Cross-posted from The Wardman Wire:
I’ve blogged before about some of the myths around Obama’s campaign – the exaggerated tales of seas of small donors and soaring turnout. Now it’s time to look at how the votes played out across the country and see what it tells us.
The US Presidential election is (with some minor exceptions) a first past the post election run across each state, with the winner scooping all the spoils. It doesn’t matter whether you win New York state by 1% or 99%; either way the result counts the same in the tally towards winning the Presidency. Therefore, when it comes to targeting campaign activities, there is a strong incentive to ignore states that are likely to be either landslide victories or defeats and instead pour efforts into the marginal areas. These ‘swing states’ in the US political parlance therefore have much the same place in campaign calculations as marginal constituencies have in the UK.
Traditionally, that targeting has primarily involved deciding where to run TV adverts, where to direct direct mail and where to send your campaign’s big names for visits. Plot Obama and McCain’s visits for 2008, for example, and you see a huge cluster in the key swing states.
The broad story of the Obama campaign is that it was well run, highly successful and used the internet in particular to mobilise large amounts of grassroots campaigning. Up against a McCain campaign that had far less money and is seen as having been much weaker, you might therefore have expected to see a fair amount of variation in the swing to Obama between different parts of the country. A good campaign, targeting its efforts well, would garner extra support in key swing areas.
The evidence, however, suggests otherwise. The Swing State Project website has compared the votes share won by Obama in 2008 against that won by Kerry in 2004 on a House district by House district basis.
(Click on image for larger version.)
As you can see from the graph, there is a striking uniformity in the change in votes. In nearly every district Obama polled more votes, and the increase was pretty uniform. There are a few outliers, which isn’t a surprise given the changing demographics of the US – very dramatic in some areas – and that the candidate teams this time came from different states from last time. Overall though the picture is one of consistency, not variation – and there isn’t any sign of a clutch of districts that clearly show an effective campaign garnering extra votes in the key swing areas.
So how to explain this?
One possibility is that the McCain campaign was better than it has been given credit for and whilst Obama’s campaign did effectively target areas, this was cancelled out by a McCain effort targeting those areas too.
A second possibility is that the targeted efforts of the Obama campaign just weren’t that good after all. We know that the much hyped talk of driving up turnout turned out to be largely a myth, so perhaps there’s a myth here too?
The third possibility is that Obama’s campaign was so successful that it ending up making its targeting redundant. This slightly perverse outcome is what happened to Labour’s 1997 general election campaign. That campaign put large amounts of effort into a range of key marginal seats, yet the swing to Labour in them was little different from that overall.
The reason? Labour’s supporters were so fired up across the country, and there was such strong word of mouth, that this swamped the targeting efforts. So perhaps the explanation is that Obama was a fantastic candidate, pulling in so much support from blanket media coverage and generating enthusiasm from people all over the place, that it swamped the efforts to target vote winning at particular areas.
The jury is still out on which of these, or what combination of them, is the explanation. But it’s certainly the case that the prima facie evidence is that the Obama campaign didn’t manage to target successfully its efforts at getting votes where they really mattered. So the next time you hear about the campaign’s targeted phone voter ID work, or micro-targeting of direct mail, or 101 other techniques, apply some pinches of salt before consuming.
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12 Comments
Possibly it suggests that local campaigning has no effect and that most people are influenced by the major TV networks and the press or
It could suggest that the concentrated local efforts have a wave rather than ripple effect. So hard campaigning in one state has a positive effect in a neighbouring state or
That many Americans were just sick of Bush and his cronies running the country. Even in normally Republican states the fact that Americans, particularly locals, were dying and being injured in Iraq would have made them think, as would some of the policies, such as reducing medical benefits for Veterans of Vietnam to pay for tax cuts.
Personally I think that Americans just wanted a change and Obama was the alternative. In a way there is a parallel in Britain in that most people are sick of the way the present political system is working.
The need for change was how Mrs T came into power and it was also the way the Tories lost power.
Come up with a sensible, believable coherent, alternative people will listen.
People may have wanted change but McCain was giving them change.
I think the reason why their is all this hype etc is the strategy that was developed, the enthusiasm and mainly the fact that he was a black person.
If it had been Hilary, there would be no talk of a wild or innovative campaign.
So the bottom line is, the Obama campaign was innovative and hugely successful then other campaigns because it got an unknown black man elected as a President of an imperial, deeply conservative and racist country.
So I for one would love to know, the nitty gritties, ‘how did you convince people to vote for a black man when 40′s years or so ago, he was being hosed down with water by police?’
That’s some persuasion campaign.
My partner’s got relatives that live in Idaho – a deeply red neck state with diddly squat votes. They’re Democrats and were supporting Hilary in the primaries. However Obama was the only presidential candidate of any party to visit Idaho – the shock value of that was enormous. No presidential candidate of any party ever campaigns in Idaho because it’s a foregone conclusion of little consequence (Kerry has a house there and even he didn’t campaign there last time).
