Zombie fundraising meme

Last week, Politico Buzzfeed ran a story claiming that Obama is having fundraising problems, noting that many of his 2008 donors haven't given him any money this year. (Here was my response to that.) Today, it followed up with an analysis of where Obama's fundraising shortfall relative to 2008 has been greatest. For the record, I was actually interviewed for this story, and I explained to the reporter (Rebecca Elliott) that I didn't think there was any there there. That is, Obama hasn't received donations this year from a lot of his 2008 donors for one main reason: he didn't face a primary challenger this year, while he was in one of the most competitive presidential nomination races in modern history four years ago. We had a good chat about this, but nothing along these lines made its way into the article.

The new article, meanwhile, starts from the premise that Obama is suffering, and tries to explain why his fundraising shortfall relative to 2008 has been greater in some states than in others. But again, I just don't think there's much here. As Elliott reports, 88% of Obama's 2008 donors nationwide have yet to contribute to him this year, and when you break those figures down by state, the highest shortfall is in Oregon at 91%. Now, if the mean is 88% and the highest value is 91%, it just doesn't sound like we're talking about a whole lot of variation here. The political scientists quoted in the story do a valiant job coming up with some reasons why Western state donors would experience higher dropoff, but it just doesn't sound like there's much of a phenomenon to explain here.

I understand the desire to run stories about how Obama is having a harder time this year than he did in 2008, and that is certainly true in many measurable ways. And who knows -- maybe we'll ultimately find that he did have a hard time raising money. But drawing these comparisons between a campaign with a well-funded opponent and a campaign with no opponent is misleading, and terribly, terribly frustrating.

Update: I inaccurately claimed that the above stories were from Politico. Rather, they were from Buzzfeed.

Obama's suffering because Hillary Clinton didn't challenge him in the primaries

I think that's what Politico is arguing here. It's hard to tell. Ben Smith and Rebecca Elliott have written another in the long line of articles alleging that Obama's slow fundraising pace in 2012 relative to the pace in 2008 is evidence of a serious problem for Obama. And like the other articles, it fails to note that Obama didn't face a primary challenger in 2012. It just offers a whole bunch of other possible narratives -- donors are hurting financially, Obama's big supporters from four years ago are disappointed in him, the thrill is gone, etc. And while all of this may be true, it doesn't change the biggest difference, which I guess I'll italicize yet again: Obama didn't face a primary challenger in 2012. The major reason Obama hasn't raised the kind of money in the spring of 2012 that he raised in 2008 is because he hasn't needed it.

(via Jamelle Bouie)

New campaign finance reporting -- now with less context!

Over at Mother Jones, Andy Kroll reports that Priorities USA Action, an Obama-aligned super PAC, is underperforming relative to its Republican counterparts:

As the leading Obama-affiliated super-PAC, it was supposed to provide a counterbalance to big Republican outside-spending groups. But the super-PAC has so far raked in just $9 million for the 2012 election cycle. By comparison, the pro-Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future has raised $52 million, and the pro-Gingrich super-PAC Winning Our Future pulled in $24 million before Gingrich dropped out of the race. Priorities isn't just struggling to compete with its Republican counterparts—it's not playing in the same league.

Kroll then provides four reasons why the Obama super PAC isn't raising much money. Strangely, none of those reasons is that Obama didn't face any primary challengers. Romney needed money to defeat his party rivals. Obama didn't.

From what I've heard from some campaign staffers, the Obama folks expect Romney's super PACs to raise more money than the Obama super PACs, although they think the Obama campaign itself will out-raise the Romney campaign. This may all be true, and we'll know better this summer and fall, when we see fundraising patterns for the general election. But comparing them at a time when one candidate had opponents and the other didn't is just silly.

(h/t John Sides)

What apathy?

Along the lines of the story I mentioned the other day in which a writer claimed that there was no enthusiasm for Obama while providing evidence to the contrary, here's a story in the American Prospect claiming young voters are apathetic compared to how they were in 2008, entitled "Young, Restless, and Not Voting." Note that the entire premise of the story hangs on the following piece of data:

According to a poll released late last week, 61 percent of college-age Millennials (the futuristic-sounding name given to the generation born in the late 1980s and early 1990s) are registered to vote, but only 46 percent say that they will likely do so in November. By way of comparison, in 2008, 58.5 percent of the same age group was registered to vote, and 48 percent of them actually did.

Go ahead, read it again. Okay, let's sum up. Voter registration is higher today among this age group than it was four years ago. And 46 percent claim they will vote in November -- just two percentage points shy of the allegedly staggering 48 percent that voted four years ago. The poll on which that 46% figure was based, by the way, has a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points (it says so on p. 40). In other words, predicted voter turnout among young voters this year is statistically identical to actual voter turnout four years ago.

