People have asked me to supply sources I have used to track Presidential campaign contributions so they can conduct their own investigations. As I wrote awhile ago, when i visited Iowa a friend did not want to know about the candidate’s positions on issues, she wanted to know “Who had bought them,” as she put it.

Let us begin with where the data come from and what is in these reports. Every Presidential candidate is required to file a monthly finance report by the Federal Election Commission. There is usually about a one month lag between the data in the report and their official release by the Commission. Here is a screen shot of the infamous line 17 of a federal election report filed by Hillary Clinton. Line 17 lists individual contributors.

Note the data on this page. We have the name of the contributor, their address, their employer, their area of employment, the date of the contribution and the amount. If you have the stamina you can go to the FEC site and call up the reports for each candidate and examine all the individual donors listed on line 17. The FEC makes things a bit easy in that the contributors are alphabetized, but there is no way, for example, to track how many people from “x” corporation gave money.

This is where the agregator sites come in. They actually take the time to go through these data and break it down by corporation, amount, etc. There are several of these sites. The one I use the most often is run by the Center for Responsive Politics: opensecrets.org. Another site that uses opensecrets data but connects it with voting records and other policy information is Project Vote Smart.

Other useful sites include the Campaign Finance Information Center, finance sites run by the Washington Post and New York Times plus the Congressional Quarterly’s Money Line.

If you really want to dig into individual contributors there also is a website, Fundrace that actually lets you research these individual contributions, so you can enter the name of a company or an occupation (actor) and see who are the donors. Check out which candidates your boss might be supporting or the person in the next cubicle or your neighbor.

There is one part of this that has a certain 1984ish quality about it, especially when you start looking up people you know or famous people. You can look up data on Fundrace by city. In fact there are even maps for every geographic area like ones you use to find restaurants or car repair shops, only these maps have little red and blue dots on them for donors. The bigger the dot, the bigger the donor. Just like those maps you can zoom in on your block to see who is contributing and how much. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of these since I know friends and neighbors who have contributed but do not show up on the map.

These databases have created a boom industry for reporters who want to write about which candidates Hollywood celebrities are supporting and how much they have given them. Bette Middler and Ben Stiller are Hillary Clinton donors. Michael Douglas and Paul Newman gave to Chris Dodd. After Dodd dropped out Newman gave to Obama. Then to cover his bets, he and his wife Joanne Woodward gave to Hillary Clinton.

If the scary part is how it pinpoints even the smallest donor (a mail carrier in a townhouse near me gave $200 to Obama), it also is helping to lift a veil secrecy over campaign finance. This is especially true of the big donors. The more we can lift that veil, the more the true nature of each candidate’s donors stands revealed before us. And if you are like my friend from Iowa you can know who is supplying the money for each candidate.

Tagged with: campaign contributors • campaign finance • federal election commission • Goldman Sachs • Hillary Clinton • impact of campaign contributions • new-york-times • opensecrets.org • Washington-Post

In the artificially muted sunlight, the shiny SUV sits improbably on the flat top of a stone monolith whose daunting vertical sides emphasize the miraculous scene, as if God’s hand had carefully set the vehicle there like a child playing with a toy. In the background reddish brown buttes and rocky crags stretch past the edges of the frame. With the incongruous exception of the SUV, you cannot see a trace of another human being, not even a faint trail.

This Monument Valley setting has become the backdrop of choice for a saurian menagerie of vehicles from tyrannosuarean pickups to four wheelers that skim across the landscape like velociraptors. Advertisers deliberately choose this setting to echo in the American imagination, for since its appearance in John Ford’s Stagecoach, Monument Valley has represented moviemaking shorthand for the Old West. One half expects the Duke himself to appear holding a rifle.

The incongruity of the scene draws a second look that leads to a question the Duke himself might ask, pointing his rifle, “Just who the heck put that darned thing up there?” Someone who might answer that question is Leo Marx, who almost half a century ago wrote the classic The Machine in the Garden. Marx’s exploration of art, political speeches and other nineteenth century artifacts showed the era’s profoundly ambivalent attitude toward America’s growing industrialization.

One prime exhibit came in the form of a George Innesss painting, The Erie and Lackawama RR, which portrayed a dark, steam-belching locomotive cutting across the edenic scenery of the Hudson River Valley. The SUV on the monolith appears to contradict the theme Marx uncovered, a contradiction that speaks volumes about where America, and particularly Liberal America, has traveled over the last century. If for Marx the ambivalence in the Inness painting came from the smoke of industrialization, the image of the SUV betrays ambivalence about reality itself in this media era.

Were he alive today, John Ford would have no ambivalence about that SUV. Since the singular, symbolic place that is Monument Valley served as a virtual cast member for Ford’s famous stock company, punctuating the action like a moody chorus, the director would have regarded that SUV as an obscenity, like spitting in the Sistine chapel.

That might be too strong an opinion, but most SUV commercials do have the tone of video games where the player tries to maim as many people as possible, only instead of human beings it is rocks and trees that they ride roughshod over. These ads typically feature some four-wheeled beast careening over the landscape, undaunted by precipitous mountain sides, rapids-filled streams, or piles of immense boulders. In the SUV commercials, unlike the Inness painting, the vehicle not only dominates the composition, but seems to impose its will on the landscape. It’s all about “intimidation” intones one ad, as if to say, nature means nothing to me, save as a playground for my pleasure.

A series of Chevy pickup ads even seems to parody the whole genre, blowing its trucks up to monster size (honey, I’ve enlarged the truck!), their brontosaurean proportions causing us to feel like those people in Jurassic Park who wander too far off course. The audacity of these ads, which range from the ridiculous to the obscene, suggests that not merely nature, but reality itself has become a playground where the bag of tricks that lie in hard drives can make the impossible real.

That SUV in Monument Valley confirms what all of us have feared: the distance between the television screen and audience is disappearing, transforming the tube from glass hearth into an electronic portal through which we can commute to another world as surely as walking through a wardrobe into Narnia. There no longer exist separate realities of real and make-believe, heaven and earth that remain clearly delineated in everyone’s mind. Somehow the gods have come down to earth. Mighty Olympus has been reduced to a molehill and Zeus and Athena walk among us while plotting the fates of the cosmos on their cell phones.

