When is spending "obscene"?

Yesterday at the Monkey Cage, Josh Tucker complained that analogizing $6 billion in campaign advertising to $6 billion spent on potato chips is improper. Jonathan Bernstein defended the analogy, arguing that it promotes numeracy by helping people understand large quantities. I'm going to take Bernstein's side here, but not just for the reasons he articulates.

The real problem here is that large amounts of campaign spending, regardless of what exactly they go towards and how many voters are involved, are routinely labeled as excessive and "obscene." A Google search of "campaign" "spending" and "obscene" yields more than 3 million hits! Examples:

• Colbert King: "The total cost of the 2012 presidential and congressional races [was] an estimated $6 billion. That makes this the most obscene display of campaign spending in history."
• Robert Oak: "The spending was obscene."
• Former Florida Gov. Reubin Askew: "The system we have for financing campaigns is obscene."

There are plenty more.

Now, needless to say, our campaign finance system doesn't come close to the legal definition of "obscene." But let's just say that the critics mean something along the lines of "morally repugnant." Why? Coca Cola spent roughly $11 billion this year on advertising, yet we rarely hear this described in such terms. After all, that's just commerce. But compare the two for a moment. Campaign advertising involves wealthy people giving money to media consultants and local television stations to run ads that provide information about public officials and encourage people to vote. Coca Cola advertising involves a similar transfer of money to encourage people to purchase and ingest a particular sugar drink (not the competitor's sugar drink, of course) that will probably shorten the consumer's life. Why is the former obscene but the latter just part of commerce? Yes, campaign advertising probably involves some deception or spin. Whereas soft drink advertising is completely honest?

Now, when I discussed this topic on a talk show with former Colorado state senator Ken Gordon a few months ago, he portrayed campaign spending as bribery. Yes, if campaign spending is bribery, then by God, $6 billion is too much! $100 is too much! But it's not bribery. What exactly are the people who donated over $600 million to Barack Obama this year getting in return, other than a Democratic president who continues to advance and protect a mainstream Democratic agenda? How exactly would Obama's millions of donors cash in? What influence has been purchased? And what do Romney's donors have to show for their investment today?

It escapes me why campaign spending, which is essentially a short term civics education program funded voluntarily by the nation's wealthiest people, is considered obscene. But as long as it is, it is helpful to have comparisons to similar levels of spending on things like potato chips, frozen yogurt, soft drink advertisements, or Halloween candy -- things for which we see a considerably lower return.

Democrats and Republicans belong to different groups

Why do people of different parties seem to have such a hard time understanding each other and reaching agreements? It may be, in part, because they belong to completely different organizations. This is one suggestion of a new article, "The Organizational Affiliations of National Party Convention Delegates," written by Michael Heaney, Dara Strolovitch, Joanne Miller, and me.

We surveyed hundreds of convention delegates at the 2008 national party conventions, asking them, among other things, what organizations they were members of. The response patterns differed significantly across party lines; Democrats belong to a wide range of groups, with no one organization proving dominant, while Republicans tend to belong to just a few key organizations. The network diagram below demonstrates this, with each point indicating a named group and the ties between them indicating that they share a common delegate. Larger groups are those named by more delegates. As can be seen below, the National Federation of Republican Women dominates among Republican delegates, while Democratic delegates are split between a number of different liberal organizations.

What the data also suggest is a real lack of common ground. Less than two percent of all co-memberships crossed party lines. There are a handful of groups that boast delegate members of both parties (notably, the NRA, the Sierra Club, and the NAACP), but those groups could hardly be labeled bipartisan, and typically they were named by a very lopsided party contingent.

The paper was recently published by American Behavioral Scientist. An ungated PDF version is available here.

No need to defend a flawed system

In an editorial Monday, the Denver Post defended the Electoral College, writing,

Until such time as candidates regularly start landing in the Oval Office despite having lost the popular vote, there is little reason to change course on the Electoral College.

