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Good points being made here, in the string below. Glad to see it. I’d like to address some of them, in due course.
For now, though, what’s really on my mind is this (a point I just made in my column for my day job):
Seems to me that what’s happening is the triumph of the Lichtman logic. The strategy of both parties is built around it entirely.
Continue reading "Lichtman Logic Triumphs"...
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This post came in from Tom Q., for the string below this one. But I think it merits its own string. (It also merits paragraph separations, which are not possible in responses to posts.)
I will respond.
He says:
Okay, to move beyond the charisma question, a few other thoughts:
1) Whether you think the number of Keys lost this cycle is 7, 8 (including recession) or 9 (including charisma), it’s an easy call. Yet out there in journalism/blogosphere land, there’s widespread “McCain surging/Obama doomed!” feeling.
Continue reading "Where we stand:"...
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The Washington Post had an article about Lichtman in late August (by the science writer, not a political guy), and then Lichtman did a chat session. Rather than list interminable urls here, I think I will suggest that you go to WashingtonPost.com and search for “Lichtman.”
In the Q. and A. the charisma issue came up. Here’s the passage:
Q: Professor Lichtman: How do you deal with the question of subjectivity for the two charisma keys? While I support Obama, I don’t find him particularly charismatic, though I can see where some would. McCain seems to me not charismatic at all, but surely others see him as an exciting “maverick” and “war hero” and so on.
Allan Lichtman: The charisma keys are the most subjective or the most judgmental of all 13 keys. No election has ever turned on the charisma keys and this one does not. The point, however, is that there are always individual voters and some voters groups that will find particular candidates charismatic or inspiring. To reach the threshold for charisma under the Keys system, however, the candidate must be broadly recognized as inspirational. Such candidates are very rare. In recent decades only John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan have reached the threshold.
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Let’s start this thread with a comment that came in on another string. You’ll see why I wanted to do that.
First, however, a word: This blog is monitored. I decide which comments get posted. I am not posting comments that are arguments for or against a candidate. That just isn’t what we’re doing here. Plenty of other places are doing it. I can understand why my post about race was seen by some as pro-Obama. But that wasn’t the idea. Please try to remember that the predictive system in use here predicted Bush on ‘04, not to mention all the other Republican popular-vote victories in recent decades.
OK, here’s the comment. It’s a couple of weeks old. Sorry about that.
Continue reading "Obama Charisma Star Still Rising?"...
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Here’s a piece that I just wrote on my day job with the Dayton Daily News. It kind of enlarges on a subject already touched on here. Starts now:
This column has already done everything possible to make clear that Barack Obama will win the national popular vote in November. It’s a Democratic year. The predictive system that is always right (pretty much) says so.
A reader might be tempted to assume that a prediction of an Obama win nationally implies a prediction of an Obama win in Ohio. After all, Ohio has been the decisive state lately (pretty much).
Continue reading "Obama and Ohio: Race Comes Down to Race"...
Where we stand as Obama wraps it up:
This post is partly in response to a comment posted on the string below. A writer suggests that the Lichtman keys are missing the intensity of the Democratic split this year. She says that intraparty wounds could, indeed, hurt Obama, even if divisions in an “out” party havn’t hurt a candidate in the past.
A response: Maybe.
But, in truth, in every election there seems to be something that has never been present before, something special that will upset the keys because of its intensity.
In the 1988, it was, among other things, “The Wimp Factor.” George H.W. Bush, having been a Uriah Heepish V.P. for so many years — having looked SO tiny compared to Reagan — was now the subject of newsweekly cover stories saying he was just too wimpy to be elected president.
But nature took its course: He started delivering Peggy Noonan’s manly lines (“Read My Lips: No Knew Taxes”), and the Republican convention featured film of him landing on an aircraft carrier as the youngest fighter pilot in WWII or something. And was that. A factor that has seemed dominant for a year disappeared in an instant. Poof.
In ‘92 it was Clinton being an adulterer and a Vietnam war protester in England and a draft dodger and having a feminist wife.
There’s always something. But so far nothing seems to have upset the keys.
Having said that, I have to also make a periodically-necessary disclaimer: The system will be wrong someday. Lichtman has never presented it as foolproof.
My own sense though is that the Democratic divisions are too close to ordinary to have any impact.
There’s nothing ideological here. I’m mean, there’s nothing about the direction of the country. By comparison, when Eisenhower beat Taft in 1952, the Republican conservatives — the base, even then — were bitterly disappointed.
Other, earlier elections saw multi-ballot conventions turning candidates who won in November: 1920, 1932.
The one factor that does give me pause (and Lichtman, too) this year is race.
We are talking, after all, about a predictive scheme that is based on historical precedents. And there is certainly no precedent for a black candidate.
You might noticed that the Lichtman keys make no mention of the demographic characteristics of the candidates. This does not mean that anybody is saying that such characteristics are irrelevant. It only means that if a given characteristic doesn’t keep a candidate from winning the nomination of a mainstream party, it is apparently not all that problematic.
This year certain characteristics would prevent an election in November: being a Muslim, certainly. Gay. Atheist. Mormon? But they would prevent a nomination first.
Being black does not seem to be in that category. However, one can’t help but notice that the Democratic nomination came down to TWO candidates of unprecedented demographic characteristics. So maybe the fact that one won isn’t so meaningful.
Not that I’m hedging. The prediction is in. I’m just making another prediction: If the prediction is wrong — which it won’t be — race will be the reason.
