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发帖数: 1637 | 1 The Romney campaign is in trouble
Posted by Ezra Klein on September 17, 2012 at 10:54 am
There are two sure signs a campaign is in trouble. The first is that it
begins changing its strategy rapidly and erratically. The second is that it
begins attacking its strategists fiercely and
First came the changes in strategy. It went from doing everything possible
to assure a “referendum” election to picking Paul Ryan as the vice
presidential nominee and going for a choice election. It went from focusing
relentlessly on the economy to cycling among welfare, Medicare and Libya.
The latest ad is about manufacturing jobs in China.
Now we’re hearing the calls for a change in strategists. On Sunday night,
Politico published a 2,700-word piece mostly dedicated to giving “Romney
aides, advisers and friends” space to knife Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney’s
top strategist. “I always have the impression Stuart must save his best
stuff for meetings I’m not important enough to attend,” one Romney
campaign insider told Politico. “The campaign is filled with people who
spend a lot of their time either avoiding him or resisting him.”
Ouch.
On the presidential level, where everyone running campaigns is very, very
good at their jobs, campaign infighting and incoherence tend to be the
result of a candidate being behind in the polls, not the cause of it. Romney
is behind and has been there for quite some time. According to the Real
Clear Politics average of head-to-head polls, Romney hasn’t led the race
since October 2011. The closest he came to a lead in the polls this year was
during the Republican National Convention, when he managed to … tie Obama.
Romney is also behind in most election-forecasting models. Political
scientist James Campbell rounded up 13 of the most credible efforts to
predict the election outcome: Romney trails in eight of them. He’s also
behind in Nate Silver’s election model, the Princeton Election Consortium’
s meta-analysis, Drew Linzer’s Votamatic model and the Wonkblog election
model.
But I didn’t realize quite how dire Romney’s situation was until I began
reading “The Timeline of Presidential Elections: How Campaigns Do and Don’
t Matter,” a new book from political scientists Robert Erikson and
Christopher Wlezien.
What Erikson and Wlezien did is rather remarkable: They collected pretty
much every publicly available poll conducted during the last 200 days of the
past 15 presidential elections and then ran test after test on the data to
see what we could say about the trajectory of presidential elections. Their
results make Romney’s situation look very dire.
For instance: The least-stable period of the campaign isn’t early in the
year or in the fall. It’s the summer. That’s because the conventions have
a real and lasting effect on a campaign.
“The party that gains pre- to post-convention on average improves by 5.2
percentage points as measured from our pre- and post-convention benchmarks,
” write Erikson and Wlezien. “On average, the party that gains from before
to after the conventions maintains its gain in the final week’s polls. In
other words, its poll numbers do not fade but instead stay constant post-
conventions to the final week.” |
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