Ambinder: Race Over?
by Mark BlumenthalNot to be missed: My colleague Marc Ambinder has an article in the latest issue of The Atlantic on how the Obama campaign "worked methodically to woo white voters without alienating black ones--and vice versa." Ambinder, whose sources in Obamaland were strong, draws heavily on conversations with Cornell Belcher, "a top Obama pollster who had conducted some of the campaign's earliest research on race."
The short version is that Obama gained sufficient credibility and support among African-American voters to allow his campaign to focus later in the campaign on wooing uncertain white voters, many of whom demonstrated what Belcher describes as "racial aversion." The eventual lopsided margin among black voters, Ambinder writes,
also highlights what Obama did not have to do: he did not have to pander to black leaders; he did not have to target specific messages at the black community with the attendant risk of exacerbating economic tension between blacks and whites. He did not have to bring up race. And that was key, because Belcher's polling confirmed that culturally anxious whites were willing to vote for a black candidate so long as they did not meditate on the candidate's blackness. Obama was able to credential himself as an African American without engaging in overt racial politics. Or, rather, the black community credentialed Obama without his resorting to racial politicking, something that white Democratic candidates had to do.
The article -- well worth reading in full -- has more details on how Belcher measured "racial aversion" and on the conclusions he drew from the data.
Ambinder also reports on Belcher's candor, back in September, about how race might limit Obama's support:
In the fall, when some Obama advisers began predicting a landslide, Belcher would have none of it. "No one with any real post-civil-rights understanding of our national political contours could with a straight face predicate a Democratic national landslide," he told me in September.
It's worth contrasting that statement with the post-election assessments of many political scientists. They found Obama's ultimate margin "not surprising" since it roughly matched what statistical models based mostly on "fundamental factors" (such as perceptions of the economy and the Bush administration) had predicted (for more details, see comments by Larry Bartels in the Brookings post-election roundtable or the concise summary, with ample links, by John Sides).
But Belcher's words of caution remind me of a comment from one of John Sides' readers in reaction to Sides argument that "the fundamentals" mattered more than the campaigns:
[T]he fact that Obama--as a black man--was able to pull within the margin of a usual victory speaks to the ability of his campaign skills. Again, coming from a sociological perspective, race is so incredibly salient in so many aspects of our lives as Americans, it is astounding that so many Americans were willing to put those sentiments aside and vote for a black man. I suspect that this is what you might mean by "It may be that the campaign helped move voters in line with the outcome that the fundamentals predict" -- but I think that understates how amazing Obama's accomplishment to be the first African American President really is.
See the same link for Sides' reply.
I can't help but thinking that if the election had turned out differently, we might have heard a chorus of "I told you so's" from a different set of political scientists reminding us of the lessons of 30 or 40 years of academic opinion research on how racial attitudes shape political preferences. It didn't happen that way, and Ambinder's piece helps explain why.
From 2002 to 2008
by Mark BlumenthalEver since Election Night this past November, I have been ruminating about a story that I've been meaning to post. Its connection to pollsters and poll methodology is indirect, but seems especially relevant right now as we formally turn the page from the incredible election year 2008 to a new administration and its travails in 2009. So before we get back into our usual routine, I want to share it.
In May 2002, I sat down to draft a questionnaire for a new client, a wealthy businessman who was then considering a challenge to an incumbent U.S. Senator two years hence. It was just six years ago, back in the days before my MysteryPollster blog, back when conducting such surveys for Democratic candidates was my full-time occupation. And, as it turned out, this client would be my last "major" race (a designation that, in my mind, falls somewhere between a contest with an uncertain outcome and one with some national significance).
My client's eventual campaign struck some as a microcosm of conventional (and thus flawed) politics. One of the consultants for one of our opponents called our campaign "an exercise in the technology of politics...They do polls and see what people want to hear and then they put ads on the air and run them again and again. There's nothing new about what they're doing." There was truth in this critique, and the ultimate demise of this campaign played a not insignificant role in my evolution from consultant to blogger.
But it was something that happened at the very beginning of that campaign that sticks in my memory now. On that day in May, I started with my usual process when drafting a benchmark "message testing" survey. I took all of my notes from initial discussions with the client, suggestions from other consultants and information gleaned from news clippings and the Internet and synthesized it into a single document listing all of the "messages" -- candidate profiles and arguments about them pro and con -- we hoped to test on the benchmark survey.
I found my "notes for questionnaire" for that project on my hard drive yesterday, still there after moving with me through at least three different computers over the last six years. My first cut consisted of roughly 700 words. About half involved the incumbent Republican, about a third concerned our client. I had also typed a two sentence profile of the potential primary opponent, a former Democratic Senator that had been turned out of office a few years before.
Finally, the document also included the names -- just the names --of three potential candidates that most everyone considered extreme long-shots. The paucity of detail on these three spoke to their status as very long shots in this particular Senate race. Anyone looking over my notes right now, however, would immediately notice one now familiar name among the also-rans:
"Barack Obama."
The survey we fielded a few weeks later showed that just 4% of likely general election voters had a favorable impression of Obama, while 5% rated him unfavorably. Nearly four out of five (79%) had never heard of Obama. He did a little better among likely Democratic primary voters -- 11% favorable, 6% unfavorable -- but still ran far behind, winning just 6% of the vote, in a five-candidate primary matchup that also featured former Senator Carol Moseley Braun. Obama did a little better (rising to 12%) when we omitted Braun, but Obama still ran far behind state Comptroller Dan Hynes (with 34%).
Of course, my client, Chicago businessman Blair Hull, started with even less recognition and support (2% of the vote, to be precise), but his candidacy and its ultimate demise was another story altogether. The consultant dissmissed our campaign as "nothing new" was a truly forward looking guy named David Axelrod. But I digress.
It is still hard to believe that a State Senator who seemed like the longest of long shots for the U.S. Senate so recently is about to be sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. I look back at my notes from six years ago, ponder all that has happened since and just shake my head in wonder.
This story teaches many lessons, of course, but the most relevant to readers of this site is that no poll or statistical model could have predicted Obama's assent. Yes, we could see from the "internals" of that first survey that Obama had the potential to be a formidable contender in the 2004 Senate primary, especially after both Braun and incumbent Peter Fitzgerald announced that they would not run. But no survey or model in 2002 could have predicted Obama's 52.8% majority in the seven-candidate 2004 Senate primary or the nearly 70% of the vote he won in the general election, much less all that followed in bid for the White House in 2008. I'm certainly a believer in opinion surveys and statistical models, but they have their limits.
The Obama story from 2004 provides no direct corollary to the ongoing arguments about the "electability" of potential Senate candidates in Illinois, New York or elsewhere, but I do see a warning against leapin
