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The 2012 GOP primaries in the South–two today

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2012 southern primaries today

Gingrich in Alabama

The big political ticket today is two southern primaries, in Alabama and Mississippi—Hawaii and American Samoa have caucuses today, too, but that’s a different story, and anyway, the delegates from beautiful places at remote distances are mainly being commandeered by Mitt Romney.

A competent run-down on the probabilities here

 

All the discussion serves as a reminder of how many kinds of political analysis there are, even in the respectable spectrum of public discourse, and even aside from political differences among the analysts.

Questions on several levels:

The open-scandal question in Alabama and Mississippi is how well Newt Gingrich’s race-baiting, politely referred to as ‘dog whistle’ or code, will work for him—will it be enough to pull him ahead of Romney?

The more conventional question is simply who will win in each state primary, and by how much, leading to the delegates question.

The less plumbed question of delegate math is the big one–whether Gingrich and Rick Santorum will pull away enough votes from Romney to siphon off the delegate count significantly. Since each state has its own version of this cycle’s super delegates, softening the proportionality of proportional representation, that question is less easy to figure—even after the results. But the question bears on the GOP convention in Tampa. Any figure less than 1144, as we know, means that Romney will go to the convention without the nomination sewn up, theoretically. It’s a little hard at this point to imagine anyone else the nominee, especially if Romney goes in with around or near 1100 delegates beforehand, but on paper the nomination would still remain to be determined at the national convention.

Nice billboard for Tampa, when the time comes:

Romney in an earlier campaign

That would make it one of the more interesting GOP conventions in decades, since the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami—written up by Norman Mailer among others—or since the decades when Mississippi Republicans routinely sent two rival delegations to the national convention. The Lily Whites—that was their name for themselves, as was the Black and Tans for the rival delegates—always won.

 

Side note:

I continue to think that Romney is being put through the wringer way too hard over his harmless comments about grits. The commentators are making him look good by comparison, as do Gingrich and Santorum. These are ethical matters. It is ethically flawed to ignore an ethical problem, wrongdoing, when it occurs, such as the fact that the date of Jose Padilla’s arrest in Chicago is still classified information. Our U.S. Marshals could have told the public a lot about torture under the previous administration, if the GOP in Congress had not prevented it. After all, it’s the Marshals who transport prisoners, inmates and ‘detainees’ and who thus have occasion to observe their condition.

Conversely, though, it is also ethically flawed to elevate some little thing into an accusation of wrongdoing when it isn’t one. Eating the local food and saying nice things about it does not qualify as something to rake a candidate over the coals for.

It would be much more substantive to try to get the GOPers to address Wall Street bonuses and other executive compensation after the mortgage-derivatives debacle, or vote suppression, or speculating on oil futures, or the effect of fear-mongering and saber-rattling on the price of oil, or the fact that insurance premiums (rates) go up every year, etc., etc.

more later

[update]

Speaking of GOP Deep-South primaries and other Limbaugh fans–

Think Progress reports that at least 140 sponsors have pulled out of Limbaugh’s show. This from the corporate horse’s mouth itself.

[update]

It’s twilight on a beautiful spring day in the mid-Atlantic. Polls in Alabama and Mississippi will close in less than an hour. That Romney, Gingrich and Santorum have been polling close to each other messes up the narratives. Anyone who wants to talk in terms of ‘narrative’ has to offer a smorgasbord.

A few interesting items gleaned from the coverage, although not necessarily new:

  • Chris Matthews is claiming, as ever, that Mitt Romney is “a moderate”
  • Dan Balz of the Washington Post is intent, as ever, on the thesis that the November general election will be a nail-biter–Balz characterized the 2008 election as “almost ideal conditions” for Obama
  • CBS News is declaring flatly that Alabama and Mississippi are make-or-break for Newt Gingrich. CBS declares that Gingrich has to win there, or he will face immense pressure to drop out; no word about delegates awarded proportionately
  • little word on the major networks about vote suppression efforts
  • the phrase “brokered convention,” re Tampa, has been replaced, possibly temporarily, with the phrase “open convention”

Time will tell.

Polls closed–8:16 p.m.

According to CNN’s exit polls, Romney looks to win in Mississippi–he should, with all the ads–and Santorum in Alabama, where the Republican guv weighed in thoughtfully mentioning that Romney’s Mormonism might be a “subtle” factor there and elsewhere. CNN exit polls also give Romney the edge among large groups such as married women.

Much emphasis also on the president’s apparent drop in opinion polls among women, in the past month. Bound to happen with the cable channels and others touting birth control as a ‘woman’ issue. Birth control is not a women’s issue. It is a population issue, thus a matter of economy as well as of choice.

Back to the results–at least as suggested in exit polls–CNN and MSNBC are joining CBS in talking up big how Newt Gingrich should drop out if he doesn’t win tonight. So there’s your heavy pressure, right there. Presumably Fox News feels the same way. No mention of proportional delegates, mainly, in this context.

One would like to hope that it’s because Gingrich’s ‘southern strategy’ has embarrassed the media outlets. One would like to, but one can’t.

8:49 p.m.

Earliest exit polls trimmed back slightly, at least as regards Romney’s lead.

Could a virtual three-way tie be shaping up? Or will Newt Gingrich please a growing chorus of commentators and come in decisively third in both these Deep South states? No one is talking about Gingrich in Louisiana and Texas, right now.

9:32 p.m.

At the moment, things not going according to plan. With voices on all the channels speculating about how soon Newt Gingrich will/should drop out, Mitt Romney is the man stubbornly clinging to third place in both Mississippi and Alabama. It’s early days yet, and the three-way race in each state is by far too close to call, or even to make an educated guess about. But with 37 percent of the vote back in Mississippi and 6 percent in Alabama, which is moving returns much slower, Romney remains behind both Santorum and Gingrich.

Meanwhile, on CNN panelist Ari Fleischer, aka Mouth of Sauron–who helped us into the Iraq war as GWBush’s press secretary–is insisting that Newt Gingrich will in all probability drop out of the race in two days. That is, if Gingrich does not win tonight. Fleischer sets the bar pretty high for Gingrich. According to him, Gingrich has to carry both states to declare this evening a win, and anything else–he’s out. “You have to win.”

10:04 p.m.

The lineup the same in both Mississippi and Alabama, with 79 percent and 34 percent of the vote in, respectively–Santorum first, Gingrich second, Romney third. NBC has already called Alabama for Santorum, who leads by four or five percent rather than by one or two as in Mississippi. Mississippi is still designated too close to call.

Another guest on MSNBC joins the chorus of voices encouraging Gingrich to get out–former John McCain strategist Steve Schmidt, now extra well known after the HBO movie Game Change. With Gingrich clearly ahead of Romney (the front-runner) in both states, obviously the argument has changed. That is, the rationale for urging Gingrich to get out can no longer be that that’s the only way Romney can be beat.

So, as one might surmise, all those media voices urging other candidates to ‘coalesce’ around an anti-Romney candidate were never about finding the most genuine conservative.

Q.E.D.

10:57 p.m.

Santorum, speaking from Louisiana, blames Louisiana’s difficulties on Obama and on environmentalism. Typical faux populism, targeting rural voters again. Nothing from him about the dredging and drilling that have frayed the Gulf Coast, opening the way for devastation by hurricanes by removing every protection from nature. Nothing about the enormous tax give-aways for Big Oil, just another claim that environmental regulation–like keeping the Gulf of Mexico from becoming one big oil pool–is destroying jobs and raising gas prices. Nothing about speculation on oil futures, of course.

By such means, combined with record low turnout, he did win Mississippi as well as Alabama. Gingrich second in both, Romney third in both.

The contest was not between one moderate and two conservatives, with the two latter splitting the field.

The contest in Mississippi and Alabama was between the rural-area vote and the metro-area vote, with Gingrich and Romney splitting the latter. The latter is disproportionately small in both states.

No wonder Santorum is talking from Louisiana, about heading to Missouri. No wonder the most prominent media figures are feverishly boosting the GOP establishment tonight, calling on Gingrich to step aside before all the precincts are in. The vague argument seems to be that that gives Santorum a clear shot at Romney. I doubt it. As things look now, Santorum would get buried in a one-on-one progression even if he picked up Louisiana and Missouri. Our population centers contain most of our population. A pretty sad prospect of a race, looking to be even uglier without Gingrich than with him. But disappointingly, too many of the journalists, even, seem eager to forestall an open convention in Tampa.

Meanwhile, the three candidates still pretty much split the MS and AL delegates three ways, of course, with Romney to sew up some more in the island caucuses.

