2012 President

Beneath the surface of all the buzz surrounding the GOP nomination for president in 2012 lies speculation about everyone’s favorite “bucket of warm spit:” possible vice presidential running mates for the eventual candidate. Many have speculated that the veep nominee will be an opportunity for the Republicans to attract new voters from the ever-growing minority populations in the United State; specifically, the Hispanic voters who have been moving into the Democratic column. One of the names being thrown around by some–most notably by former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty–has been Puerto Rico Gov. Luis Fortuño. Fortuño is a young and potentially attractive Hispanic Republican–much like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Gov. Susana Martinez (R-NM)–but given Puerto Rico’s current status as a commonwealth, is he even constitutionally eligible for the job? Yes. According to a law signed by President Truman in 1952, all people born in Puerto Rico on or after Jan. 13, 1941, are native-born citizens of the United States. As Fortuño was born in San Juan on Oct. 31, 1960, he would be eligible for the GOP ticket. The irony in all this is that, if Fortuño did end up with the VP nomination, he would not be able to

One of the least remarked upon aspects of the Obama presidency has been the lack of scandals. Since Watergate, presidential and executive branch scandal has been an inescapable feature of the American presidency, but the current administration has not yet suffered a major scandal, which I define as a widespread elite perception of wrongdoing. What happened, and what are the odds that the administration’s streak will continue? Obama has been extremely fortunate: My research (PDF) on presidential scandals shows that few presidents avoid scandal for as long as he has. In the 1977-2008 period, the longest that a president has gone without having a scandal featured in a front-page Washington Post article is 34 months – the period between when President Bush took office in January 2001 and the Valerie Plame scandal in October 2003. Obama has already made it almost as long despite the lack of a comparable event to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Why? Obama should be highly vulnerable to scandal given his standing with Republicans. My research identifies presidential approval among opposition party identifiers as a key risk factor. The reason is that discontent among the opposition’s base creates demand for negative news about the president,

Take a poll of political pundits about next year’s presidential election, and most at this point would probably predict that President Barack Obama would win reelection, but with a reduced margin from 2008 in both the popular and electoral vote. Yet if that actually happens, it would be an historical rarity of the first order. Most presidents seeking reelection cruise to victory with a larger margin than their initial triumph four years earlier. Some lose their bid for a second term. But only one president thus far has “thread the needle,” so to speak. And that is Democrat Woodrow Wilson. He won the White House easily in 1912 as a result of a horrific split in the Republican Party, then was narrowly reelected in 1916 when the GOP was relatively united. In the course of four years, Wilson’s winning margin in the popular vote shrank from 14 percentage points to 3, his electoral vote total dropped from 435 to 277, and the number of states that Wilson won decreased from 40 to 30. Yet that he won at all in 1916 was no small feat. The personally prickly but intellectually brilliant former Princeton professor and New Jersey governor provided the

In 2008, Barack Obama used massive majorities among African Americans and other nonwhites to overcome a large deficit among white voters and win the presidency. Thirty months later, opinions about his performance remain deeply divided along racial lines. Moreover, persistent questions about Obama’s place of birth and religion have raised the question of what role racial attitudes are playing in shaping opinions of Obama among white Americans. Are whites evaluating Obama differently from the way they would evaluate a white Democratic president with a similar policy agenda? Until now, debates about the influence of racial attitudes on opinions of Obama have been severely hampered by a lack of survey data including relevant questions. However, the availability of a new data set now makes it possible to directly examine the impact of racial attitudes on whites’ evaluations of President Obama. The data used in this article come from the October 2010 wave of the American National Election Study Evaluations of Government and Society Survey (EGSS). The October 2010 survey was the first of several cross-sectional studies being conducted by ANES in 2010, 2011 and 2012 to test new instrumentation and measure public opinion between the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. The

The death of Osama bin Laden, inflicted by crack U.S. Special Forces personnel acting on the orders of President Barack Obama, is undoubtedly a triumph for the embattled commander in chief. But will it provide him tangible political help when he stands for reelection a year and a half from now? An obvious recent precedent is President George H.W. Bush, who not only prosecuted a quick, successful war with Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf, but also held office during the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismemberment of the Soviet Union. Bush’s ultimate reward for these feats? Being shown the door by voters angry over the economy in 1992. There are other examples. Harry Truman, after taking over for Franklin Roosevelt in 1945, ordered atomic bombs dropped on Japan, which ended World War II. A little over a year later, his party was dealt stunning setbacks in the 1946 midterms; only a rebounding economy allowed Truman to win reelection in 1948. Across the pond, Winston Churchill and the Tories were swept out of office in July 1945, just two months after the surrender of Nazi Germany. In all of these examples, victory abroad seemed to focus the electorate