The rest of the article goes on to try to offer some rationale for why this trend that isn't actually occurring is occurring.

I certainly understand the desire to force findings into a theory, even if they don't fit perfectly, but here the evidence is precisely the opposite of the narrative. Maybe we could change the narrative?

Lack of enthusiasm for Obama demonstrated by enthusiasm for Obama

Here's another entry for the "Problems Obama Doesn't Actually Have" file. An article in today's Denver Post tries to make the case that young voters' enthusiasm for Obama isn't quite what it was four years ago:

When then-junior Sen. Barack Obama came to the University of Denver in 2008, the Democratic presidential hopeful was greeted by long lines and a crowd full of youthful enthusiasm. And while his return to the state for tonight's appearance at the University of Colorado at Boulder more than four years later has produced similarly long waits for tickets, the other response — enthusiasm — is lurching along.

That's the first paragraph. Let that sink in for a second. The one piece of hard evidence we have so far that would allow us to measure student enthusiasm -- long lines to obtain tickets -- suggests just as much enthusiasm as existed four years ago. So where's the evidence that there's less enthusiasm?

Maybe the evidence lies in the quotes? The article includes quotes from four CU students. The first is unapologetically pro-Obama. The second describes Boulder as pro-Obama. The third, an officer in the campus Republican group, is vaguely critical of Obama, and the fourth is somewhat lukewarm toward Obama. This is the basis for a conclusion that enthusiasm is waning? (The other quotes are from a political consultant and a political scientist seeking to explain the enthusiasm gap for which there is no evidence.)

Oh, the article also cites a study showing that fewer than half of younger voters are "absolutely certain" about whom they will vote for in November, but that doesn't really tell us anything about enthusiasm or expected voter turnout.

So, to review: the quantitative evidence suggests that there's just as much enthusiasm for Obama as there was four years ago, and the qualitative evidence is mixed. I'd love to know how the author or the headline writer reached their conclusions.

Now, this isn't to say that enthusiasm for Obama isn't down since 2008 -- it may very well be, although this article certainly hasn't provided the evidence to support that conclusion. But to the extent we're seeing fewer Obama stickers on backpacks and laptops this year than we did in 2008, we might note an important contextual difference: the lack of a primary opponent. I had several students take leave four years ago to volunteer in Democratic contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Ohio. The fact that they're not doing so this year has less to do with an enthusiasm gap than the lack of Democratic contests in those states. My guess is that enthusiasm will be running plenty high on both sides come September.

Poor Obama failing to raise funds he doesn't need

Last September, Nick Confessore wrote in the NYT that the Obama campaign was failing to secure funds from small donors like it did in 2008. Today he's written almost the complete opposite story and still gotten it wrong, which is kind of amazing, really. As he writes:

President Obama’s re-election campaign is straining to raise the huge sums it is counting on to run against Mitt Romney, with sharp dropoffs in donations from nearly every major industry forcing it to rely more than ever on small contributions and a relative handful of major donors.

So now Obama is relying upon the small donors who allegedly weren't contributing to him. Okay. But what does Confessore mean by "sharp dropoffs in donations"? Well, it turns out that's compared to the same time period in 2008. Why might that be a bad comparison? Confessore provides an explanation further down in the article:

With no primary to excite his base, the economy struggling to rebound, and four years of political battles with Wall Street and other industries taking their toll, Mr. Obama’s campaign raised about $196 million through March, compared with $235 million at the same point in 2008 [emphasis added].

The lack of a primary is really important! At this point in 2008, Obama was locked in a tight contest with Hillary Clinton that would go on until June. He really needed the funds. He might not need them as much today, as Confessore again points out:

And with no primary to fight, Mr. Obama is spending much less than he was at this stage in 2008: He had about twice as much money in the bank at the end of March than he did four years ago.

So Obama is suffering compared to 2008 even though he has twice as much cash on hand?

It is, admittedly, hard to find a good point of comparison for Obama at this stage. Here's one, though: George W. Bush was an incumbent president facing no primary opponents in 2004. By the end of March 2004, his campaign had raised around $186 million, which is something like $225 million in 2012 dollars. So Obama's a bit shy of that, although the story notes that Obama has spent a lot of effort doing fundraising with the DNC, which might make for an important distinction. It is also possible that the fundraising environment today is so completely different from what it was eight years ago as to make comparisons meaningless. But the direct comparison to 2008 is highly misleading.