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Consumer Confidence and the Markets

January 22, 2008 12:15 PM

Steep drops in the stock market historically have not had much short-term, direct influence on consumer confidence, for a simple reason: Most people simply haven’t seen market gyrations as having a lasting impact on their day-to-day personal finances.

While it’s commonly noted that most Americans own stocks, that includes indirect holdings through mutual funds and retirement plans. Far fewer own individual shares directly, especially when you exclude their own employer’s stock – just 22 percent in a Pew poll in fall 2006.

Most, moreover, are passive, long-term investors; last fall only 6 percent said they trade stocks or funds “pretty regularly,” no different than when we asked a similar question in the midst of the market meltdown of 2001. Buy and hold is the norm.

There’s also a good deal of built-in acceptance of market shifts. In a poll we did a few years ago, 69 percent called the stock market “risky,” and it’s been as high as 80 percent after the 2001 correction. Even then, in a poll we did in July 2002, just 17 percent said rises and falls in the market affect them “a great deal.”

This doesn’t mean market falls are painless. Plenty of people are hurt by drops in the price of shares, especially those who rely on the markets for income. For many others, though, these are paper losses offset by previous paper gains. Most seem to recognize that markets go up as well as down, and in the long run beat the heck out of passbook savings. And most are much more sensitive to more direct factors, such as incomes, inflation (e.g., the price of gasoline) and the job market.

The table below lists the largest one-day postwar drops in the Dow in percentage terms, and what happened to consumer confidence in the ensuing week and month. The answer: Not much. Even the Dow’s largest drop, 22.6 percent on Oct. 19, 1987, was immediately followed by a relatively meager 4-point decline in our weekly Consumer Comfort Index.

Shifts in the consumer index like those in the table – generally 2 to 4 points – are unremarkable. Over its 22-year history it’s fallen by 3 points in a single week 72 times and by 4 points 50 times. The CCI’s rarer, bigger drops appear unrelated to market events.

  Largest Postwar Percentage Drops in the Dow
             Dow's      Change in ABC CCI  
 Date      decline   Week later   Month later
 10/19/87   -22.6%     -4 points     -7 points  
 10/26/87    -8.0      -3            -3 
 10/27/97    -7.2      +1            +4
 9/17/01     -7.1       0            -2 
 10/13/89    -6.9       0             0
 1/8/88      -6.9      -2            -3

None of this is to say that the market is irrelevant to consumer views; confidence is worth closely watching in the weeks ahead. It’s simply to say that with history as a guide, the market’s impact on overall consumer confidence should not be overstated.

January 22, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Good Eating?

January 15, 2008 3:09 PM

I'll take a little break from the political fray and the fallout over the New Hampshire polls (though we're not done with that!) to dig into public attitudes on a completely different issue - food from cloned animals, which was certified as safe today by the FDA. A memo I just distributed in-house follows. At a minimum, it's a reminder of the useful intelligence we can glean from polls, far beyond the hothouse of election politics.

Re today's FDA action: Public acceptance of genetically modified or cloned foods is up in the air, at least in part because a lot of it has to do with that very choice of words. “Cloned food” sounds scary. “Genetically modified,” a little less so. “Biotechnology,” apparently less so still.

Those differences – plus the information people have – are reflected in their attitudes.

The last poll we see that asked about cloned food was done by the Mellman Group and Public Opinion Strategies (a pairing of partisan D and R firms), for a Pew Foundation group in September 2006. Sixty-four percent said they were “uncomfortable” with animal cloning, 46 percent strongly so. Just 22 percent called foods from cloned animals safe, 43 percent unsafe; many, 36 percent, had no opinion.

Other results show the extent of compunctions about cloning: In a Gallup poll last May, 59 percent called cloning animals "morally wrong." This question did not refer specifically to food.

