Romney’s Shifting Iowa Coalition

Posted on January 22, 2012 by

Mitt Romney has famously been running for president for the past four years. He seems to be having more success this time; at the moment, Romney is the unquestioned frontrunner for the Republican nomination.

A previous post analyzed Romney’s voting coalition based off of exit polls. Given that Romney also ran for president in 2008, there are also a lot of exit polls which provide information of Romney’s coalition in 2008.

Exit polls were conducted in both the 2008 and 2012 Iowa Republican Caucuses; the 2008 exit poll can be found here, and the 2012 exit poll can be found here. This post takes all the questions which the two exit polls had in common and then places them side-by-side. The fact that Romney got 25.2% of the vote in 2008 and 24.5% of the vote in 2012 makes the comparison especially interesting. By examining the exit polls one can get a sense of how Romney’s 2012 supporters are different from his 2008 supporters.

The results are quite revealing.

Let’s start with a pretty basic question:

Gender Romney 2008 Romney 2012
Male 26% 23%
Female 24% 25%

This is probably the least interesting of the polls. There is essentially no gender gap in Romney’s support. The differences in support are minuscule enough to be a function of sample size error.

Here is the next question, which asks about something much more interesting:

Born-Again Evangelical Christian? Romney 2008 Romney 2012
Yes 19% 14%
No 33% 38%
Evangelical vs. Non-Evangelical Support Gap 14% 24%

These exit polls indicate that Romney does substantially worse amongst evangelicals than amongst non-evangelicals. In fact, in 2008 the gap between evangelical support for Romney and non-evangelical support for Romney was greater than any other divide in the 2008 exit poll questions this post examines.

What is even more revealing is that in 2012 this gap widens. Evangelical support for Romney is even less in 2012; non-evangelical support is even greater in 2012. The 2012 evangelical versus non-evangelical divide in support is also greater than all but one in support amongst the questions examined in this post.

One should be a bit cautious, of course. Saying that Romney is doing worse amongst evangelicals in 2012 than in 2008 is very premature. Exit polls are notoriously unreliable, and to draw firm conclusions from unreliable polls of just one caucus is ill-advised.

The next question also shows something very interesting:

Age Romney 2008 Romney 2012
18-29 22% 13%
30-44 23% 20%
45-64 25% 25%
65+ 28% 33%
Oldest vs. Youngest Support Gap 6% 20%

Unlike religion, age has not often been thought of as a factor in whether or not one supports Romney. Yet as these results make clear, there is actually a substantial age gap between support for Romney amongst the elderly and amongst the young. Older voters like Romney more; younger voters are less enthusiastic.

In 2008 the gap is not very wide. Romney’s support does rise slightly with voter age, but the divide is small enough to perhaps be a function of sample error. In 2012 the divide has widened considerably. Romney almost falls into single digits with young voters, while gaining a healthy third of the elderly vote. Much as evangelicals became less likely to vote for Romney in 2012, younger voters – cool to Romney in 2008 – are even less enthusiastic in 2012.

Let’s take a look at income:

Income Romney 2008 Romney 2012
Less than $30,000 19% 15%
$30,000 – $49,999 16% 16%
$50,000 – $99,999 27% 21%
$100,000 or more 32% 36%
Highest Income vs. Lowest Income Support Gap 13% 21%

There have been considerable attacks on Romney on the basis of class; Romney is one of the richest Americans, and it is fair to say that he has never really experienced hardship. Unsurprisingly, poor voters are not exactly enamored of Romney. As with age, there’s a steady progression of increasing support as income increases.

This was so true in 2008, where the lowest income voters were actually more likely to support Romney than the income tier above them. In 2008 the wealth attack was used much less against Romney (back then the main issue was his flip-flops on social issues). In the 2012 campaign Romney has been criticized much more on the issue of wealth, and unsurprisingly the income divide in support has correspondingly increased.

The next question deals with political philosophy:

Political Philosophy Romney 2008 Romney 2012
Very Conservative 23% 14%
Somewhat Conservative 27% 32%
Moderate 26% 38%
Moderate vs. Very Conservative Gap 3% 24%

In 2008 Romney ran as the conservative religious candidate, attempting to win Iowa by running to the right of all the major candidates. His strategy backfired when Mike Huckabee began rising in the polls, and Romney actually did worst amongst very conservative voters that year. Still, 2008 didn’t really feature a big divide in support for Romney; all three numbers are pretty much within the margin-of-error.