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I’ve taken so ludicrously, shamefully long to respond to a couple of posts (DAY JOBS!!) that I have decided to do so in new posts, rather than hope people are still checking for comments after old posts.
I’ll copy the post I’m responding to here, then respond.
Here’s one:
I want to commend you for being so adamant about Lichtman’s system, but I warn you not to expect many to listen. I’ve been a fan of the system since I read the book in ‘92, and have advocated for it on blogs across the Internet. But I can’t tell you the number of times people have either utterly ignored the points, or tried to rebut them with irrelevancies or falsehoods. Thanks to the ignorant press, many out there truly believe elections have turned on Reagan saying “There you go again”, the Weinberger indictment in ‘92, the swift-boaters, the DUI of 2000 (which is said to have been the only thing that prevented a Bush landslide)
I’m sure you know of Occam’s Razor — which is frequently mis-stated as “the simplest explanation is probably correct”, but is actually “When considering an issue, cut away all but things that are truly relevant”. I’d say no profession is more disdainful of Occam than political punditry, which spends the vast bulk of its time on things that aren’t germane in the least.
In a way, I’m glad about this election, which may finally put the lie to the media contention that Willie Horton and Boston Harbor torpedoed an otherwise completely electable Michael Dukakis. The GOP is clearly planning to run the precise same campaign this year — with media assistance — but the Keys circumstances are so wildly different that the result is certain to be the opposite. How will our press corps justify themselves in that aftermath?
By the way, how many Keys do you see ultimately falling this year? The only ones I see as clearly staying up for the GOP are third-party and social unrest. Scandal is probably not quite bad enough to fall, though Scooter Libby, Alberto Gonzales and heckuva-job Brownie push it into gray area. And incumbent party contest is devilishly hard to pinpoint. Surely McCain’s nomination was half-hearted and achieved solely through the combo of split right-wing votes and winner-take-all primaries. But McCain may top Lichtman’s 2/3 delegate standard.
The rest, though — mandate, incumbency, short and long term economy (technically not a recession yet, but tell the public that), policy change, foreign policy disaster and lack of success, incumbent non-charisma and challenger charisma (yes, I assume Obama) — this is one of the surest elections in American history. (If you tilt either contest or scandal against the GOP, it’s 10 negatives, the most in all the years Lichtman surveys)
Once again, thanks for taking up the standard of intelligent election coverage. At least some of us are on your team.
END
RESPONSE:
Wow! A believer. How exciting. I don’t think I know any others, except for Lichtman. I know a few people who see Lichtman as having a point. But as to real believers, I don’t think so.
As for frustration, tell me about it.
I love the points you make about Willie Horton, Swift Boats and all that. You are completely right.
I have been writing about this subject since 1986. For a while, my column got some national distribution (because the New York Times Wire distributes columns from the Cox wire. Cox is the chain that owns the Dayton Daily News, site of the aforementioned day job. To this day, when I have a Lichtman related column, I put it out on the wires.
Some readers, at least in Dayton, have picked up on the subject. I am identified locally with this subject more than any other. It’s an icebreaker in conversation. People I know and don’t know ask me about the latest prediction.
But as for journalists, forget about it. Nothing.
I finally got so frustrated, I wrote a book. And, trust me, that means REALLY frustrated, because I’m not a guy who likes to go home from a day of writing and start writing.
Then I couldn’t get the book published. I’ll let others decide whether that was because of the quality of the book, which is mention at the top of this blog and still available, because I self-published it.
Then I failed completely to get reviewers to pay any attention to the book.
Completely.
And yet, the fight goes on.
(But perhaps you can see why sometimes I’m a little slow about posting.)
We should keep in touch and exchange notes. Thanks for writing.
As for this year’s keys: At this stage, Lichtman is only calling seven against the Republicans:
House seats moving in D direction;
no incumbent on the ballot;
bad long-term economy;
no policy change;
foreign policy failure;
no foreign policy success;
and no incumbent charisma.
The key on turning many of the keys is the word “major.” It means MAJOR.
So, on scandal we’re just not there. The Libby and Gonzalez things are too ordinary. Something has to touch the president directly.
As for a recession this year, technically we’re not there yet. That’s mainly because the low price of the dollar is helping exports. That keeps the economy growing very marginally. But I think you’re on to something when you say the public certainly feels a recession. Close call.
As for Barama’s charisma, this is perhaps softest of the keys. Charisma is something that sometimes just emerges. JFK’s charisma really only became apparent, Lichtman says, after the first debate with Nixon. Suddenly JFK had a sort of star quality, with the “bobby soxers” jumping and screaming. Their have certainly been signs of that with Obama. But I’m not ready to turn the key, and neither is Lichtman. Personally, I don’t think Obama is in a league, say, with Reagan as to personal connection with people. But there is some sort of phenomenon at work here; I can tell that in Dayton, Obama got the biggest and most enthusiastic crowd I’ve seen any politician get here in 24 years. But Hillary won the state. We’ll see.
No on social unrest.
On incumbent party unity: At a certain stage Lichtman was assuming the Rs would be divided enough to turn the key against them. But, as you say, the 2/3-of-the-delegates seem to be there for him. This might relate to Romney having given up fairly early.
No third party.
In sum: The incumbents can only lose five keys. They’re losing seven. If they lose recession or challenger-charisma, it’s lopsided. (But that does not mean a prediction of a lopsided victory).
Continue reading "An ally! Really?"...
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Indeed, it’s “polls uber alles” feeling that creates most false narratives in the