I suppose this all depends on what we mean by "regularly," but in four instances -- 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000 -- the Electoral College chose a president despite the plurality of voters having preferred someone else. This represents roughly seven percent of all the presidential elections held in this country. It is difficult to imagine us designing a voting system today in which the plurality winner was denied the office roughly one out of every 14 times a vote was held. If a blackjack table awarded the pot to the player with the lower hand seven percent of the time, we would complain that the system was rigged. And yet this is the system we are asked to uphold every four years, all in the name of providing extra political power to states with fewer residents.

Sorry. Not a fan. I'll concede that no voting system is perfect, but there's a large gap between "imperfect" and "occasionally producing wildly perverse results."

Voter turnout in the states

Nate Silver helpfully compiles voter turnout figures (so far) by state in last week's presidential election. I've used those figures to chart the change in turnout since 2008, plotted against the state's partisan vote in the election:

Turnout was down in most states since 2008, but the one area where we saw slight increases in turnout was in the states that voted right around 50 percent for Obama. In other words, the swing states. Yes, this is an effect of the Electoral College (or at least the winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes), which encourages the campaigns to concentrate all their resources in a few pivotal states.

A few states saw pretty dramatic drops in turnout. We can chalk up New Jersey and New York to Sandy. Alaska and Arizona probably saw turnout drops relative to 2008 since that year featured prominent home state politicians on a national ticket. Alaska also had a closely contested Senate race that year. No such drama this year. I really don't know why California saw such comparatively low turnout this year, although Silver suggests that we'll see big improvements in those numbers as more ballots are tabulated over the next few weeks.

The socially networked campaign

I have not yet read Sasha Issenberg's book (it's on my holiday wish list!), although I imagine there are still several books to be written about the use of social networking software by the presidential campaigns this year. This subject came up quite a bit at last week's post-election panel here at the University of Denver. Sunshine Hillygus explained how the Obama campaign had hundreds of different search algorithms in their on-line advertising that combed through your computer's browsing history and geographic information to assess what kind of message might resonate with you, and then selected one of hundreds of pop-up messages deemed most likely to affect your vote. In general, while both parties are making advances in this area, right now it seems like the Obama folks are simply more technologically advanced (and borrowing heavily from the social sciences), although whether this actually explains their recent victories remains to be proven.

One recent advance that caught my eye is the Obama app (seen at left), which is a lot more sophisticated than their 2008 version. Click on the "canvass" button and it shows you a map of your immediate neighborhood and unites it with the VAN (Voter Activation Network) database developed by Democrats that lists the voting history and party registration of the people in the area. You can then knock on their doors using a suggested script, and enter information about their likelihood of voting and support for a candidate into the database, where it is instantly accessible by other activists. This strikes me as a very powerful tool, potentially untethering volunteers from their local campaign offices and allowing them to canvass wherever and whenever is most convenient for them. Judging from the campaign's success this year, I'm going to guess that the technology wasn't built on top of Apple Maps.

Another advance that amused me was the Obama campaign's use of social pressure in its e-mail contacts. Here's a message I received about a week before the election, when mail-in voting was available in Colorado:

7,604 Seths have already voted! How can I not be one of them? Surely I am not worthy of the name if I do not vote.

Hey, anything to break through the clutter.

The most diverse caucus in history, if you ignore history

Nancy Pelosi, describing the incoming Democratic House caucus, of which white males make up a minority:

[O]ur House Democratic Caucus [will be] the first caucus in the history of civilized government to have a majority of women and minorities.

The only way this statement is true is if we define "civilized" as meaning "American." This helpful Wikipedia entry offers a number of examples of ethnic parties that have formed in democracies since the 1800s. For instance, there are a number of Jewish parties that have formed in nations where Jews were distinctly outnumbered (and endangered) minorities, and the parties of modern Bosnia-Herzegovina are almost entirely based on ethnicity. Sweden's parliament is nearly half female today, and its Liberal Party is divided evenly between men and women. More than half of Rwanda's parliament is female.

