We congratulate Saguaro’s Barack Obama on wrapping up the Democratic nomination for President. Assuming all goes to plan, he will be the nation’s first African-American major party nominee for President. [Various folks have commented on the fact that only Hillary Clinton upon losing could give an "unconcession speech". If she can't give an acceptance speech, she won't accept reality sums up Maureen Dowd.]
In choosing a vice presidential running mate, we hope that Barack will find someone other than Hillary Clinton who can help to reunify the Democratic base of working collar Americans and older Americans. Choosing Hillary only shackles Barack to the scorched earth politics of the past as we witnessed in great quantity from her during the primary season. Moreover, as we often write about in this column, trust is an extremely valuable commodity and hard to repair once breached. And with Hillary as his Vice President, President Barack Obama could scarcely take a business trip without fearing a palace coup during his departure. Whether one’s grist is Shakespearean tragedies or the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, it’s hard to build an effective team around fratricide.
An interesting post of Gallup, shows a sudden break in their polling towards Barack Obama in the last several weeks.
Obama now holds a 15% percentage point lead over Hillary Clinton overall, and more interestingly, given all the previous reports that the deviseness was causing an ever increasing number of Hillary supporters to indicate that they would not support Obama if he were the nominee. While they don’t ask that exact question, they do show that among almost every demographic (other than women over age 50+ where Hillary clings to a narrow majority), a majority of likely Democrats in every demographic that they looked at support Obama.
I trust that Obama’s focusing on his differences with McCain is reminding lots of Democrats of the fact that they agree far more with Obama and his policies than with McCain and has thus started to help unify the Democrats.
Matt Bai mentioned our research on diversity and social capital in his “What’s the Real Racial Divide?” article in this weekend’s New York Times Sunday Magazine section, 3/16/08. Bai talks about how our research on racial diversity might explain why white rural voters are more comfortable supporting a transracial candidate like Barack Obama, since increased diversity in a community is associated with less inter-racial trust. (Bai notes that strangely whites in more rural, more homogeneously white parts of the U.S. have been more willing to support Obama than whites in more diverse, more urban communities.)
My colleague Bob Putnam and I have written about the new cohorts that Barack Obama is so effectively bringing into politics (see Putnam op-ed and my blog posts here and here). We agree that the upsurge in youth civic participation is a dramatic and important new civic “bud”, but one that needs to be nurtured to grow and become more permanent.
Andrew Sullivan enters the chorus with his piece for the Atlantic entitled “The Clinton Rules”, predicting that if Clinton’s old-school negative, mudslinging campaign beats out Barack’s politics of hope of engagement, a whole cohort of Americans being drawn back into the political process by Barack is likely to run for the exits and not look back.
There were clearly shades of New Hampshire in the election results last night of Texas and Ohio. In NH, Texas, and Ohio, Barack closed large double digit leads of Hillary that had existed for weeks or months, but in all three cases, Barack came up short of Hillary in the final count. And due to the better spin control operations of Hillary’s campaign than Barack’s, they were able to spin this as a win for Hillary. In film-making, it makes all the difference when you begin rolling the camera and Hillary’s campaign successfully convinced the press that the film should start with her in a neck-and-neck race with Barack in Texas and Ohio that she successfully defended, rather than focusing on the fact that over the last week, hundreds of thousands of voters in Texas and Ohio abandoned her campaign for Barack’s.
Barack was clearly hurt by some last minute gaffes like the private statements of a senior economic adviser to the Obama campaign (Austan Goolsbee) which were later shared in a memo to Canada’s ambassador to the U.S. that they shouldn’t take seriously Barack’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric on the campaign trail in Ohio, and the fact that the Obama campaign was then less than forthcoming with the facts after this memo from the economic adviser was disclosed. Exit polls showed that late-deciding voters tilted toward Hillary, perhaps because of this or her negative campaigning on Barack. [There is even one recent allegation by a DailyKos blogger that Hillary's campaign darkened the hue of Obama in their Texas advertising to make him look more black, analogous to what TIME magazine did on its cover to make O.J. Simpson look more black. If true, it's a new low in the Clinton campaign scare tactics that seem to be dropping in ethical standards as they get more desperate. How long until another Willie Horton ad?]