Results are different when the question is about “genetically modified” food. In a General Social Survey poll in August 2006, 16 percent said they didn’t care about eating GM food, 52 percent said they were willing to eat it but would prefer not to if other food is available, and 30 percent said they would not eat it. (GM foods were defined as follows: “Genetically modified foods come from plants or animals whose characteristics have been changed by alteration, addition, or deletion of DNA in their genetic material using advanced laboratory techniques. Some say that genetically modified foods are unsafe and pose risks for human health. Others say that they are safe and necessary to reduce world hunger.”)

In another approach, Gallup in July 2005 asked if people support or oppose “the use of biotechnology in agriculture and food production.” They got an even split: 45 percent support, 45 percent opposed. (The previous question explained that biotechnology “includes tools such as genetic engineering and genetic modification of food.”)

In that same poll, 88 percent were confident in the safety of food sold at grocery stores, and 80 percent were confident in the federal government to ensure food safety.

The Mellman/POS poll asked about GM foods, as well as about cloning. One question asked if people favored or opposed “the introduction of genetically modified foods into the U.S. food supply.” It got 27 percent in favor, 46 percent opposed, with again a lot – 27 percent – undecided.

Mellman noted that opposition was down over the years, from 58 percent in 2001 to 46 percent in 2006; and that it was particularly down among women, from 66 percent in 2001 to 48 percent in ’06. (Opposition among men started lower.)

Just under four in 10 (38 percent) said they were likely to eat GM foods, 54 percent unlikely, a different formulation than the GSS question. Again there was a gender gap, with women much more apt than men to say they’re unlikely to eat these foods (61 percent to 46 percent).

Thirty-four percent called such foods basically safe, 29 percent basically unsafe, with a very big 37 percent unsure. But perceptions of safety increased (to 45 percent) after people were told that “more than half of processed products at the grocery store are produced using some form of biotechnology or genetic modification.”

This suggests that additional information – as well as the language used – may help shape attitudes as they evolve on this issue.

January 15, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The New Hampshire Polls: What We Know

January 11, 2008 11:24 AM

(Note: This post was updated at 2 p.m. with a data point that came late to our attention.)

Efforts so far to explain the New Hampshire poll meltdown amount to theories in search of data; we don’t yet have the hard evidence and full, thoughtful evaluation we need. But two of the most current explanations are to my mind the weakest: that the polls were right when taken, but missed a late Clinton surge; or that respondents lied.

There’s good empirical data to rebut the first argument, a late Clinton surge. And the racially based theory of dissembling respondents needs more data to be persuasive.

But again – not to prejudge. The short answer is that we don’t know yet where these polls went wrong. This post will try to move along our knowledge in three ways: to examine the facts of the failure, summarize the theories and explore avenues for inquiry.

One aside: I’ve been joking that what I like best about the final New Hampshire pre-election polls is that I didn’t do any of them. That may seem to put me in the classic definition of a critic: The person who, after watching the battle from the hilltop, rides down and shoots the wounded.

The reality is that several of these polls were produced by experienced, consummate professionals; what I really think when I look at their New Hampshire data is that there, but for the grace of God, go I. For all our sakes, we simply need to know what happened.

Here’s the state of play:

The Failure
Nine final pre-election polls were released Monday or Tuesday morning in the New Hampshire Democratic primary; each had Obama numerically ahead, by margins from 3 to 13 points, averaging 8 points. The Clinton and Obama campaigns’ internal polls are reported to have shown him ahead as well. Clinton won by 2 points, 39-37 percent.

Of the nine public polls, five have been rated as airworthy by ABC News’ methodological standards. They did no better: A range of +4 to +13 for Obama.

Three of the nine polls were conducted Friday-Sunday, three Saturday-Sunday, one Saturday-Monday and two Sunday-Monday. All were done by telephone, with sample sizes from 323 to 862. Gallup’s (Obama +13) included interviews with cell-phone-only respondents. A Gallup national poll, Friday-Sunday, also showed movement to Obama; he tied Clinton 33-33, their closest in any national survey.