In 2012 Romney ran as something quite different: a moderate, business-oriented Republican. Moderates were thus much more likely to support Romney in 2012. Conservatives, however, were turned off by the similarity of his Massachusetts health care plan to “Obamacare.” Their support, always lukewarm, plummeted. In 2012, the moderate-conservative gap thus tied the evangelical versus non-evangelical gap as the largest divide in support for Romney. Out of all the divides in support for Romney, this divide widened the most between 2008 and 2012.

The next table is a bit puzzling:

Party Affiliation Romney 2008 Romney 2012
Independent 19% 19%
Republican 26% 27%
Republican vs. Independent Support Gap 7% 8%

Republicans are more likely to support Romney than Independents. Unlike the case with most of the other questions, the gap in support hasn’t really widened since 2012. This is actually a strange result; it seems to contradict the fact that moderate voters are the most enamored of Romney. It also would suggest some weakness in the general election.

The next questions involves depth of support:

Opinion of Candidate You Support Romney 2008 Romney 2012
Strongly Favor 24% 22%
Some Reservations 26% 29%
Some Reservations vs. Strongly Favor Support Gap 2% 7%

Romney’s share of voters who strongly favor their candidate and his share of voters who favor their candidate with some reservations was essentially the same in 2008. In 2012 the gap has widened somewhat (a pattern that’s coming up again and again). This is perhaps not so surprising considering the many attacks that Romney has received since 2008.

Finally, another question of some utility:

Decided Whom to Support… Romney 2008 Romney 2012
Today 18% 22%
In the last few days 26% 23%
In December 23% 22%
Before That 29% 28%
Earliest Decision vs. Latest Decision Support Gap 11% 6%

This table indicates that Romney generally does best amongst those who make their decisions earliest. This is one of two categories in which the gap between Romney’s strongest and weakest supporters in 2008 narrowed (the other being gender).

Conclusions

The differences between Romney’s 2008 coalition in Iowa and Romney’s 2012 coalition in Iowa can be revealed just by examining his strongest and weakest supporters out of all these categories. In 2008, out of these nine categories, Romney’s strongest supporters were non-evangelicals; he got 33% of their vote. His weakest supporters were people who decided whom to support on election day; Romney got 18% of them. The greatest gap between Romney supporters and opponents was the 14% gap between evangelicals and non-evangelicals.

In 2012 things were somewhat different and similar at the same time. This time, out of these nine exit polls questions, Romney’s strongest support was with non-evangelicals and moderates. The candidate took 38% of their vote. On the other hand, his weakest supporters were voters aged 18-29; Romney won a mere 13% of them. The greatest divide was amongst evangelicals versus non-evangelicals and very conservative voters versus moderate voters. In both, there was a 24% gap.

Consider these statistics in light of the fact that Romney got essentially the exact same share of the vote in both caucuses.

Nevertheless, his coalition has changed in several interesting ways. In general, Romney is doing better with the voters who supported him the most in 2008. On the other hand, he is doing worse with the voters who were most lukewarm towards him in 2008. His coalition has become less broad but more deep.

Of course, it should be noted that one should hesitate before drawing firm conclusions. This is, after all, an analysis of a form of surveying which has proven to be flawed in the past, which has very high margins of error, and an analysis of only one caucus.

A next post will examine the differences between Romney in 2008 and Romney in 2012 with respect to the New Hampshire primary.

Posted in 2012 Republican Primary, Iowa, Republicans | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Case Study of the Perils Facing Third-Party Candidates: Taiwan

Posted on January 20, 2012 by

Photobucket

In an important world event that far too few Americans knew or probably cared about, Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou was recently re-elected with 51.6% of the vote.

The election itself was quite interesting; there are several fascinating patterns that occur in Taiwanese politics. But this post will focus mainly on the travails of third-party candidate James Soong Chu-yu.

In America third-party candidates generally do terribly. Amazingly, there is not a single Congressman in the House of Representatives who is not a member of either the Democratic or Republican Party.

There is a very simple reason for this: American politics is based on a first-past-the-post system, rather than a proportional parliamentary system. Whoever gets the most votes wins.

This represents a tremendous hurdle to third-party candidates in the United States. Since the supporters of a third party would otherwise vote disproportionately for another major party candidate, third party candidates are constantly accused of “stealing” votes. A vote for Ralph Nader is a vote for George W. Bush, or so the saying goes (and, as it turned out, a vote for Ralph Nader was indeed a vote for George W. Bush). This is why a third-party candidate has never won a presidential election in the history of the United States.

