by WonkoKevin

After Clinton’s 10-point, er… 9.5-point… if you go by delegates, 8-point win in Pennsylvania, people are asking why Obama can’t close the deal. He’s the leader, right? The “presumptive candidate”? Certainly, presumptive candidates aren’t supposed to lose, that’s a no brainer. But how big a win should we expect from the presumptive candidate? For comparison we can look at how John McCain has done since he wrapped up the Republican nomination on March 4. On that night, he won all four states: Ohio (60%), Rhode Island (65), Texas (51… as many of his would-be voters were busy voting for Hillary), and Vermont (72). Only two states have had Republican primaries since then: he won Mississippi on March 11 with 79%, and Pennsylvania last week with 73%. So let’s call 70% the breakeven point–above it and you’re fine, below it and people are talking. Of course, if Obama was getting 70% or more now, the race really would be over.

by WonkoKevin

Throughout the campaign season John McCain’s buzz share in Wonkosphere shot up after almost every debate as the format gave him an opportunity to shine.  Now, McCain is still winning debates, even when he isn’t a participant!  Most of the pundits agree that the de facto winner of last night’s Clinton-Obama debate was McCain, as Clinton turned in a better performance, continuing the comeback narrative that will play out (one way or another) in PA, NC, and IN.   Taylor Marsh and The Moderate Voice have great summaries of blog and MSM opinion on the debate.  I’ll reproduce here what I thought were the most representative and interesting posts. (more…)

by WonkoKevin

Iowa and New Hampshire were key. Always have been. Until they were over, and then South Carolina was the turning point. And then Tsunami Tuesday was the non-turning point. I think somewhere along the way Maine and Wyoming were important. What can we make of this campaign season that continues to refuse to conform? In Politics 1.0, averages and totals were the key stats–how many votes, how many delegates, etc. In Politics 2.0, it’s not the averages that define where things are going but rather the extremes. In old politics, the center wagged the extremes; in new politics, the extremes wag the average. When it comes to extremes this campaign season, one place in the U.S. dominates–the Inner West. Maybe we should look to the Inner West for where the body politic is heading.

The Inner West of the U.S. handed many of the candidates their best results of the season. In Utah, Mitt Romney won an astonishing 90%. Ron Paul had his best showing in Montana, at 25%. Barack Obama loves Iowa, which handed him a 79% victory. Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee were big shots in the South, but it was the central plains where they brought it home–Thompson with 25% in Wyoming and Huckaee with 60% in Kansas (equalling what he got in Arkansas, his home state). Even Duncan Hunter had his best outing in the Inner West with 2% in Nevada.

There were several other patterns I observed. First, the South gave two of the three remaining candidates their biggest wins. Hillary Clinton pulled down 70% in Arkansas, and John McCain’s biggest victory to date came in Mississippi (79%). Delaware awarded hometome boy Joe Biden his best showing (3%); Michigan’s shortened list resulted in best outings for Chris Dodd (1%), Mike Gravel (0.5%), and and Dennis Kucinich (4%); John Edwards (30% in Iowa) and Bill Richardson (5% in New Hampshire) faded early; and Rudy Giuliani really did do his best in Florida, just like he had planned (15%). Alan Keyes, Sam Brownback, Tom Tancredo, and Tommy Thompson didn’t register above 0.5%.

by WonkoKevin

Both conservative and liberal bloggers have a laser-focus on Barack Obama, which is probably good news for him at this point.  Amongst all bloggers, Obama has regained his 60-40 buzz share lead over Clinton, and his sentiment is also up to “good” levels, equal with McCain’s.  Clinton has both lost both buzz share and sentiment over the last week.   Amongst our buzz list of 30 posts from conservative, liberal, and independent spheres, there are only 2 posts about John McCain; and on McCain’s buzz page, only 9 of the 30 top posts are from conservatives, thus indicating that conservative bloggers are not focusing much on making McCain’s case right now. 

by WonkoKevin

County-level results from Texas suggest that Republican cross-over voting may have well given Hillary Clinton a victory in the Texas primary, thus enabling a narrative that has allowed to her to remain in the race.  This has been reported in the WSJ, but my number crunching indicates the so-called Limbaugh effect may be significantly larger than is being estimated.  First, from Washington Wire: (more…)

by WonkoKevin

Hillary Clinton is now pulling the majority of liberal buzz in Wonkosphere, beating Obama 53 to 47% yesterday. Conversely, conservatives are still leaning towards Obama as the likely nominee, as Obama wins their attention 54 to 46%. On the Republican side, John McCain continues to enjoy significantly positive sentiment from conservative bloggers; his buzz from conservatives is considerably more positive than liberal’s buzz on Clinton and Obama, supporting the hypothesis that continued in-fighting degrades public sentiment of both candidates.

by WonkoKevin

Congratulations to John McCain for making his nomination official.  In the end, McCain won not so much because he forged a conservative coalition a priori, but because he ran the best campaign.  After a messy start, he cleaned house and did well in all important dimensions: retail, fundraising, press relations, and consistency.   These are all things that will continue to bode well for him into the fall.  A positive word also has to be said about Mike Huckabee, who has formally dropped out of the race.  Huckabee, not Ron Paul, was the pentultimate Politics 2.0 candidate.  The blogsphere fell in love with him early on, provided grass roots support, and in part fueled his Iowa performance; in the end, the blogosphere is also responsible from being him down with 6 weeks of negative buzz following his climb in the polls.  I doubt Huckabee could have gotten this far pre-Internet.