Nature and its mysteries have traditionally been the sources of magic and spiritual visions. Shamans harnessed those shapes that flickered in the firelight, Moses and Jesus went into the desert, and more recently Thoreau and Muir become secular saints whose sermons celebrated the power of wildness. In the SUV ads we manipulate nature–whether on a computer screen or in reality doesn’t really matter. The nature of the shaman disappears forever, the magic tamed by SUVs, CPUs and CPAs.

The manipulation of our media environments symbolized by placing an SUV on a monolith parallels a similar attitude about manipulating our natural environment. Where the one says we have the tools to create and manipulate any vision from the orcs of Middle Earth to the multiple Mr. Smiths of The Matrix, the other says that we can also do that to the realm of the real. We can control nature just as surely as we can control computer images. The phenomenal achievement of The Lord of the Rings series lies in its ability to literally create an entire world with exacting detail, from its landscapes to every living thing that populates them.

In suburban America developers have created equivalents to Middle Earth by bulldozing, dynamiting, and even dewatering to create totally artificial worlds within what used to be acres of grass and forest. Much of the prevailing interpretation of the suburbs speaks about them as a classic example of our need to live somewhere between nature and civilization. The suburbs, goes the interpretation, lie between city and country, their expansive lawns a symbol of that desire for what Marx termed the “middle landscape.”

In actuality, though, the suburbs and SUV ads represent the domination of nature. Suburban construction routinely ignores the natural features of the terrain in a way that would cause Frank Lloyd Wright to become apoplectic. Hills flatten, wetlands dry up, streams straighten, ponds fill and forests disappear with the wave of a transect, all to fulfill some master script, much as in the filming of Hollywood epics, where if something in the “real” world doesn’t fit, it can be matted out with something better.

The motivations that put SUVs on monoliths and suburbs in farm fields stem from the same ideology, one which sees nature as something that can be manipulated however the developer wishes. The much-maligned sameness of many developments comes only in part from their architecture. The real sin lies in the bulldozing of unique natural features that might place those houses in some truly distinct setting. Even as they replant the landscape, these developers often forego native trees and shrubs for generic greenery, the way plastic trees populate children’s play sets.

Like the Inness painting of a train steaming across the landscape, the SUV on the monolith represents a symbol of our uneasiness over our times. In the nineteenth century, as Leo Marx points out, people like Thoreau worried about what the machine was doing to the garden. In our own times faced with the SUV on the monolith, people have attacked the symbol but not what lies behind it. We face a more serious environmental crisis that rivals even global warming. Media manipulation and the manipulation of the suburban landscape represent an attempt to remake the American social and intellectual environment. Putting corporate logos on football stadiums, police cars and school hallways plus the obliteration of unique environmental communities and the falsification of media images makes individualism, truth, and intellectual freedom as much endangered species as the spotted owl or the snail darter. The landscape we stand to lose becomes not only local ecological communities but the unique trails and spiritual monuments of the human mind.

Essay adapted from the book <i>The Strange Death of Liberal America</i>.

Tagged with: frank lloyd wright • john ford • landscape • lord of the rings • manipulating nature • monument valley • nature • suburbia • SUV • suv commercials • thoreau

Has the playing field become so tilted that big money calls the shots while the average American is left out? March campaign data offer a mixed answer.

Below are the March figures courtesy of our main source, opensecrets.org. I am including information on John McCain for the first time, because one question on the minds of many Democrats is whether McCain can now start hording cash for the Presidential race while the Democrats burn all their funds fighting each other.

Obama now has a healthy funding lead over Hillary Clinton–a lead so large that it equals both Clinton and McCain’s cash on hand with almost ten million to spare. This funding lead is what lies behind the controversy about more debates. Debates are free exposure, so the Clinton people are pushing for more of them.

The other notable data on this chart is that Hillary Clinton’s debt continues to grow. Clearly Clinton is borrowing against the future, hoping to pour funds into the current contests. If you do the elementary accounting and subtract debt from cash in hand, then Clinton is in serious trouble in trying to keep up with Obama.

Almost half that ten million is owed to–guess who–former Clinton pollster and campaign advisor Mark Penn, who according to the New York Times is owed $4.5 million. Penn’s debt would equal one-third of McCain’s total war chest. Not bad for a guy who got fired. As the saying goes, “Nice work, if you can get it.” Then there is Clinton advisor Harold Ickes, whose for-profit company is owed $245,000. Washington campaign finance lawyer Ken Gross put the debt in perspective:

We are not used to seeing eight-figure debt in a campaign.

For Democrats this ought to raise red flags about a Clinton presidency. Clinton can’t keep her campaign out of debt and much of the debt is owed to cronies who seem to be lining their own pockets.

McCain’s low totals may be misleading. With no reason to spend money until the Democrats have a candidate, he can continue to pile up contributions. The question will be whether his donors can make up the current considerable gap between him and Obama. If not, this would mark the first campaign in a long time where the Democratic Presidential candidate has enjoyed a substantial funding advantage. If there is any more telling gauge on what George W. Bush has done to the Republican Party, I don’t know what it is.

This sets up an improbable scenario in which the Republican candidate opts to go with public financing. It also backs the Democrats into a corner because they have the financial advantage, but McCain would own the moral high ground, especially given the perception that Obama pledged to run his campaign on public funds if the GOP candidate did the same.

If he gets the nomination, Obama would be wise to leverage this advantage into an iron-clad commitment that all future Presidential campaigns be run on public funds. This would finally accomplish the long-sought goal of lessening the impact of big money on Presidential elections. In addition it would allow Obama to move those funds to other Democratic races to help offset the GOP’s advantage in state contests and help insure that there is a Democratic Congressional minority that supports his agenda.

The Funding

Much has been made of Obama’s many small donors. Only about $14 million of Obama’s campaign contribution come from donors pledging over $4,600. An astounding $20 million comes from donors pledging less than $1,000. Total donors at this amount is over 57,000 people. This is unprecedented. No Presidential campaign has ever raised so much money from those William Jennings Bryan called the common people since perhaps Bryan himself.