All the polls understated Clinton’s support (by 5 to 11 points, average 9) rather than overstating Obama (+5 to -5, average 1). They reported “undecided” voters (which we regard as function of polling technique rather than a measure of true indecision) in a range from 2 percent to 12 percent.

Final polling in the New Hampshire Republican race came closer to the election outcome. Seven of eight public polls had the correct order of finish of the top two candidates. The average McCain lead was 5 points, matching his winning margin.

The Background
Pre-election polls have a remarkable history of accurately predicting election winners. A review of 2004 general election polls by the National Council of Public Polls found an average error on each candidate of 2 points in state polls and 1 point in national polls. The en masse failure of the New Hampshire Democratic primary polls is unprecedented.

Pre-election polling is more complex than other survey research because it requires examining the attitudes of a population that does not yet exist – voters. These polls are required to estimate a “likely voter” population based on propensity to participate. Models used by each organization are idiosyncratic and generally treated as proprietary.

A further complication is that while underlying attitudes on issues are likely to be stable, vote-preference choices may evolve over time, not crystallizing for some voters until Election Day approaches or arrives; this can be so particularly in primaries, in which  preferences are not stabilized by political party identification. A final complication is turnout, which can be affected by unanticipated variables such as weather or get-out-the-vote drives.

While we can’t yet conclude what occurred in New Hampshire, as a rule, problems in likely voter modeling are the chief suspect in bad final estimates of vote preference.

The Theories
Insufficient data are available to fully analyze the New Hampshire Democratic polls. What’s needed is a review of overall turnout estimates, the size of population groups within the “likely voter” population, and the vote preference in each of these groups. We’ve requested these here, and we do expect an analysis from a competent independent arbiter such as the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

As noted, some pollsters tend to blame poor final pre-election estimates on one of two factors: Late deciders or misrepresentation by respondents. These sound somewhat self-serving, and my first instinct is always to look inside – at sampling or modeling – rather than outside.

In any case a variety of theories have been proposed. As of yet they are theories only. A summary follows:

1) Late deciders
It’s postulated that there was a sharp swing to Clinton among voters who made their decisions in the last day or two of the campaign; in some arguments this is described as a shift of women to Clinton after she became emotional in a campaign appearance Monday.

No data have been presented to support this late-swing theory, and several data sources rebut it. First: Three of the nine polls were conducted through Monday night; if there were a shift toward Clinton that night presumably they would have caught it. They did not; Obama was +13, +9 and +5 in these polls – all in fact slightly better for Obama than their results in polling completed the previous night.

Second, the exit poll asked voters the time of their decision. Seventeen percent said they decided on Election Day; they voted for Clinton over Obama by a 3-point margin, 39 to 36 percent – hardly a significant swing from the overall result (Clinton +2). Those who said they decided in the previous three days, 21 percent, favored Obama over Clinton by 3 points, 37-34 percent – further deflating the late-decider argument. Those who decided previously, 61 percent of voters, favored Clinton over Obama by 41-37 percent.

Some of the New Hampshire pollsters have said they saw higher-than-usual changeability in the electorate – a quarter or more saying they might change their minds. I wish that, seeing this, more of them had stayed in the field Monday night. Neither of the two that did, nor the exit poll, indicate a late Clinton surge. 

Note further that the nine pre-election polls showed Obama leads regardless of their level of “undecideds” – Obama was +4 in one poll, with 12 percent undecided, but +13 in another, with 2 percent undecided. That would not argue in favor of arbitrarily moving all undecideds in these polls to Clinton’s favor.

2) Turnout surge
In a corollary to the late-decider theory, it’s been suggested that an unexpected surge of sympathetic older women delivered the contest to Clinton after her show of emotion on Monday. Our election night analysis noted overwhelming support for Clinton among women aged 65 and up, 57-27 percent. But their turnout was not up disproportionately; they accounted for 7 percent of all voters, vs. 6 percent in 2004 and 8 percent in 2000.

