How Obama Won

President Barack Obama just won reelection a few weeks ago.  There has been a lot of speculation by people on the right about how Romney lost.  Most of it is of execrable quality.  I want to look at it from the other side, from the Obama perspective.  And I am going to start far afield with Gerrymandering.  What is Gerrymandering and how does it work?  Let's start with how it works.

Consider a hypothetical state that has 10 congressional districts.  Assume that the state is evenly split between the Red party (R voters) and the Blue party (B voters) and that the Red party controls the levers of state government, thus putting them in charge of redistricting, resetting the district boundaries after the census that happens every 10 years.  For simplicity let's further assume that the state has 100 voters.  In a real scenario we can think of each of our hypothetical voters as standing in for 1% of the actual population.  So in our case we have 50 R voters and 50 B voters.

Each district would then end up with 10 voters in it.  In an ideal situation each district would end up with 5 R voters and 5 B voters and each election would be a heavily contested affair with the candidate for each party having a 50-50 chance.  We would expect that the Red candidate would win half the time and the Blue candidate would win half the time.  This would result in the state being represented by a delegation consisting of 5 Red congressmen and 5 Blue congressmen.  But the Red state officials would like for things to turn out better for their party and also be less subject to the vagaries of luck.  Here's how they would go about getting their wish.

They would put 6 R voters and 4 B voters in the first district.  They would do the same thing with districts 2 through 8.  At this point they would have allocated 48 R voters and 32 B voters.  They would then put 1 R voter and 9 B voters in district 9.  They would do the same thing in district 10.  All 100 voters would be assigned to a district.  Each district would have exactly 10 voters in it.  But now 8 of the districts would elect Red congressmen and only 2 would elect Blue ones.  All of a sudden a very balanced state ends up with a very unbalanced delegation.

That's how you Gerrymander.  You create as many districts as you can that tilt in your favor by a small margin.  The remaining few districts now tilt in favor of the other guys by a large margin.  The result is that more politicians that you support win (by a small margin) and fewer politicians that you oppose win (by a large margin).  There are now computer software packages that you can download from the Internet that will do this for you automatically.  You plug in the election results from each precinct in the state.  The software then builds a large number of districts that are tilted in your favor by a small margin and a small number of districts that are tilted toward your opponent by a large margin.  There are other considerations.  But the software packages can handle many of them.  So Gerrymandering is now simple to achieve if you control the process for drawing districts.

In our case we were able to tilt things so that what should have been a 5-5 situation becomes an 8-2 situation.  If you have more districts to work with and if you can accurately predict how voters will tilt you can do even better.  So Gerrymandering is a technique to create an unfair advantage in favor of the party that can control how districts are drawn.  The only thing you need to know is the distribution of voters that will support or oppose your preferred group of politicians.

Now this is something both parties do.  But in the recent election the Republicans were much more effective at it.  Why?  Because they controlled the legislatures of way more states than the Democrats in 2011.  This is the year when redistricting was done based on the 2010 census.  Censuses are done on a ten year cycle so redistricting is done on a ten year cycle.  The result of Republican Gerrymandering efforts was that the Democrats had many more votes cast for their candidates in the 2012 elections for the various races for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.  But the Republicans won many more seats anyhow.  It is unusual for one party to control the redistricting process in way more states than the other party.  But it happens.  And it happened in the most recent redistricting cycle.

My state (Washington) has a "nonpartisan" redistricting commission.  But I live in a district that tilts heavily Democratic.  This should have made it possible for Republican representatives to win more races in other districts by winning closely.  It didn't actually happen.  In my state Democrats won a number of close races in supposedly "slightly Republican leaning" districts.  This was actually unexpected.  Most of the smart money said that the Republicans had won the "redistricting war" in my state.  So the smart money expected the Republicans to do better than they actually did.  But my state was an exception.  The Republicans did as well or better than expected in most states.  And they were expected to do well due to Gerrymandering.  So the U.S. House of Representatives for the session that starts in January of 2013 has many more Republican representatives, a comfortable majority in fact, than the overall vote would predict.