These small donors hold out the promise that Obama could use them much as Ronald Reagan used his supporters, calling on them to help when the GOP threatens to tie up needed legislation that would help to level the playing field that has become so tilted under the Bush Administration. Finally, this amazing number of small donors should put to rest the idea that Obama does not resonate with the average American.

On the other hand, Clinton’s campaign depends heavily on large donors. $31 million comes from donors pledging over $4,600, while only $10 million comes from the under $1,000 group. To put this in perspective: Hillary Clinton owes Mark Penn almost half as much money as her entire total from small contributors! Total donors at this level is 32,000–less than half Obama’s total. This is a major reason why the Clinton campaign may be facing financial trouble, because her heavy dependency on large donors means many of them are probably maxed out and cannot contribute more.

The Donors

The last report identified some interesting trends in the big donor lists of each candidate. For Clinton those included the drop in rankings of EMILY’s list. For Obama it was the appearance of UBS AG, a Swiss company that, according to their web page, is the leading global wealth manager and one of the largest global asset managers. According to a February 27, 2007 story by World Law Direct (a major online provider of legal services):

Swiss banking giant UBS has agreed to pay $100 million, one of the largest fines ever against a securities firm, after admitting that some former employees had violated Federal Reserve Board rules by transferring U.S. currency to Cuba, Libya, and Iran.

UBS also was involved in the subprime lending fiasco leading to the resignation of UBS head Peter Wuffli.

The other story concerned changes in funding by some of the big donors. Goldman Sachs, for example, switched from Clinton to Obama. Technology rivals Microsoft and Google each elected to put their money on different candidates with Microsoft funding Clinton and Google Obama.

Here are the March side-by-side comparisons:

For Clinton, the good news comes from EMILY’s List which increased its contribution by over $100,000 from February. EMILY’s List played a big role in Clinton’s win in Ohio, her winning the popular vote in Texas and Tuesday win in Pennsylvania. It may not be too much to say, EMILY’s List may have saved the Clinton campaign.

Besides EMILY’s List there are no political PACS on either candidate’s list. ActBlue was one of John Edwards’ top supporters, but with Edwards now out of the race and holding a strict neutrality, it has not shifted funding to either of the others.

The other interesting entry is the University of California which now has risen to second place on the Obama donor list and appears for the first time on Clinton’s list. Lest some Californians wonder what their University is doing involved in a political campaign I quote from the opensecrets.org site:

The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came from the organization’s PAC, its individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals’ immediate families.

In other words, faculty members, employees and students at the University are the contributors. In addition to the University of California, the Obama campaign lists Howard University and the University of Chicago as major donors, while Clinton has only the one academic institution.

The appearance of Bear Stearns on Clinton’s list at the very time they were appealing for a bailout should raise a few eyebrows.

Of the other donors, Goldman Sachs continues to be the biggest spender. It increased its February contribution to Obama by $100,000, but its contribution to Clinton by only $27,000. J.P. Morgan, which bought out Bear Stearns, increased its Obama contribution by a little over $70,000 and its Clinton contribution by about half that.

Both Goldman Sachs and J.P.Morgan also appear on McCain’s donor list although only in the $100,000 range. One safe prediction is that this will change substantially as the campaign moves along.

Troubling Thoughts

The huge donations made by financial firms, all involved in the current crisis, continue to be troubling. I have predicted that as the mortgage crisis and its financial reverberations continue to grow, the economy will become the issue of the campaign. There seems little doubt it will be number one on the table when the new administration and Congress take office next January. It is hard for me to believe the wife of the man who repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, which played a major role in creating this mess, can be a viable candidate in November, but then no one in the mainstream media has asked about it.

As I noted last month, this domination by financial firms is a change from the mix of donors that funded Bill Clinton’s successful 1996 run. Among Bill Clinton’s top twenty donors were AT&T, Sprint, Raytheon, Energy Corp, and Walt Disney. His number one contributor was the accounting firm of Ernst and Young.

Here is what opensecrets had to say about Goldman Sachs:

It has been a major proponent of privatizing Social Security as well as legislation that would essentially deregulate the investment banking/securities industry.

As for J.P. Morgan, besides its role in the Bear Stearns bailout, here are its political priorities:

As expected, the firm has lobbied heavily on legislation that would affect the nation’s financial industry, including bankruptcy reform and banking deregulation.

It is not too much to say that as next year dawns, these financial firms will make solving the current crisis as difficult as the drug companies have made solving the health care crisis. The one optimistic note is that currently Barack Obama’s unprecedented number of small donors holds out the hope that he will be less beholden to the likes of Goldman Sachs than the other candidates.

One thing for certain, keeping the playing field level will be a major battle a year from now, for as the tilt has grown you can begin to hear the cries for help of those sliding down a slope built by the Republican Counterrevolution.

Tagged with: Add new tag • average American • Barack Obama • Bear Stearns • campaign finance • campaign_contributors • common people • Democratic Party • EMILY's List • Goldman_Sachs • google • Hillary Clinton • hillary clinton campaign • John Mcain • level playing field • microsoft • mortgage crisis • small donors

Blogging live on the eve of the Pennsylvania primary. The final polling data for Pennsylvania is in from Real Clear Poilitics. They show a slight increase in the percentage for Hillary Clinton and a smaller increase for Barack Obama.

The exact percentages are: Clinton–49.5; Obama–43.4. On Sunday Clinton led 47.4% to 42.3%, which registers as a jump of 2.1% for Clinton over the last 48 hours. More importantly this also puts Clinton on the threshold of the 50+% she needs to make a creditable showing in Pennsylvania. It also puts her close to the 52% which had been her high total a month ago.

It is important to note this is polling data, not exit polls of actual voters, but it suggests Hillary Clinton has regained her momentum. The downside of these data are that they raise expectations for Clinton a bit higher than they were.

Now we will see how the votes turn out.