While we anticipate data from the pre-election pollsters among 65+ women, the sample sizes of this subgroup may be inadequate for firm conclusions.

Turnout among women overall likewise was not up, but average; they accounted for 57 percent of Democratic voters, compared with 54 percent in 2004, 62 percent in 2000, 57 percent in 1996 and 54 percent in 1992.

3) Ballot Order
As published on our site, Prof. Jon Krosnick of Stanford University argues a ballot-order effect. Polls generally randomize the order in which candidate names are offered. The New Hampshire ballot listed them without randomization. Clinton’s name was near the top, Obama’s near the bottom. Krosnick’s research suggests this would have added an estimated 3 points to Clinton’s vote total.

This is a seemingly plausible argument that could explain some (but not all) of the discrepancy with pre-election polls. It suggests, in effect, that the polls were less wrong than they look (by varying degrees), and the election itself was distorted, to some extent, by ballot order.

We’ve found one possibly supporting fact: Uniquely, as far as we have ascertained, a pre-election poll that was closest to the correct outcome (Obama +1, Suffolk University, Saturday-Sunday) did not randomize candidate names – it read them alphabetically, as they appeared on the ballot. (However, Suffolk moved to Obama +5 in its final Sunday-Monday estimate, and it was the only polling outfit to muff the order of finish in the GOP race.)

4) “Bradley Effect”
It’s been suggested that in some past elections involving a white and a black candidate, many years ago, pre-election polls understated the white candidate’s support. (The Bradley effect is named for Tom Bradley’s 1982 race for California governor.) This has led to suggestions that some whites are reluctant to express support for a white candidate in a biracial race for fear of being perceived as racist.

This postulated effect ties into studies finding that some respondents give different answers to polling questions based on their perception of the interviewer’s race. The only published work we’ve seen to put this in an election context (holler with more) is a 1991 study finding that whites were 8 to 11 points more apt to support the white candidate in the 1989 Virginia governor’s race when speaking with a white interviewer.

There are some problems, though. I’d like to see more than one study, of just 172 white respondents, carried out by nonprofessional student interviewers. (And the report footnotes a contextual effect in this particular study "that may heighten the race-of-interviewer effect.") The Bradley effect has been raised in six elections, all 15 to 25 years ago. We’re aware of many other, more recent biracial races (five Senate or governor races in 2006 alone) in which the pre-election polling was quite accurate. It didn’t happen in Iowa. And this contest can hardly be described as racially charged. The effect, if it exists at all, is at best inconsistent.

Pew pollster Andy Kohut, in yesterday’s New York Times, added the argument that poorer and less-educated whites who do not respond to surveys have more racist views than those who do respond. Knowing more about that would be valuable.

Clinton did do best with voters lower on the socioeconomic scale, and low SES individuals are harder to reach in polls. Sample weighting should adjust for this, but it’s another area worth further examination.

5) Iowa-related Motivation/Demotivation
I’d add another theory – admittedly again lacking supporting data. The Iowa and New Hampshire contests were compressed as never before. Obama rode a wave of enthusiasm out of Iowa; Clinton was deflated. Obama supporters in New Hampshire may have been encouraged, Clinton supporters demotivated, to express support for their candidates. And Clinton voters may have been less apt to pass likely voter screens based on expressions of intention to vote, enthusiasm, strength of support or attention to the contest.

6) Modeling and Sampling
I’ve already discussed likely voter modeling. I’ll add the issue of sampling. Saturday is a bad day to conduct opinion polls – people aren’t home. Sunday daytime is bad as well – people are at church, shoveling snow, watching football games. Sunday evenings are better, as are weeknights after work.

Further, polls done over two nights lack best-practice sample management techniques. The customary field period for most ABC News polls is four nights. There are a variety of best-practices techniques that can be built into short time-frame or tracking polls; it may be useful to know which were used in New Hampshire.

