State of the Race – August 18

It has now been one week since Governor Romney chose Paul Ryan as his running mate, so let's see where the race stands and what, if any, impact this choice has made. The chart below shows the breakdown on electoral votes as I calculate them as of this weekend:

	Safe	Likely	Lean	Total
Obama	158	85	32	275
Romney	144	47	0	191
Tossup				72

If you want to see a visual breakdown of where states fall, see the photo above or click here for a map. Obviously, the darker the shade of blue or red, then the safer that state is for that candidate. (If you want to see how I arrived at these categories, I would encourage you to review last week's post which can be found here.)

Obviously, the biggest change is the addition of Florida and Virginia from Lean Obama to tossup. This puts four states with a total of 72 electoral votes in the tossup category. Although the president is still above the magic number of 270, it is by a very slim margin which shows that this election is still very close and as I expected, the race is tightening up. The other visible change is Wisconsin moving from the Likely Obama category to the Lean Obama category. In addition, there were other states that made changes in their percentages, but did not change categories – specifically, Ohio moved closer to the tossup category while Missouri moved closer to the Lean Romney category. In fact, all of the changes from last weekend to this weekend were states that were moving closer to the center, so to speak.

What does this say about the race and the selection of Congressman Ryan? Well first of all, I think it tells us that Governor Romney got a little bit of a bounce from the selection of Congressman Ryan as his running mate. I think this is largely due to the fact that the conservatives in the Republican Party are now really getting behind Romney's campaign and Congressman Ryan goes a long way in winning those voters over. As I said last week, Governor Romney's biggest fear would be that the conservatives would not get behind his candidacy and as a result, he would lose their enthusiasm. The conservatives clearly believe that Romney has chosen one of them with the selection of Congressman Ryan, so I think this goes a long way in helping Romney put any leftover troubles he had from the primary season behind him.

However, I also think that the tightening in the race and the movement of states towards the center speaks about the tone that this campaign has taken so far. Anyone who lives in a state or market that is considered one of the swing states has already had to deal with the constant barrage of advertising in this campaign and we're not even to Labor Day yet. Here's an interesting fact I read this week: the entire advertising spending in the 2008 general election was approximately $512 million. So far this year, the advertising spending in the general election in this presidential campaign has already exceeded that amount. Most commentators who study politics and elections generally say that the campaign doesn't start in earnest until after Labor Day. In other words, this will only get worse.

The insane amount of money being spent on this election is a clear byproduct of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision in 2010. I hate to say I told you so, but this was something that I did predict. In a blog post I did immediately after the Citizens United decision, I wrote “Why is this significant? It completely changes the way elections will now be run. Candidates will not only have to worry about ads that their opponent will run, but ones that corporations may run against them. It will also open up the amount of money that will be spent on political campaigns to heights never imagined.” The amazing thing about the amount of money I listed above is the fact that most of this is being spent by outside forces, i.e. not the campaigns themselves. You'll hear the news organizations refer to them as the Super-PACs. The other interesting thing about the so-called Super-PACs is that their advertising cannot be in coordination with the campaigns. In other words, they can't be promoting the candidacy of one of the candidates, so they are only left with one option – to go negative against the other side. If you're watching the political advertising, it is clear that both campaigns have been negative in their ads thus far, but what compounds this is the fact that all of the ads run by the Super-PACs are negative. For those of you who live in one of the battleground states and dislike political advertising, you better just avoid TV for the next 11 weeks because it's going to get really ugly.

What is this doing to the polls? There are a lot of studies that have gone into the effect of negative advertising and it's no surprise that they show that negative ads generally turn voters off. So why do campaigns run the negative ads? Unfortunately, it's because they work. While it turns voters off, it also has the consequence of depressing turnout for your opponent’s supporters and making undecided voters less likely to vote at all. This allows you to win not by winning undecided voters, but rather by making less of your opponent's voters show up at the polls. As a result, it should be no surprise that the percentage of eligible voters who actually participate in the electoral process continues to go down. So when we see the polls in these various battleground states getting closer, I think a lot of it can be attributed to the unprecedented negative ad wars that are going on in these states.