On Youth Turnout: it’s worth noting that both Texas and Ohio evinced the continued surge in youth turnout (under age 30) that we have witnessed in other primaries. Youth turnout in Texas nearly tripled, going from 6% in 2000 to 17% in 2008; and youth under 30 in 2008 made up 15% of all votes cast as compared with 9% in 2000. In Ohio, youth under 30 made up 15% of voter turnout, up from 11% in 2000; turnout of youth under age 30 rose from 15% in 2000 to 25% in 2008. See my earlier post here and last night’s youth turnout here (Texas) and here (Ohio). This increased youth turnout is also of a piece with my colleague Robert Putnam’s recent Op-Ed on superdelegates and a 9-11 Generation.
A persuasive Op-Ed by my colleague Robert D. Putnam appeared in Sunday’s Boston Globe entitled, “The Rebirth of American Civic Life.”
Putnam highlights the amazing political birth of a “9-11 Generation” since September 11th, reversing a 35 year decline in political engagement of young adults. He sees this pent-up interest in politics as dry kindling that Barack Obama ignited through the content of his message, his age, and his extraordinary ability to connect. Youth turnout has soared in primaries across the country (as I’ve chronicled earlier) and youth activists are at the heart of his organizers.
Putnam notes that the democrat superdelegates, if they overturn the will of the democratic majority and vote for Hillary Clinton, threaten to squelch this incipient youth political movement and teach them that politics are for suckers, since the meaningful results are all negotiated in back rooms. This would not only cost the democratic party in the long-term, but could extinguish one of the most encouraging civic developments of the past several decades.
TIME magazine’s cover story (“The Year of the Youth Vote”, Jan. 31, 2008) describes how Obama’s candidacy has been buoyed by the strength his support among under 30-year olds. This youth movement, what the article calls “Barack the Vote” propelled his victories in Iowa and South Carolina and strong finishes in Nevada and NH. Barack won Iowa among those under age 25 by a 4:1 margin. In New Hampshire, he won the youth vote 3 to 1; in Nevada, his youth totals doubled Hillary’s and in Michigan he got some 50,000 “Uncommitted” protest votes by youth under 30 since Hillary was the only name listed on the ballot.
Author David Von Drehle describes how this is ushering in a youthquake of increased voter turnout. “While enthusiastic Democrats of all ages produced a 90% increase in turnout for the first caucuses, the number of young voters was up half again as much: 135%….The youngest slice — the under-25 set, typically among the most elusive voters in all of politics — gave Obama a net gain of some 17,000 votes. He won by just under 20,000. The excitement that created — a “tidal wave,” in the words of Bill Clinton — nearly drowned the hopes of the former President’s wife. But Hillary Clinton answered with her own organizational prowess, whipping up huge numbers of working-class, female and older Democrats.”
Polling by TIME supported the attraction of youth to both politics and Obama. “Nearly three-quarters of the [TIME survey] respondents said they feel the country is headed down the wrong track, with majorities expressing worries about jobs, affordable health care and the war in Iraq. Their interest in the election exceeds their interest in celebrity news or sports — 7 of 10 said they are paying attention to the race. Obama is the only candidate in either party who is viewed favorably by a majority of young people, and he has half again as much support as his nearest competitor, Democrat or Republican.” The poll showed that 72% of 18-29 year olds are paying attention to the campaign, way above the 13% and 42% who were paying attention in 2000 and 2004.
And the article talked about how Obama courted the youth vote starting in Iowa: Barack in Iowa treated high schoolers like VIPs, meeting with them in small backstage sessions after local appearances. [Iowans can vote in the Caucuses at age 17 if they will be 18 by the general election.]
One shocker in the story was that 52% of voters found Hillary Clinton inspirational (are they watching the same programmed candidate as me?), only a shade behind Obama’s 53% and far surpassing any of the Republican candidates.
The article claims (although without much support) that Facebook is having more of an influence in 2008 than Meetup had in 2004 (with the Howard Dean campaign). It is true that Facebook has larger market share and more frequent page views, and offers the advantage that it is generally physically rooted at universities, making it stronger than social networks that are less grounded in face-to-face relationships. But it is a stretch to jump from more frequent page views and easier tools to refresh content to greater political impact without better data to support this.
Social capital is dominant in campaigns, with two recent examples in the last week.