The Lessons
Even before we have solid answers, there’s a lesson in the wreckage. You’ve heard it here before: I’ve long argued for de-emphasizing horse-race reporting in our election coverage. (“Throttle back on the horse race,” as Jon Cohen and I put it in our Washington Post op-ed Dec. 30.)

The better use of pre-election polls is less to predict outcomes and more to set the table for our election coverage by informing our judgment on the contours of the contest. Not solely who’s ahead, but how and why voters are coming to their choices – what issues motivate them, what candidate attributes attract or repel them, how groups are dividing, which candidates are major players and which not. If one fallout from New Hampshire is to get us all to ease up on the horse race a little, that would be a good result of some apparently bad polls.

January 11, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (25) | TrackBack (0)

New Hampshire's Polling Fiasco

January 09, 2008 12:05 AM

There will be a serious, critical look at the final pre-election polls in the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire; that is essential. It is simply unprecedented for so many polls to have been so wrong. We need to know why.

But we need to know it through careful, empirically based analysis. There will be a lot of claims about what happened - about respondents who reputedly lied, about alleged difficulties polling in biracial contests. That may be so. It also may be a smokescreen - a convenient foil for pollsters who'd rather fault their respondents than own up to other possibilities - such as their own failings in sampling and likely voter modeling.

There have been previous races that misstated support for black candidates in biracial races. But most of those were long ago, and there have been plenty of polls in biracial races that were accurate. (For more on past problems with polls in biracial races, see this blog I wrote for Freakonomics last May.) And there was no overstatement of Obama in Iowa polls.

On the other hand, the pre-election polls in the New Hampshire Republican race were accurate. The problem was isolated to the Democratic side - where, it should be noted, we have not just one groundbreaking candidate in Barack Obama, but also another, in Hillary Clinton.

A starting point for this analysis will be to look at every significant Democratic subgroup in the New Hampshire pre-election polls, and see how those polls did in estimating the size of those groups and their vote choices. The polls' estimates of turnout overall will be relevant as well.

In the end there may be no smoking gun. Those polls may have been accurate, but done in by a superior get-out-the-vote effort, or by very late deciders whose motivations may or may not ever be known. They may have been inaccurate because of bad modeling, compromised sampling, or simply an overabundance of enthusiasm for Obama on the heels of his Iowa victory that led his would-be supporters to overstate their propensity to turn out. (A function, perhaps, of youth.)

Prof. Jon Krosnick of Stanford University has another argument: That the order of names on the New Hampshire ballot - in which, by random draw, Clinton was toward the top, Obama at the bottom - netted her about 3 percentage points more than she'd have gotten otherwise. That's not enough to explain the gap in some of the polls, which presumably randomized candidate names, but it might hold part of the answer.

The data may tell us; it may not. What's beyond question is that it is incumbent on us - and particularly on the producers of the New Hampshire pre-election polls - to look at the data, and to look closely, and to do it without prejudging.

...Wednesday afternoon p.s.: Some folks are suggesting that "late deciders" made the difference - a common explanation for poor estimates. But the exit poll doesn't support the notion. Remove voters who decided on Tuesday and the New Hampshire exit poll result is Clinton +2 – exactly her actual margin. (Among those who decided "just today" it was Clinton +3.) Next theory.

January 9, 2008 in Favorite Posts | Permalink | User Comments (886) | TrackBack (0)

In New Hampshire, is it the Indies?

January 07, 2008 11:47 AM

There’s a feature of the New Hampshire Democratic and Republican primaries that’s important to keep in mind as we look forward to tomorrow’s results: A lot of the voters aren’t Democrats or Republicans. They’re independents – Barack Obama and John McCain’s best groups – and in the past their large numbers have compromised the state’s predictive power.

In 2004, nearly half the voters in the New Hampshire Democratic primary – 48 percent – were independents, a remarkable level. In the 2000 Republican primary, 42 percent. Nowhere else, in either of those years, did turnout by independents approach those levels.