Early Results

Turnout is reported to be high, but an even better indication of how high is that the major search engines on the net seem to be overwhelmed by the traffic.

Curiously the first exit poll data from ABC contradict the above movement saying:

Despite all the down-to-the-wire campaigning, preliminary exit poll results indicate that nearly eight in 10 Pennsylvania voters made up their minds at least a week ago, and six in 10 decided on their candidate more than a month ago — a higher number of early deciders than the norm in Democratic primaries to date.

f you read between the lines eight in ten means 20% undecided–which is a pretty high total! I wouldn’t want ABC analyzing my data!

First Data

The Associated Press has the first data, but you have to do a little manipulating to get it as the main AP web site is jammed. I found mine at the Seattle Times. Here is what our table looks like based on these data:

These VERY early data look promising for Clinton. Essentially it shows that the voters she needed to activate showed up in high numbers. Obama will now need high totals among the young and African Americans to offset this. Don’t expect these data soon.

Union voters were the key, according to my earlier analysis. If the 30% figure is accurate it suggests a turnout double their percentage of population. That will be very hard for Obama to beat.

More Data

The Las Vegas Sun reports:

One in 10 voters changed their party registration since the start of the year so they could vote in the hotly contested primary, which was open only to registered Democrats. About half of the party-switchers had been registered Republicans and the rest had been unaffiliated with either party. Another roughly 3 percent were voting for the first time in Pennsylvania.

As usual, the early exit poll data is focusing on the issues the networks think are important but not giving us any demographic data. If these data were what you were getting back from your field people at campaign headquarters, you would fire them all.

The interesting thing is the mainstream media already HAVE the demographic data, but don’t seem to think we would be interested in it.

By the way, with a bit of a lull here before the polls close in less than an hour, here is the URL for the site that does the polling for the networks and the AP. It will allow you to click back and forth between various networks to see how they are all treating the same data set.

Edison Media Research

The use of one firm by all the major news organizations does save some money, but you have to ask what if there were another firm doing the polling? Is the fact that a single firm does the polling responsible for some of the errors in the past that have been magnified because they have been reported by everyone at the same time?

A Projection

When the polls close in a little bit, I will make an early projections based on the data we have so far and explain why. Stay tuned.

While we are waiting, the Times online reports, “Early exit poll spells bad news for Hillary Clinton.” The basis for the article is a last minute poll showing Clinton winning 52-48%. They must not be reading the same data we are.

Now that the polls are closed, based on the data we have I will call Pennsylvania for Clinton. Unless the demographic data we have are totally off or those voters have suddenly switched their voting habits, I will even suggest that she will reach the 50% I said she needed to make a respectable showing. The way things are trending, the data look quite a bit like Ohio where Clinton won 54%. In Ohio the union turnout was 34%. The turnout of voters over 55 was over 40%.

In Ohio the African American turnout was 18% and that still was not enough to help Barack Obama, which he lost by 10%. A turnout of 18% in Pennsylvania would beat the previous record African American turnout of 17%. For Obama, then, the “x” factor at the moment is the turnout of young voters, for whom we do not have any data.

BTW, remember you heard it here first. The networks will not call it because they are not looking at the demographic data. They also want to keep you watching.

Next Data Set

We now have some more complete data from CNN. To their credit they withheld this until the polls closed.

The most startling numbers in this poll are the figures for older and younger voters. CNN breaks down their groups differently than I do, but their tables show that only 27% of those under 44 voted with the remainder going to those over 44. I predict one of the questions people will ask about this campaign is what happened to Obama’s young warriors?

The overall impression of these data are that Clinton could be moving towards a win like Ohio where she won by 10%.

It’s About Time

The networks have finally decided to call the contest. Remember they knew what I knew when I called the race an hour ago. This late call was about keeping viewers on the hook as long as possible. The other interesting piece, as one analyst pointed out, is this will get Clinton on the evening news.

Some new data from CNN, but only a few changes.

The only large shift in the last hour has been the increase in the total of women voting. EMILY’s list played a big part in Clinton’s performance in Ohio and Texas. They deserve credit also for Pennsylvania.

I will post some more detailed analysis in a bit as I review some of the data from the previous primaries. The question is: does this hurt Obama and how much?

Analysis: Five Questions

1) The Delegates: The idiots at the networks, etc, have forgotten the rules of the Pennsylvania primary. Remember that the delegates are allocated by PRECINCT, not statewide. In other words, in each precinct each candidate gets a percentage of delegates equal to their percent of the vote in that precinct. Why is that relevant? From the data I have seen Barack Obama may have won as much as 80%–perhaps even more–in some Philadelphia precincts. It is unlikely Clinton won any precincts by that big a margin.

I predict that the final delegate count will be much closer than the actual vote. Pennsylvania could even end up like Texas, with Obama ending up with the most delegates–although I think that would be unlikely. I could see the delegates splitting so Clinton’s margin of victory IN THE DELEGATES is only a few percentage points. This will not be enough to substantially impact Obama’s overall lead.

2) Clinton’s Campaign: It has become pretty clear that given Obama’s delegate lead that the only way Hillary Clinton can win the nomination is to cut up Barack Obama so badly that Democrats start wondering if he can win. Make no mistake, the Clintons know this campaign is about who shall control the Democratic Party. That is why this is the most ferocious nomination contest since the Humphrey-McCarthy-Kennedy campaign of 1968 and the Goldwater-Rockefeller Republican campaign of 1964. This scorched-earth strategy does the Democratic Party no good.

3) Where are the Democratic Leaders? While Hillary Clinton has been cutting up Obama, those Democratic leaders who supposedly support him have largely been silent. This has produced the bizarre spectacle of an ex-President acting like an attack dog while the Party leadership has behaved like poodles. When someone is subject to character assassination then it is up to the friends and supporters of that person to stand up. Joe McCarthy was successful for awhile because so many people were deserted by their friends and supporters when they were blacklisted. Barack Obama cannot govern by himself. If his supporters do not come to his defense now, what will happen when he needs them for something really serious?

