"Attack ads work perfectly"?

Via Sullivan, the American Psychological Association Monitor has a nice piece up describing some current research in the use of campaign advertisements. Most of the findings in there emphasize just how modest and ephemeral advertising effects are. That's not to say that there are no effects, just that the effects are small and usually wash away after a few days, but they could matter in a very close race. This strikes me as the appropriate interpretation, and it's consistent with much of what I've seen on the topic within political science. But then there's this part:

In the past, campaigns have been wary of deploying negative ads for fear of backlash, says [political scientist Travis] Ridout. However, that may be changing as campaign operatives see evidence that negative ads can break through party affiliations and also sway independent voters. A case in point: Mitt Romney’s February landslide in the Florida Republican primary came on the heels of the “most negative advertising campaign in history,” according to the nonprofit Campaign Media Analysis Group. The week before the primary, 99 percent of Romney’s ads were negative, while 95 percent of Newt Gingrich’s ads were negative. 

“I wish candidates wouldn’t use them, but attack ads work perfectly,” says Joel Weinberger, PhD, a psychology professor at Adelphi University. “Democrats know it, Republicans know it, and it’s going to get ugly this year.”

A few points here. First, I have a hard time believing that the Florida Republican primary was the "most negative advertising campaign in history," although I guess it depends on how we're defining our terms. History's pretty long. But more importantly, just because a lot of money was deployed by Mitt Romney and his allies against Newt Gingrich and Romney won hardly proves that Romney won because of the negative ads. It's possible -- John Sides has some tentative evidence suggesting that the ads mattered -- but we'd need a lot better data than we currently have to prove that negative ads swayed independent voters away from Gingrich and toward Romney.

And then there's Weinberger's sweeping conclusion that "attack ads work perfectly" and that everyone knows it. Yes, a lot of people are convinced that they work, but that's far from proof that they do. To cite Sides again, "We haven’t remotely arrived at a place where 'research' suggests that negative ads 'work.'" Quite a bit of research suggests they don't do much at all.

With my mind on my money and my money on my mind

Thomas Edsall brings us this beautiful piece of microtargeting, showing the partisan breakdown of various alcohol choices:

Now, call me a cynic, but I'm just not sure how useful this information is to a political campaign. I mean, with a decent political list, you should be able to figure out my party ID, my age, my race, my marital status, my religion, my voter turnout history, and my area of residence. Just how useful is it to also know that I prefer scotch to bourbon?

That said, it's a fun chart. I would not have thought that cognac -- the drink of Louis XIV, Kim Jong Il, and Winston Churchill -- would be the furthest left, but there you are. I also like that Budweiser (which is union made) is to the left of Coors (which is not).

Mental note: campaign managers do not like economic forecast models

From an e-mail to supporters from Jim Messina, campaign manager for Obama 2012:

This weekend, The New York Times Magazine ran a long analysis of the 2012 election headlined, "Is Obama toast?"

It uses a mathematical formula to conclude who will win this race.

In other words, it says neither you nor Barack Obama has a role to play in this election, because the outcome is essentially predetermined.

We disagree. [...]

[The] dramatic differences between the Republican nominee and President Obama will be crystal clear to Americans as the 2012 election approaches, because our grassroots organization in all 50 states will be having conversations every single day with their friends, families, co-workers, and neighbors.

That grassroots organizational advantage is a critical factor in this election that the Times' "formula" doesn't consider at all.

There's a quite natural hatred by campaign managers toward economic forecast models like Nate Silver's. They pretty much deny the campaign any agency at all. And that's not really fair. After all, there have been plenty of studies showing at least modest campaign effects -- a campaign's decision to devote resources to particular areas at particular times can affect votes, a campaign's message can affect how voters evaluate candidates, etc. But it's quite possible that opposing parties' campaigns largely cancel each other out. At any rate, we know that you can predict elections pretty reliably without any reference to the skills or decisions of the campaign managers.

If I were a campaign manager, that would piss me off, too.