So the principles of how to Gerrymander are simple.  Theoretically, the math necessary to pull it off is hard.  But with "off the shelf" software available on the Internet this does not represent a real practical difficulty.  In the past it was easy to spot Gerrymandering.  Some districts would look like abstract art creations, not congressional districts.  But, if you are willing to settle for getting a good Gerrymander rather then the best possible Gerrymander, even this obvious give away can be avoided.  That leaves only one possible problem.

In our little artificial example we assumed we could accurately predict who voters would support.  There is a term of art, a "yellow dog Democrat".  This is a voter who will vote Democratic even if his candidate is a "yellow dog lying in the road".  And, of course, one can imagine yellow dog Republicans.  There are a number of Democratic voters who always vote Democratic and a number of voters who always vote Republican.  These people are frequently described as "hard core" Democratic/Republican voters.  In my example I have assumed that all my voters were hard core voters.  In the real world not all voters are hard core voters.  In fact, pundits talk interminably about "swing" voters.  There are the opposite of hard core.  They sometimes vote for the Democrat and sometimes for the Republican.  Supposedly they are "convincable".

Most of the "informed opinion", baloney for short, had it that the election was all about swing voters.  In fact the field was narrower than that.  It was about swing voters in swing states.  One "expert" went so far as to say that the whole election boiled down to swing voters in one county in Ohio.  But polling suggests that people the experts identified as swing voters went for Romney.  So expert opinion got it wrong.  Their swing voters should have determined the outcome of the election but they didn't.  This doesn't necessarily mean that the experts did a bad job of identifying who were swing voters.  But if they did the identification correctly, it means there was something else going on that turned out to be more important than the whole "swing voter" thing.

Now, the publicly available estimates are that the Obama campaign spent about a billion dollars.  This was matched by about a billion dollars spent by the Romney campaign and a billion dollars spent by "independent groups", actually a dozen or so very rich people.  So three billion dollars were spent to influence the vote of perhaps a hundred thousand voters (swing voters in Ohio).  That's about $30,000 per vote.  If this were how the election truly worked then each vote cost roughly a year's salary for a typical middle class family.  (Assume 1.5 independents per family and you get very close to the median family income of same).  Spending this kind of money on the people who are supposed to determine the outcome only to find out that actually other people would determine the outcome is bad, very bad.  If the Romney people spent their money influencing the wrong group of people while the Obama people spent their money influencing the right group of people then that would explain the outcome.  But it doesn't tell us anything about the people that the Obama campaign targeted, apparently correctly.

We can understand what's going on by returning to our little Gerrymandering lesson.  We learned that you can work magic if you know how people will vote.  One approach a Gerrymandering group can take is to put people into three groups:  us, them, and swing voters, also called "independents".  If the independent group is large then it's hard to Gerrymander.  You can't make a lot of close districts because you have to put in a big enough cushion to allow for the possibility of the independents going heavily for the other guy.  And people don't walk around with a big "R" or "B" tattooed on their forehead.   So the usual technique is to use results from previous elections.  Precinct by precinct election tallies are available.  Theoretically, all you need is to pick one statewide office, say Governor and tally the R and B votes for each precinct.  But if you go with one race, you may have a "good candidate" or "bad candidate" effect.  Let me take a minute to expand on what I am talking about.

I am not talking about "the issues".  I am talking about non-issue oriented attributes of a candidate.  Voters like candidates that are good looking, articulate, and relatable.  Good looks are particularly important for female candidates.  Most successful female candidates are blonds with a full but trim figure.  Height is particularly important in male candidates.  Tall men tend to beat short men.  Height is less important for women and handsomeness is less important for men.  Voters like candidates that give a good speech.  So being articulate helps.  But in this context "articulate" is more related to smooth delivery and an ability to use humor effectively than it is an ability to put together and deliver a well reasoned argument.  In fact, appearing too brainy is a liability.  A "good old boy" will beat a "professor" almost every time.  Voters like a candidate that they think can see things from their point of view.  Bill Clinton is the undisputed master of this.  But if a voter decides a candidate "just doesn't understand my situation", that candidate is in a lot of trouble.