4) Obama’s Base: One major question remaining about Barack Obama is one I have raised before–can he expand his base? In 1996, 34% of all voters had an income under $30,000. In the Pennsylvania primary, only 20% of those voting fell into that group. I will say this for the umpteenth time: the Democrats cannot win without these voters. They just barely won in 1996 with a sitting President! I am still waiting for Obama to make that speech about justice, equality and the need for a level playing field.

Even more troubling is that in Pennsylvania, Obama’s base did not turn out. The young people who have been such a refreshing addition to the Democratic Party seem to be cooling off. This group inspired thoughts of the Obama campaign becoming another “Children’s Crusade” like 1968. Pennsylvania tarnishes that hope.

5) Troubling Data: Besides what has become increasingly clear–Clinton and Obama’s supporters do not like each other–there are some troubling findings in the exit poll data from Pennsylvania.

Some of these data suggest the GOP may have been meddling in this primary. Eleven percent said neither candidate was trustworthy. Six percent believed neither could improve the economy and less than half believed both could. But the key statistic is that eleven percent said they would vote for McCain for President! According to the exit poll data, 69% of these McCain voters went to Obama.

The other troubling thread is race. Of the nineteen percent who said the race of the candidate was important to them, 58% voted for Clinton. Which means they voted for her because she is white. If you do the math, 58% of 19% is 11%–more than the margin of victory for Clinton. Thirteen percent of whites said race was important versus only 4% of African Americans. A troubling 74% of those whites voted for Clinton.

Final Thoughts

The numbers are clear. Hillary Clinton cannot win the nomination unless she cruises to huge victories in the remaining primaries, convinces superdelegates to change their declared preference, or bloodies Obama so badly that the Party decides he cannot win. As you will see in Friday’s essay, Clinton does not have the money to mount the kind of campaign that would yield that 60%, nor has she ever won 60% in any contest. That leaves the superdelegates or the scorched strategy. Now the question is at what point does this become destructive to the Democratic Party?

Tagged with: Barack Obama • democratic primary results • equality • exact percentages • exit polls • Hillary Clinton • justice • level playing field • major search engines • Pennsylvania • Pennsylvania exit polls • polling • polling data • real clear poilitics • turnout

The “Make Your Own Analysis” guide turns its attention to Pennsylvania. If you’ve never been in a campaign headquarters the night of an election, this will perhaps give you some feel, although a big-time campaign on the Presidential level will have far more data than you will see here.

Having run for office a couple of times, I can say there is nothing quite like watching the returns come in. It’s like a sports contest as you watch each precinct and then compare it with what you think you needed to win. I can remember one memorable race where I was winning every precinct, only to have a huge vote come in from one precinct that cost me the election.

Clinton campaign strategist and election night talking head James Carville, once described Pennsylvania as two suburbs with Alabama in between. Pennsylvanians, especially, rural Pennsylvanians have not forgotten this. We will see how Carville spins it on Tuesday night. Interestingly, no one brought this up during the dust-up over Barack Obama’s remarks about rural Pennsylvania.

Clearly, looming over the contest is the impact of Barack Obama’s remarks about small town Pennsylvania and last week’s debate. I won’t reprint the remarks here, because anyone who has not heard about them has either been on an Amazonian expedition or living off the grid. Nor will I go into the discussions about the remarks and the Obama campaign’s spin on them, because people have pretty much made their minds up by this point.

As for last week’s debate, a similar question arises about whether Clinton’s aggressive attacks on Obama along with the questioning of the ABC moderators hurt or helped Clinton. The Internet is recording a large backlash against the negativity, but there are also a lot of people who believe Obama’s responses left something to be desired.

Which brings us to Pennsylvania. These are the people whose minds matter on Tuesday. For once, the media framing of a primary makes some sense, for what now matters is how much damage did the “bitterness: remarks and the debate inflict on the Obama campaign. For Obama supporters, is the message of a new politics registering with voters?

Here are the latest polling data for the state.

Source: RealClearPolitics

This poll is a composite of all the major polls. The purple line is Hillary Clinton; the green Barack Obama. Clinton leads 47.4% to 42.3%. The trending lines are interesting. Clinton received a slight increase after the Obama “bitterness” remarks, but no as much as you might expect. In fact, Obama has been trending up and Clinton down in recent days. One factor that might have contributed to that is the debate.

If you factor in the usual polling error of plus or minus 2%, then this race looks to be close where once Clinton appeared to have it won handily. In a sense, then, Pennsylvania mirrors the trend of the campaign.

Primary Rules

It is important to remember that Pennsylvania is a proportional primary, not winner take all. More crucially the proportional rule does not apply across the state–by that I mean if Hillary Clinton wins 50% of the state she does not automatically get 50% of the delegates. Instead the proportions are allocated at the precinct level.

For those counting delegates, this means that in order to cut into Obama’s lead, Clinton will have to win a majority of precincts by a comfortable margin. The networks cannot possibly give you a precinct count, so be wary of any predictions about the real outcome of this race, which probably will not be known for awhile.

For our purposes we will focus on the entire state, knowing that the precinct level could alter the final delegate count substantially–as it did in Texas, where the media gave Clinton the win only to have Obama wind up with the most delegates.

Turnout

The number of independents voting and the crossover vote will be not be as big a factor in Pennsylvania as it has been elsewhere. The Pennsylvania Primary is a closed primary, meaning you have to declare a party affiliation as part of registering to vote. You had to do this in March, so there will be no last minute independents voting in this primary. If you are as an independent, you either had to change your affiliation to the Democratic Party by the end of March or you are shut out.

Here is how one blog in Philly explained it:

As of November of 2007, there were about 100,000 registered independents in the city of Philadelphia—about 10% of all voters. Because PA has a closed primary system, none of them is going to be able to vote for Clinton or Obama, or in any other tight local race in the April 22nd election.

Which means in local elections, we’re losing the ability to turn out votes from a natural constituency for progressive change (young voters) because of antiquated laws.

Given Clinton’s lead and the closed primary, it will be difficult for Obama to bring in the last-minute and independent voters that have helped him in other campaigns.