The gender and racial diversity of the incoming Democratic caucus in the U.S. House is an impressive milestone, and one can crow about it without making stuff up. There's no need for Pelosi to join the long, sad list of American leaders who insist that anything Americans do has never been done anywhere else in the world. To quote Paul Waldman's wonderful piece from last spring:

Why is it necessary to assert that every good thing about America can only be found in America? We should continue to be enormously proud of the fact that we were the first democracy, but sometimes we act as though America is the only place in the world that isn't still ruled by a king. Are we so insecure about ourselves and our nation that we have to be constantly told that we're the most terrific country that ever was or ever will be, and there's nobody else even remotely like us?

(h/t Rob Salmond, via Facebook)

Moderation in progress

Just to follow up on Greg's post (and some important earlier posts by David Karol and Jonathan Bernstein), the wake of a lost presidential campaign is an excellent opportunity to observe a party "learning" from the experience. Party activists are pretty hard-headed folks, but they don't like to lose repeatedly, so they'll update their beliefs about what sorts of tactics to use and what sorts of issue stances American voters like or don't like. Of course, they don't always learn the right lesson (as David points out, Democrats "learned" that Walter Mondale was too liberal to win in 1984 and they needed to start nominating centrists, although it's far from obvious that that was true), but they do take losses seriously.

This is how we end up with the famous Figure 4-1 from Cohen, Karol, Noel, and Zaller's book The Party Decides. As the plot below shows, the longer a party is deprived control of the White House, the more moderate its presidential nominees become. One term out of office may be a fluke, but two terms is serious, and three is catastrophic. Parties take this seriously and tend to nominate considerably more centrist people, sacrificing a significant chunk of their governing agenda for a chance of actually governing.

But just how does this "learning" occur? Sometimes it's pretty brutal, and right now we're at the beginning stages of what is likely to be a difficult struggle within the GOP. The Tea Party groups and other conservative activists are quite strong in primary nominations right now, helping to drive the party sharply right in recent years. They are not going to relinquish power easily. But they are being challenged by some significant people, and not just at the national level.

For an interesting case study, please read this op/ed in Sunday's Denver Post by former Colorado state legislators Josh Penry and Rob Witwer. These are both serious people who are highly regarded in Colorado Republican politics. Witwer is a former state representative who has actively researched and written on Democratic political tactics. Penry is a former state senator and gubernatorial candidate who would quite likely be governor today if not for a Tea Party insurgency that produced the Great McInnis/Maes/Tancredo Meltdown of 2010. They've noticed that while Colorado used to be a reliably Republican state and is now considered purple, the GOP hasn't won a major statewide race there since 2004. As they write,

We live in a diverse state that is roughly divided between Republicans, Democrats and unaffiliated voters. Yet since the mid-1990s, our party has been barely distinguishable from the TV show "Survivor." 

Every year, we kick somebody else off the island. We make it easy for Democrats to say that we don't want the support of women, Hispanics, teachers, gays and lesbians, African-Americans, conservationists, Muslims and union members. Pretty soon there won't be anybody left to vote for us. [...]

Even the Almighty won't help us if we can't do better than a crusty old white guy with a penchant for running up the debt versus another crusty old white guy incapable of conveying empathy for victims of rape. 

There is nothing inevitable about the Republican Party. If we continue to offer voters poor choices cycle after cycle, they will decide that they can do just fine without us, thank you very much. Just ask the Federalists or the Whigs.

Expect those making these arguments to butt heads with those urging ideological purity in the 2014 primary elections. Long before the 2016 presidential field is set, we'll see plenty of debates in primaries for congressional and state legislative seats, starting roughly a year from now. That's when we'll get to see just how powerful the calls for moderation and openness are and how much Republicans are willing to sacrifice for a chance to lead.