Another attribute voters don't value is actual honesty.  They don't want to be told what they don't want to hear.  They prefer candidates that will make a plausible sounding argument for what the voter wants to believe.  But voters don't like this kind of deception to be rubbed in their faces.  The usual candidate strategy for dealing with this is to be as vague as possible.  Say something bland and meaningless instead of telling the voter what they don't want to hear.  Unfortunately, if a voter agrees with a candidate's position on 9 out of 10 issues he will still vote for the other guy if the other guy throws up enough fog so that the voter doesn't notice points of disagreement.  Effective candidates can expound at great length (here defined as about 3 minutes) while appearing to say something in any situation and in response to any question.  A candidate that has not mastered the effective use of this skill will not be successful.

Gerrymandering committees will put the R, B, and S data for each precinct into the computer model along with whatever other information they think is important and a nice Gerrymander will be produced.  The computer can even figure out how big a cushion each of your districts needs to be safe.  Given that the Republicans did this in 2011, and did it well, there must be more to the story when it comes to the Presidential campaign.

Some elections are high turnout (a relatively high percentage of eligible voters actually cast a ballot) elections and other races are low turnout elections.  The 2008 election was a high turnout election and the 2010 election was a low turnout election.  Polls indicated that the general population had not changed their opinions on the issues by much in the intervening two years but Democrats did very well in 2008 and Republicans did very well in 2010.  What happened?  In the simplest terms, Democrats stayed home in large numbers in 2010 compared to 2008 but the Republican turnout dipped far less between the same two elections.  If you don't vote your vote doesn't count.  The absolute number of Republican votes dipped in 2010 but the absolute number of Democratic votes dipped more.  So the Republicans won a large number of races in 2010 that they had lost in 2008.

Voters hate negative ads.  But they have come to dominate campaigns.  Why?  The general consensus is that negative ads depress the turnout for whoever the ad is aimed at.  If you can depress the number of votes for the other guy more than he can depress the number of votes you get then that gives you an advantage.  All you have to do to win is get more votes than the other guy  And, as the saying goes, "winning is everything".

Republicans have had a long term strategy of catering to voting blocks that reliably turn out and vote.  In relative terms, young people don't vote.  Old people do.  Minorities don't vote.  White people do.  Women don't vote.  Men do.  So the core constituency of the Republican base is old white men.  This has worked very well for them, particularly since the "Reagan revolution".  Historically, white blue collar men, particularly union members, voted for Democrats.  Reagan in the 1980 campaign convinced this group that they had been sold down the river by the Democrats and that Republicans would take much better care of them.  They bought the claim and came over to the Republican party in large numbers.  Union leaders would strongly support Democratic candidates.  But the rank and file would vote Republican in large numbers.  One thing that helped with this argument is that this group is socially conservative and strongly religious.  Democrats had put a lot of effort into liberal causes (civil rights, women's rights, anti-war - viewed by this group as being unpatriotic) and were less effective in implementing changes that were seen as both positive and important to this group.  Republicans were able to put conservative social positions in the forefront and successfully divert attention away from Republican anti-union and pro-business policies that this group would have disliked.  With this block added to their other constituencies, Republicans have been very successful winning elections since 1980.

But Obama has won twice now, and the recent win was the more surprising of the two.  In 2008 the Republicans were coming off of 8 years of what ultimately became a very unpopular President in George W. Bush.  Then the financial crisis hit.  Most people blamed Republican policies much more than Democratic ones.  And Obama was a charismatic figure who ran a very well regarded campaign.  McCain's campaign was not as nearly as well regarded and he was bucking the "W" currents.  So it was not a big surprise when he lost.  2012 was supposed to be a Republican year.  Obama was seen as an ineffective legislator and the economy was in poor shape. The theory was that an "I'm not Obama" campaign would not have much trouble winning.  So what went wrong?

The conventional wisdom is that Romney ran a poor campaign from a technical point of view and that he was a bad campaigner.  While extremely weak on the economy, Obama was seen to have an advantage elsewhere.  He was seen as being on the "right" side of many issues.  But losing candidates have often been on the right side of issues and have still lost.  Many Republicans, Romney most prominent among them, also disagreed with the characterization that Romney ran a poor campaign from a technical point of view.  They thought they had a strategy that would be successful and that they implemented their strategy well.  But they lost.  Why?