It mattered, particularly in 2000: Independents gave McCain his New Hampshire victory that year, while he lost party regulars to George W. Bush. A big win among independents pushed Bill Bradley close to Al Gore in 2000. And Pat Buchanan won Republicans by just one point in 1996 (actually within that exit poll’s error margin), but beat Bob Dole among independents by 9 points.

McCain and Buchanan went on to lose their party’s nominations, and Bradley never came as close to Gore again, in subsequent states where the independent turnout was lower.

Independents seem critical particularly for Obama in New Hampshire; polls from UNH/CNN/WMUR, USA Today/Gallup and Marist all have him leading Clinton by more than 20 percentage points among independents. Among Democrats, by contrast, Marist has Clinton +6, UNH has Obama +5 and Gallup has Obama +8. How Obama ultimately fares among Democrats on Tuesday will be at least as crucial, looking ahead, as his showing among New Hampshire independents.

On the Republican side the pre-election data are a bit more equivocal, but Gallup and UNH alike both have substantially bigger McCain leads among independents than among Republicans; Marist has both groups about the same.

In Iowa last week, Obama trounced Clinton among independents (who were far fewer in number than in New Hampshire) by 41-17 percent, and McCain finished second among independents in the Republican race to Ron Paul. Obama and Clinton finished about even (32-31 percent) among mainline Democrats in Iowa; McCain, by contrast, landed a distant fourth among his party’s regulars there.

In New Hampshire this year, Obama and McCain have to tussle over who draws independents to their party's primary (so-called "undeclareds" can vote in either). And there are a range of variables to consider beyond New Hampshire. Turnout among independents has varied widely in other states. In Maryland Republican primaries, independents have accounted for anywhere from 28 percent of voters in 2000 to 15 percent in 1996.  In Democratic primaries their share has ranged from 40 percent in Wisconsin in 1992 to 29 percent in 2004; and 26 percent in California in 1992 vs. half that share in 2000. (The 1992 exit polls asked political allegiance a little differently, which might account for some of those differences.)

African-Americans are also a potentially key group in the Democratic race – not in New Hampshire, where there are so few of them, but beyond. In Iowa just 4 percent of Democratic caucus-goers were blacks, but they favored Obama over Clinton by a vast 72-16 percent. Imagine the influence that kind of margin would have in places like South Carolina and Georgia, where blacks accounted for 47 percent of Democratic primary voters in 2004; Louisiana, 46 percent; Maryland, 35 percent; or Virginia, 33 percent.

Obama surely would like to retain that kind of support among blacks. More broadly, it seems clear that if he and McCain can fire up independents elsewhere to turn out, it’d help their causes immeasurably. But ultimately, especially outside of New Hampshire, to win Democratic and Republicans primaries, it’d help to win Democrats and Republicans.

January 7, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Spin, or Something

January 04, 2008 9:17 AM

A funny thing happened on the way to the Iowa caucuses. A good name for it is, well, spin. But there are other words that might fit even better.

It happened Tuesday, after the Des Moines Register released its poll showing Barack Obama in the lead in the Democratic race. Mark Penn, chief strategist of the Clinton campaign, put out a fairly blistering memo attacking the survey’s methodology.

The DMR poll, wrote Penn, was "out of sync with the other polling done in the race... depicting an unprecedented departure from historically established turnout patterns... other recent polls all show Hillary trending up... and having the momentum in this race." See his full memo here.

We advised our people internally at the time that this argument had no merit. Penn in effect was saying the DMR should have altered its data to get a different result. Political pollsters do that all the time, but it's voodoo. In reality we were not re-living any previous caucus, so weighting the data to prior parameters was not warranted.

The criticism of DMR's work was out of line – but we didn’t learn how far out of line until this morning.  On the press plane flying from Iowa to New Hampshire, our off-air reporter Eloise Harper reports, “Mark Penn admitted to knowing that the trend was shifting towards Obama this past week.”

That means that at the very moment Penn was accusing the Des Moines Register of producing unreliable data, and saying it was Clinton who had the momentum, he knew otherwise.