Demographics (Census Data)

The big picture is that Pennsylvania should be a Clinton state. Its demographics very closely parallel those of neighboring Ohio, which Clinton won comfortably–54% to 44%. Anything less than 50% for Clinton would be a disappointment, no matter how her campaign spins it. The fact the Clinton campaign is being tight-lipped about predictions along with the polling data suggest she may well finish below the needed 50%.

Obama will need a high turnout of African American voters to offset Clinton’s current lead in the polls and that means Philadelphia. Philadelphia’s African American mayor is a strong Hillary Clinton supporter, which has spawned a great deal of local coverage. The question everyone is asking is how much will his support hurt Obama? The answer is that it cannot help but draw some needed votes away.

Census data show African Americans make up 10.7% of Pennsylvania residents. Obama will need to turnout a number higher than this to help cut into Clinton’s lead. If this figure approaches in the mid to high teens or more it would be VERY significant. Pay close attention to the Philadelphia turnouts. If they are high, they will provide Obama with that 15%.

Typically when Obama has won he also has captured 85% or better of the African American vote. So the first trend to watch is the turnout percentage then as the evening wears on watch the voting percentage. I expect many Philly precincts to have large turnouts, so don’t expect them to report early.

Young voters have always gone for Obama. Census data show 18.8% of potential Pennsylvania voters fall into the 20-34 year-old age group. Even though these voters tend to have low turnouts, if Obama can move this number into the 20s, he may have a chance. Pennsylvania is known for its large number of colleges and universities, which have been a strong Obama base. Watch for turnouts in these college towns such as the home of the Nittany Lions–State College, where both campaigns are targeting last minute efforts. The Penn State system has over 20 campuses in communities such as Wilkes-Barre, Harrisburg, and York.

CBS reported yesterday:

Among Pennsylvania students who will vote or have voted in a Democratic primary in any state, Obama leads Hillary Rodham Clinton 71 percent to 28 percent, and among those who intend to vote in the Pennsylvania primary, Obama leads by a nearly identical margin of 71 percent to 29 percent.

The one group that has stayed with Hillary Clinton is older voters, especially voters over 55. In Pennsylvania almost of quarter of all voters fall into that cohort. The imbalance between older and younger voters in the Census data may also account for Clinton’s lead. If Clinton can keep this imbalance tilted her way, she should maintain her lead. Typically Clinton has won when the turnout among these voters is in the 30% range and she captures close to 60% of their votes.

Pennsylvania is also 51.4% female. Although Obama won a sizable percentage of female voters during his winning streak, Clinton’s lead in Pennsylvania suggests that at least in this state they remain Clinton supporters. EMIILY’s List and other groups are boosting Clinton and clearly made a difference in Texas and Ohio.

It is clear that as in Ohio and Texas, Pennsylvania women are well aware they need a large turnout to elect the first woman President. If the percentage of women gets into the mid-fifty percent range or higher, Clinton could not just win, but pile up some significant numbers.

This spreadsheet has a column labeled nonvoters, my term for the less-educated and those living in poverty since they have tended to not vote in recent elections. These voters need to turn out if the Democrats are going to win in November. In Pennsylvania 16.7% of eligible voters make under $15,000 and over half of all eligible voters have a high school degree or less.

How these voters turnout and who they vote for will be an excellent gauge of whether the “Snobama” tag is sticking. If the turnout is large and mostly for Clinton, the Obama campaign could face some serious trouble.

Parts of Pennsylvania may be stereotyped as the rust belt, but clearly blue-collar workers could be a key to this election, which is what prompted a final column for union voters.

Pennsylvania is one of the few states to actually increase its numbers of union members. According to the Department of Labor, half of all union members live in six states:

California, 2.5 million; New York, 2.1 million; Illinois, 0.8 million; Michigan, 0.8 million; Pennsylvania, 0.8 million, and New Jersey, 0.7 million.

Only one of those states–his own Illinois–went for Obama–who has had trouble capturing union voters. The Labor Department stats also record that much of this growth has come from non-traditional unions such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which has endorsed Clinton and provided strong organizing support. Again, this also probably accounts for Clinton’s Pennsylvania lead. If Hillary Clinton brings in large numbers of these voters, it will also not be good news for Obama.

This leads me to make a prediction–as goes the union vote, so goes Pennsylvania. If the turnout of union voters is high–the current percentage of union workers stands at 14.1%–Clinton should increase her lead and capture her needed 50%

The Bottom Line

Clinton’s supporters are being particularly coy about Pennsylvania. It is clear that she will win the state, but her staff is not making any predictions about how much. If she can push her victory percentage into the mid fifties , it would be a significant win.

With Pennsylvania, Clinton will have won all the Eastern and Midwestern industrial states–states the Democrats have to have to win the White House–with the exception of Illinois. Clinton had 54% of the Ohio and New Jersey votes, won Michigan by default, and won her home state of New York with 57%. In all these states her margin of victory was by 10% or more. A significant Clinton Pennsylvania win will help her courting of superdelegates, who now seem destined to decide the nominee.

Your Tally Sheet

As with previous primaries I am attaching below a spreadsheet you can actually print out and fill in as the night goes on, sort of like a political box score. Actually, you will need to print the entire page, but you can use the rest to put your beer and pizza on.

Making the Call
By filling in the information as it comes in, much of it first on the Internet, you can begin to make your own prediction based on the demographic section above and what is in the tally sheet. Not to broadcast any commercials, but I have found in the past CNN tends to have the first reliable data. Fox will sometimes try to release data earlier than the others, but it can be iffy data. What none of them tell you is that all their data come from the same place, it is just when they choose to release it, which data they emphasize, and how well their talking heads can explain it.

I leave it to imaginative readers, especially those in Pennsylvania, to supply updates from your areas.

To facilitate this on Tuesday night, I will make it easier to comment, so comments get on the blog right away. That may yield more spam, but let that be my problem.