The 2012 southern strategy and a GOP pincer movement on Afghanistan

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2012 southern strategy and the giant pincer movement on Afghanistan

 

In Afghanistan

 

The political equation of winning-and-losing is far from the most important point about Afghanistan. The shooting spree by a U.S. soldier who apparently had a nervous breakdown and shot Afghan civilians, including women and children, is only the most recent dreadful event.

Not one Afghani was on those planes on September 11, 2001. Not one. The only connection between Afghanistan and the paired, parallel attacks of 9/11 was Osama bin Laden, encamped with his wealth in the ruling regime over the hapless Afghanis.

There was also not one political reporter in the national political press in Washington, D.C., who pointed out this fact in the heyday of George W. Bush’s popularity after 9/11.

The Afghan people—much as they undoubtedly hated foreigners on Islamic territory—had about as much say in regard to bin Laden’s presence as television viewers in the U.S. today have in regard to the number of commercials on cable television. Or less, since theoretically our elected officials could brace up the FCC and control paid commercials on air time that subscribers have already paid for.

 

Ron Paul

On the campaign trail, the only Republican candidate who comes close to persuasive sanity on the Middle East is still Ron Paul, whose views have been consistent throughout his years in Congress.

 

Gingrich

A new development looms, however, politically speaking. On yesterday morning’s talk shows, Newt Gingrich began making little noises about pulling out of Afghanistan. Not a clarion call, still a deviation from the usual bellicosity. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, as always, continue to call for more bloodshed, and even the concept of an end in sight—some day—continues to be disparaged or ridiculed. So on one side of the argument, as the GOP presidential campaign swings through the South, you have Paul and to some extent Gingrich; on the other you have Romney and Santorum.

 

Santorum

In narrowly political terms, it’s a lose-lose for the president, as always with these guys, in a situation not of Obama’s making. If Obama succeeds in getting us out of Afghanistan—as most decent people hope—it will be too soon for Romney, Santorum and the professional saber rattlers, no matter when it is. If we remain mired in Afghanistan, there will be hints from the Gingrich types that more could be done to get out.

There is always an underlying tension between GOP voters who are primarily evangelicals, on one hand, and GOPers who are primarily fans of militarism. There is also a tension between extreme militarists and genuine fiscal conservatives. Wars cost treasure as well as blood. The uneasy overlap among the three big ‘wings’ of the party—rightwing Christians, rightwing monetarists, and rightwing militarists—also goes largely unreported in a press contingent eager to play up divisions among Latinos or other Democratic voters.

It will be interesting to see whether Gingrich’s most recent comments on Afghanistan affect his results in tomorrow’s southern primaries in Alabama and Mississippi, for better or worse. He has sagged somewhat in polls over the past couple of days.

 

The word was

Meanwhile, in the South, the campaigns are working hard. Voters (including Democratic voters) across the Mississippi Delta are being inundated with robo-calls from the Romney campaign. One asks the householder to stay on the line for a telephone ‘town meeting’ with Rick Santorum, who is heard saying (2008) that Romney is the only choice. Another offers a recorded conversation between Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi, agreeing on something. Another brings the recorded voice of former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw, announcing that Gingrich has been censured by Congress on ethics charges.

Speaking of the FCC.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, Romney is being castigated for the wrong things. Far too many commentators are harpooning his harmless “grits” comments–about liking grits, about eating the local food while in the South. Far too few are taking him to task for being in favor of apparently every war, everywhere, regardless of the cost to other Americans and to other human beings.

 

But the establishment GOP has been given a free pass on that for years.

The 2012 GOP Southern Strategy–a Brokered Convention?

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2012 Gingrich’s Southern strategy and delegate count–GOP primaries

 

Gingriches in Alabama

The campaign to darken history continues, as the GOP primary season scrolls on to further proving grounds for Newt Gingrich’s (infamous) southern strategy. Alabama and Mississippi come March 13 and Louisiana March 24. The March calendar also includes March 10 caucuses in Kansas and the islands, the Missouri caucuses with 52 delegates at stake and the Illinois primary with 69, but Gingrich is not considered a threat (to other candidates) in those. The three old Deep South states offer 136 delegates, and Gingrich supporters give every sign of expecting to get at least some of them, counterbalancing the 240 or so on which Gingrich has no southern claim. Farther down the road come North Carolina on May 8 (55 delegates), Arkansas on May 22 (36), and the granddaddy of them all, Texas on May 29 (155).

Gingrich supporter Rick Tyler


In this context a Gingrich supporter, Rick Tyler, gave a thought-provoking elucidation last night on cable. Tyler, billed as a Gingrich attack dog, resigned from the Gingrich campaign when it imploded after the Gingriches’ Greek cruise and Tiffany bills in 2011, but is now senior adviser to the pro-Gingrich super PAC ‘Winning Our Future’. Tyler’s own views on race in the public discourse leave something to be desired, to put it nicely; he’s one of those So-are-you types at best. Most recently, with 40 or so advertisers pulling out of Rush Limbaugh’s show, Tyler has come out front and center with a big ad buy. At that, it might be a good buy. Few Gingrich voters are liable to be perturbed by Limbaugh’s comments. The price might even be down right about now; Limbaugh’s not saying.

But in spite of his peculiar views and the eccentricities of the Gingrich campaign—again putting it nicely–Tyler gave the clearest explanation yet of why Gingrich should stay in the race. Lawrence O’Donnell on The Last Word challenged Tyler with the assertion that Romney needs Gingrich to stay in the race, to keep Romney from being defeated by Rick Santorum one-on-one. Tyler countered, and this is where it gets interesting, that Santorum, rather than Romney, needs Gingrich to stay in.

From the transcript:

O’Donnell:

“And Super Tuesday failed to do what it usually does–convince at least one candidate to drop out of the race. Santorum needs Gingrich to drop out. Gingrich needs Santorum to drop out. Well, we`re going to have a Gingrich/Santorum showdown tonight in the spotlight.”

Introducing Tyler and Santorum supporter Eric Metaxas, O’Donnell opens with everyone’s question:

“Eric, the–Santorum is beating Gingrich consistently in these things. All you have to do is add Gingrich`s total to Santorum`s larger number and you have a wipe out of Mitt Romney in all these campaigns. What does Rick Santorum have to do to convince not Newt Gingrich, but other Republicans to rise up and say, come on, let’s narrow this race?”

Metaxas argues that Santorum is the one the Obama administration is really afraid of, and electable.

O’Donnell moves on to Tyler, again with everyone’s question:

“Well, Rick Tyler, the national polls don`t show that Mitt Romney has any particular advantage over Rick Santorum running against President Obama. And your guy is just falling behind, further and further behind. Why? Why, Rick?

Why prolong this? . . . You heard Steve Schmidt say that a vote for Gingrich is a vote for Romney. How can you let that happen?”

Tyler answers smartly, “Well, Steve Schmidt managed the John McCain campaign. So I`ll just leave it at that.”

Going on,

“But look, we put a lot of effort into Georgia because we felt like we had to win Georgia. We probably over-invested in Georgia, spent too much time and money there.

But it was OK. We had a decisive win. I`m out here in Mississippi and Alabama. That`s the next step. Let me–we heard a lot about calculations today. The calculation has actually changed somewhat. The calculation is that–put out by the Romney campaign, who has no ability to beat Barack Obama–in fact, David Axelrod did a conference call today laying out why he couldn`t beat Barack Obama, because Mitt Romney has used up his last half life, and he has just wiped out his support for the middle class and independent voters.

So he has just destroyed his ability to beat Barack Obama. And you pointed out in the first segment that more people showed up for Barack Obama than showed up for the Republicans. That`s because of the negative campaigning that`s been going on.”

Interesting observation from a Gingrich man. But moving on—

“But let me just put this calculation on the table. The hurdle for Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum to catch up with Mitt Romney is only equaled by the hurdle of Mitt Romney to actually arrive at the convention with the proper number of delegates. The calculation has changed in this way, Rick–it is not in Rick Santorum`s interest for Newt Gingrich to drop out of this race.

It is in Rick Santorum`s interests, believe it or not, for Newt to stay in the race and to collect as many delegates, as Rick should do, to keep Mitt Romney from getting the requisite number of delegates to arrive in Tampa. And in that–doing that, after the first ballot, which Mitt Romney will fail to win, then Rick Santorum would have a genuine chance at winning an open floor fight. [emphasis added]

But he doesn`t have a chance otherwise, because he has no ability to beat Mitt Romney and his organization and his money.