With gas prices soaring as summer vacations near, many optimistic Republicans and nervous Democrats are left wondering about what impact those prices will have on President Obama’s reelection chances. High gas prices, they point out, sank Jimmy Carter in 1980 and added to the baggage George W. Bush passed on to Republican nominee John McCain in 2008. A Washington Post-ABC News poll this week showed that 70% of respondents felt high gas prices were causing them financial hardship. Fewer than one in four Americans who say gas prices are a “serious” financial hardship approve of Obama’s job performance and 60% of Independents facing financial hardship from rising gas prices said they will not vote for Obama in 2012. Even Obama’s advisers see cause for concern as the price at the pump surges. Last weekend, the president’s radio and Internet address centered squarely on gas prices, as he warned that there was no “silver bullet” to bring prices down, but simultaneously unveiled a coalition of federal agencies to investigate potential fraud within the markets in hopes of relieving some of the pressure pushing prices upward. Skeptics of the idea of a correlation between gas prices and presidential approval ratings wonder if

The two major parties have done their job in terms of setting the parameters for the 2012 presidential nominating process. Now, it is time for the states to fill in the blanks. And what they do in that regard over the next few months could go a long way in determining who wins next year’s Republican presidential nomination. Basically, the governors and state legislatures – often in conjunction with the state parties – have two major questions to answer: When to hold their event, and what that event should be – a low-turnout caucus or a higher turnout primary. In short, will the nominating process next year be heavily “front-loaded,” as it has been in the recent past, which rewards the candidate with early momentum and concludes by the Ides of March? And with many states facing budget deficits, will there be a move away from rather pricey primaries to relatively inexpensive caucuses, the latter a process that often boosts candidates with passionate support over those with broader-based appeal? Not So Fast Basically, Republican rules are agnostic on the question of primaries versus caucuses, but very clear on the desire to significantly lessen the pileup of states at the beginning

With 18 months to go until November 2012, there is exactly one use for a current projection of the 2012 Electoral College results. This is merely a baseline from which we can judge more reliable projections made closer to the election. Where did we start–before we knew the identity of the Republican nominee for president, the state of the economy in fall 2012 and many other critical facts? And so, with that enormous caveat in mind, here is THE MAP. If you INCLUDE the “Leans” states with the “Likely” and “Safe,” the numbers are as follows: 247 Democratic EVs 180 Republican EVs 111 Undecided If you DO NOT INCLUDE the “Leans” states, i.e., just counting “Likely” and “Safe,” the numbers are as follows: 196 Democratic EVs 170 Republican EVs 172 Undecided With 270 needed for election, our Democratic readers will prefer the first tally, and our Republican readers the second. Indulge yourselves! As heated as the campaign will get, let’s remember to have fun along the way.

The classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller “North by Northwest” contains a few of Hollywood’s most memorable–and ludicrous–sequences, including a famous scene in which our hero, played by Cary Grant, finds himself being shot at by a crop duster at a bus stop near a cornfield. In the spirit of the seemingly preposterous, consider a path to reelection for President Obama that is less North by Northwest than South by Southwest, to borrow from the music and film festival held in Austin each year. A South by Southwest map plots a course to an Obama victory that follows in the footsteps of the Americans and immigrants who are voting with their feet, choosing to live in the West and the South rather than in the Midwest. It also reads the fluttering tea leaves that indicate the Obama campaign is pondering a non-traditional electoral map. As Mike Allen of Politico recently reported, “Democratic officials are intently focused on three states that Obama won last time–Virginia, Colorado and Nevada–that provide different paths to victory as an alternative to the traditional dependence on Ohio and Florida.” What Democrats are considering is a strategy that, as centrist Democrat William Galston disapprovingly described in a February New

We at the Crystal Ball are pleased to welcome a new staffer to our precincts, Kyle Kondik. A former journalist from Ohio and a current political junkie extraordinaire, Kyle loves the facts and figures of elections, as you will see with his first offering on this website. Kyle previously served as Director of Policy and Research in the office of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, where he wrote speeches and directed the office’s online communications. Prior to that, Kyle was an editorial page editor and political columnist at The Chronicle-Telegram and a reporter at The Times-Reporter, two mid-sized newspapers in Northeast Ohio. Kyle can be reached at [email protected]. ~The Editors Now that President Barack Obama confirmed the obvious on Monday—he will be running for a second term—his challenge is not only to win, but also to continue a historical trend: two-term presidents win their second term more convincingly than their first. The last president who won a second term directly after his first term without improving his share of the popular vote was Andrew Jackson, who received 54.7% of the popular vote in 1832 after his 55.9% showing in 1828. Franklin Delano Roosevelt lost support in his third and