In Taiwan, whoever gets the most votes also becomes president. Third party candidate James Soong Chu-yu’s positions generally leaned towards the Kuomintang. He was unsurprisingly accused of siphoning votes away from the Kuomintang candidate Ma Ying-jeou. Soong thus faced the same hurdle that all third-party presidential candidates in the United States have failed to overcome.

So how did James Soong Chu-yu do? Well, in the earliest summer 2011 polls Soong generally pulled in low double-digits, sometimes breaking the 15% barrier but never falling below 10% of the electorate’s support. As the campaign season wore on, however, his support steadily leaked away. The polls document this drip, drip, drip of support fleeing him quite well. By October Soong was dipping into the single-digits. By November he was struggling to break into the double-digits at all. The last five polls on Wikipedia’s list gave him 7%, 5.8%, 7.2%, 6%, and 6.8% of the vote. Due to Taiwanese laws, polling then ceased during the ten days prior to the election.

On election day James Soong Chu-yu got 2.8% of the vote.

In other words, a candidate who started regularly polling above 15% ended up with less than a million actual votes. James Soong Chu-yu essentially turned into a non-entity; as the possibility of him splitting the Pan-Blue coalition vote came closer and closer to reality, his support plummeted.

All in all, this result is a fascinating application of an electoral principle being applied to a country outside the United States (or outside of the Western world for that matter). When electorates in the United States and Taiwan are presented with the same situation, they react in the exact same way. This reveals that the effect of a first-past-the-post system is quite universal: the system destroys third party candidacies. Whether the third-party candidate is Ralph Nader or James Soong Chu-yu, the result is the same.

Posted in Foreign Elections, Asia | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ron Paul Is Lying

Posted on January 17, 2012 by

Libertarian Ron Paul is doing quite well in the 2012 Republican primaries; he has taken third place in Iowa and second place in New Hampshire. Perhaps the greatest controversy that Ron Paul has run into is a series of newsletters published under his name. These newsletters are written in a racist and hateful tone.

Ron Paul has defended himself by saying that he never wrote or even read the newsletters. Here is one fairly typical interview of this defense:

In this interview, the media has tended to emphasize the fact that Ron Paul abruptly walked away from the interview, although it seemed to be ending anyways.

What is much more interesting is to watch the parts of the video in which Paul specifically denies having read or written any of the newsletters. Specifically, look at 7:20. At 7:20, Paul says:

You know what the answer is, I — I didn’t read — write them. I didn’t read them at the time. And I disavow them. That is the answer.

Look at Paul’s body language when he’s saying these words. It’s fascinating. He refuses to meet Gloria Borger’s eyes. Rather, Paul looks at the floor. This is in contrast to the rest of the interview, when Paul does confidently meet the reporter’s eyes.

Ron Paul is lying.

Posted in 2012 Republican Primary | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Looking at Romney’s Voting Coalition

Posted on January 11, 2012 by

The primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire have recently concluded, with Mitt Romney winning both. It’s quite probable now that Romney will be the person facing Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election.

Both Iowa and New Hampshire have provided detailed exit polls of the Republican electorate. These paint a good picture of the coalition that Romney is assembling.

Of course, exit polls are notoriously unreliable. If exit polls were trustworthy, President John Kerry would just be completing his second term right now. Any exit poll thus ought to be taken with an enormous grain of salt.

Nevertheless, there are some patterns that are appearing pretty consistently in the exit polls of the Republican primaries. These are large enough to be of some note.

  • Romney’s support increases steadily as a voter’s age increases.

  • Similarly, support for Romney increases steadily as income increases.

  • Very conservative voters are not fans of Romney.

  • Neither are born-again Christians. Which is not to say that their support is nonexistent; plenty of born-again Christians are still voting for Romney.

  • Those with college degrees appear slightly more disposed to voting for Romney.

  • Similarly, so are Catholics.

    • There is one final pattern which the exit polls don’t show, but which also appears consistently in the results: rural voters do not like Romney. He has done the worst in the rural parts of Iowa and New Hampshire. It will be of interest to note whether this pattern prevails in South Carolina.

    Not all of these patterns occurred in the last 2008 Republican primaries. During 2008, for instance, very conservative voters gradually became the strongest supporters of Romney. In fact, while there are great similarities between the voters Romney is winning now and those he won in 2004, there are also substantial differences. These are fascinating enough to be the subject of another, much more detailed, post.

