 presidential bid or some legislative work he was doing on the Hill. I can buy that. And while the benefits of using the Cafe Press search data (searching for actual candidate-related merchandise) are that we are gaining strength of attachment, the drawback is that we are potentially losing out on data concerning searches that while not as strong, are still related to these candidates in terms of the presidency. In other words, I'd like to take the larger view and try to narrow the scope somehow than narrow things unnecessarily right off the bat and miss something important.

[Fine FHQ, what's the point?]

This actually settles quite nicely into the realm of political science. The very first thing I thought of when I saw this data was issue evolution. The classic model constructed Carmines and Stimson (1981) looked at issue changes (such as on racial issues during the 20th century) on two planes. First, issue stances change over time, but secondly, their evolution takes place at the elite level within the party (in terms of perception and actions in Congress) and works its way down to the mass level affecting perceptions on the issues there.

This obviously has a link to the invisible primary period we are in now ahead of 2012. No, it isn't terribly active right now. Not at the mass level, at least. But there's no doubt there is jockeying going on at the elite level and that ultimately finds its way down to the masses. This approach has already seen some attention within the literature. Cohen, et. al (2003, 2005, 2008) have examined this at the elite level, tracking candidates' efforts to woo donors and high-profile endorsements. It strikes me, though, that this Google Trends data is an interesting means of tracking the level to which this permeates the masses. Now granted, the Cohen argument is that the system is set up in a way to allow for party autonomy over the nomination decision, but this data seems like an alternate means of investigating this as opposed to focusing on polling (which may have some endogeneity issues with internet searches) or waiting for vote outcomes in the primaries.

This week, then, we'll be focused on this relationship (among other things). Ideally I'd be able to roll this out in one big post, but I don't have the time tonight (and I suppose I've been sitting on this for a couple of days already anyway) to put it all together. We all may be better served having it broken down into its component parts. Regardless, this should be fun to look at.


Recent Posts:
The 2012 Presidential Primary Calendar (4/4/09)

Georgia in 2012: Back to March?

Championship Set in NPR's 2012 Bracket