O`DONNELL: Rick, I just have to follow up with that. Of course he has the ability to beat him. You look at Michigan. You look at Ohio. Romney bombed Santorum with money in Ohio. And if Newt Gingrich wasn`t in the race, Santorum would have beaten him decisively.

TYLER: Explain that theory to me in California. Explain that theory to me in New Jersey. Explain that theory to me in New York. That theory doesn`t hold up. Those are big states. And Mitt Romney will decisively beat Rick Santorum in those states, because he`s going to out-spend him.

He out-spent him in Ohio by almost four to one. The calculation is if you can keep Mitt Romney from out-spending you by three to one, you might win. But if he out-spends you by four to one, then you`re going to lose. And that was–that is what would happen to Rick Santorum.”

O`Donnell turns back to Metaxas:

“ . . . Eric, what Rick is essentially saying is OK, hey, everybody, let`s just keep playing. It seems pretty clear to us that even Romney isn`t going to get the delegates he needs in the election process to go into the convention with the nomination.

So we will all show up in Florida with our delegates, and then we can talk. And if Rick–and if Rick Santorum`s way ahead of Newt Gingrich, then maybe there`s some kind of deal to be made. Let`s just wait until Florida.

What`s wrong with that?”

Metaxas responds with the inevitable POV on Gingrich:

“Listen, I think they really believe that. So it`s hard for me to tell them not to do that. I don`t believe that. I think that–listen, a lot of the votes for Romney are very pragmatic votes. A lot of people don`t love Romney, but they would vote for him. I`m certainly one of them.

However, people love Santorum. . .

If I thought Gingrich could win, that`s one thing. But at this point, I don`t think he can. I guess the question is, when will he see that? The point is, it really doesn`t matter what we think. Gingrich has to believe that he can`t win. For some reason, he still believes.

I mean, he`s come back from the dead twice. I think he still believes he can do it. I simply don`t. I think Santorum is going to go a lot further.

The question is when will Gingrich see what everybody else is seeing? And I don`t know that he ever does that.”

O’Donnell goes back to Tyler:

“Rick Tyler, you seem to be saying that it isn`t about winning, that the Gingrich world has given up the idea that he can actually win the nomination through the election process. And you`re just in the business of getting delegates out of this proportional outcomes that you can get in various states, and just seeing how many you end up with when you go to Florida?”

Tyler:

“No, the key to winning is getting the most delegates to vote for you at the convention. That still remains operative. Look, Newt Gingrich is behind–60 delegates behind Rick Santorum. He could wipe out that difference in Mississippi and Alabama alone. There`s 150 delegates—”

“O`DONNELL: OK. But what if he doesn`t? Let`s just go to Mississippi, where you are right now, OK? And it`s Gingrich`s neighborhood. If Rick Santorum goes in to those southern states and beats Newt Gingrich, is there any message Newt Gingrich can get from that to say, you know what, I really am in the way; I should get out of the way so this can be the conservative against the moderate flip-flopper Romney?”

TYLER: Well, that would be up to Speaker Gingrich. As you know, I would support Speaker Gingrich if he wants to go to the convention. I would support whatever he wants to do. I believe we will win Alabama and Mississippi, and we`ll have a new ball game.

I also believe this is what Newt Gingrich has said from the very beginning, if, in fact, he believed that Romney or Rick Santorum could actually beat Obama and change Washington, which neither of their records reflect that they would be able to do that–they would both accommodate Washington–then he would step aside.”

“He doesn`t see that in either of those candidates. And so why not give the people in Rankin County, Mississippi, the chance to vote for–vote for another conservative?”

O`DONNELL: Well, according to that formulation then, he`ll never step aside, because every poll shows President Obama beating every one of these guys. Rick, come on. Come on. You can`t keep things going like this.”

TYLER: Polls change.”

 

Thus the 622 delegates from Old South states where Gingrich can theoretically win a majority, especially since he has openly staked a claim on the territory, could actually make a difference. Gingrich and Santorum, the argument goes, can siphon away enough delegates from Romney to prevent Romney’s reaching the magic number of 1144.

Craig Crawford with Helen Thomas

And then the GOP would be heading to a brokered convention—which is what well-regarded analyst Craig Crawford has been suggesting could happen.

And then, gentlemen and ladies, we would be finished with all this nonsense of a more open, more democratized process for the GOP, with the Republican nominee for president chosen directly by the voters, or at least by voters motivated enough to get out and vote. The trajectory from state conventions with their back-room deals to state primaries either too little or too much controlled by party insiders would finish with a national convention with, presumably, back-room deals. In that scenario, btw, Ron Paul delegates could make a difference.

It is fascinating to consider what kind of job offer, if any, might induce either Gingrich or Santorum to reconsider their 2012 strategy.

 

Side note, and it shouldn’t be a side note:

Looking at these numbers, one wonders whether there is any slightest chance that either Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum will speak against racial bigotry at any point in the 2012 primary season. Given the tepid response to Rush Limbaugh’s slanderous and defamatory comments about a young female law student, it seems unlikely at the moment. But there is always a moment for conscience to surface.

The big story in Super Tuesday 2012–turnout depressed, along with GOP

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2012 primary turnout heading lower

Turnout for most GOP primaries and caucuses hits new lows

Santorum, Romney

There can be little doubt that turnout in the GOP primaries is reflecting some kind of political margin of diminishing returns. In almost every state holding a GOP primary or caucus on ‘Super Tuesday’, turnout was down from 2008. Regardless of whether the state is big or small, suspenseful or predictable; regardless of geographical region and almost regardless of demographics, turnout went mostly down. The partial exceptions were Ohio, Vermont and North Dakota, the latter two heavily organized by Ron Paul supporters.

Ron Paul

 

Short overview

Massachusetts gave Mitt Romney a huge margin—Romney won with over 70 percent of the vote–but showed little life otherwise. Ask the six voters who turned up at one precinct in Springfield. Anecdotal evidence abounds from around the state, corroborated by unofficial tallies showing total turnout at 355,454 votes cast. The official figure given for the GOP primary in 2008 is 1,108,854. That’s a two-thirds drop in turnout in a hotly contested GOP primary season.

Obviously, predictability is a factor. In a state viewed as Romney’s home, where Romney was governor, there was little perceived suspense. Furthermore, Romney-alternative Rick Santorum recently declared that John F. Kennedy’s speech on religious tolerance and the separation of church and state in America made him want to throw up. His words. Scant wonder Santorum failed to pick up even one delegate in Massachusetts.

Turnout was depressed for ample reason in Virginia, too, with only Romney and Ron Paul on the ballot. Romney won Virginia with 60 percent of the vote, but with Paul his only opponent, the outcome was not considered seriously in doubt. Unofficial tallies put the vote total at 265,520. Local reporting on the ground confirms the low turnout, predicted to be low in Virginia. Danville and the Danville area, Hampton Roads, the Valley, Lynchburg, etc., etc.—the story was the same across the state, generally attributed to the fact that most of the GOP candidates were not on the ballot. However, the remarkably poor turnout contrasts heavily with Virginia’s Democratic primary in 2008—which had been narrowed to a two-person contest, although by less doofy processes than in Virginia 2012. Democrats did not get de-energized in a two-person race in 2008; maybe the number of people on the ballot matters less than who the candidates are. The 2008 Democratic primary, furthermore, was hit by a massive ice storm affecting the entire mid-Atlantic. People drove through the storm, or took mass transit through the storm, that Feb. 12 to vote for the candidate of their choice—Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton–in the ‘Chesapeake primary’. Some of them drove or traveled for hours to do so after a full work day.

Or for simpler comparison, contrast the 265K number above to the Republican presidential primary in Virginia in 2008: Less enthusiastic than the Dems’, it still totaled 489,252. That’s a drop by almost half in 2012.

 

Predictability cannot be the whole story

For a less predictable state, take Ohio, where the outcome was in serious doubt until late into the night March 6, and where Romney finally won by twelve thousand votes. In arguably the most hotly contested of the day’s primaries, with millions in advertising, billed by media outlets as the one to watch, turnout was nonetheless low. Official results are not yet posted, but by all accounts turnout stayed less than 25 percent. The unofficial total is 1,181,074 votes cast. The total reported for the GOP presidential primary in 2008 is 1,095,917. A slightly higher turnout in numbers this time, but an increase of only 85,000 statewide, in the most ballyhooed primary in the nation. It would be interesting to know how many of the 85,000 were crossover Democrats.*

Ohio also had a GOP primary for the Senate, with Republicans hoping to take back the seat held by Sen. Sherrod Brown, who won his primary. One of the livelier spots in Ohio 2012 was Cuyahoga County, where Reps. Marcy Kaptur and Dennis Kucinich had been redistricted against each other. Turnout reached 25 percent there largely because of the Democratic race.