    Nor should one expect all these patterns to hold throughout the primary season. This is particularly true with respect to religion. In 2008 Catholics were more likely than Protestants to vote for Romney in Iowa and New Hampshire. In later states such as California and Florida, however, Protestants were more favorable to Romney than Catholics (this was true even counting only white Catholics and white Protestants). Why this is so is somewhat of a mystery.

    There is one very important consideration which has not appeared yet: race. So far, the voters in the 2012 Republican primary have been overwhelmingly white. Asians and blacks do not vote in Republican primaries in numbers large enough to be counted by exit polls. Hispanics, however, do. In 2008 Romney won 14% of the Hispanic vote in Florida, compared to the 31% he took statewide; he failed to break single digits amongst Cubans. It will be very revealing to see whether Romney can do better than that this year.

    Implications for the General Election

    Romney appears to do best in the more traditional wing of the Republican Party. His support is concentrated amongst the wealthier, more urbane voters in the party – the part of the party that is commonly represented by the sophisticated businessman. This, I know, will come as a shock to everybody who has been following politics these past few years.

    During the general election, Romney will probably do well in places filled with people of the above description. These include areas such as suburban Philadelphia and the northern exurbs of Atlanta. He may struggle to raise much excitement amongst the rural evangelical crowd, the red-hot conservatives who in bygone days voted loyally Democratic. Unfortunately for the president, these voters probably loathe Obama more than any other segment of the electorate.

    Probably most useful for a political analyst is the fact that Romney’s support increases in proportion to a voter’s wealth, age, and closeness to a major urban center. These are things about Romney’s coalition which political analysts haven’t known about before (especially the facts about voter income and age).

    It will be interesting to see if Romney’s coalition remains the same throughout the next few primaries, or whether it changes. Indeed, Romney’s coalition is actually somewhat different from the one he assembled in the 2008 Republican primaries. The next few posts will compare the exit polls from those primaries and those from the current primaries.

    They will examine:

    Iowa

    New Hampshire

    Posted in 2012 Presidential Election, 2012 Republican Primary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

    A Postmortem on William Daley

    Posted on January 10, 2012 by

    Photobucket

    In one of the less noticed news items of the day, White House chief of staff William M. Daley has resigned. Mr. Daley was brought in during the wake of the 2010 midterm elections. Supposedly his business background would restore the president’s ties with American business, and his wheeler-dealer background would help find compromise with Republicans.

    When Daley was first hired, I wrote that this was a very bad idea. The post, titled “William Daley – A Poor Chief-of-Staff” argued that nothing Daley had done in his career had come out of his own hard work. Rather, Daley had throughout his lifetime merely utilized the famous name of his father and brother, who were both mayors of Chicago, to get where he was. The post specifically argued:

    William Daley, in many ways, stands out as the opposite of [the American Dream]. Mr. Daley has succeeded not because of any personal qualities – intelligence, leadership, ambition – but merely because of his last name. Mr. Daley’s father, Richard Daley, famously ruled the city of Chicago for decades and accumulated enormous power and massive political connections. Without those inherited connections, William Daley would not be where he is now.

    Take, for instance, Mr. Daley’s job before being appointed Chief of Staff. He was an executive at Morgan Stanley who supervised its Washington lobbying efforts. Here is how Mr. Daley got the job:

    …Chase executives, including Jamie Dimon, its chairman, wanted to bring in someone with Chicago connections who could smooth over relations with wealthy clients and corporations there.

    One Chase official…recalled, “A few bankers said we should hire a Bill Daley,” meaning someone with Chicago political connections and clout who could serve as a new public face for Chase.

    The primary reason, then, that Mr. Daley got his job was because his father happened to be Mayor of Chicago. Without the last name Daley, William would not be a top executive at a corporate bank. Without that prestigious position, he would not be the president’s Chief of Staff.

    Being chief of staff of the White House, however, is something that doesn’t merely require a great last name. It requires talent, luck, and mostly importantly a lot of hard, hard work. As chief-of-staff to the president, one can’t succeed by merely utilizing family connections to lobby Washington politicians. Was Daley up to the job?