The lesson in all this is less about Mr. Penn, and more about political campaigns. They are focused, admirably perhaps, on winning. What they’ll say to get there needs, always, to be taken with a grain of salt. Or maybe a five-pound bag.

January 4, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

In Iowa, Somebody's Wrong

January 03, 2008 1:41 PM

Looking at the final Iowa pre-election polls released the past week, one thing is clear: Some of ’em will have the wrong order of finish.

In the Democratic race, four estimates have Hillary Clinton numerically ahead (albeit by as little as a single point), three Barack Obama, two John Edwards and one tie. They differ on second and third place, as well. And in the Republican race, five of the final-week polls have Mike Huckabee numerically ahead, three, Mitt Romney.

“Numerically ahead” means quite a few of these “leads” are within sampling error. Still, the races aren’t necessarily close. Some of these polls have it close, others not. “Close” is more of a shorthand way of saying it’s unsettled, and that given their limitations in this kind of low-turnout contest, polls can’t give us a really clear prediction of the outcomes.

While this level of inconsistency is unusual, differences are not unheard of. In the 2004 Democratic caucuses, of the five final-week poll estimates, four got Kerry correctly as winner, but one did not. Two others got second place wrong. Moreover, a lot of them were way off on the candidates’ actual support levels. Four of these five had Kerry between 21 and 26 percent support; he actually got 35 percent.

Similarly, while the final polls in the 2000 Republican caucus got the order of finish (Bush-Forbes) right, they all understated Steve Forbes, putting his support at 12 to 25 percent; he got 30. One overstated Bush by a whopping 14 points.

It doesn’t end in Iowa. In past years nearly all New Hampshire polls have gotten the right winner, but in some races have badly misstated actual support levels. It’s a reminder that pre-primary polls are best used to identify the key issues and candidate attributes and to identify the leading players, rather than to precisely handicap the final outcome.

One of these Iowa polls may well be dead-on, and the pollster who produced it likely will claim uncanny skill. Our recommendation: Don’t buy it.

January 3, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

IA and NH: A Quizzical Homage to Firstness

January 02, 2008 9:00 AM

The turning of the New Year is a dandy time for us to pay quizzical homage to the upcoming Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries. Herein, a data-based effort to make some small sense of this quadrennial brouhaha.

Fair warning: It might not work.

It once seemed clear why New Hampshire mattered: Starting with Dwight Eisenhower, no one who lost the state’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary went on to get elected president. Granite Staters spent four decades invoking this factoid, proof positive of their power, prescience and uncanny ability to back the right horse.

Then it crumbled, as coincidences do – yet another alleged bellwether done in by the law of averages. The Democrats went first: Bill Clinton lost New Hampshire but won the presidency in 1992. And then George W. Bush did it in 2000. (Plenty, indeed, don't even get nominated: New Hampshire winners have gone on to the eventual nomination in seven of 10 contested Republican races since 1952, and in just six of 12 on the Democratic side. The total success rate, 13 out of 22, is a tepid 59 percent.)

At least there’s Iowa – only its track record is worse. Just once since Iowa fever took hold in 1972 has the winner of a contested caucus been elected president – Bush in 2000, when he went mano-a-mano with… Steve Forbes. The stronger contender, John McCain, sat it out, pretty much presaging the McCain/Giuliani/Thompson approach this time around.

The gotcha squad might double the score to say that Jimmy Carter took an Iowa victory to election in 1976. So make it two. But Carter didn’t really win… he came in second, to “uncommitted,” an option that represents one of the many oddities of Iowa caucusing. (Intramurally, counting Carter in ’76 and Ed Muskie in ’72 - he also actually lost to “uncommitted” - Iowa winners have gone on to take their party’s nomination five of eight times on the Democratic side, and just two of five times in contested Republican races – a 54 percent hit rate.)

The real fuss, it seems, derives simply from being first – the first caucus, the first primary – and not much else, kind of like the teen-ager who camps out for a week outside the Cajundome in Lafayette, La., to be first in line for Hannah Montana tickets.