Anyway, as we proceed through the campaign, another interesting thing to monitor will be where both the campaigns and the Super-PACs are spending their money on advertising. I think that will say a lot about what are the true tossup states and which ones are not. As we get further into the campaign, this will be something I'll also look at and track as I continue to blog about the status of the election.

More Significant than Massachusetts?

I am going to take a break in blogging about health care because there was other big news in the political world today. But it will not get the same publicity that the special election in Massachusetts got; nor will it get the same chatter on the political news television and radio stations. It may get one day of coverage, but people will not dwell on its consequences like they will Scott Brown becoming the 41st Republican Senator. However, the effects of this story will be much more long lasting than Senator-elect Brown’s win. In fact, I am willing to go as far to say that this is the BIGGEST political news of the year, even if the Republicans take back both the House and Senate this fall because of the long range significance of this news.

What am I talking about? The Supreme Court today announced its decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Without getting into the specifics of the case, the High Court essentially held that corporations are free to use their own money to run advertisements in support or against a candidate that is running for election. Previously, the law prohibited corporations from spending their own money in such a way. Instead, corporations had to go through the step of setting up a PAC (Political Action Committee), but Citizens United argued that such a prohibition was a violation of their First Amendment Free Speech rights and five of the Justices agreed.

So what does mean? We can now expect corporations to run advertisements supporting different candidates. In fact, the next logical step would be that people will set up corporations to specifically fund advertisements to air for candidates. Such corporate “funding” would be completely outside the campaign finance law limits. In other words, this opens a HUGE loophole for individuals or corporations to funnel money through to support their candidate of choice.

Why is this significant? It completely changes the way elections will now be run. Candidates will not only have to worry about ads that their opponent will run, but ones that corporations may run against them. It will also open up the amount of money that will be spent on political campaigns to heights never imagined. If a campaign does not have much money and a corporation decides it wants that candidate defeated, it will be very difficult for that candidate to survive unless another corporation comes to his or her rescue.

Who does this help? Conventional wisdom says that this will help the Republicans because they are the ones that are more cozy with big business. In fact, the 5-4 decision broke on those ideological conservative/liberal grounds where the four conservatives plus moderate Justice Kennedy voted to strike down the law. Additionally, conservatives applauded the decision while liberals decried it. President Obama criticized the decision saying that it will give “a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics.” However, wasn’t it just a year and a half ago that Candidate Obama decided to forego public financing for the general election while Republican John McCain agreed to the limits. Why did Obama decide that? Because he was able to raise over $1 Billion dollars towards his campaign. The Democrats certainly didn’t seem to be at a money disadvantage in 2008 and even though I am a supporter of the President, I have to call him on his hypocritical criticism of this decision. In short, I don’t think either party will benefit to a large degree, instead this will add another dynamic that politicians will need to navigate. The good ones will be able to do that where the bad ones won’t. Additionally, corporate America as a whole is seen by the public as supporting the Republicans over the Democrats but the truth is, they support both parties. In essence, they hedge their bets.

What do I think? I have never been an advocate of campaign finance reform, but not for the reason that most conservatives are (that ideological argument about free speech). Rather, I’m just more practical and perhaps jaded. Money and politics go hand in hand whether you want them to or not. I heard it described like this once: “Campaign money is like water on pavement; it will find the cracks and seep through no matter how small those cracks are.” That’s the perfect analogy and today the Supreme Court didn’t make a crack in the pavement, they created a chasm! I have always thought the way to deal with money and politics is to only have one rule. Each candidate can collect as much as they want, from whomever they want; they just have to disclose it. Who people get there money from, in many ways, will tell you more about what policies they will support than the candidate’s own words.

One final note regarding the Supreme Court – who are the activists now? The criticism that conservatives have had of the judicial system is that the courts go beyond their scope of what they should do. If a law is passed by the popularly elected branch (Congress) and signed into law by the “republically” elected executive (President), then the courts should not just strike down the law and ignore what the majority of people voted for. Conservatives always complain about justices or judges who insert themselves into the law making process. To do so has always been the definition of being a judicial activist. Yet, I don’t think any Republicans will criticize Justice Kennedy (who wrote the opinion), Chief Justice Roberts or any of the other conservative justices as being an activist judge. However, the argument could be made that this is exactly what they did. I always find it curious how people swallow their criticisms when the shoe is on the other foot.