The Presidential Election

President Obama will likely be the first two-term President in history who received fewer votes in his re-election than he did in his initial election. (It is not likely that this result will change between now and the posting of the final count.)

The 14 who received more votes on re-election than initial election were Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S Grant, William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.

Nine Presidents ran for re-election and lost. Three of them, John Quincy Adams, Martin van Buren and Grover Cleveland, received more votes in their re- election effort than in their initial election. Six others, John Adams, Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush, received fewer voters in their unsuccessful re-election efforts than in their initial elections.

Four sitting Presidents were re-elected to the office after ascending to the Presidency as the result of the death of the President they served, Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry S Truman, and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Gerald Ford was nominated to run for re-election, but lost in the general election to Jimmy Carter.

Five sitting Presidents who came to the office when a President died in office failed to receive their Party’s nomination for re-election: John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and Chester A Arthur.

FDR got fewer votes in his 3rd and 4th re-elections than he did for his second.

---

Much ado was made of the fact that no President had been re-elected since 1940 when the unemployment rate was above 7.7%. In 2012, the September rate was 7.8% and in October it was 7.9%. The average unemployment rate at the time of the last ten Presidential campaigns was 6.43%.

---

Many things change, but some things never change

I finished law school in June 1964. Going all the way back to junior high school, I had been involved in school elections and campaigns. My first endeavor as a campaign manager was to manage the campaign of Diane Martini, who was running to be the President of the junior high school student council. I continued to work on student council campaigns all the way through undergraduate school.

When I finished law school I decided to get involved in public official campaigns. One of my professors was the 5th Congressional District chairman for the Johnson Presidential campaign. I went to him and told him I wanted to get involved as a volunteer. He responded by saying that he was anointing me as the vice chairman for the District, and that I should report to Arvonne Fraser, who was managing her husband’s Congressional campaign.

A few days later I showed up at the campaign office, met Arvonne, and told her of my interest. She was welcoming and told me she had just the assignment for me. For the next few weeks I spent my days in the basement of the Minneapolis City Court House hand-copying voter registration records. By August a totally serendipitous set of circumstances resulted in my having a paid job running the voter registration and turnout program in what was then the 3rd Congressional District. (It happens that then Attorney General Fritz Mondale was the Johnson Chairman for Minnesota, but that is another story.)

Of the many things that I learned during that election the most important was that the person who is likely to be the most persuasive with a potential voter is his or her long-time next door neighbor. That neighbor’s suggestion or request was backed up by all of the elements of their personal relationship.

Some 8 years later, when I managed then Senator Mondale’s re-election campaign, I installed what was then state-of-the-art data collection and sorting equipment: an IBM punch card sorter. It was about 6 feet long, 4 feet high, and a foot and a half wide. Each “card” had to be created on a special typewriter-like device which contained a maximum of 11 pieces of data. A deck of cards was fed into one end of the machine and out of the other end came a sorted deck of cards by address or town. Those cards were then fed through another device that printed out each card and created lists that were used by volunteers going door to door.

I thought of the above when I read Jim Messina’s interview at a Political Playbook Politico breakfast.

He first talked about the “cacophony” of television in the final months of the campaign. He said, “And people got so much of it, a simple door-knock from a trusted neighbor really mattered more than anything else—to say, ‘Hey, let me tell you why I’m supporting Barack Obama. I live down the street, let me talk to an issue you care about.’ And that, we found, became incredibly important to how people were going to vote.”

“We used data for everything, we modeled everything, trying to figure out how to use our time wisely....We had a whole bunch of data points:...your voting history, your giving history. Everything we knew about you allowed us to figure out whether or not you were going to volunteer. We even modeled whether or not people were going to be a better direct mail giver or an online giver.”

Let there be no mistake, Messina and the Obama campaign team he recruited, many of whom had never really been involved in campaign politics, created a mechanism for direct voter contact that far out performed any Presidential campaign we have seen in the past, including the 2004 Republican campaign and the 2008 Obama effort. Of course, 2012 Obama built on 2008 Obama.

One example of the changes they made has to do with lists. Even the 2008 Obama campaign worked off a variety of lists. Volunteers at different calling centers were working off of different lists. The get-out-the-vote list was not merged with the fundraising list. In short, there were a variety of databases that were used separately. The first step for Obama 2012 was to merge all of these lists.