Negativity and the Denver Mayor's Race

Michael Hancock won yesterday's election for mayor Denver, beating opponent Chris Romer in the runoff by a 16-point margin. This comes after a poll last week showing Hancock with only a ten-point lead. An earlier poll showed only a four-point lead for Hancock, and Romer actually had more votes than Hancock in the early May first-round election. How did Hancock do this?

It's a good question, but the consensus answer from Denver's political elites -- that Denver residents turned against Romer because of his negative advertisements -- almost certainly has to be wrong.

For one thing, for advertising to have moved a race from a four-point gap to a 16-point one would be a shockingly large campaign effect. Advertising effects are difficult to measure, although Alan Gerber, James Gimpel, Donald Green, and Darron Shaw came up with a pretty good experiment. In their large-scale field experiment, they found that roughly $2 million in TV and radio advertising could shift roughly five percent of the vote as measured by tracking polls, although this effect was very short-lived, lasting only a few days to a week. Conversely, Hancock's lead over Romer was not only larger than that but grew over time. Keep in mind that the Gerber et al experiment was ideal in many senses. Most campaign advertising is far less effective and is often countered by the opposing campaign.

Second, this purported campaign effect was in the wrong direction. Romer's negative ads (and yeah, they were pretty negative, although to my knowledge they didn't fabricate anything) are alleged not only to have had no effect on Hancock's numbers, but to have boomeranged and pulled down Romer by 12 points. This is highly improbable. In a multi-candidate race, it's possible for a negative ad to be effective but for voters to lose interest in the candidate running the ad, as well. (Arguably, this is how John Kerry won the 2004 Iowa Democratic caucus -- Gephardt and Dean, who had better initial organization, tore each other down with negative ads, and the voters transferred to Kerry.) But in a two-candidate race, it's far less likely that the attack ads will harm the candidate running them, unless the ads are completely off the wall (which these really weren't). It's not impossible for this sort of boomerang effect to happen, but it's rare, and the notion that Denver residents are so fragile that they can't see a fact-based negative ad without clutching their pearls and fainting is rather silly (and, personally, at least slightly offensive).

Let me suggest a more plausible story: Romer's internal polling numbers last month suggested he was in serious trouble. Despite his win in the nine-way first-round race, there was a clear ceiling on his support, while many other voters who had not voted for Hancock initially were at least open to the idea of doing so. Romer realized the only way he could win this was to pull down Hancock's favorability ratings. Hancock, meanwhile, provided Romer with some convenient flubs, and Romer made the best out of them. Flubs rarely cost a candidate an election (recall George W. Bush?), but that was the best Romer had to work with. The ads just didn't work. Meanwhile, Hancock stuck with his ground game of turning out supporters, and that did work.

I don't have the direct evidence to back this up (at least not yet), but this strikes me as eminently more likely than one of the largest campaign effects in human history occurring in the wrong direction.

Update: Some solid analysis here from Patrick Doyle. He makes some reasonable suppositions about the stability of the vote from the May to the June elections, although an exit poll would be really helpful.

A noble spirit embiggens the smallest party faction

Via Sullivan, here's Mike Tomasky's take on the danger's of a Sarah Palin presidential nomination:

The Republican primary will likely be set up in such a way that she’ll be able to pull the field, and the party, hard to the right, and while that will be fine for Barack Obama come Election Day, it will help cripple any attempt to do anything constructive afterward.

This differs from the situation today how exactly?

Actually, Gary, maybe it's just you

Gary Hart, in today's Denver Post:

In my experience, endorsements don't turn out votes. I have endorsed candidates in the past. I don't think I turned one vote.

Hey little girl, is your daddy home?

The Denver Post today provides us with the three favorite songs of each of the 3,000 people currently running for mayor of Denver. In most cases, these lists aren't particularly revealing about the type of mayor the candidate would turn out to be. But I was struck by one of them: Chris Romer -- a recent state senator and the son of a former governor -- claims his favorite song is Bruce Springsteen's "I'm on Fire."