A Final Aside

I have not been a fan of the media “calling” elections especially before the votes are all counted. That view has not changed. Instead, my intent with this is to give you a sense of what it is like not to be at CBS, but to be in a candidate’s headquarters as they watch the data come in. This idea also began when I became upset at the networks the night of the Iowa primary because their pundits were not paying attention to the data, but either trying to spin things in their candidate’s favor or just plain wrong about the significance of particular trends.

See you Tuesday evening.

Tagged with: African_Americans • Barack Obama • California • campaign • Census • Cleveland • Clinton • clinton campaign • delegates • Democratic • Democrats • election • EMILY's List • female voters • Florida • google • GOP • Hillary Clinton • identification • Illinois • john mccain • less_educated • Michigan • networks • New Jersey • New York • nomination • nonvoters • November • Obama • Ohio • older_women • party officials • Pennsylvania • poll • polling • polls • Prediction • rust belt • spreadsheet • stereotype • superdelegate • Tuesday • turnout voter • union voters • voters over 55 • woman President

AP: Jae C. Hong

After watching last night’s debate, I had a different perspective than the media–both candidates exhibited an incredible lack of knowledge about U.S. history. Maybe we need a historian for President instead of a lawyer.

Had either candidate possessed even a bare awareness of American history, particularly the history of the Presidency, he or she would have won the debate hands down, because with a little knowledge of American history we viewers would have had better answers to many of the questions.

Of course, had any knowledge of American history governed that so-called debate it would have pointed out one of the questioners was one of Bill Clinton’s former political advisors. That ABC saw nothing wrong with this and Stephanopoulos did not see fit to excuse himself, shows how low journalistic ethics have fallen in television land.

The candidates’ lack of knowledge about American history is only part of larger trend that any history professor or teacher knows intimately. Every so often a survey appears that again demonstrates the abysmal knowledge Americans have of their past. They mix up Joe McCarthy and Gene McCarthy, World War II and Vietnam, and even segregation and integration. Every history teacher has enough stories about students getting the past all wrong to fill an entertaining book.

Many of these mistakes seem humorous, but their consequences are anything but. When we mix up our Sunnis and Shiites, Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia it has global ramifications. The consequences of our lack of historical knowledge unfortunately were on full display last night by candidates and questioners.

The first example of this came during the atrocious opening of the debate which went on to consume almost half the evening as both moderators and candidates failed to ask a single policy question, but instead focused on personal issues: Obama’s “bitterness” remarks, Clinton’s Bosnia “misstatement, Obama’s former pastor, a person who served on the same board as Obama.

The stench of the dirty laundry pervaded our living room. Had either candidate possessed even an elementary knowledge of American history, this “guilt by association” series of questions could have quickly been silenced. Any American history student, of course knows about Joe McCarthy and the blacklist as well as other examples of guilt by association that rank as some of the uglier manifestations of our past. My favorite example of this is when the McCarthy crowd tried to go after Lucille Ball, her then-husband Desi Arnaz gave a heart felt speech about his wife that included the line, “The only thing red about Lucy is her hair.”

One longed for one of the candidates to say they thought the nation had grown up since the days of Joe McCarthy, especially since the Democratic Party has suffered more from guilt by association tactics than the Republicans. In the 2004 election, the heirs of Joe McCarthy even doctored a photo of an anti-Vietnam War rally to put Jane Fonda and John Kerry in the same picture.

The most painful example of the candidates’ “F” in American history came later in the debate when Charles Gibson asked about Iraq.

So if the military commanders in Iraq came to you on day one and said this kind of withdrawal would destabilize Iraq, it would set back all of the gains that we have made, no matter what, you’re going to order those troops to come home?

Both candidates answered the question like the lawyers they are, pointing out that the President is Commander-in-Chief, but neither of them cited the numerous examples from American history in which generals speaking out about strategy were regarded as insubordinate to their Commander-in-Chief.

As any American history major can tell you, probably the most famous example of this was Harry Truman’s firing of Douglas MacArthur. I quote Truman’s full speech on this because we seem to have forgotten its central point in recent years:

With deep regret I have concluded that General of the Army Douglas MacArthur is unable to give his wholehearted support to the policies of the United States Government and of the United Nations in matters pertaining to his official duties. In view of the specific responsibilities imposed upon me by the Constitution of the United States and the added responsibility which has been entrusted to me by the United Nations, I have decided that I must make a change of command in the Far East. I have, therefore, relieved General MacArthur of his commands and have designated Lt. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway as his successor.

Full and vigorous debate on matters of national policy is a vital element in the constitutional system of our free democracy. It is fundamental., however, that military commanders must be governed by the policies and directives issued to them in the manner provided by our laws and Constitution. In time of crisis, this consideration is particularly compelling.

General MacArthur’s place in history as one of our greatest commanders is fully established. The nation owes him a debt of gratitude for the distinguished and exceptional service which he has rendered his country in posts of great responsibility. For that reason I repeat my regret at the necessity for the action I feel compelled to take in his case.

American history buffs can all cite other examples where military commanders crossed the line–Patton in World War II, Curtis LeMay’s outrageous plea to use the nuclear option in Vietnam, and, of course, the many travails Abraham Lincoln had with his generals, one of whom had the temerity to run against him after being dismissed from his post as commander of the Army of the Potomac.

History buffs also know well that the line between the military and civilian control of the military has never been a comfortable one, but the War in Iraq seems to have taken this conflict to another level. Suddenly it is the commanders on the ground who have become the dictators of our policy, rather than the instruments of it. The fawning over General Petraeus by members of both parties seemed to turn the line between military and civilian control upside down.

What virtually no one acknowledged was that the situation put Petraeus in an untenable position. It’s like asking one of his generals to testify what he thinks about Petraeus. Petraeus is bound by the Constitution to carry out the orders of George W. Bush no matter what he thinks of them.

An article by military historian Richard H. Kohn in the Naval War College Review made the case:

In recent years civilian control of the military has weakened in the United States and is threatened today. The issue is not the nightmare of a coup d’etat but rather the evidence that the American military has grown in influence to the point of being able to impose its own perspective on many policies and decisions. What I have detected is no conspiracy but repeated efforts on the part of the armed forces to frustrate or evade civilian authority when that opposition seems likely to preclude outcomes the military dislikes.