There is a payoff: She gets a good seat; Iowa and New Hampshire get first crack at the winnowing process, not so much selecting the next president as culling untenables from the field. The compressed calendar, though, may now mitigate some of that effect.

It’s conjecture whether Iowa and New Hampshire winnow better or any differently than any other states would. There’d be some solace in their obstinate firstness, perhaps, if they looked a lot like the rest of the country, ensuring a mix of issues and voter groups that translate well to the national stage. But consider:

-Ninety-four percent of New Hampshire residents and 92 percent of Iowans are white, compared with 67 percent of the nation’s population.

-Just 55 percent of Iowans and 62 percent in New Hampshire live in or around a major population center, compared with 83 percent of all Americans. Four in 10 Iowans and New Hampshirites alike live in outright rural areas, double the national rate.

-Among the country’s 251 cities with more than 100,000 people, Iowa’s biggest rank 107th (Des Moines) and 190th (Cedar Rapids). New Hampshire’s biggest, Manchester, ranks 216th. Out of 251.

-Three percent of Iowans and 5 percent of New Hampshire residents were born in a foreign country, compared with 12 percent of all Americans. Of the 1.1 million immigrants admitted legally to the country in 2005, 4,536 settled in Iowa, fewer than one-half of one percent; 3,298 in New Hampshire, fewer than one-third of one percent.

-Iowa’s median household income, $41,350, is just under the national average, $44,468. New Hampshire’s, by contrast, is far above it – $55,589.

In the Iowa caucuses, moreover, hardly anyone actually participates. Total turnout in the 2004 Democratic caucuses was 122,193; peak reported Republican turnout was just over 108,000, back in 1988. This in a state that’s home to around 2.2 million eligible voters.

New Hampshire does much better in turnout: it peaked at 42 percent of the voting-age population in 2000, far more than is customary in other states. And pre-election polling suggests a lot higher turnout this time, with hot races in both parties. Still, Iowa and New Hampshire combined will have hundreds of thousands of voters in a primary process that ultimately will involve tens of millions.

There’s a particular oddity about the makeup of voters in the New Hampshire Democratic and Republican primaries: A heck of a lot of them aren’t Democrats or Republicans. In the 2004 Democratic primary, for instance, a whopping 45 percent of voters were registered independents. So were 32 percent in the 2000 Republican primary. That’s a lot more independents than participate elsewhere – partly because of voting rules, and partly because, hey, that’s New Hampshire. Bottom line: It can help insurgents (e.g., McCain 2000, Buchanan 1996, Tsongas 1992). But it can’t give them legs.

Another quirk is that Democratic turnout in New Hampshire is sometimes predominantly female – 62 percent in 2000, 57 percent in 1996 – while Republican turnout tends to be broadly (57 percent) male. And New Hampshire Republican voters are much less likely than those elsewhere to be evangelical Christians (listen up, Mike Huckabee); indeed, in our last poll there, 52 percent of likely Republican voters in New Hampshire favored legal abortion. You heard right.

Iowa can have its own oddities as well; the Democratic race in 2000, for instance, saw especially high turnout among union voters – one in three, compared with 15 percent of the population nationally. The commitment a caucus requires (this is not drop-in voting) makes get-out-the-vote efforts essential. And as far as pre-election polls modeling Iowa’s minuscule turnout… let us say: Aaagh.

Both these states look different on issues as well as demographics. The economy, for example, ranks much lower both in Iowa and New Hampshire than it does nationally. Republicans in both states rank immigration much higher, and Democrats rank health care much higher, than do their counterparts in the country as a whole.

In the end, though, to get the rapt attention of every political junkie in America, Iowa and New Hampshire don’t have to look like the rest of the country. Nor do they have to pick winners. They only have to go first. And that they will, just a few days hence.

January 2, 2008 in Favorite Posts | Permalink | User Comments (17) | TrackBack (0)