An interesting Op-Ed in the NYT by Mark Mellman and Michael Bloomfield, “Loose Lips Win Elections” (1/6/08) discussed fact that Huckabee’s victory over Mitt Romney last week in the Iowa Caucuses demonstrated that conversations (social capital) are more effective than advertising in getting individuals elected. Mellman and Bloomfield noted that Romney outspent Huckabee on advertising by a 6:1 ratio, but Huckabee’s campaign motivated lots of more efficacious parishioner-to-parishioner conversations through church networks urging fellow congregants to vote for Huckabee.
And “Why Iowa? Sociologist says it’s groupthink ; Voters elsewhere play follow the leader” (Jonathan Tilove, Times-Pacyune, 1/5/08) notes that Obama’s bounce post Iowa exhibits a social dimension. The press post-Iowa tell a revisionist story that makes Barack seem like the invincible and wise candidate, and then, assuming he wins NH (and the polls now show Obama with a recent double digit lead over Hillary Clinton), this story becomes all the more compelling and believable. “Why? Because ultimately, for all the talk about voting being a private act, it is in fact a social act in which individual behavior is hugely dependent on the thinking and actions of others….Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociologist and principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, has studied the phenomenon. As he explains, sooner or later in the primary process voters find themselves thinking less and responding to the cues of others more, under the assumption that ‘all these other people can’t be wrong.’…”
This social cascade overwhelms individual judgment and consideration. And history shows that the candidate that has won NH and Iowa, while they may not have won the general election, have never failed to win their party’s nomination.
That’s one reason why the NYT and others have been calling for a regional primary where the first states in a region would be rotated so that Iowa and NH don’t take on this disproportionate influence.
Watts and colleagues have documented something I wrote about earlier (viral popularity). They showed in a 2006 study in Science that “early deciders — like voters in Iowa and New Hampshire — have a profound power to get the snowball rolling” and hence influence later voters. “Watts and his colleagues created a music Web site and asked 14,000 participants to listen to a series of songs and rate them. Some were asked to rate without knowing others’ picks, while the rest were divided into discrete groups in which they knew the choices being made by others in their group. The groups that knew about other members’ ratings came up with different choices, and in each the most popular songs were rated much higher overall because ratings were influenced by members who had chosen earlier.” Part of this result, as was seen in Huckabee’s Iowa vote is the results of a huge number of cascading conversations, where every NH conversation in a book group, or PTA meeting, or Rotary group starts to change some voters in favor of the Iowa victor (in this case Obama), and the power of that influence is magnified over the days.
Randy Pausch, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, who is imminently dying from pancreatic cancer but still quite alive, gave a ‘last lecture’ (i.e., what lecture would you give if you had only one last chance to give a lecture). He was at Brown University a bit ahead of me and I was a teaching assistant to him in a computer class, but never knew him that well; obviously my loss!
It’s funny, poignant, touching and all about living life to its fullest with humanity. Among his wise takeaways from his life thusfar are:
1. Brick walls aren’t meant to keep us from doing things but to separate the ones who REALLY want to do something (those who find a way around the brick wall) from those who don’t (those who give up)
2. Hold on to our “wonder” as we lose our chance to dream of greater things when we lose our wonder.
3. Experience is the wisdom we learn from failing to initially achieve what we wanted.
and many more…
And story also described in a Wall Street Journal column “A Beloved Professor Delivers The Lecture of a Lifetime” (WSJ, 9/20/07, p. D1 by Jeff Zaslow in his Moving On column). If not available there, you can also try here (for text and a 4 minute video story).
The YouTube Election (Vanity Fair, June 2007, James Wolcott) discusses how YouTube is likely to change the 2008 presidential election. YouTube increases the power of individuals — to produce news rather than consume it in election and to spread important videos via social capital to their friends.
The power of such YouTube videos is that they can spread powerfully and quickly through watchers’ social networks (electronic and word of mouth). The downside is that it increases the chance that ANY gaffe gets circulated widely. If that gaffe reveals the secret and true, unscripted candidate, it may be a good thing; if it simply rewards robo-candidates that are controlled enough or lucky enough not to slip up, it may be a bad thing.
Ironically, the YouTube factor may work to try to make candidates MORE controlled and artificial rather than less since they fear that unscripted moments that turn out badly are likely to gain wide circulation.