    It turns out that he was not. While Daley was able to improve relations between the president and the business world, he failed disastrously in wheeling and dealing with the Republican Party. The president and the Republican Party spent the year fighting a series of battles on the budget and the federal debt. Most famously, Daley tried and failed to secure a grand deal with Republicans on the federal debt during debt ceiling negotiations. The end result left the president looking weak and unprepared.

    Perhaps the final straw occurred when the White House scheduled an important speech on the night of a Republican primary debate. Daley claimed to have previously secured a deal with Republican party leaders in Congress to allow the president to speak to Congress on that date. Embarrassingly, this proved not to be the case; Republicans attacked the president for scheduling his speech during the middle of the primary debate, and the president was forced to back down. Daley, it turned out, was unable to secure a deal with the Republican Party on something as small as the date of a speech.

    The new chief of staff, Jacob Lew, has a rather different story from William Daley. The son of immigrants, Lew was born in New York City and attended the public school system. He entered politics, like many individuals, working as an aide to a local congressman. Lew then gradually moved up the ladder; he previously worked as Obama’s Budget Director before becoming chief of staff.

    Unlike, Daley, Jacob Lew does not have a famous last name. If Jacob Lew does better than William M. Daley’s failed tenure at the White House, it may be due to this fact.

    Posted in Politics | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

    Looks Like Romney’s Set To Win?

    Posted on January 7, 2012 by

    I’ve been traveling and unable to access the Internet or news for the past few days, so unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – I did not have the opportunity to watch the Fox News and CNN pundits excite themselves to climax watching Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum battle to a tie.

    I have spent the past few hours catching up, however, and from what I’ve seen it seems that Mitt Romney has the nomination all but sewn up. His polling numbers have surged massively since the Iowa results, whilst the numbers of his only credible competitor Newt Gingrich have collapsed. Romney looks set to win New Hampshire; he has always had a strong lead there. More surprisingly, Romney also is now posting leads in conservative evangelical South Carolina. Newt Gingrich is still leading (or is he?) in Florida, but that lead may collapse as quickly as Rudy Giuliani’s national lead did in 2008, after Giuliani placed badly in the early primaries.

    The second and third-place finishers in Iowa, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul, simply do not have the ability to win the nomination. Rick Santorum is simply too far behind; his surge has barely pulled him up to double-digits nationwide. As for Ron Paul, as Jay Cost memorably put it – “Ron Paul will never be the Republican nominee for the simple reason that he is not actually a Republican.”

    So it looks like Mitt Romney is all set. His last serious opponent his crashing. Romney will almost certainly win New Hampshire. He will have the momentum of Iowa and New Hampshire heading into South Carolina, where he’s already posting leads. If Romney can win in the heartland of the South, where his popularity has always been lukewarm, then he’s probably the nominee.

    This is quite surprising, for me at least. I had not expected Romney to get such a polling boost from his performance in Iowa. After all, Romney actually won fewer votes than he did last time in 2008. For months Republicans have shied away from backing Romney due to his weaknesses on consistency. Yet now suddenly Gingrich is falling like a rock, while Romney is surging.

    Here’s one final thought. What a boring nomination it’ll be if Romney ends up winning this easily. It really seems like there is something different about the conservative and liberal psyche in the Republican and Democratic Parties.

    Posted in 2012 Republican Primary, Republicans | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

    Europe Hasn’t Been Much In the News Lately…

    Posted on January 3, 2012 by

    They say that no news is the best news.

    There was a lot of news in 2011 about Europe. During the summer, and throughout the fall, the biggest news item was the European debt crisis. European governments from　Italy to Spain fell, government bonds skyrocketed, European leaders Angela Merkel held summit after summit attempting to solve the problem, and people prepared for disaster. Some said that the European Union would not last past Christmas. Almost everybody agreed that the Europeans have failed to solve their problem.

    But for some reason, the news in the past few weeks has been far less Euro-centric. The European debt crisis seems to have faded as an issue. For some reason, the it’s not making the front pages.

    There might be several reasons for this. Perhaps it’s simply a coincidence, nothing more.

    Perhaps the Europeans have magically solved their European debt crisis, and the issue will gradually disappear. I personally wouldn’t bet on it.

    Perhaps the holiday season has slowed things down in the financial sector. The hedge fund managers and Wall Street bankers might be too busy shopping for Christmas and visiting relatives to think about Europe. Without people thinking about Europe and trading against their government bonds, things might have stabilized temporarily.

    Whatever the reason, let’s hope that Europe continues staying out of the headlines for the next year and beyond.

    Posted in Europe | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment