The staff hikes weren't Hancock's

Under the provocative page-one headline "Mayor Ups Pay to Aides" (although the on-line title is different), the Denver Post implies that new Denver Mayor Michael Hancock is ratcheting up salaries on his staff. They compare his staff salaries so far with those of former Mayor Hickenlooper during his first year in office, 2004. Yes, the new mayor is paying about $1 million more on staff than Hick did in his first year. But is that really the right point of comparison?

Notably, in a table buried on page 6A, Mayor Hancock's staff payments are compared with those of Hickenlooper in 2009, and they're virtually identical. Hick paid $2,512,651 in salary to his discretionary appointees; Hancock is paying $2,514,211. Yes, Hancock is paying all of $1,560 more for these appointees than Hickenlooper did two years ago. This is a scandal?

All this really demonstrates is that Hickenlooper ratcheted up staff salaries during his term, and Hancock is maintaining salaries at that same level.

Does any of this matter? Katy Atkinson gets in the key quote:

Sometimes you have to pay more for really good top people. Success will breed all kinds of forgiveness Failure? Everyone will be screaming about everything.

But really, this is a pretty pathetic way to gin up a scandal.

Covering a scandal

Let's say you're the editor of a prominent newspaper covering a competitive election. Your reporters are hearing rumors about a sex scandal involving one of the leading candidates, but your newspaper has endorsed the other candidate. It's just a few days before the election. Do you run the story, potentially affecting the outcome of the election? If you do, what if it turns out the rumors were wrong? On the other hand, if you sit on the story, what happens if it turns out the rumors were right, and through your passivity, voters elect a time bomb?

Well, we needn't speculate further, because this is happening right now. Last Tuesday, Denver voters elected Michael Hancock as their next mayor over Chris Romer by a 58-42 margin. Yesterday's Denver Post, however, detailed a story that the Post had clearly been sitting on for some time: the records of a defunct prostitution service known as Denver Players show that a "Mike Handcock"* who worked for the city and had the same cell phone number as the mayor-elect had hired hookers from them on at least three occasions.

This is actually a pretty interesting case study in media politics in a one-newspaper town. These allegations were first publicized by a local Drudge-style blog shortly before the election, but were never circulated in the print or televised media or even most major blog coverage. I was following the mayoral race pretty closely, and I never heard anything about this until election night, when a reporter made an offhanded comment about it to me (even though he didn't actually report on the story). And one can certainly sympathize with the Post's awkward position** -- this could have tipped the race. Yeah, I know Hancock won by 16 points, but my impression is that a lot of those votes were pretty malleable and would have been swayed by this sort of news.

I'm curious where this goes from here. Does anyone know of a similar situation, where a candidate is elected but a serious scandal emerges before he/she takes office? What happens?


*Hee hee.
**Interestingly, the Post's coverage yesterday was not "Hancock has a hooker problem" but rather "Hancock promised us his phone records and is now reneging."

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.

Give businesspeople a little credit

I'm with Jonathan Bernstein on this one: the reason that the economy isn't growing robustly just can't be that American businesspeople are terrified of tight new regulations that the Democrats are going to impose any day now but just haven't gotten around to imposing yet.

Look, I've never started a business. But my impression of businesspeople is that if they think they have a money-making idea and they can get the necessary capital together, they're going to start a business regardless of which party controls the White House or the Congress. And if they think they can make more money by expanding, they're going to do that as well.

It may well be true that a substantial chunk of business leaders, perhaps even a majority, prefer that Republicans control the government. But, generally speaking, they're in business to make money, not to prove some political point. They're also capable of doing a little research, and they know that businesses did very well in the last Democratic presidential administration.

If businesses aren't hiring right now, it's probably because they're not convinced that taking on more employees will be a profitable move at this point in the economic recovery. That's not nuts. Demand for a lot of products is still low thanks to the nastiest recession since World War II. But to suggest that businesses aren't hiring because they're terrified of the socialist takeover that's coming any day now but somehow just hasn't come yet strikes me as silly and more than a little insulting to entrepreneurs. I doubt most of them are that irrational or timid.

