Rick Perry vs World

07 September 2010

Cleaning out, post Labor Day edition

Today is the first day after labor day, and thus the traditional campaigning period has begun. It also means the Silly Season is well upon us.

So let me clear out tabs on my browser:

1. Wayne Slater leads with:

With the elections two months away, incumbents across the country are scrambling to survive an anti-establishment, pro-outsider tide of voter discontent.

In so far as Democrats (and Republican appropriators) are the incumbents and the establishment, this is true. I seem to hear alot more about angry voters in 2010 than I did in 2008 or 2006, although people are swinging more along ideological grounds in 2010 than in 2008 or 06.

2. Obama's recently departed budget director comes out hesitantly in favor of extending all the Bush tax cuts for two years.

3. Peggy Fikac makes fun of new state GOP chair Steve Munisteri:

State GOP leaders said they made history by bringing conservative Hispanic leaders together last week, but one who attended the meeting dismissed the gathering as more hat than cattle.

"That meeting was designed to be a meeting so they could say they met with Hispanic leaders. I did not see a plan of action," said Fermín Ortiz, president of the Llano County Republican Club, who emphasized he wasn't speaking on behalf of the group. "I'm not the only person that left that meeting thinking, 'What didn't we do today?'."

State GOP Chairman Steve Munisteri - who highlighted the participation of leaders from seven other groups - said Ortiz is wrong. He said Ortiz asked to attend, rather than being on the original invitation list, adding, "I don't know him from Adam." Maybe that's a problem.

Is Fikac really suggesting that the chair of the state party must know everyone, even if they are from a county of under 20k people? Especially when, as Fikac admits, Mr. Ortiz "said he's twice worked to try to elect Democratic candidates."

4. Rick Casey can get really outraged at the big donations to Republicans, yet sound very zen about equally large or larger donations to Democrats. Hold on, was it Labor Day weekend? Check.

5. Ratcliffe's analysis lede: The Texas general election opens this Labor Day looking like the Year of the Angry Voter.

A year of the Angry Voter would be characterized by incumbents of both parties falling. Have many Republican statewide incumbents are in danger of falling? How about in the legislature? Alot more Democrats are likely to fall, meaning this probably has more to do with a shift in partisan identification and motivation than it does about anger.

6. The Fix has a post on the 8 most important non-federal races this cycle for redistricting purposes. Of the 8, 6 are gubernatorial races, and Republicans will probably pick up 5 or 6 of those.

Posted by Evan @ 09/07/10 05:59 PM | Comments (0)

Edwards losing to Flores

Stu Rothenberg catches the Chet Edwards campaign fibbing:

Rep. Chet Edwards, for example, hasn't answered GOP polling showing he trails challenger Bill Flores (R) badly. While the Texas Democrat told me earlier this cycle that he never releases his polling, his campaign did release a Bennett, Petts & Blumenthal survey done Oct. 9-10, 2006, that showed him far ahead of then-challenger Van Taylor (R).

That poll showed a significantly wider lead than what happened on election day.

Plenty of campaign staffs do this, but it underscores that Edwards is probably losing right now by more than a few points. Can he turn it around?

Posted by Evan @ 09/07/10 01:12 AM | Comments (0)

06 September 2010

Burka gets 538's prediction...less than right

I just posted on some problems with 538's prediction of Perry +7. It wasn't really that newsworthy when you look at the inputs.

It looks like Paul Burka didn't quite understand the methodology:

Silver analyzed every governor's race in Saturday's New York Times, projecting the likely outcome. In the Texas governor's race, the prediction is Perry 52, White 45. This margin is slightly lower than the results of recent Rasmussen polls, which are the most frequent source of information about the race. Rasmussen has had Perry up by 8 and 9 points in his last two polls.

This is why Fivethirtyeight is forecasting that the race will tighten.

Fivethirtyeight isn't really predicting that the race will tighten. Silver is saying that the race is currently at +7 right now because he doesn't like Rasmussen's results.

