Who's on First? - A Continuing Political Question

Polling has begun to look at the 2008 Presidential race - and while I think most normal people are not interested at this point there are some interesting trends. I will admit that it is always dangerous to make much of polling a year before the campaigning begins in earnest. A recent poll looked at major and minor candidates for both parties and their favorable and unfavorable ratings as well as their undecided percentages. The chart shows those numbers. It also includes two other statistics. The first gives a ratio of the negatives to positives. The second, gives an estimation of how much flexibility the candidate has in making up their deficit in popularity (i.e. of the remaining undecideds how many would the candidate have to capture to erase the negative?). A candidate with high negatives but low recognition has the chance to change perceptions for Gore, Kerry and Clinton, public perceptions are pretty well set in the negative and and it would be surprising to see them change. In the 1968 election Nixon had some relatively high negatives and overcame it, in part because voters were very grumpy about LBJ. But I am reasonably convinced that the negatives of Clinton are not likely to be reversed. And in spite of the hype from his silly movie, I do not think Gore is likely to become real in the total electorate. That does not mean that either party might choose a candidate who cannot win in the general - 1972 and 1984 suggest that parties can make silly mistakes (one could also argue that the 1992 GOP primary is another example of that same trend - POTUS 41 was clearly not excited about running for re-election). One other preliminary point. With the exception of Obama, any candidate with more than 50% unknown suggests a pretty unreliable polling subject. (The public perceptions are simply not yet well defined.) At the same time, it is possible that a candidate like Gore with high negatives and low flexibility could turn the situation around - but the chances are pretty small.

For the dems there seem to be two problems. First, those who are well known have high negatives. The average negative for the leading dems is twice that for the leading GOP candidates. Obama, at this point is the great unknown for the dems - not a surprise. But the flexibility that Clinton, Gore and Kerry have in trying to make up their negatives is non-existent. For the GOP candidates their negatives are a lot lower and at the same time their flexibility is considerably greater. For the newer candidates I have not calculated their flex scores, it's probably not a reasonable number.

What does all this say two years before the election? First, depending on what happens to Obama in the next few months, I would expect the democratic race to be more interesting. The three "front runners" if you can call them that are likely to falter and if they do not will have a very tough time getting through a general election. I would expect these kinds of numbers to draw some more democrats into the race. That does not mean candidates like Biden are likely to strengthen. When he announces people will begin to remember his last run - and that may slow him down a lot. Second, Romney seems a lot like Obama although I suspect his negatives are a bit better known at this point, even though he is not well known by the electorate. Third, it is hard to imagine the fervent GOP accepting any of the three front runners - so there is a good chance that in that primary there will be a developing free-for-all. This could be a very interesting 12 months for political junkies.