Man was I wrong on my Obama sweep prediction.  Kudos to Clinton who actually outdid their own expecatations and who gained the right to claim victory this morning.  My prediction of Obama wins was based on the fact that in the last 2 months of primaries, Obama’s poll numbers have been significantly underestimated.  Not this time.  Instead, I should have paid attention to the Wonkosphere data.  Check out Hillary’s buzz share in the last two weeks (conservative-red, liberal-blue).  Note how it spiked up starting 2/29.  Let’s see what kind of buzz-legs her victories have for her now.  Will she retake the lead from Obama in liberal buzz share?  Will she again become the primary target for conservative bloggers?  All this and more, stay tuned!

by WonkoKevin

Every four hours each of the candidates’ Wonkosphere buzz page is re-generated, and it gives you a snap-shot of the 30 most representative posts about the candidate over the last several days (biased towards recent posts). We identify those posts that are most representative by using computerized text analysis, which measures how “close” each post is to another, and then selects those posts that are on average the most similar to all other posts. You’ll note that the 30 the computer chooses are independent of affiliation, so we can look at the ratio of red to blue to get a sense of which side is being more focused.

For example, in today’s buzz for John McCain, there are 7 liberal posts and 21 conservative posts (and 2 independent)–that means the conservative posts outnumber the liberal posts 3:1–in this small subset of the most representative posts. That means conservative bloggers are best describing what the collective buzz is. The same is true for Mike Huckabee’s most representative posts, where the conservative posts outnumber the liberal posts almost 3:1. What is interesting is that the same ratio holds for Barack Obama, 3:1! This means conservative bloggers are also shaping the Obama dialogue right now; liberal bloggers are still more numerous in their posts about Obama, but their dialogue on him is more varied, i.e. less focused. This will be an interesting development to watch because it’s the same “problem” we saw with liberal dialogue about Kerry in 2004–no central message, and no message discipline.

by WonkoKevin

A quick study of today’s Wonkosphere buzz tone charts (Clinton, Huckabee, McCain, Obama) indicates that 3 of the candidates have had a rough ride in the last two weeks. It’s probably part tightness of the Dem race, and part campaign fatigue amongst the campaigns, media, and bloggers alike. Only one came out looking sweet, Mike Huckabee.

SPIKE DOWN–Clinton remained at neutral levels the last 2 weeks (all results discussed only reflect the tone of the partisan blogs), but spiked down to dangerous territory yesterday with the “dressed photo” story.

STEP DOWN–McCain was riding a wave of highly positive sentiment until the lobbyist story broke, which pulled him down in neutral territory.

SLIDE–Obama has slid from slightly positive to being on the border of significantly negative. With Obama and Clinton at roughly the same negative level, I think both are getting pulled “down” by the current news cycle.

SMILE–Huckabee’s tone went from neutral to off-the-charts positive, coinciding with his SNL appearance. Lesson for other three: Do more improv comedy? P.S. & BTW–I won’t embarrass them by naming them, but how could some bloggers have thought that Huckabee’s skit was not a skit?

by WonkoKevin

“It is time to start bomb bomb bomb, bomb bombing again. No, not Iran, but John McCain’s Google ranking.” In a sign of our Politics 2.0 times, the liberal site MyDD posted suggestions yesterday on how to “Google bomb” John McCain. By “flooding the Web with references to the candidates and repeatedly cross-linking to specific articles and sites on the Web, it is possible to take advantage of Google’s formula and force those articles to the top of the list of search results.” In McCain’s case, the goal of bombers would be to create web sites that link to negative McCain stories or videos; by embedding words on these new web pages, these words get linked to searches on McCain. This is not the first time Chris Bower at MyDD has led a Google bomb campaign. In October 2006, the NYT reported on Bower’s campaign against 50 Republicans, including Arizonan John Kyl.

A Google search on “John McCain” currently turns up almost all “favorable” results. McCain’s own sites take up the first five slots; other top listings are “objective” sites: listings of McCain on Congresspedia, the Congress Votes database, collected stories from the Washington post, CNN, and CBS News. The NYT endorsement is tenth, and a story in TechCrunch positive to McCain’s taking on Google and Yahoo! is 12th ranked. The only negative link in the top 20 is RealChange.org’s page on McCain’s skeleton closet, and they have a negative page on everybody.