Let me just submit that "I'm on Fire" is nobody's favorite song. If you were to rank the top 500 Springsteen songs (and you probably could), "I'm on Fire" would probably come in somewhere south of 450, if it even made the list. Sure, it was a hit, but only in the sense that virtually everything on the "Born in the USA" album became a hit, in the same way that any show sandwiched between "Friends" and "Seinfeld" was going to be a hit, even if it starred Jonathan Silverman and Ernest Borgnine. And even if Romer just wanted to give a shout out to Boss fans, why choose this piece?

There was actually one other politician who listed "I'm on Fire" as a favorite song. That would be Barack Obama. My hypothesis is that this is a form of dog-whistle politics. The Denver mayor's race is a crowded field consisting largely of Democrats in an officially nonpartisan race. Romer is signaling to the largely Democratic electorate that he is the true Obama Democrat in the race.

Okay, it's thin gruel, but I can't come up with any other reason for listing that song as a favorite.

10,000 doors

Most of the Nebraska senators to whom I spoke during my recent trip expressed the value of door-to-door campaigning. Money and endorsements are nice, they said, but door-knocking is essential, allowing an underfinanced candidate to win. Conversely, a well endowed candidate who doesn't bother to meet constituents will lose.

Just how many doors are we talking about? There are approximately 35,000 Nebraskans per state legislative district. If you omit the children and account for the folks that live together, that comes to roughly 10,000 doors to knock on. Indeed, several senators cited the 10,000 figure to me.

Is it really possible for a politician to knock on 10,000 doors?

I've done some campaign door-knocking, and it's exhausting. But let's say it takes only about 30 seconds to check a door where no one's home, maybe leaving behind some campaign literature. It takes about a minute to briefly greet a person who really doesn't want to talk to a politician -- that's a lot of them. There are probably a relatively few folks who actually want to talk to or yell at a politician that comes to their door -- that could take five or ten minutes.  So let's suppose that the average door-knocking taking about a minute, probably more in sparsely populated rural districts.

10,000 minutes equals 167 hours of campaign time. If you do this 6 hours per day (grueling, but possible) you could reach 10,000 doors in under a month.

So yes, it's possible. It's a month when you're really doing nothing else, including whatever your day job is (Nebraska senators only make about $12,000 a year as legislators and thus need a regular job or personal wealth). On the other hand, actually meeting with constituents might be a good thing for the democratic system.

Please think of the children

Yes, this may be the best attack ad ever.

Bennet caves to Big Yard Sign

If you live in Denver, you've probably noticed that Andrew Romanoff seems to have a lock on the demographic known as "voters with yards."  For months now, the only visible Democratic Senate yard signs have been Romanoff's, even in Bennet's own neighborhood.  Despite my candidate preferences, I was sort of excited by the possibility that Bennet might win the primary without having any yard signs.  After all, there's painfully little evidence that these things affect voters at all.

Well, it looks like Bennet's putting up yard signs after all.  I suppose there's a natural experiment in there somewhere.  Maybe we can see if Bennet's support goes up noticeably once the signs are installed.  But given the paucity of polls, I'm not expecting a great study out of this.

Does convention location matter?

Over at 538, Tom Schaller says the Republicans made a smart choice in situating their 2012 nominating convention in Tampa, Florida.  After all, Florida is the largest swing state, and the Tampa area is very much in play.  He then adds,

Anyone who remembers the 2008 crowds in Denver for Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at Invesco Field in August and at another huge rally in late October would be hard pressed to make the case that picking Denver had no effect on Obama’s eventual, 9-point victory in Colorado.

Well, I was at both those events, and I'll make that case.  Remember the scatterplot comparing the Kerry 2004 vote to the Obama 2008 vote?  Here it is:

Yes, Obama did notably better in Colorado than Kerry did four years earlier, but he did better just about everywhere.  The average state swing toward the Democrats in 2008 was 5.85 points.  The swing in Colorado was 5.79 -- right near the mean.  

Okay, maybe it didn't matter statewide, but maybe in Denver?  Again, not really.  The Democratic swing from 2004 to 2008 in Denver was 6.1 points, not much bigger than the state or national means.

There are some campaign activities that do seem to be associated with vote boosts for candidates, but generally such campaign effects are pretty short-lived.  Conventions are associated with short term boosts for candidates, but since they occur two months before the election, it's hard to find much influence on the vote.