By the way, one other thing worth mentioning that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere: the main reason Silver gives White a 17% chance of winning is precisely because his model recognizes that there is a greater margin of error because there aren't many polls. If more polls (like the WRS) poll show a similar outcome, White's chances of winning would be reduced substantially.

Posted by Evan @ 09/06/10 06:49 PM | Comments (0)

On 538's +7 Perry victory prediction

One of the more annoying things to have happened in the past few years is the fealty shown by journalists to Nate Silver's models. Ooh! Look! Numbers! More than beginner stats! Since most political journalists don't know what a t-statistic is, they simply repeat whatever Silver writes without question. Because it's just so...quantitative. Numbers don't lie, right?

Silver is a pretty good modelmaker who works hard and deserves the success he has had. But a model is only as good as the assumptions that form it and the data that go into it. In some races this year, there's reason to think that his model is pretty good. In the 2010 Perry v White race, there's not much reason to put much confidence in 538's model.

Data that goes into his model
538 is dependent on public polls. Who has polled the Perry v White race publically? Silver doesn't -- and won't, based on his criteria -- include the recent Wilson Research Strategies poll in his rankings, so he's entirely going off of the last couple Rasmussen polls, a PPP poll from mid-June, and a mid-May YouGov internet poll of registered voters. See a problem here?

Of course, Silver doesn't like Rasmussen polls. He uses two separate adjustments to discount Rasmussen polls in his model: one is his pollster ratings (where his assumptions make Rasmussen look slightly less accurate than it really is though Rasmussen still gets a pretty good score) and the other is a special 2010 "house effects" adjustment. What does the latter mean? It means that Silver thinks that Rasmussen is wrong on his turnout model, essentially. Silver is essentially substituting his own judgment of Texas turnout for Rasmussen's judgment. Silver could be correct, but would you rather take an established, prolific pollster with a very good record or a guy who's just started doing political models in the last couple years?

Assumptions that form the model
Silver used polling data since 1998 to make his model. That's a pretty limited sample size in terms of number of elections. While it does include some wave elections, it doesn't include a GOP wave. So he is essentially using data from a different type of election in order to form assumptions. Will pollsters get a GOP wave as accurate as a Dem wave?

Another potential out-of-sample problem for predicting Perry v White is that Perry has already served 2.5 terms. He is running for his 3.5 term. It's not an open-seat election, and it's not your standard re-election.

We're still a long way to go from election day, so lots of things could still change. Probably $20M more in attack ads will hit the Texas airwaves over the next few months. Rick Perry is a very known quantity to Texas voters; Bill White is not. That means that there is much more variability in whether people like Bill White on election day, but there's probably some negative skew and fat tails because of blowup risk (scandal, political ad that defines one of the candidates) that are much more likely to happen to a first-time candidate than an entrenched incumbent. Plus he's a fairly mainstream Democrat running in Republican Texas during one of the most Republican years. Of course, White does have the advantage that anyone undecided right now is undecided despite the fact that they have a relatively firm opinion of Rick Perry.

In short, Silver's prediction of Perry v White is basically just Silver averaging Rasmussen's polls and then sticking a finger on the scales because he doesn't like Rasmussen.

So, Perry +7? I'll take the over. The Texas gubernatorial race is one of the places where Silver's statistical model is on its shakiest theoretical ground.

Posted by Evan @ 09/06/10 06:41 PM | Comments (0)

It's official: Silly Season has begun

The Tea Party protests Cornyn's Dallas office:

About a dozen tea party activists rallied at Sen. John Cornyn's district office in Dallas on Thursday to protest the National Republican Senatorial Committee's involvement in several primary contests.

The protesters met briefly with Cornyn's staff but were told their question would have to be answered by representatives of the campaign committee, which Cornyn leads, or Cornyn's political staff. The senator was not in that office.

Try to keep your eyes on the target, don't you think? Cornyn has done a decent job as NRSC chair, and even though I recently had a pretty horrible constituent service experience with his staff (distracted by the NRSC?), the Tea Party protesting Cornyn has to mark the official beginning of Silly Season.