Tennessee

Or take a look at Tennessee, another of the less predictable states. The unofficial total, again for a state where the outcome was in some suspense, is 540,791 votes cast. In the GOP presidential primary in February 2008, the total was 553,815 votes cast. The 2008 primary had a high-interest field of nine persons, including winner Mike Huckabee. But then, as mentioned, this year’s contest in Tennessee was regarded as holding some interest too.

If a safe primary does not generate large turnout, and a suspenseful primary does not generate large turnout, what does that leave?

 

Gingrich

Quick run-down, primaries:

Georgia: total votes unofficially reported 872,888. The Secretary of State’s office puts the total somewhat higher, at 900,129. The Georgia State Board of Elections also has a commendably user-friendly web site, with historical comparisons accessible. In 2008, the GOP presidential primary had 963,541 votes cast. Be it noted that the drop in Georgia is at least less than the drop some other places. Newt Gingrich himself has pointed out that turnout this year tends to be higher in places where he wins than in places where he loses. Down.

Oklahoma: vote total reported unofficially as 283,308. The total for the GOP presidential primary in 2008 was 335,054. Down.

Vermont: vote total this year 54,949. Same vote (GOP presidential primary) in 2008 is reported unofficially as 39,843. There was even less enthusiasm for Rick Santorum’s candidacy in Vermont than in neighboring Massachusetts. For quick comparison to the general elections in Vermont over the years, go here. Up.

 

Quick run-down, caucuses:

Alaska caucuses: Total this year 12,926. Total in 2008 13,703. Down.

Idaho caucuses: Total this year 44,655. Total in 2008 125,056. Way down.

North Dakota caucuses: Total this year 11,349. Total in 2008 9,743. Up. An exception.

 

There is more than one way to look at this decline in turnout. Argument is different from statistics. While there is no question about the decline, there is some question about what it means, or how much it means. Lack of enthusiasm, yes. Lack of drive to vote, yes. Why? Open to question.

As previously written, the committed Obama-haters do not need a reason to vote. They hardly need a candidate.

Also as previously written, much of the Republican electorate gives every sign of wanting to know as little about its candidates as possible. They want somebody else? They like seeing someone new? They suddenly jump onto a new and intriguing bandwagon, and just as abruptly jump off it? They get turned off by candidate after candidate, after learning more about the candidate? They remain uncommitted to Mitt Romney because they know so much about him? Romney’s unfavorable rating goes up the longer he stays in the race? The common denominator underlying these trends is the same throughout: This is lack of knowledge, and a lack of knowledge enthusiastically embraced, lack of knowledge rewarding the candidate, lack of knowledge about the candidate perceived as a plus.

The GOP is struggling mightily: It has opened up, mixed up, broadened, varied, adjusted and otherwise democratized its primary process, to choose a candidate who will uphold anti-democratizing policies. This can hardly be done.

*Note: CNN reports that its exit polls show 5 percent of GOP voters were Democrats this time. If accurate, that would be 59,000 Dems, or equivalent to most of the increase in turnout from 2008. These numbers on party ID are not watertight, but CNN was the first network to report–accurately–that Romney was actually leading in the close Ohio race. CNN had the advantage of the on-site work done by Dana Bash, at the county level, to provide more solid numbers, faster, than other networks. The reporting was swiftly picked up by John King and Wolf Blitzer, and swiftly conveyed. Arithmetic trumps preconceived story lines, actual voting trumps preliminary opinion polls.

Dana Bash

Note:  This post is corroborated by the run-down posted by Daily Kos, just a few hours after the above. East Coast met by West, once West Coast gets up.

 

2012 and the shrinking Super Tuesday

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Republican primaries in rapidly shriveling interest

Tuesday, March 6, 2012–‘Super Tuesday’ GOP primaries and caucuses are here, along with a lot of media coverage. Most of the remaining Republicans running for the White House are trying mightily to switch the conversation from birth control and vaginal probes to bombing Iran. As usual, the single honorable exception is Ron Paul. Paul’s comments on our nuclear age, on the Cold War of the 20th century, and on diplomacy today rank as the most sane in almost his entire party, at least among candidates for office.

 

Santorum, Romney, Gingrich

In more local focus, eleven states have delegates at stake on Tuesday. From a political perspective, they fall loosely into a few categories.

  • Georgia is the stand-out with 76 delegates, although not winner-take-all. Good thing for Mitt Romney, since Georgia is also the only state where the most current polls show Newt Gingrich out ahead of everybody else by double digits. Rasmussen, done last night, gives Gingrich 10 points over Romney. Rasmussen is a GOP-oriented poll, protective of the establishment front-runner; other recent polls put Gingrich farther ahead. It will be interesting to see whether Rasmussen is confirmed. Georgia, of course, is considered Gingrich’s home state, and Gingrich has spoken frankly about needing to win there. It is also the most fertile ground in the Union, aside from South Carolina, for winning by out-uglying everybody else.
  • Tennessee is another of the three states in which Gingrich has placed some stock, i.e. attempting to woo it like Georgia with a shades-of-Nixon southern strategy. Santorum leads in Tennessee, as the Nashville paper reports, but the race is tight. If Romney’s well-funded attack ads against Santorum have an impact, between their direct effect and the boomerang effect Gingrich could be extruded upward up into a statistical tie in the outcome.
  • Virginia should have been a natural for Gingrich to make a big play. But alas, what with one thing and another—fraud, presumptuousness and disorganization—Gingrich did not make it onto the ballot in the Old Dominion, where he was leading in opinion polls before the ballot debacle, and where he has lived for years in the DC suburbs of northern Virginia. The Commonwealth has 46 delegates, but not statewide winner-take-all. So Ron Paul’s people might hold Romney to less than the total.

Those are the three southern-strategy states.

Then there are the caucus states—Alaska, Idaho and North Dakota. They have a combined 87 delegates but also combine geographic remoteness and distance from the radar screen of the national political press. The main question is how many of the delegates Paul receives, after extensive organizing with emphasis on caucus states.

Massachusetts and Vermont, the two New England states, are both considered Romney’s. They have 41 and 17 delegates respectively, offer little toehold for other candidates to reach a percentage threshold that would allocate any share of the total to anyone but Romney, and have no swing-state appeal to draw media attention. Thus even if Romney wins all the delegates, the win is liable to be regarded as just another nail in the coffin for reasoned interest in the GOP primaries.

 

Romney

Oklahoma is something of a stand-out for Rick Santorum. Santorum leads by a hefty margin in the most updated polls, and furthermore, Gingrich comes in second. Romney is a distant third, in spite of winning the endorsement of Sen. Tom Coburn. Thus Oklahoma is sui generis, unless you lump it with Ohio.

Ohio, of course, has received the most media emphasis. The big news, horse-race-wise, is that Santorum led in the polls and may still lead, but Romney has been moving up. With 66 delegates at stake and Santorum planning to watch the election returns from there, the standard media line is mostly about Ohio being to Santorum what Georgia is to Gingrich.

more to come

The 2012 primary in Virginia; any news?

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Virginia and Ohio—quiet and quieter

On tomorrow’s ‘Super Tuesday’ primaries, safe predictions do not abound. One remaining prediction is the lack of suspense over the outcome in Virginia.

Mitt Romney

With only two candidates allowed on the ballot—neither of them Newt Gingrich with his southern strategy, who had been leading the polls in Virginia—a nation is not bating its breath. Items of real news aside from vaginal probes are few and thin.

One is that King George County, Virginia, is not under the Voting Rights Act as of now.

Another is that on the eve of the primary, Rep. Eric Cantor has endorsed Romney. No surprise there. There is no Gingrich or other ‘alternative’ on the ballot, and it was a safe guess that Rep. Ron Paul was not going to get Cantor’s endorsement. Almost simultaneously, a top Cantor aide has abruptly resigned from Cantor’s staff to join the ‘Young Guns’ Super PAC. An objective observer could also bet that Romney’s chances in tomorrow’s Virginia primary are considerably more solid than those of the upper-ticket GOP in the general election in Virginia.

More on the general tenor of the political discourse in Virginia (setting aside vaginal probes), from Roll Call:

“Similar attempts at “no super PAC” pledges have fallen flat in California and Virginia. Former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (D) told a debate moderator that he would “agree to it tomorrow” if he and former Sen. George Allen (R), his opponent in the open-seat race, could nix outside spending. Allen responded during the forum that such a pledge would tread on free speech.

