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Yes Obama 2012 – AT: Economy
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Yes Obama 2012 – AT: EconomyEconomic winds are changing – key to independent vote for ObamaCharles E. Cook, Jr., Spring 2012, “Have President Obama’s Re-Election Prospects Brightened?”, The Washington Quarterly, http://www.twq.com/12spring/docs/12spring_cook.pdf We’ve seen Republicans go through 21 debates with increasingly over-heated rhetoric and positions on key issues often taken to curry favor with the conservative base of the Republican Party. It’s hardly shocking that the GOP presidential contenders are chasing after Tea Party voters through the primary process. However, independent voters might find it off-putting: those non-aligned voters who are neither conservative nor liberal had turned against Obama because the economy was doing so badly. They could plausibly be turning back with better economic news. At this juncture, it once again appears clear that fundamentalssuch as campaign organization and money, advanced planning, and groundworkstill matter. The laws of gravity still apply. That is a roundabout way of saying that the factors that made Mitt Romney the favorite for the Republican nomination early last fall are still in place. Clearly Romney is encountering substantial difficulty within the GOP, but at this point it is a battle over delegates and it is increasingly unlikely that Senator Rick Santorum or the former speaker Newt Gingrich will be able to over take him. When you get into mid-March and have accumulated more delegates than the rest of the field combined, as Romney has, and in place after place, your rivals are not on the ballot in whole states or file delegate slates in Congressional districts, forfeiting the chance to win delegates there, the race is coming to an effective close. More importantly however, while Romney’s favorable-unfavorable ratings among Republican voters are still strong, there is more or a preference for a more ideologically pure and stylistically bombastic nominee than Romney. The key is preference not opposition. Republicans want something bolder and angrier than Romney but his rivals and not sufficiently strong to tap into those preferences on a consistent basis. More problematic for Romney is that his negatives among independent voters have skyrocketed, as a fundamentally centrist candidate has had to reposition himself as someone far more conservative than his nature to win the nomination, but alienating less ideological independents in the process. This will require substantial repair work over the summer. This also comes at a time when the Republican Party’s ‘‘brand’’ has taken a beating, the cumulative effect of a party that has become obsessed with its conservative base and the Tea Party movement without any regard toward the alienation among moderates and less ideologically inclined independents, many of whom are disappointed by President Obama’s performance in office but are growing increasingly skeptical about the GOP. At best one can describe Romney’s debate performances as uneven. They are sometimes disappointing to his supporters. They give rise to concerns among Republican strategists, who concede that he has had difficulty meeting expectations that existed a few months ago. Republicans hope that this trial by fire will result in Romney being a stronger and tougher general election candidate than he would have been had the nomination been handed to him on a silver platter. This idea recalls Obama’s vast improvement as a candidate, having fought Hillary Clinton to the final round. Overall circumstances in individual Senate and House races have shown a little movement as a result of nominal economic improvements and the slight upward drift in President Obama’s numbers. If it continued, it would be just cause for Republicans to worry and for Democratic hopes to rise. There has been some recent national polling data giving Democrats reason to claim that the winds have turned decisively in their direction. AT: Too Far Off to PredictOur predictions models don’t have to be perfectly accurate to a provide a pretty good idea of who will winJohn Sides, political scientist, PHD, 3-29-2012, “In Defense of Presidential Forecasting Models,” Five Thirty Eight, http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/in-defense-of-presidential-forecasting-models/ But I am less critical of the accuracy of these models than is Nate. For one, forecasters have different motives in constructing these models. Some are interested in the perfect forecast, a goal that may create incentives to make ad hoc adjustments to the model. Others are more interested in theory testing — that is, seeing how well election results conform to political science theories about the effects of the economy and other “fundamentals.” Models grounded in theory won’t be (or at least shouldn’t be) adjusted ad hoc. If so, then their out-of-sample predictions could prove less accurate, on average, but perfect prediction wasn’t the goal to begin with. I haven’t talked with each forecaster individually, so I do not know what each one’s goals are. I am just suggesting that, for scholars, the agenda is sometimes broader than simple forecasting. Second, as Nate acknowledges but doesn’t fully explore (at least not in this post), the models vary in their accuracy. The average error in predicting the two-party vote is 4.6 points for Ray Fair’s model, but only 1.72 points for Alan Abramowitz’s model. In other words, some appear better than others — and we should be careful not to condemn the entire enterprise because some models are more inaccurate. Third, if we look at the models in a different way, they arguably do a good enough job. Say that you just want to know who is going to win the presidential election, not whether this candidate will get 51 percent or 52 percent of the vote. Of the 58 separate predictions that Nate tabulates, 85 percent of them correctly identified the winner — even though most forecasts were made two months or more before the election and even though few of these forecasts actually incorporated trial heat polls from the campaign. This view reflects my “forest, not the trees” approach to consuming these models. I assume that any individual model will always have errors. I assume that although some forecasters are historically more accurate than others, no one has some special forecasting sauce that makes his model the best. So when I see a range of forecasts, I tend to look at the direction that forecast is pointing. That tells me who is likely to win. Looked at this way, the “forest” will rarely lead me astray in “Dewey Defeats Truman” fashion. Perhaps that’s a low bar, but that’s all I am looking for. (And, as Election Day draws closer, there will always be purely poll-based forecasts to draw on as well, both nationally and within states.) To be sure, the forest-not-trees approach does not render criticisms of forecasting models irrelevant. Moreover, forecasters themselves often use “the trees” — i.e., errors in any one model’s predictions — to evaluate the models. So Nate is entirely justified in using these metrics himself. I am also not suggesting that problems in forecast models should be ignored as long as they get the winner right — after all, some models called the winner correctly but overestimated his vote share by 10 points — or that the models cannot be improved, or that there might be better ways of forecasting elections than any of these models. I am simply suggesting that viewed at a distance, the models will rarely “fail” (as the headline of Nate’s post has it) in a way that misleads the average person who follows politics and wants to know only who’s the likely winner, but doesn’t care about root-mean-square error. 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