This time next year, the airwaves will be full of speculation about GOP vice presidential possibilities. (The Democratic ticket is already set, for all practical purposes, with Joe Biden getting the party slot again.) Without a Republican nominee, or even an absolutely clear frontrunner, it is pointless to come up with a list of likely possibilities. But it is never too early to call on the nation’s premiere scholar of vice presidents, Prof. Joel K. Goldstein, to give us a sense of what will shape this critical selection by the eventual GOP presidential candidate. ~The Editors Until recently, serious discussion about a vice presidential candidate generally did not begin in earnest until the third night of the convention, after the presidential nomination was decided. Then an exhausted and elated presidential nominee devoted the next few hours to the hurried process of choosing a political partner. The proliferation of presidential primaries and caucuses has changed the dynamics of presidential nominations, thereby accelerating the resolution of the race for the top spot on the ticket and making the conventions a formality. In so doing, these changes have revised the calendar for considering the running mate to an exercise that now occurs over

Much has changed since our launch of the 2012 Crystal Ball Presidential Ratings—and yet little has changed in this slow-starting campaign. We outlined all our cautions about early assessments in the January Crystal Ball, so we’ll just skip right to the red meat evaluation. Assuming Republicans want to put forward a candidate who can fully compete with President Obama—if the electoral circumstances in 2012 allow it—then the GOP nominee is likely going to come from either Tier I or II, so we focus special attention there. In the past months we’ve lost a couple of Tier II candidates, Indiana Congressman Mike Pence and South Dakota Sen. John Thune. Pence is positioning himself instead for a run for Governor in his home state, while Thune has decided for now to focus on Senate leadership office. Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana gained the most from Pence’s non-candidacy decision, if in fact Daniels decides to make the race. Of course, Pence had intense conservative base support, so other conservatives in the field might have moved up a bit, too. Thune’s opt-out probably favors former Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, given the overlap in Midwestern regional backing. In Tier I, Mitt Romney remains the

Over the course of the last few months, MSNBC political commentator (and host of “Hardball”) Chris Matthews has popularized the idea that the 2012 presidential election will be decided in a swath of terrain “from Scranton to Oshkosh.” To Matthews, this is “the industrial center” of the nation, the part that “built” America, and “where guys root for Da Bears and the Packers, the Eagles, the Steelers, and the Browns.” In recent elections, it also has been the country’s political epicenter, a collection of battleground states from Pennsylvania west to Wisconsin that can readily swing from one party to the other. But the spotlight these days is on the western terminus of this vote-rich sector, the state of Wisconsin, where a high-stakes, political battle is raging that could significantly affect the backdrop of the 2012 campaign. On one side, the newly elected Republican governor, Scott Walker, is aggressively seeking to balance the state’s budget by reducing benefits for tens of thousands of state employees and curbing their union-based collective bargaining rights. On the other side, aggrieved workers and the public employee unions are protesting, while their Democratic allies in the Wisconsin Senate have left the state to at least temporarily

In the days immediately following the 2010 midterms several indisputable trends for the cycle were apparent. Voters were most concerned about the state of the economy, particularly unemployment, as well as the federal budget deficit. The Tea Party movement was the key, ground-level political force. And although the exact sums and sources were uncertain, tens of millions of newly-legal dollars were injected into campaigns courtesy of the Supreme Court’s 2009 Citizens United ruling. But within a month of the results, one electoral controversy slowly and rather quietly emerged: Were Latino voters trending Republican or not? Three weeks after the election, Republican Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas—a state where President George W. Bush proved that a Republican could win Latinos—boasted on the Washington Post op-ed page that Republican House candidates did better in 2010 than in the 2006 midterms or any cycle other than Bush’s 2004 re-election high watermark. “This level of Hispanic support for Republican candidates came despite widespread pre-election claims by advocates for illegal immigration that the Arizona law and a pro-rule-of-law stand would undercut Hispanic support for Republicans,” wrote Smith, citing strong Hispanic support for Republican candidates Marco Rubio, Rick Scott and Sharron Angle. “Hispanics certainly share [fears

The 2012 presidential election is still more than 20 months away. While the early maneuvering for the Republican presidential nomination is already underway, the identity of President Obama’s GOP challenger won’t be known for more than a year. Economic trends will have a major impact on the President’s reelection chances and unpredictable events, such as the recent political turmoil in Egypt, could also affect the public’s evaluation of the President’s performance. But even without knowing what condition the economy will be in, whether a major international crisis will erupt, or who will win the Republican nomination, one crucial determinant of the outcome of the 2012 presidential election is already known. Barack Obama will be seeking reelection as a first term incumbent and first term incumbents rarely lose. In the past hundred years, there have been ten presidential elections in which an incumbent president was seeking a second term in the White House for his party with the most recent being 2004. The key distinction here is the number of terms the incumbent’s party has been in office, not the number of terms the individual incumbent has been in office. Incumbent party candidates have won nine of those ten first term