By the time polls close on election day in Idaho, pundits have already predicted who’s won. The incentive to go and cast your vote is not exactly high.
The message that Obama’s visit sent to Democrats in Idaho was that they counted – and that’s perhaps how he got that shift. His campaign was about the voters as much if not more than the candidate.
You almost sound almost like one of those bitter ex Clinton types – The PUMAs
http://thebigotbasher.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/puma-a-year-of-bitterness/
complete with their revisionist version of history that suggested that the campaign run not only by Barack Obama on behalf of Obama/Biden 08 did not achieve a massive success but that the whole 50 State strategy ran by his Primary Team and the DNC during the election did not count either.
For a start, the main importance of the small donations (as the much maligned Ron Paul was also able to use) was that the campaign could keep going back to them. This had devastating consequences for the Hillary campaign, her donors were maxed out. There was a near endless supply of the $50 donors that became $100, $150, $200 donors.
In the General, both campaigns took a calculated risk that in the end benefited the Obama campaign. McCain recognising that their best fund-raiser for the RNC could not be used went for public finance in the hope that the unofficial “527″ & “501″ campaigns would back him up. They ran very little and the kitchen sink had already been thrown at Obama by the Hillary campaign.
Obama, who had initially agreed to public financing if both main Parties were to, decided against this, having had no reassurance from the RNC that they themselves would not run 527 ads.
McCain having already accepted public funds could not get out of the deal, Obama had a free reign. With enough free money to buy a 1/2 hour slot on every tv channel across America in the week before the election.
As well as tieing the McCain campaign down on tv, the Democratic Party 50 State strategy meant that McCain was also tied down in States that he should hope not to work. This was causing polling ripples that meant McCain had to retreat from Swing States during the election in order to prevent wipe out.
With regard to voter turn out numbers -the turnout was 62% compared to 56% in 2004 and that was despite 2004 being a much closer race, which both Parties felt heavily invested in. The Republican vote collapsed in 2008 which makes that 40 year high turnout look even more impressive.
TheBigotBasher: where does your 56% turnout figure for 2004 come from? All the figures I’ve seen are that it was 61%, and hence my comment that turnout didn’t soar as it was 62% in 2008.
“you might therefore have expected to see a fair amount of variation in the swing to Obama between different parts of the country. A good campaign, targeting its efforts well, would garner extra support in key swing areas.”
You’re wrong to say that a good campaign would have a swing in target areas in the main part. That was not the nature of the Obama campaign. The Obama campaign followed the 50 state strategy, and didn’t tend to let any states go. It does not mean Obama’s campaign was not as good as people think because there was a “striking uniformity in the change in votes”; on the contrary, such uniformity is a validation that the 50 state strategy worked. The uniformity in swing shows that Obama’s campaign was successful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_elections
There are several problems with the voter turn out level. Very early on in the campaign the DNC and the Obama campaign recognised that voter registration would also be an issue and they both had very large campaigns to increase voter registration. Therefore in many States, large increases in actual numbers voting did not reflect an increase in % of voters turning out.
There was a continuance of voter denial tactics on election day (queues of 4 hours to vote) in Democratic areas by the Republican Party, this had an effect on numbers voting, however that was mitigated by the scale of the Obama win (the first Democratic Presidential Candidate to secure an absolute mandate).
Early vote counts which suggested a lower level of turnout have been disproven by final ballot counts, which show 69.3 million votes for Barack Obama as opposed to the 63 million originally reported.
Alex, for a variety of reasons (and not because of Palin), the Democratic Party was not able to run as successful a campaign in Alaska as it would have wished. So it did slightly vary the 50 State Strategy.
TheBigotBasher: That’s an odd figure on Wikipedia, because if you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2004#cite_note-31 Wikipedia also gives a source for it being 61% in 2004 (and which was published in January 2005, i.e. not immediately after polling day when I can imagine a greater risk of numbers being wrong estimates) which is the figure quoted elsewhere too. Not sure why these numbers are so different…
Alex: the 50 state campaign was certainly important, but if you look at what the Obama campaign did with phoning, as it got closer to polling day it got people’s efforts to more and more be concentrated in swing states. Hence, large numbers of supporters in California making phone calls on polling day to other states rather than to Californian voters. Similarly, both his appearances and his TV adverts were – whilst more widely spread – still concentrated heavily on the swing states. If his campaign concentrated efforts in some areas but didn’t get an extra swing there, then that does suggest quite strongly that those efforts were not as successful as the narrative given about them at the time.
Mark, the 50 State Strategy was not the exclusive domain of Team Obama, it was a DNC strategy, not just for the Presidential elections.
I think that you will find that strategy paid off far better than expected, given that it delivered 59 Senators (if you include Al Franken) and 256 House Representatives (a total of 33 States won).
It’s significant that Team Obama didn’t need any dubious bar charts in order to propel Barack to the White House…