The campaign paid little attention to anything but a group of swing States.

If you need to be convinced of the importance of the decision to focus on swing States by the Obama campaign, consider the following. [The following is based on the exceptional data collection prepared by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report. Cook uses 12 swing States, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. The Obama campaign designated 11 swing States. Minnesota did not make their list.]

Overall turnout was down by about 3.35 million votes, a 2.55% drop from 2008.

Turnout was down by 3.46 million votes in the non-swing States, a drop of 3.99%.

In the swing Sates turnout was UP by 109,000 votes, a 0.24% increase from 2008.

---

In the event you need further convincing of the vitality of the Obama campaign turnout operation, consider the following. A shift of 495,398 votes from Obama to Romney in the following swing States , Florida – 74,310 votes; Nevada – 67,807 votes; New Hampshire – 39,644 votes; Ohio – 164,338 votes; Virginia – 149,299 votes, and Romney would have won in the Electoral College. A shift of 427,591 votes would have resulted in an Electoral College tie, and again Romney would have been selected as President by the House of Representatives. (11/29 numbers).

---

It is worth noting the design of the Obama campaign internal polling program that was used along with their other diagnostics efforts.

* There were no national polls conducted in the entire campaign

* Regular surveys (twice a week for the final two months of the campaign) were done in the 11 battleground States

* State tracking polls were conducted in each of the battleground States throughout the campaign using a “team” of six Democratic Pollsters

---

The importance of the non-voter pool to Obama, and presumptively other Democratic candidates, is made vivid by a late October survey by the PEW Research Center.

Among all adults, Obama led Romney by 51% to 39%. Among likely voters the two men were running even, 47% to 47%. Among non-voters Obama was preferred by 59% to 24%.

---

An Electoral Vote Pattern?

Chris Cillizza did an interesting piece on the electoral college in the “Washington Post.”

He notes that in the last six Presidential elections, 1992 – 2012, the Democratic nominee has averaged 327 electoral votes, while the Republican nominee has averaged 210 electoral votes.

In the preceding six Presidential elections, 1968 – 1988, the Republican nominees averaged 427 electoral votes, while the Democratic nominee averaged 113 electoral votes.

He includes an extended explanation of what seems to have happened, and if you are an electoral vote geek and have not seen the article it is worth pulling it up. (Wash Post 11/12/12)

---

Mandate/No Mandate?

President Obama and his team claim that his 50.9% victory on November 6th gave him a mandate to do a variety of things. Of course the Republicans say that he does not have a mandate.

House Republicans claim they have a mandate because they control 54% of the House seats, even though they lost 8 seats. By that calculation Senate Democrats have a mandate (they have not claimed one) because they control 55% of the Senate seats.

There is no mandate resulting from this election for the President or for either House of the Congress. If there is anything approaching a mandate it is a mandate to all of the elements of the Federal Government to get together and solve the problems that plague folks every day.

The reality is that

* the President has extensive executive power that he may have been hesitant to use prior to his re-election and that he now may be less hesitant to exercise.

* Republicans have solid control over the House of Representatives and can essentially veto any legislative proposal.

* the “my way or the highway” approach to which the country is now being treated by these power centers does not create confidence that the Government will do what needs to be done to the benefit of the country.

---

The following is a list of the final Presidential election surveys of various polling organizations. The noted date is the last day on which the survey was conducted. All are surveys of likely voters. As of 11/29 the President is leading Romney by 3.2%.



Perhaps the “biggest loser” among pollsters in this election is Gallup. Beginning in mid-October it had Romney with an ever-increasing lead, which reached a point where Romney was up by 7 points. During this period most other polls had Obama with a lead. On October 28th, Gallup had Romney up by 5 points. Everyone else had the race tied or Obama with a +1 lead.

Nate Silver, while not a pollster per se, using his computer-driven models of available survey data, predicted that Obama would win with 51% of the vote, about as close as it gets.

---

Most Americans feel good about the next four years. 54% think the country will be better off four years from now. This is well below the 74% who felt that when Obama was first elected. [Gallup 11/12]

Return to Home Page