But the staffs of candidates almost never include historians today, instead taking strategy suggestions from pollsters and hired guns who probably wouldn’t know Franklin from Theodore Roosevelt. So this article passed by Obama and Clinton, which is interesting because one of its points is that this erosion began not with George W. Bush, but Bill Clinton.

With neither candidate able to summon evidence from American history to bolster their arguments, it left Americans watching the debate to choose between two lawyers trying to make their case. Without the perspective of the past, anyone who watched that debate was left adrift in the present, blown about by the cross currents of prejudice, public opinion, and personality.

The lack of historical perspective figured in another key issue–that of Iran’s potential possession of nuclear weapons. Here it is simply appalling that neither candidate could cite the most critical moment of the last half century–the Cuban missile crisis. There may be no more relevant situation for the lessons it has to teach than Iran. Yet neither candidate summoned up a parallel that was one of their past Democratic President’s shining moments.

Historical ignorance even came from the mouths of the moderators themselves. The pretentious Charles Gibson, who feigns a Professor Kingsfield manner with his glasses and his tone, made the following statement:

MR. GIBSON: But history shows that when you drop the capital gains tax, the revenues go up.

Mr. Gibson, may I direct your attention to a 2002 report of the Congressional Budget Office. Since you obviously have not read it here is its conclusion, whose economic language may be a bit thick for a brain that did not conduct proper research:

The relationship of realizations and receipts to gains tax rates is neither predictable nor obvious. And while reductions in the overall taxation of capital income can measurably increase economic growth, a cut in capital gains taxes alone is likely to produce much smaller macroeconomic effects. Inaccuracies in projecting revenue and disagreements about the effects of tax changes stem not from a failure to incorporate the behavioral responses of asset holders but from the complexities inherent in the nature of gains and gains realizations.

Gibson also dropped a misleading statistic that would get him soundly reprimanded in any freshman history course when he in essence argued against dropping the capital gains tax:

100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected.

A hundred million people may own some stock, but who controls most of it? If Gibson didn’t know the answer when he asked the question he should be summarily dismissed. If he did, someone in the news department ought to remind him about basic journalistic ethics. The following graph from Ezra Klein shows the relevant evidence in dramatic fashion:

Talk about equality! As you can see, the top 1% control 40% of all stocks, with the top 10% controlling an astounding 80%. In other words, an increase in the capital gains tax will primarily impact the rich!

But a historian could have helped here by pointing out the primary purpose of the income tax in the first place was not to tax wages people earned by slaving away from dawn till dusk but to level the playing field by including income such as capital gains.

The lack of historical knowledge on exhibit last night by both candidates and their questioners represents a sad state for this nation, for how can someone purport to govern who has not studied the history of this nation? Perhaps someone will get the point that that is why we are in such a mess.

Tagged with: al qeada • depression • dirty laundry • equality • Gene McCarthy • General MacArthur • General Petraeus • graph • guilt by association • Harry Truman • history • history of the presidency • history teachers • income • Iraq • Joe McCarthy • lack of knowledge • level playing field • little knowledge • personal issues • policy question • Presidency • sunnis and shiites • world war ii

This blog has made interesting connections, but you must be asking what is the connection between taxes, the Final Four and Bush’s America? The answer–tigers.

Now that you are wondering how I am going to weave this one together, let’s start with the Final Four. Although the championship game was last week it is on my mind because I finally had a chance to talk with my son about it. I had picked Kansas to win it all in my original brackets based on the fact they led the NCAA in a host of statistical categories, the most important of which was their scoring margin per possession. They scored 1.176 points every time they had the ball and their opponents scored only .874. They also were number one in field goal percentage and ranked high in free throw percentage.

Along with a lot of other hoops junkies, both of us had rated the Memphis Tigers low, because they had one of the worst free throw shooting percentages in the country, and the worst of any team in the NCAA tournament. Their 59.6% for the team would be unacceptable to most good high school teams.

As far as I know no team with such a miserable free throw percentage had ever made it to the Elite Eight let alone the Final Four. Yet for some reason, the teams who played Memphis refused to take advantage of their miserable free throw shooting. Certainly NCAA officials and the TV networks must have cringed at the thought that some coach would turn the game into a free throw shooting contest. But in the end that’s what won Kansas the national championship.

My son had picked UCLA and North Carolina in the final game. Neither of us had Memphis even getting out of their region. When I talked to my son about that final desperate shot for Kansas he said he, along with a lot of America cheered when it went in to send the game into overtime.

Then he went on to say that if Memphis had won it would have gone against everything he had practiced as a college player and taught in summer camps such as the ones in DC for the children of elite, including a Saudi who arrived in a limo and the son of a foreign ambassador. One drill he used to do involved blindfolded shooting, and by his senior year in college he could routinely hit 70% that way. “Whatever happened to fundamentals?” he asked.

That precipitated a long conversation about the decline of both shooting and defense which has in part been responsible for this country’s miserable performance in international games. I recall talking to a pro scout many years ago who said on the whole Europeans were better shooters than Americans because American coaches no longer emphasized the fundamentals of shooting. To my son, the Tigers epitomized lack of attention to fundamentals.

That observation about fundamentals applies to tax day, the Times and George Bush’s America and curiously all also involve tigers. For example, there probably is a tiger somewhere in your tax report, because TIGER is the acronym for Tax Information Group for ECommerce Requirements Standardization. The TIGER website explains:

[TIGER] develops and maintains tax electronic technical format standards for a variety of tax filing and other related government electronic reporting or data exchange applications. Its members are exploring the use of XML in tax filing processes. Its goal is to develop XML resources relating to an XML-based tax data submission process for use by all state and federal tax authorities, based on the commitment and contributions of a variety of federal and state government personnel and the participation of a broad group of interested industry partners.

TIGER is an interesting project I would like to know more about, but for now the big picture is that as all record keeping becomes electronic, so do our taxes. Someone on the radio the other day said it sure is interesting that the government can make it so easy to file our taxes but so hard to find out about anything else.

TIGER has been around for some time, whi