Beyond Red & Blue

State of the Race: May 15

The Boston Phoenix's Steven Stark says that if the presidential election were held today, Barack Obama and John McCain would each get 269 votes, throwing the election into the House of Representatives. Stark arrives at this conclusion by replicating the 2000 election map and shifting just one state, moving Colorado to the Democrats.

The website FiveThirtyEight.com also shows a virtually tied race at this point. They give McCain an impossible 269.3 electoral votes through some formula too complicated to describe here. But their state-by-state predictions differ from Stark's only by giving Nevada to Obama.

In the chart below (download here), I took FiveThirtyEight.com's predicted breakdown of the two-candidate vote (based on both recent polls and on the past accuracy of polls in each state) and applied it to the vote turnout of 2004 to see how the popular tally might end up. Right now, it shows Obama narrowly losing the popular vote even while narrowly winning the Electoral College. This situation probably won't hold in November: Turnout will almost certainly be up, and I think Obama will win heavily Democratic states such as Massachusetts and New York by a bigger margin than polls now indicate. But the possibility of another split in the popular vote and Electoral College remains a real possibility.

Tax breaks and transparency in Quebec

New Brunswick Business Journal columnist David Campbell notes the reputation of Québec as a "bad boy" in terms of stealing jobs from other provinces (and, presumably, the United States) by offering generous tax incentives and grants to private industry. But he lauds the Québec government for releasing generous amounts of public data about the effectiveness of these business incentives. ("Despite offering the most lucrative business incentives in Canada, Investissement Québec claims to have a cost-benefit ratio of 3.74 to 1. In other words, for each tax dollar spent by the Quebéc government it collected $3.74 in tax and incidental tax revenues.")

Indeed, the Investissement Quebéc website is a bountiful source of information on the government's efforts to lure business to La Belle Province. It includes a 112-page annual report detailing the agency's 1,451 "financing operations" over 2006-07, which supposedly created 10,959 jobs and "retained" 10,722 jobs.

As far as I know, Massachusetts does not have an equivalent source of data (though the Department of Housing and Economic Development touts infrastructure grants and other resources for new businesses). But perhaps more transparency about the benefits of business incentives would mean more political support for them.

CommonWealth editor Bruce Mohl asked whether the state is coming out ahead from tax breaks for the film and life sciences industries in our Spring issue; read his cover story here. 

Obama's rural peaks and valleys

As other bloggers have noted (see Al Giordano), Barack Obama's weakness among rural voters seems most pronounced along the Appalachian Mountains, though the map below suggests that the anti-Obama region extends farther west to take in Oklahoma and northern Texas.

West Virginia, which went overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton last week, seems to represent the absolute nadir of rural support for Obama; southern Ohio wasn't much more hospitable. But notice that he was more competitive in the rural counties of Indiana and Missouri, which accounts for the tight races in those states' primaries. And Obama's strong showings in the West and upper Midwest so far means that he can probably count on victories in the Montana, Oregon, and South Dakota primaries. Whether he can be competitive in a state like Montana in the general election is another question.

Elitist Republicans, rube Democrats

Over the past few decades, Democratic presidential candidates have done increasingly well in urban areas and Republicans have strengthened their hold over rural areas. The map below shows the major exceptions to this trend in 2004, showing which counties were both significantly more urban and more Republican than the national average, or more rural and more Democratic.

Most of the rural Democratic counties in the South are majority African-American, while a good number of the rural Democratic counties in the West are mostly Hispanic or American Indian (but there are also several resort areas in California, Colorado, and Idaho). White rural Democrats are concentrated in New England and the upper Midwest. In order for the Democrats to win in November, they probably need to carry at least a few more heavily rural counties. Barack Obama may be able to do this in the West and in states like Iowa; he probably can't do much to stop the withering away of white rural Democratic counties in Kentucky and West Virginia.

Conversely, Republican candidate John McCain can't afford to lose more urban Republican counties. They still exist in Florida and Texas, but they are few and far between in the Northeast and Midwest.

Elaboration, please: Sexist attacks on Hillary

The Boston Globe's Joan Vennochi has a typically clear-eyed column on the refusal by many of Hillary Clinton's female supporters to concede the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. But one paragraph warrants elaboration:

The final book on the 2008 presidential campaign will record a great deal of gender bias. The Hillary Nutcracker, a product whose name says it all, is one example. The emphasis on Clinton's cackle and depictions of her as a witch are others. Dean and other top Democrats did nothing to discourage blatant sexist attacks, and, for that, they are paying a price with Clinton's female supporters. [Italics added]

There has certainly been sexism in the media's coverage of the Clinton campaign, but have "blatant sexist attacks" come from within the Democratic Party? It would be nice to have an example. What attacks did Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean fail to prevent or repudiate?