Anti-Kaine broadcast attacks by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Crossroads GPS have already topped $1.5 million, according to his campaign. Kaine is one of eight Senators and a dozen House Members targeted in a U.S. Chamber of Commerce ad campaign that by some estimates is in the $10 million range.”

There’s a lot of quiet free speech of the behind-the-back kind in Virginia, the state that most resembles Dallas on a larger scale.

That quietness has been breached lately, to the intense regret of GOP insiders, by the remarkable state requirement that prospective abortion patients get a vaginal probe.

Virginia governor

If only corporate media outlets would stop talking about ‘moderate’ Republicans. In practice, the so-called moderates are those flexible on the social issues who always go along with rapacious economic policy.

But more on that later. Unfortunately, the big contest re Virginia, bigger than Romney’s tax returns, is not hitting in the big-time media. The big contest is the court battle—initiated by Gov. Rick Perry—over the issue of how far a state party can go, even in-state, to block intra-party competition.

 

Rick Perry

Quick run-down or recap:

Perry having failed to qualify for the ballot in Virginia’s GOP primary, he sued Republican members of the State Board of Elections, joined by the other GOP candidates who likewise failed to get on the ballot, over Virginia’s onerous rules for qualifying. District Court Judge John Gibney, who gave Perry et al. a temporary ruling holding up the mailing of absentee and overseas ballots, then ruled against Perry’s bid to be placed on the ballot. Perry et al. appealed the decision (not joined by Michele Bachmann, who had dropped out of the race). Both sides were briefly appellants.

Siding with Perry along with his fellow GOP non-qualifiers was the ACLU.

Gibney allowed the ballot process to go forward, saying that the plaintiffs—Perry, Newt Gingrich, John Huntsman, and Rick Santorum—could not re-play the game after losing. Huntsman dropped out of the lawsuit, having dropped out of the presidential nomination fight.

Rick Perry dropped his appeal Jan. 27. Newt Gingrich dropped his appeal Feb. 6. Case closed. So it’s over–except that it’s not over, because the rules are still on the books.

As politicos know–and discussed for a couple of days, before designating Mitt Romney as the inevitable nominee, then almost dumping him, then waffling on the razor’s edge of whether a primary loss could finish him off—Perry and Gingrich failed to get on the Virginia ballot when they could not turn in enough signatures. Only Romney and Ron Paul managed to qualify as candidates for the Virginia primary with its 50 delegates to the national convention. At issue are Virginia’s rules for signature gathering: Even a major-party candidate must turn in petitions with 10,000 valid signatures, including 400 signatures from each of the Commonwealth’s congressional districts. Furthermore, Virginia requires that all signature gatherers must be residents of Virginia. Judge Gibney commented that the resident-gatherer rule struck him as unconstitutional but said that plaintiffs should have filed earlier.

Since in most cases a party must be injured before filing a lawsuit, it is puzzling to a non-lawyer how a candidate can claim injury before being excluded from the ballot (or before losing).

Another problem with the time-frame argument in the Virginia case, however, is that the party rules used to keep Perry and (especially) Gingrich off the ballot are new. As the Republican Party of Virginia said in its official statement on the certification process,

“In October 2011, RPV formally adopted the certification procedures that were applied on December 23 . . . Candidates were officially informed of the 15,000 rule in October 2011, well in advance of the Dec. 22 submission deadline.”

 

A little local history

Recapping–as previously written, the use of a primary election in Virginia is itself relatively new. As one local blogger and political watcher points out, there was no Virginia Presidential Primary before 1988. Previously, both parties chose their presidential nominees, as in many other states, in a nominating convention. “The state decided to hold a primary in 1988, likely in an effort to gain more prominence for the Commonwealth in the first election since 1968 where there would not be an incumbent President running on either party’s ticket.” The rules for getting on the ballot were fairly loose: a candidate had to be “prominently discussed in the news media” or qualify for primary season matching funds. The first primary was won by George H. W. Bush for the Republicans and Jesse Jackson for the Democrats.

For whatever reason—possibly Jesse Jackson’s victory, the local informant suggests—Virginia went back to using conventions instead of primaries in 1992 and 1996. (The move also kept Independent Ross Perot from making much headway in the Birthplace of Presidents.) The Commonwealth brought back the primaries in 2000, but with strict rules, the same as now—except that in 2000 and 2008 they were not enforced. There was no GOP primary in 2004, because incumbent George W. Bush was the only GOP candidate on the ballot. In 2012 there is no Democratic primary in Virginia.

What brought about this sticking to the letter of the rules? The major difference is that “in October 2011, an independent candidate for the legislature, Michael Osborne, sued the Virginia Republican Party because it did not check petitions for its own members, when they submitted primary petitions. Osborne had no trouble getting the needed 125 valid signatures for his own independent candidacy, but he charged that his Republican opponent’s primary petition had never been checked, and that if it had been, that opponent would not have qualified. The lawsuit, Osborne v Boyles, cl 11-520-00, was filed in Bristol County Circuit Court,” too late to affect his election but with noticeable effect on the presidential primary. Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli was so dismayed by the exclusion of almost all the Republican candidates from the primary ballot that he briefly considered trying to change the rule during the election year.

We are reliably informed, in short, that GOP contenders for the White House are being held to a standard previously unmet—not only the most restrictive of any state in the nation, but newly adopted (or enforced) only months before the election. If Obama or Tim Kaine or any other Democratic candidates had shifted procedural ground this way, it would be blazoned coast to coast.

Oddly, this historical fact also did not feature in the defendants’ filings to the appeals court. To the contrary, defendants argued:

“The presidential primary is scheduled for March 6. Two candidates met the statutory requirement of filing 10,000 valid signatures, including at least 400 from each Congressional district. In past elections, there were larger slates of candidates who have met the Virginia statutory requirement and were included on the primary ballot.”

Unsurprisingly, the entire GOP state establishment supported Romney and the Board of Elections in the lawsuit, against plaintiffs Perry et al. Perry gained the support only of Gingrich, Huntsman, Santorum and Michele Bachmann—before she dropped out of the presidential race—and briefly of Cuccinelli, along with the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU filed an amicus brief arguing that the rule that signature gatherers must be from Virginia is unconstitutional, violating the rights of speech and assembly.

 

By the way, Virginia law also recognizes only the Democratic and Republican parties as political parties. No third parties allowed. Furthermore, no write-ins are allowed in the primaries.

Ironies abound in the current situation. The well-funded Texas Governor Rick Perry, Virginia resident and U.S. history consultant Newt Gingrich, and three other Republicans failed to get on the ballot in ‘red-state’ Virginia. Perry did not get enough signatures. Gingrich collected more than 11,000 signatures, but over a thousand turned out to be fraudulently signed by one person. Candidates Bachmann, Huntsman and Santorum did not even file to get on the ballot in Virginia. Thus only Romney and Paul remained eligible to compete, this in a year when—as ever—southern states are eager to make their mark on history. Florida even gave up half its delegates by moving up its primary date, against GOP national party rules.

Under the U.S. Constitution, rules for getting on the ballot are left to the states, and there is no national standard for ballot access. Legislation to limit how far states could on restricting access has been introduced repeatedly by Rep. Ron Paul, but without success.

The rationale for restrictions to ballot access is protecting the integrity of elections. Yet the Virginia rules give a pass to exactly those most liable to jeopardize election integrity, namely the biggest and best-funded campaigns. The biggest list of signatures is exempt from any checking at all. The defensive RPV statement shows that the RPV itself recognizes this exemption as questionable.

Only the Virginia GOP brought you that rule that even the Democratic and the Republican parties, established parties, have to spread their signatures around among every congressional district. The rule effectively prevents a college town from harvesting enough signatures to put, say, Ron Paul on the ballot with ease. Ironically, it did not bar Ron Paul, whose supporters are both dedicated and able to read. It just barred every other potential not-Romney candidate.

 

Ohio

With regard to Ohio, briefly it can be said that the GOP establishment has worked, behind the scenes, to keep things from getting even uglier in the state. Some of the same people who fabricated Terry Schiavo’s case as rightwing martyrdom are still out there, in the wake of the Chardon, Ohio, shootings.

Is Mitt Romney a buzz-kill for gold markets?

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2012 Republican primaries and gold stock price

Do gold stocks take a hit when Mitt Romney wins a primary?

gold stocks yesterday

 

This is better than hemlines.