Similarly, I question Denver mayoral candidate Chris Romer's claims that removing red tape will allow Denver's businesses to suddenly start hiring. If there truly are regulations that protect no one and just annoy businesspeople (an iffy proposition), sure, get rid of them. But I just can't imagine there are business owners sitting around saying, "I could make a mint by expanding my business right now, but I just don't want to fill out all those damned forms."

Voting one's race

The Denver Post's map of the early May Denver mayoral election showing which of the top three candidates received the plurality in each precinct. The candidates were Hancock (who is African American), Mejia (who is Latino), and Romer (who is white):

And now, the Census Bureau's map of the distribution of racial and ethnic groups in Denver, courtesy of the New York Times:

Direct mail and accountability

A while back I wrote about some of Denver mayoral candidate Michael Hancock's recent campaign flubs, including one in which he he said that intelligent design should be taught in schools. (He quickly retracted that.) Not surprisingly, his opponent, Chris Romer, has put together some direct mail pieces hitting him on this. You can see a picture of one of them at left.

Here's something I found innovative: you see that QR code on the center left? It links to a video of Hancock's debate appearance in which he made the offending statement. Say what you want about negative ads, but this is about as well-sourced as they get.

How to pick a candidate in a low-information, nonpartisan race

The runoff contest in the Denver mayoral race is between two mainstream Democrats, each with an impressive array of endorsers, substantial funding, highly similar positions on most issues facing the city, and roughly equal place in the polls. How does one make a informed choice between them? I have a useful indicator: former undergraduate students of mine are now staffers for each of the candidates. I can infer qualities of the candidates from qualities of the students. The trick is, on what basis shall I judge the students? Ideology? Grade point average? Manners?

Once is a flub; 3 times is a pattern

Denver mayoral candidate Michael Hancock stepped in some significant doo-doo the other night when he was asked at a debate whether creationism and intelligent design should be taught in schools and he replied yes. He then reportedly got an earful from the audience, realized the enormity of what he said, and changed his answer to no. 

Now, it's important to keep in mind that the mayoral candidates have done a lot of debates, and many of these debates have featured rapid-fire yes/no questions. That a candidate would misunderstand a question and give a quick, wrong answer is certainly not hard to imagine.

However, Hancock's self-described "flub" comes on the heels of some other similar unforced errors. A month ago, when asked at a debate whether he believes in evolution, he replied, "I believe in God." At another point, when the candidates were filling out a Planned Parenthood issues survey, candidate Chris Romer identified himself as "pro-choice," while Hancock called himself "pro-family planning."

A mayoral race is a relatively low information contest. The candidates' formal positions are not terribly distinct from each other -- both are mainstream Democrats -- and there are no party labels on the ballot to help voters choose between them anyway. They also both come off as pretty decent, intelligent guys with lots of important endorsements behind them. In such an environment, small, symbolic items like Hancock's recent flubs are magnified in importance as the candidates seek ways to distinguish themselves from each other and as voters try to choose between them.

The most charitable interpretation of Hancock's flubs would be that he is making some amateurish mistakes in a heated campaign -- hardly inexcusable, but still, these are mistakes his opponent is not making. Denver's largely Democratic electorate, however, would be well within its rights to interpret these events as signs that Hancock is unreliable on vital issues like abortion and science in the schools. Denver Democrats might have given former Governor Bill Ritter's pro-life stance a pass when the alternative was a Republican, but when the alternative is a pretty capable pro-choice Democrat, these voters may not be so forgiving.

Won't you take me to Honkeytown?

In the Denver mayoral race, Chris Romer and Michael Hancock are going to a runoff election next month. Here's how the Denver Post begins its contrast piece about the two candidates today:

Romer is a white, affluent native of Denver whose father was a popular three-term governor and who spent a career in the world of banking.

Michael Hancock is an African-American who overcame a poor upbringing to become a Denver councilman and get elected twice as City Council president.

Anyone want the spoiled white banker? Yeesh. Tough coverage for Romer. I suppose one could argue that the Post is trying to plug a party narrative into a nonpartisan race, casting Romer as the Republican and Hancock as the Democrat. Of course, both men are Democrats, as are the bulk of the city's voters. Sure, Romer has the backing of Republican Josh Penry, but Hancock is getting money from John Elway, so I guess they're about even on Republican-ness.

Sounds like Romer is going to have to spend some more time kissing up to Post reporters.