Over?

The consensus in the mainstream media is that Hillary Clinton lost any chance for the Democratic presidential nomination yesterday, thanks to a big defeat in North Carolina and only a wafer-thin victory in Indiana. Yesterday's results pretty much mirror the primary season as a whole: Barack Obama's victories have tended to come with wider margins than Clinton's, and that means more delegates for the Illinois senator.

In retrospect, the biggest disappointment for Clinton over the past five months may have been that her win in California, the biggest state to vote on Super Tuesday, didn't make her the prohibitive front-runner. Instead, Obama raised eyebrows with his landslide victories in the Super Tuesday caucuses, including Colorado, Kansas, and Minnesota. As I've noted before, elections are almost always won by the candidate with the fewest geographical "black holes" -- states, counties, or cities where he or she gets absolutely walloped. Obama had a couple of states like that (Arkansas, Oklahoma, Rhode Island), but Clinton had a lot more (including the belt of states from Maryland to Louisiana and most of the Rocky Mountain states).

More analysis to come in the next few weeks...

Meta-post: Temporary lull in blogging

Sorry for the relatively light blogging over the past week. We are now in overtime mode at CommonWealth magazine putting together our special issue on the 15th anniversary of Massachusetts' Education Reform Act. And it's almost as if Barack, Hillary, and the voters of Pennsylvania are helping us out by freezing the Democratic primary contest in place.

In a few days, we'll be back up to full speed on the blog. In the meantime, you can read past posts and marvel at how little has been resolved...

Update: Democratic primary vote in the 10 regions

 

I've added the Pennsylvania results to the chart showing how Clinton and Obama have fared in our 10 political regions. For the first time, Obama leads in four regions, as his votes in Philadelphia and its suburbs push him to a narrow edge in the Northeast Corridor. And for the first time, Clinton's strongest region is not El Norte, as her sweep across central Pennsylvania makes Cumberland her most reliable base of votes. Note that Clinton has a narrow lead in the popular vote because the Florida and Michigan primaries, while nonbinding, are included here.

No exit (or, the sitcom campaign)

What more to say about Pennsylvania? The Democratic race has become a sitcom, in which all the stock characters -- the sassy grandma, the dumb jock, etc. -- go through crisis after crisis and never change a bit. Last night, as usual, Clinton won the votes of women, older people, Catholics, and voters without a college education, and Obama won among men, younger people, non-whites, and college graduates.

In particular, the age difference seems irresolvable. According to exit polls at CNN, Clinton won the over-60 vote in Pennsylvania by a ratio of 62-38, while Obama won the under-30 vote by a ratio of 61-39. In all 28 primaries and caucuses for which CNN has done exit polls, Obama has done better with younger voters, and in 17 states Obama has won the under-30 cohort while losing voters over 60. (In another state, California, he tied Clinton among voters under 30 but lost the senior set by 21 points.) The gap has been smallest in Vermont (where Obama won 64 percent of the younger group and 58 percent of the older group) and Connecticut (58 percent and 50 percent). It's been widest in Iowa (where Obama got 57 percent of the younger group but only 18 percent of older voters against Clinton and John Edwards) and Ohio (61 percent for Obama among younger voters and 28 percent among older voters).

This persistent pattern may spell trouble in November for the Democrats. If Obama is the nominee (still the likelier possibility), he may lose older Democrats to 72-year-old John McCain. If Clinton is the nominee, she may not attract younger voters to the polls and may have problems with independents who don't necessarily share the fondness for the first Clinton administration that older Democrats seem to have.

Conflict of interest: Where you stand depends on where your state legislature sits

The National Conference of State Legislatures features a good daily round-up of news from the state capitals, and today there are two good pieces about conflicts of interest among state lawmakers who have "day jobs." Jessica Fender writes about Colorado in the Denver Post:

Pretend you're bar-manager-turned- state Rep. Paul Weissmann, and the House is considering a bill to boost the price of restaurant licenses. Do you vote?

Just to make sure nobody thinks he's voting in his own interest, the real Weissmann says he abstains.

But attitudes seem more relaxed in Kentucky, according to the Herald-Leader's John Cheves:

Democratic Sen. David Boswell, who annually crusades for legalized casino gambling in Kentucky, is also citizen David Boswell, sales manager and registered Frankfort lobbyist for the Owensboro Executive Inn, which wants to open a casino on its premises. Boswell said he would have pushed for casinos regardless of who pays his salary. But he added that a casino would help the hotel, and what's good for his employer is also good for his Senate district.