The candidates

 

Yesterday, February 29, 2012, the day after Mitt Romney won the Arizona and Michigan primaries convincingly (pretty much), in a very highly touted contest, gold and silver stocks plunged across the board. That includes gold futures, gold mining and related mining, and silver along with gold. You might think the stability and reassurance provided by a big win from Mr. Wall Street himself would buttress high-end markets. Instead, everything gold went down.

Check this quick list.

“Nothing gold can stay,” Robert Frost said. One understands that gold and precious metal companies are notably volatile stocks; commodities are volatile in general; mining is an extremely hazardous occupation; international markets and foreign companies and foreign governments complicate the market further. Gold and silver were described by a cable tout just yesterday, as chance would have it, as particularly “emotional” markets. Also, needless to say, one event does not make a pattern.

The image

 

Still—are gold stocks, gold and silver, silver stocks, and related mining company stocks going up every time somebody besides Romney wins? Are they going down, almost across the board, every time Romney wins? So far this season, it looks that way.

Checking the GOP primary schedule thus far this year, and double-checking the primary results thus far–in brief, gold stocks go down every time Romney wins.

  • On Tuesday Jan. 3, Romney was thought to have won the Iowa caucuses—very narrowly, but an announced win. Gold and silver were down somewhat on Jan. 4. Ron Paul came in third in Iowa.
  • Tuesday, Jan. 10, Romney won the New Hampshire primary, but the win was discounted as a next-door-state inevitability. Ron Paul came in a good second place. The next day, gold and precious metals were up somewhat.
  • On Saturday Jan 21 Newt Gingrich won the hotly contested and much-hyped South Carolina primary. On Monday Jan. 23, gold and silver shot up to their highest in a month. It should be noted that Gingrich had publicly boosted gold—Gingrich to commodities sector: “HIRE ME!”–and that Iran was banned from trading in gold. Romney finished second in South Carolina, Ron Paul fourth.
  • Saturday Jan. 28, the Maine caucuses began, to continue through the next days, won by Romney but with Ron Paul coming in a strong second—and some Paul-leaning precincts not reported in the vote tally. In the climate of another disputed win, on Jan. 30 and Jan. 31, gold and silver were mixed but up.
  • Tuesday Feb. 7, Santorum swept the Colorado caucuses, the Minnesota caucuses, and Missouri’s non-binding primary. Ron Paul came in second in Minnesota. Early on Feb. 8, gold and silver stocks enjoyed a definite rally, up, then down, ending mixed.
  • Tuesday Feb. 28, Romney won the Arizona primary and the Michigan primary, solidly defeating second-place finisher Santorum. On Feb. 29, gold stocks were down significantly, silver ditto, mining ditto, etc.

 

Note: This is obviously, and avowedly, a superficial discussion, not a serious argument or a prediction that gold and silver stocks, futures, mining companies and bullion will decline on March 7 if Romney does well on ‘Super Tuesday.’ Even if the correlation above were definitive instead of highly selective—I left out all the other days–there is a margin of diminishing returns. A Romney win may become less and less newsworthy over coming weeks, and if so, the credibility of touting any other candidate as the alternative to Romney will also decline. Thus any relationship between media-hyped primaries and a market, if there is any, will also be affected.

Also, note that candidate Ron Paul openly advocates returning to the gold standard, and there is no question about his sincerity. Financial disclosure forms filed by Paul reveal that he has invested in several gold companies. What effect if any Paul’s policy statements might have on gold stocks is unclear, but they may have some effect.  Maybe any seeming relationship between Romney’s fortunes and gold markets is really a reflection of a relationship between Ron Paul’s campaign and the markets.

Still, it is more fun to follow the ups and downs of a stock price, as with this company, than it is to follow hemlines, which have been all over the place for decades. And just for fun—note that indeed the stock price of this particular gold-aimed company traded down on Feb. 1, 6th, 8th and 29th.

It is somewhat of a buzz-kill to note that it also traded down somewhat on several other days the past month.

 

Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Funny and sad, leading up to Super Tuesday

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2012 Super Tuesday–

Former GOP front-runner Herman Cain

With the 2012 primary calendar moving inexorably toward ‘Super Tuesday,’ this is as good a time as any to indulge a quick review of past fatuities this election cycle.

Michele Bachmann

It’s anything for a joke with some people.

The following is a short list, nowhere near exhaustive, reflecting fleeting moments in time over the months leading to where we are today in the GOP primary season, 2012.

What these funny historical statements all have in common is that they issued from highly qualified or at least well-regarded media outlets and, however intrinsically ridiculous, were taken seriously at the time by equally established and respectable audiences.

Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin

From the Christian Science Monitor:

“When all is said and done, the race for the 2012 GOP nomination may boil down to just three serious contenders: former Governor Romney of Massachusetts, former Governor Pawlenty of Minnesota, and Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi.”

Presidentialelectionnews.com:

“Following the withdrawal of former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, the field narrows a bit while at the same time expanding to accommodate Texas Governor Rick Perry.

The new top tier roughly consists of Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry.”

 

The Daily Beast:

“The Republican nomination race has suddenly metamorphosed from a snooze fest into a three-way smack down with a fascinating cast of characters. Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, two aggressive, charismatic religious conservatives, will spend the next few months vying for values voters and the role of chief alternative to Mitt Romney.”

The Alaska Dispatch newspaper:

“Imagine former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, comfortably campaigning in next-door New Hampshire, keeping the home fires warm as he heads toward an anticipated win in the first primary early in 2012. Then the pugnacious governor of Texas, Rick Perry, jumps in and threatens to take it all away.

Could Governor Perry actually succeed?”

The New York Times:

“With a strong finish in the caucuses, Mr. Perry could re-emerge as a top-tier candidate — perhaps the best-equipped to compete with Mitt Romney, the presumed frontrunner, on a state-by-state basis.”

The New York Post:

“Like a Hurri-Cain, Herman Cain’s presidential campaign has been gathering strength and rocking his opponents–while causing political pros to scrap some of their early forecasts for the GOP field.

Fueled by strong debate performances and his trademark quips, Cain has jumped to the top tier in several independent national polls, including pulling up to a dead heat with Mitt Romney in the latest CBS poll, tied at 17 percent, with Rick Perry trailing at 12 percent.”

 

The Washington Post:

“1. Cain is already top-tier: Cain has surged to 27 percent in a hypothetical national primary ballot test — up from just 5 percent in an August NBC-WSJ poll. His current standing puts him on par with Romney (23 percent) and makes clear that the two men comprise the top tier in the race as of today. That Cain’s rise has been fueled almost entirely by the struggles of Texas Gov. Rick Perry (Cain went up 22 points between August and October, Perry dropped by 22 points over that same period) is a dynamic that suggests Cain is now the conservatives’ choice in the contest.”

It may be added that none of these opinions were formed in a vacuum. Not even the goofiest ones were idiosyncratic. The above are not one man’s opinion—each expresses the view or hypothesis held at some point by numerous persons, all experienced in their field.

 

There’s more than one way to go with this. An old saying has it that the worst insult you can level at someone is to accuse him of having no sense of humor. (Can’t say that about the experts quoted above.) I don’t think so. It looks to me as though many people are far more insulted by any criticism, even implied through disagreement, of their judgment of people. This insecurity is often most vehement, vented with most rage, among people who really are not good judges of character, who have shown zero ability to size up a man by his character.

The favorable treatment given by seniors at the Washington Post to GWBush and Dick Cheney as candidates, back in the 2000 election cycle, may be the premier example. Cheney was widely characterized as having ‘gravitas.’ Bush was linked to down-home folksiness rather than to his Wall Street policies. The characterizations masked a breathtaking obtuseness about what Bush and Cheney actually had in mind for the country—assaulting the Middle East abroad and the middle class at home. (Admittedly, the WP had a motive for obtuseness: Bush’s education policy—standardized testing–benefited the Post Co.’s Kaplan Learning sector by billions, a windfall the Post newspaper did not report.)

But the same blinders have been on during the past year, with regard to candidates or potential candidates from Michele Bachmann to Donald Trump. The same people who took George W. Bush seriously as a candidate for the White House were eager to treat Rick Perry the same way, and with the same breathtaking presumption that Texans or Southerners would go for Perry whole hog. They made the same error with regard to Sarah Palin and Women in 2008, and Michele Bachmann and Women in 2011. Regardless of how ridiculous the candidacy, or the potential candidacy, may be, some pundit is always ready to take it seriously—if the person is a Republican. Nor, of course, are the analysts ever held to account for their past mistakes. Who’s keeping score? On television, no one.

The biggest problem may be the way the horse race is so separated, often, from any reasoned discussion of the (disastrous) policies supported by the candidates.

