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USANews版 - Morning Jay: Why Romney Is Likely to Win
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l****z
发帖数: 29846
1
Jay Cost
November 2, 2012 6:00 AM
When I started making election predictions eight years ago, I had a very
different perspective than I do today. I knew relatively little about the
history of presidential elections or the geography of American politics. I
had a good background in political science and statistics. So,
unsurprisingly in retrospect, I focused on drawing confidence intervals from
poll averages.
Since then, I have learned substantially more history, soured somewhat on
political science as an academic discipline, and have become much more
skeptical of public opinion polls. Both political science and the political
polls too often imply a scientific precision that I no longer think actually
exists in American politics. I have slowly learned that politics is a lot
more art than science than I once believed.
Accordingly, what follows is a prediction based on my interpretation of the
lay of the land. I know others see it differently--and they could very well
be right, and I could be wrong.
I think Mitt Romney is likely to win next Tuesday.
For two reasons:
(1) Romney leads among voters on trust to get the economy going again.
(2) Romney leads among independents.
Let’s take each point in turn.
Romney’s advantage on the economy. This to me is pretty straightforward.
Take the recent NPR poll, which was a bipartisan survey conducted by
Resurgent Republic and Democracy Corps. It found Obama’s job approval
rating on the economy to be underwater, 47-52. The poll also found Mitt
Romney to be more trusted on the economy over Obama, 50 to 46 percent.
Poll after poll, I generally see the same thing. Romney has an edge on the
economy. That includes most of the state polls.
Moreover, this election looks to hinge on the economy, and little else. The
recent Fox News poll broke the top issues into four: economic issues (like
jobs); social issues (like abortion); national security issues (like
terrorism); and fiscal issues (like taxes). To my mind, economic and fiscal
issues are one and the same, meaning: 75 percent of respondents willing to
pick a top issue picked the economy or fiscal issues.
I do not know of an election where the electorate was so singularly focused
on one set of issues, and the person trusted less on them nevertheless won.
This makes 2012 different than 2004, when the electorate was focused on four
issues, in roughly equal proportion – terrorism, moral values, Iraq, and
the economy. Bush dominated the first two, Kerry the second two. This cycle,
Team Obama tried to transform the culture into a second front in this
electoral war, but they have clearly failed. Per the Fox News poll, just 13
percent of voters list that as their top concern.
Romney’s lead among independents. This second point is related to the first
, but gets down to my view of the long-term trajectory of American politics,
which corresponds quite closely to Sean Trende’s book, The Lost Majority.
After the Great Depression, the Republican brand was in tatters and the
Democrats seemed to have saved the nation with the New Deal. The result was
a forty-year period of Democratic dominance in party identification. The two
Republican presidents between FDR and Ronald Reagan were Dwight Eisenhower
and Richard Nixon, and their paths to office were peculiar. Eisenhower could
have won the presidency running as anything, and Nixon required a crack in
the Democratic coalition, winning just 43 percent of the vote in 1968.
During this period, it simply was not enough for a successful GOP candidate
to win independents and self-identified Republicans. Barring a substantial
third-party challenge from the Democratic side, a victorious Republican had
to pull significant crossover support from the Democratic party. This is why
Gerald Ford lost the presidency in 1976, despite winning independent voters
by 11 points; Jimmy Carter carried enough Democrats to secure victory.
But the New Deal coalition by that point was fractured badly, and it finally
broke into pieces in 1980. Democrats had, prior to that, enjoyed a 10-point
or greater identification edge over the GOP, but that year it fell to just
4 points. Since 1980, it has averaged about 3 ½ points. And because
Republican candidates typically hold their party together better than
Democrats (or, put another way, there are almost always more Democratic
defectors than Republican defectors), the effective edge has been even
smaller.
This has led to the rising power of the independent vote. And its effects
are all around us, if we only care to look.
From 1932 to 1980, the Democrats had unified control of the Congress for all
but four years. That is an extraordinary level of dominance, unprecedented
in American history, and speaks to the overwhelming advantage the Democrats
had due to the Great Depression. But since then, the Democratic edge has
collapsed, the Republicans have drawn to parity, and now we see control of
Congress regularly swing back and forth. The reason is simple: Independent
voters hold the keys to Capitol Hill.
The same goes for the presidency. Between 1932 and 1980 Democrats won eight
of twelve presidential elections because the country was simply more
Democratic. All four of the Republican victories came under unique
circumstances, be it a war hero or a crack in the Democratic coalition. But
since 1980, Republicans have won four presidential elections to the
Democrats three, with one being a virtual tie. What’s more, the Perot
phenomenon of 1992 remains a testament to the power of the independent vote.
So when I look at 2012, I see Mitt Romney with a lead among independents in
almost every poll. But there is more than that. This is a president who lost
the support of independent voters nearly three years ago when he and his
allies in Congress passed a health care bill the independents did not want.
I have watched and waited to see if independents would return to the
president’s fold, but they have not. And the hour is very, very late.
Is it possible to win a presidential election while losing the independent
vote? Sure. The independents basically split down the middle in 2000 and
2004, which left the outcome up to the relative strengths of the two party
bases. But that is not what I see right now. Instead, I see a Romney margin
among independents that ranges between 5 and 10 points. Prior to the 1980s,
I could see the Democrats overcoming that, but not in 2012.
Plenty on the other side think 2008 is the exception to this trend, a sign
of the emerging liberal majority, which the left has been waiting for ever
since Adlai Stevenson's candidacy in 1952. But they misinterpret 2008: the
Democratic share of the vote that year was right within its historical track
of the high-30s. What differed was a drop in Republican identification from
the mid-30s to the low-30s.
Does anybody really expect that to persist this year? Of course not.
This means we will probably be back to a slender divide between the two
parties, narrowed even more by greater Republican loyalty. In all likelihood
, white Democrats from the Ohio River Valley to the Gulf of Mexico will
defect from their own party’s ticket in droves. These children and grand
children of FDR’s core backers will support Mitt Romney overwhelmingly, so
a nominal 3 to 4 point Democratic identification edge over the GOP will
shrink to 1 or 2 points, meaning that independents will determine the
outcome, just as they have basically for the last 32 years.
Again, this is a different approach than the poll mavens will offer. They
are taking data at face value, running simulations off it, and generating
probability estimates. That is not what this is, and it should not be
interpreted as such. I am not willing to take polls at face value anymore. I
am more interested in connecting the polls to history and the long-run
structure of American politics, and when I do that I see a Romney victory.
Jay Cost is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD and the author of Spoiled
Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic
Party and Now Threatens the American Republic, available now wherever books
are sold.
l**1
发帖数: 1875
2
because Morning Jay is a day dreamer.

from

【在 l****z 的大作中提到】
: Jay Cost
: November 2, 2012 6:00 AM
: When I started making election predictions eight years ago, I had a very
: different perspective than I do today. I knew relatively little about the
: history of presidential elections or the geography of American politics. I
: had a good background in political science and statistics. So,
: unsurprisingly in retrospect, I focused on drawing confidence intervals from
: poll averages.
: Since then, I have learned substantially more history, soured somewhat on
: political science as an academic discipline, and have become much more

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