In a nut shell those things that I said above about who votes turned out to be wrong, at least relatively speaking.  Obama got large numbers of young people to vote and vote for him.  He got large numbers of minorities to vote and to vote for him.  He also got large numbers of women, particularly single women, to vote and to vote for him.  Taken together, these groups put him over the top.  So why did the Romney people miss all this?

The Republican party has had a very effective messaging machine for decades now.  They started out by convincing large numbers of white blue collar men, frequently union men, to vote for them.  They did this by catering to them on social issues while implementing anti-union and pro-business (and pro rich people) policies.  They used their superior messaging machine to successfully deflect attention away from their unpopular policies. They have now been able to hold on to this block for about 30 years.  And a number of the social issues they have championed, anti-"women's libber" and anti-immigrant/minority issues in particular, are popular with this group.  But you eventually alienate women and minorities by doing this.

They have also been anti-entitlement.  George W. Bush famously championed drastic changes to Social Security in 2005, for instance.  More recently, Republicans have attacked Medicare in its current form.  Many of the Republican core constituency depend heavily on Social Security and Medicare.  Their efforts in these areas have not been completely successful.  But a large number of this core constituency have stuck with them due to the herculean efforts of the messaging machine to frame these initiatives as "necessary reform" whether or not these initiatives really are either necessary or a reform (e.g. improvement).

Republicans have also made a careful calculation that they can keep a large percentage of women on board.  The theory is that husbands will sway married women in sufficient numbers to keep the loss manageable.  As to the young, minorities, and single women, they don't vote (in very large numbers) so they don't count.  This kind of calculus has worked very well for them for decades.  Experts have predicted the death of this strategy for almost as long as it has been around. So anyone opining that "time's up" for this strategy can be rebutted with the many past predictions of its demise that turned out to be incorrect.

Republicans have had electoral success for many years in spite of pushing unpopular positions.  The thing that has made this possible has been their messaging machine.  It has been able to cover up or paper over innumerable unpopular positions.  As a result, politicians associated with many of these unpopular positions in the past have garnered success at the polls anyhow.  Why should this not continue?  And Republicans have also not been shy about trying to use various techniques in the past to keep the turnout low among the groups listed above.  They have been past masters of negative campaigning.  They have long championed voter registration policies that make it hard for the young, who move around a lot, and minorities who are concentrated in a few areas, to register and vote.  The fact that these groups have long been categorized as "groups who don't vote" is testament to their success.  A voter who would normally vote for the other guy but stays home is effectively a vote for your guy.

The Obama campaign made a specific effort to counter all this.  First they did what a traditional campaign would do.  They concentrated their efforts in about ten swing states.  The Romney people did the same thing.  The vast majority of us who lived in one of the "other forty" saw a far different campaign than the swing staters did.  But this was not a differentiators.  As I said, both campaigns did this.

The strategy that the Obama campaign successfully implemented that won them the election was to Get Out The Vote (GOTV, in politics-speak) among traditionally low turnout groups, specifically young people, minorities, and single women.  Everyone, but especially the Romney people, missed this.  The actual Obama vote outdid predictions based on the standard polls by about 2%.  More people voted for him than the pollsters thought would.  Romney, on the other hand, underperformed relative to the standard polls, and way underperformed relative to Romney internal polls.  Why was this?

Well, you remember the discussion above about Gerrymandering.  And how important it is to know which bucket to put voters in, e.g. R, B, or S.  And remember the discussion about how negative advertising depresses turnout.  The Romney campaign assumed that the Republican juju would work one more time.  In the past many polls have overestimated the Democratic turnout and underestimated the Republican turnout.  This campaign was heavily negative by both sides.  That should result in a low turnout election like 2010.  In a low turnout election only hard core voters turn out.  So the Romney people tracked sentiment among hard core voters and figured they were in good shape.  They also tailored the Romney message toward hard core Republican voters for the most part.  If turnout had gone as the Romney people expected he would have won and he and his people would have looked brilliant.