But reporting on policy with the same focus and attention as personalities would destroy the media pretense that the two major parties are somehow equivalent.

There is a continuing dynamic in the GOP contest, 2012, and here it is: It is an ongoing tension between Republican voters who don’t know much about their candidates, and the possibility that they might actually learn about them. The bottom line is that many or most GOP voters in 2012 do not want to know their candidates well. It’s not just that they want to be surprised by a white knight; it’s that they don’t want any information that would shake their willingness to vote along previous party lines or to vote against the president.

So you start with that firm, solid, bedrock fundamental of Tea Partyers and other prospective GOP voters 1) not knowing, AND 2) not wanting to know. This dual fundamental alone goes a long way to explain the brief prominence in the Republican field of Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain. In fact, it is virtually the only thing that does explain the aforementioned prominence.

The same fundamental goes a long way to explain the ongoing longing for some other prominent Republican to enter the race—Sarah Palin, Haley Barbour, Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, etc. However unrealistic the demand, and however ineligible a prominent GOPer might be—Palin was a disaster on the ticket in 2008, Daniels was GWBush’s budget director, Christie conducted federal prosecutions timed with political advantage, Bush is still a Bush—there is always some cadre of analysts and unnamed insiders ready to take him/her seriously. As long as they don’t know much about the candidate, s/he is in like flint.

 

Gingrich

It will be mildly interesting to see how this tension plays out over ‘Super Tuesday’ on March 6. At this moment, prognosticators are largely engaged in a cynical guessing game with regard to Newt Gingrich. Will Gingrich’s race-baiting, aided by Romney’s Mormonism and Santorum’s Catholicism, be enough to put Gingrich over the top in the Georgia and Tennessee primaries? Will any of the known anecdotes be enough to shake loose voters from their chosen candidates? Or conversely will any surface gracelessly enough to undermine the attacker rather than the target? This new version of Southern strategy would of course be more viable if Gingrich had succeeded in getting on the ballot in Virginia—where polls showed him leading. (As a result of Virginia’s ballot requirements, only Romney and Ron Paul are on the ballot in the Commonwealth.) More chances for Gingrich on March 13, in Alabama and Mississippi, and another in Louisiana on March 24.

Maybe. They don’t put it as bluntly as I just did, but that’s the game plan.

Meanwhile, more respectably, Ron Paul’s forces are working the caucus states including Idaho, North Dakota, Kansas and Wyoming. As of now little attention looks to be directed any of those places. Iowa is usually the only caucus location that gets big media play. The other primaries and caucuses mainly come down to a question of who will win the most delegates, and an increasingly glum and shriveled media force is increasingly ceding most of them to Romney.

Florida now, and 2004 election revisited, part 9

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Florida–Revisiting the 2004 election, and now

Two debaters in Jacksonville

In Thursday night’s GOP debate in Jacksonville, Newt Gingrich made a point of sounding more decent on stage for CNN than in his stump speeches around Florida (and South Carolina). The “food stamp” prevarication, while repeated, was somewhat softened. He even mentioned his grandchildren. Gov. Marco Rubio’s advice aside, the rhetorical tack of sounding nice temporarily is routinely adopted by the GOP in a national election, to blur the line with Democrats as much as possible in order to pick up votes or to cause enough confusion to get voters to stay home. That ‘voter apathy’ we used to hear so much about, in the national political press.

Also, being in Florida with its large Latino population, Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum all made a point of sounding humane on illegal immigration. Gingrich attacked the notion of deporting grandmothers. Santorum mentioned his immigrant grandfather. Romney mentioned his father’s having come to this country from Mexico and his wife’s father’s having come from Wales.

Immigration as a hot-button issue is a staple of Republican Party campaigns and events, of course. The way to help would be to help Mexico.

Sign

Considering the human suffering and injustice involved, what they do not say is galling:

  • The majority of people entering the U.S. illegally come through Mexico.
  • Conditions in Mexico are deplorable. It is hard to make a living there.
  • Ergo, one could infer that many undocumented immigrants are seeking not only freedom but survival.

Where GOPers don’t go:

  • Therefore, to forestall illegal immigration from Mexico, it would make sense to help Mexico.
  • We could stop buying drugs from Mexico, a commerce that bloats the cartels at the expense of everyone else. Sticking it to the man is much more like buying it from the man, where kingpins come into the picture.
  • We could stop shipping assault weapons to Mexico. The cartels use them to impose a reign of terror on the populace.

The only candidate on stage capable of recommending sane and reasoned policy in regard to Mexico and the border, as usual, was Ron Paul. In a nutshell: “You can’t deal with immigration without dealing with the economy.” Paul also noted that we have expended vast resources on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Border-security fanatics might be well advised to fantasize less about building a fence between the U.S. and Mexico and to focus on bringing those resources home.

Or such was the suggestion. Most of Paul’s statements received friendly rounds of applause from the audience—as did converse statements from the other candidates.

Back to Florida—

Nothing I saw or heard in the debate last night dispelled my standing contention that the GOP nominee, whoever he is, will need all the help he can get in a general election. Hence the history reminders–

For background:

Predictably, voting technology tends not to arise as a topic in these debates either. As previously written, Florida was one of the four states in 2004 where the biggest swing from exit poll to published vote tally also swung the state from to Bush. (The other three were Ohio, New Mexico, and Iowa.)

Remember, the big voting legislation called the Help America Vote Act was passed in 2002 by a GOP-controlled Congress under the GWBush administration, at a time when Team Bush was flying high in opinion polls because of 9/11. One of the bill’s key features was what it did not include—a paper trail. Following the ‘hanging chad’ debacle in Florida, the act (HAVA) authorized the use of electronic voting machines in presidential elections. (N.b. Chads were not the real problem in Florida.) Regrettably, HAVA did not require a paper receipt for voting. Thus there was effectively no provision for ironclad verification, for independent and objective assessment of whether data produced by the voting machines accurately reflected the votes cast. Democrats largely tried to require the paper trail in the bill, but the provisions were successfully fought off by Republican congressional leaders including Tom DeLay. Without the paper trail, it is impossible to have a separate recount.

Problems with Diebold

Among voting machines used in Florida, questions have swirled around Diebold voting machines in particular for years. A reader reminded me earlier of this paper on Diebold machines published back in 2004 by Dr. Avi Rubin, professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins. Rubin and his students studied Diebold’s source code—theoretically protected lines of code making up the software that runs the e-voting machines.

Diebold scanner atop its garbage can, also from manufacturer

The software program was supposed to be encrypted. To its surprise, however, Rubin’s team found that Diebold machines were encrypted by a method called Digital Encryption Standard (DES)–a code that was broken in 1997.

Furthermore, the key to the encryption was in the source code. Thus all Diebold machines would respond to the same key; breaking into one was breaking into all.

Rubin’s paper was published in February 2004. In April 2004, California’s Voting Systems and Procedures Panel said that the Diebold machines had malfunctioned in the state’s March 2 primary. The panel recommended unanimously that the state not use Diebold machines. In September 2004, Bev Harris of Black Box Voting successfully taught Baxter the chimp how to hack Diebold. The film is available on YouTube here.

Voting technology scrutinized by Black Box Voting

And all this is relevant to Florida how?

Florida was one of the close states in 2004 showing exit-poll anomalies, written about previously. The differences between op-scan counties and touch-screen counties in 2004 in Florida look like part of the same picture.

Florida counties, op-scan and touch-screen

It is a pattern of great-to-greater variation between party registration and party presidential voting in 2004, in all 52 Florida counties using op-scan. (Florida has 67 counties.)

The 15 Florida counties using touch-screen machines showed much less variation between their party registration and party presidential voting.

Simplifying here, there are three main areas to focus on—counties where the 2004 outcome was the reverse of the 2000 outcome; counties where the 2004 outcome was the reverse of party registration in the county; and counties where the 2004 outcome was extraordinarily close.

Op-scan technology predominated in all three categories—but this may reflect the fact that op-scan technology predominated across the state.

Starting with the slightest example, in only three op-scan counties was the 2004 outcome the reverse of the 2000 outcome:

  • Flagler
  • Hernando
  • Osceola

All three switched from Democratic (Gore) in 2000 to Republican (Bush) in 2004. Two touch-screen counties switched from Dem in 2000 to GOP in 2004—Pasco and Pinellas.