Posted by Evan @ 09/06/10 11:11 AM | Comments (0)

Helter-skelter strategy

RG Ratcliffe recounts the facts:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White recently launched a new television commercial designed to portray Republican incumbent Rick Perry as an Austin insider more interested in taking care of himself and his friends than the people of Texas. The ad focused on a Thursday fundraiser in Austin that was hosted by 29 lobbyists.

"You want to know who pulls the strings in Rick Perry's Texas," says White, casually dressed in a blue shirt that matches his eyes. White speaks directly to the camera. "There're 30 hosts; 29 of the 30 are registered lobbyists. Many used to work on Perry’s staff."

The Capitol Inside newsletter noted that many of the same lobbyists attended a White fundraiser in Austin in 2004 shortly after he was elected Houston mayor and that Washington, D.C., lobbyists hosted a fundraiser for White in February.

Generally in any sort of communications, it helps to have the facts on your side.

Posted by Evan @ 09/06/10 06:48 AM | Comments (0)

05 September 2010

Rick Perry for Gubernatorial Majority Leader.

Politico sees candidates following Rick Perry's lead nationwide:

They're all Rick Perrys now.

A year and a half after the governor of Texas energized his reelection campaign by casting himself as an antagonist to President Barack Obama, Republican gubernatorial candidates across the country are following his example.

Left unsaid is that at no moment has Obama ever been a positive factor in Texas, so it wasn't as gutsy as it might have been in say...Connecticut.*

On the other hand, folks like Bill White and Chet Edwards were all aboard the Obama bandwagon in 08 and early 09 when Obama was a neutral factor, so it wasn't as obvious a political strategy as it seems now.

Also, put me down as unconvinced that all of Perry's anti-Obama agitation was strategery, as Will Farrell would say. Quite a bit of it was probably just his honest reaction, which is probably one reason why he's managed to keep winning statewide elections in Texas. If there were gubernatorial leadership elections, Perry would be looking good.

* Come to think of it, I wonder if Obama has fallen harder in Conn than in other states. Given the high-end financial industry concentration in the state, I'd assume so.

Posted by Evan @ 09/05/10 10:10 PM | Comments (0)

Anita Perry is on message

The HouChron did email interviews of the first lady of Texas and the prospective first lady.

Q: Is campaigning a test of even a good marriage? How and why?

A: Rick works a ton - whether he's home reading briefings or traveling. Yes, the schedules can be grueling, but we talk a lot and try to work schedules so that we're home almost every night - even if it's late. We always have stories to share from the trail, or we talk about our fantastic children and daughter-in-law. And then there is our dog Lucy, who loves us no matter what!

She mentioned it later in the interviews as well, whereas Mrs. White's responses were a bit more...terse. A little bit of a missed opportunity but campaigning is hard for rookies.

Posted by Evan @ 09/05/10 02:55 PM | Comments (0)

02 September 2010

Perry +12 in WRS poll

8/29-8/31, 1001 likely voters
Wilson Research Strategies for GOPAC TX

Perry 50
White 38
Undecided 11
Other 1

Perry Fav/Unfav
50/40

Memo here.

Posted by Evan @ 09/02/10 02:42 PM | Comments (0)

06 August 2010

Nancy Pelosi, governor of Texas?

Melanie Mason, DMN:

Led by Sen. John Cornyn , 20 members of the Texas GOP congressional delegation have sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., urging her to strip a Texas-specific provision out of an upcoming spending bill.

The amendment, inserted by Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, requires Texas to preserve current education funding levels through 2013 in order to receive $820 million in federal funds to protect teacher jobs. Texas is the only state to face specific requirements.

True or False: A vote for Chet Edwards is a vote in favor of Nancy Pelosi trying to dictate how Texas governs itself.

I seem to recall Nancy Pelosi pushing for Chet Edwards to be Obama's vicepresident and Edwards not exactly fighting it...

Posted by Evan @ 08/06/10 07:13 PM | Comments (0)

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