Too many elections

It's Election Day in Denver! I just voted for mayor and two city council offices.* But what's really important is that I had a chance to vote for the city clerk and recorder's office. Whoever wins that race better, um, record... stuff... just the way I like, or there'll be hell to pay. Oh, and I also voted in the city auditor's race. Now, obviously, as a voter, I have strong opinions about auditing, so if the next incumbent doesn't audit in a fashion consistent with my auditing vision, I'll go out and find someone else who will.

Um, yes, I was being snarky. The point is, I don't see why these positions can't be appointed by the mayor and/or confirmed by the city council. I relied heavily on endorsements when casting votes because I really have no idea what makes someone a good municipal clerk/recorder or auditor. Frankly, I doubt the endorsers know much about that, either, but I'm counting on them to at least not endorse lunatics.

*I don't want to offer too many predictions about the mayoral election, except to say that it will go to a runoff featuring Romer and either Hancock or Mejia, and that Linkhart will under-perform his most recent polls. If you've followed this election at all, you know these aren't particularly brave forecasts.

Do consensus candidates make sense?

Like many Denverites, I've found myself torn between candidates for mayor (although Westword's "Speed Candidating" feature has been both entertaining and helpful). By most accounts, Chris Romer, the son of the former governor, seems to have the broadest range of mainstream Democratic backers. But he's also got a pretty impressive array of Republican endorsers, including some conservative students of mine, as well as former state senator Josh Penry. (Penry, BTW, is the guy who probably would be governor today if he hadn't been pushed out of the Republican nomination race in late 2009.)

It's interesting to consider the perspective of Republicans living in a Democratic city having to choose among a bunch of Democrats to be their mayor. Romer's probably the most centrist of the major candidates, and the fact that he stuck it to the teachers' unions no doubt appeals to Republicans. And on one level, it's impressive that such a broad ideological array of people are backing Romer.

On another level, it's disconcerting. I have a great deal of respect for Josh Penry, but if you were to compare our voting records over the past decade, I'd be shocked if we voted the same way more than 15 percent of the time, and even then it was probably just voting no on some of the sillier initiatives. Really, we should not be supporting the same candidate, and if we are, at least one of us has made a serious miscalculation about who that candidate is.

You are the weakest candidate. Goodbye.

I'm not sure how I feel about this development. Tonight, NewEra Colorado is hosting

an alternative candidate debate for the Denver Mayor’s race, free and open to the public, that will involve a ‘survivor’ theme where candidates will go through several rounds, culminating with a round where the audience will be voting for their favorite candidates using text message voting.

Yeah, this probably provides candidates with all the wrong incentives, and it's pretty tacky. At the same time, it may increase public interest in a pretty low-salience (thus far) election. Generally, my favorite candidates (not the ones whom I'd necessarily vote for, but the ones who I think do the greatest service to democracy) are the ones who can combine both spectacle and substance. Obama is great at this, as is Schwarzenegger. So if a candidate can get through this debate while still sounding reasonably knowledgeable about the issues facing Denver, well that's only good for the city, I think.

Denver mayoral race poll

Via ColoradoPols, RBI Strategies has put out a poll in the Denver mayoral race, asking city residents their opinions about the many candidates. The results can probably be summed up by one of two questions: "Who?" and "There's an election this year?" With just three weeks remaining before the election, Denverites still don't have much of a sense of who these candidate are. The vote preferences, including leaners, are as follows:

• Romer (22)
• Mejia (10)
• Hancock (9)
• Linkhart (7)
• Boigon (5)
• Spahn (2)
• Other (5)
• DK/NA/Undec. (45)

So, not terribly surprisingly, Romer has the lead, based largely on his name-recognition (dad was governor). But still, he's only at 22 percent, with nearly half of respondents having no opinion. This is not necessarily a poor reflection on the candidates -- it's an off-year, off-season, non-partisan, municipal election involving candidates who are mostly city council members (Pop quiz: name yours!). No, three weeks isn't a long time for making a decision, but a lot of the advertising is just kicking in.

Compare this poll with one taken the week prior to the 2003 mayor's race. In that poll, Hickenlooper (whom no one had heard of a few months earlier) was already at 40%, and only 3% of respondents were undecided. I'm guessing we'll get to something close to that within the next two weeks. Some negative ads would really help.