But in 28 op-scan counties, the 2004 outcome was the reverse of majority party registration:

  • Baker—switched from punch card
  • Bradford
  • Calhoun
  • Columbia–from punch card
  • DeSoto–from punch card
  • Dixie–from punch card
  • Duval–from punch card
  • Franklin
  • Gilchrist–from punch card
  • Glades–from punch card
  • Gulf
  • Hamilton
  • Hardee–from punch card
  • Hendry
  • Holmes
  • Jackson
  • Lafayette
  • Levy
  • Liberty
  • Madison (close)–from punch card
  • Okeechobee (close)
  • Osceola–from punch card
  • Polk
  • Putnam
  • Suwanee
  • Taylor
  • Wakulla–from punch card
  • Washington

Again, there were 28 Florida op-scan counties where the vote went for Bush in 2004 although more registered voters in each county were Democratic. Eleven of these had also switched to op-scan from paper balloting (the much-maligned punch card).

In six op-scan counties, the outcome was very close:

  • Flagler—switched from Gore to Bush
  • Madison—Bush won, more Dems registered
  • Monroe
  • Orange
  • Saint Lucie
  • Volusia

Bush won all these nail-biters, including one county where the outcome switched from Gore to Bush and one that had more Democrats registered than Republicans.

These op-scan counties are interesting. Many of them are small, and some of the excellent statistical analyses of the 2004 election in Florida exclude small populations. But in toto they were significant, because they showed a heavy preponderance of Democratic Party registration. Of 15 touch-screen counties, only one had the Dems with more than 50 percent of registered voters–Broward, with 50.5 percent.

But of the 52 op-scan counties, 30 counties had the Dems with more than 50 percent of registered voters. In most of these (21 counties) the Democrats constituted more than 60 percent of registered voters. In thirteen of them the Dems had more than 70 percent of registered voters, and in four the Dems had more than 80 percent of the registered voters.

Incidentally, Baker County, with a whopping reversal and 77 percent turnout in 2004, was the only county using Sequoia op-scan machines. Diebold is not the only problem.

Outcomes in op-scan versus touch-screen counties, Florida 2004, have been presented in simple contrasts here, but this is not to say that the 2004 outcome was a clean sweep. For the 52 op-scan counties, of the 43 counties where Bush votes went up over 100 percent more than Republican registration, Bush still lost seven.

For the 15 touch-screen counties, in the three counties where Bush votes went up over 100 percent more than did Republican registration, Bush still won. In the three touch-screen counties where Kerry votes went up over 100 percent compared to Democratic registration, Kerry still lost. There are, as we know, problems with DREs (touch-screens).

There are problems with Florida.

Reiterating: For Florida counties, the biggest difference in the 2004 election was not between ‘red’ and ‘blue’ but between touch-screen and op-scan.  Fifteen Florida counties used touch-screen voting machines, produced by ES & S or Sequoia. The other 52 counties used paper ballots processed by optical-scanning equipment manufactured by ES&S, Diebold and Sequoia.

The difference is a simple and clear pattern. Touch-screen counties’ vote for president almost always went with their party majority. Op-scan counties’ vote for president mostly went against the county’s majority party. Of the 52 counties using op-scanned ballots, only 21 voted in the direction predicted by their voter registration, fewer than half. The other 31 counties went opposite their own voter registration, all but one going to Bush. The exception was Monroe County, with an exceptionally close outcome.

Even where the op-scan vote ran with party registration, the margin was different, suggesting again that at the last minute John Kerry lost Democrats, independents, and unaffiliated voters–in an election where independents and new voters were trending toward Kerry.

A manual recount of two counties and part of another by two Miami Herald reporters netted Kerry 11 additional votes in one small county, 24 in another. They discontinued the count in a larger county where his projected pick-up would be about 1,300 votes.

Much of the voting public was well aware of these issues after 2004. They were submerged in the Obama landslide of 2008. But they could surface again in 2012—especially if a drumbeat of “close election” predictions is sustained.

In my opinion, resentment at the cavalier treatment of the vote itself fueled public anger and distrust of the GOP before the elections of 2006 and 2008. That neither the FEC, Justice, nor anyone else was able to address these problems after the 2008 election contributed to the outcome in 2010. The right to vote is fundamental. Congressional Republicans, for obvious reasons, have done everything in their power to prevent meaningful safeguards for election integrity.

 

Rick Perry Virginia lawsuit updated

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More history on those Virginia rules

 

Perry et al., plaintiffs

Regarding that Rick Perry lawsuit—since joined by Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, and Rick Santorum—over ballot access in Virginia, far too many people state erroneously that the Virginia rules are longstanding.

Today’s Washington Post reinforced the canard:

“Virginia’s ballot-access rules, in place for four decades, are considered the toughest in the nation. Candidates must collect 10,000 signatures, with at least 400 from each of the congressional districts, while some other states only require candidates to pay fees or sign forms.” [emphasis added]

When an excellent reporter, top-notch herself and one of the best political reporters at a major paper, transmits a mistake  this way, the mistake has reached significant proportions. Ballot access in the U.S. is a serious issue.

What follows below is the best and most lucid correction on this point easily available. Be it noted that the author does not sympathize with the GOP lawsuit, as the rest of his blog makes clear. The excerpt quoted here pertains only to the history of the Virginia rules on signature-gathering and the Virginia primary:

“Prior to 1988, there was no primary in Virginia at the Presidential level . . . The state decided to hold a primary in 1988, likely in an effort to gain more prominence for the Commonwealth in the first election since 1968 where there would not be an incumbent President running on either party’s ticket. That year . . . a candidate was allowed on the ballot if they had been “prominently discussed in the news media, or who had qualified for primary season matching funds.” (Source: Ballot Access News) George H.W. Bush won the Republican Primary that year. The Democratic Primary was won by Jesse Jackson.”

“Whether it was because of that Jackson win or for other reasons, Virginia didn’t hold a primary in 1992 or 1996 and reverted back to the caucus/convention model. The Virginia primary came back in 2000, but this time candidates had to submit ballot access petitions. The rules were the same as they are now, at least 10,000 signatures with at least 400 from each of Virginia’s Congressional Districts. That same system was in effect in 2004 and 2008, and for eight years pretty much any candidate who submitted a petition package with at least 10,000 raw signatures made it on the ballot.”

Since incumbent George W. Bush was the only GOP candidate on the ballot in 2004, Virginia did not hold a Republican primary that year. Virginia will not hold a Democratic presidential primary in 2012.

A larger difference remains, between the rules of 2000 and 2008 and the rules of 2012. The difference is enforcement:

“Then, just this year, an Independent candidate for the Virginia legislature filed a lawsuit against the Republican Party Of Virginia:

The only reason the Virginia Republican Party checked the signatures for validity for the current primary is that in October 2011, an independent candidate for the legislature, Michael Osborne, sued the Virginia Republican Party because it did not check petitions for its own members, when they submitted primary petitions. Osborne had no trouble getting the needed 125 valid signatures for his own independent candidacy, but he charged that his Republican opponent’s primary petition had never been checked, and that if it had been, that opponent would not have qualified. The lawsuit, Osborne v Boyles, cl 11-520-00, was filed in Bristol County Circuit Court. It was filed too late to be heard before the election, but is still pending. The effect of the lawsuit was to persuade the Republican Party to start checking petitions. If the Republican Party had not changed that policy, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry would be on the 2012 ballot.”

 

The difference is no mere detail:

“In other words, prior to this year, the RPV was allegedly not really checking the signatures submitted for validity. As long as a candidate submitted the raw number(s) required then they got on the ballot. The Democratic Party of Virginia apparently follows the same process and has not held its candidates to the high standard that the technicalities of the law require. Since the State Board of Elections relies entirely on the political parties to determine who is eligible for the primary ballot(s), this is apparently entirely legal. It does, however, make one wonder if other candidates would have found themselves in a similar situation in the past had their petitions been given more than a cursory examination.”

A reasonable question.

Further reinforcing the point, the Republican Party of Virginia itself has represented these rules as new. Here is the official party statement on the ballot dispute, quoted again:

“In October 2011, RPV formally adopted the certification procedures that were applied on December 23.”

 

Maybe something hinges on that word “formally.”

 

Whatever the outcome, the defendants in the GOP lawsuit have made the history of the rules part of the grounds for their appeal. As the defendants told the appeals court,

“The presidential primary is scheduled for March 6. Two candidates met the statutory requirement of filing 10,000 valid signatures, including at least 400 from each Congressional district. In past elections, there were larger slates of candidates who have met the Virginia statutory requirement and were included on the primary ballot.” [emphasis added]

 

On its face this sounds like a telling argument. Surely it becomes less telling if it turns out to be inaccurate.