But the Obama campaign saw an opportunity to turn out a large number of people who are the opposite of the traditional hard core voter.  They are young, minority, single women.  They put together a very sophisticated turn out machine designed to get these people to register and vote.  They also devoted a significant part of their traditional campaign to issues important to these people.  In the case of minorities they highlighted immigration and voter suppression.  In the case of single women they highlighted Republican anti-abortion and anti-birth control activities.  They highlighted student loan reforms already implemented and support for science, education, and the environment, issues important to young people.

Campaigning, like most other things, is captive to technological issues.  Historically, the best way to reach people has been TV ads.  So campaigns for the last 50 years have invested heavily in TV ads.  Both the Obama and the Romney people spent a lot of money on TV this time too.  But the Obama campaign put a lot more effort into social media and did it better than the Romney campaign.  They invested in things like Twitter and Facebook.  They invested in an extremely sophisticated GOTV tools.  The Obama tools were better and they worked.

And the biggest irony about the Obama win is that they learned their strategy from Carl Rove.  Rove's nickname is "Bush's brain".  In 2004 he headed up the Bush reelection campaign.  It looked like a bad year for the Republicans.  Rove decided to go after a group of voters and see if he could increase Republican turnout.  He picked a group he was confident were in the Bush camp, evangelicals.  He then put together a sophisticated campaign to reach these people and turn them out.  In his case, he used the informal network evangelical churches use to communicate with each other.  This network is invisible to the Washington punditocracy so he could go about his business out of the public spotlight.  The campaign was not invisible.  The Kerry people figured out what he was doing.  It looked like Rove could turn out 4 million additional Bush voters this way.  So they set out to find enough Kerry voters to counter this.  Their effort was successful.  So why did he lose the election?  Because Rove was able to turn out 8 million new evangelicals.  The additional 4 million overwhelmed the Kerry response and he lost.

I'm sure the Romney people were aware of what the Obama people were up to.  But in the same way the Kerry people underestimated how successful Rove would be, the Romney people underestimated how successful the Obama people would be.  In the case of the Kerry people, you can hardly blame them. They were not wired into the evangelical community so they couldn't accurately gage how successful Rove was being.  And the same is true of the Romney people.  But Romney had an additional problem.  The Republican messaging machine, recently dubbed the "Conservative Entertainment Complex" by David From, a prominent conservative intellectual, has been very successful at lying (Frum's characterization) to the Republican base (and the rest of us) for a long time now.

This operation  is also referred to as the "Conservative Media Bubble".  A lot of conservatives genuinely believed that Romney would win the election.  Why?  Because a lot of people in the Conservative Entertainment Complex/Conservative Media Bubble said Romney would win.  Democrats do not have an equivalent Bubble.  They have been forced by Republicans to live in the real world.  So I am sure that a lot of people in the Kerry campaign thought their guy would win.  But some of them had their doubts.  And I am sure that none of them believed that a loss was impossible.  So far no one has found anyone in the Romney organization who thought it was possible for Romney to lose.

Besides the win itself, there is another thing that seems to have come out of the election.  One of the themes that the Obama campaign hammered on continuously was that conservatives in general and Romney in particular was dishonest.  This idea was definitely reinforced by the spectacular and very public failure of the Conservative Entertainment Complex (Fox TV, Rush Limbaugh and others on the radio, etc.) to predict the outcome of the election.  It is definitely possible that this reputation for dishonesty will dissipate.  But what if it doesn't?  Credibility is important in the short run and critical in the long run.

Political parties and movements come back from the dead all the time.  Republicans did it in 2010 after being beat badly in 2008, way more badly than they were beat in 2012.  But the key to a comeback is to have a message that works and to have people believe the message.  If people think an individual or group is dishonest then they will think "that's just old so and so mouthing off again" and not pay attention to what he is saying.  I don't know how you make a comeback if no one is paying attention to what you say.  Republicans have come back from setbacks far worse than the 2012 election results before.  They have done it by coming up with a popular message and then getting it out using their messaging machine.  But this will not work if no one believes the message machine.  In this environment they become responsible for their many unpopular policies. This makes it even harder for them to come back.

It is way to soon to write off the Republican messaging machine.  But if it turns out that the Obama campaign has severely damaged it then 2012 may turn out to be a "sea change" election like 1980.