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Sabato’s Crystal Ball: Two Articles Today
But should we be watching so early and closely?
Bill Clinton and Mike Huckabee
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2 Responses to “Sabato’s Crystal Ball: Two Articles Today”
Greetings from Iowa.
(No need for modifiers that add nothing of value.)
Are they greedy? Yes.
No. The states have power and influence relative to their population. (That’s why we have a Senate as well as a House of Representatives, with equal apportionment in the Senate, to counter-balance the advantage normally held by the large states.)
Yes. There is nothing, repeat, nothing sacred about Iowa and New Hampshire going first. There is no reason anyone has to accept a state law defining what it does in terms of what other states are doing.
White: Race or ethnicity (or sex, a.k.a. “gender”) or any other such criterion should play no role whatsoever. In a nation civic, legal, and political equality, in fact that is (reverse) discrimination.
Rural: Yes. Practically all farmable land is intensively farmed, and this state is a constellation of small towns, totally different from the modern major metro area with suburbs (where most voters are, and which effectively define the modern USA).
(Look here — cities and towns are red; most towns are too small to even be seen.)
IOWA DOT map (many, many towns — click to enlarge)
BANG! goes the 2008 campaign starting gun here.
Before I leave — I have encountered plenty of criticism of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation role, but not one defense so far of its role.
“This paper provides an investigation of the role of momentum and social learning in sequential voting systems. In the econometric model, voters are uncertain over candidate quality, and voters in late states attempt to infer the information held by those in early states from voting returns. Candidates experience momentum effects when their performance in early states exceeds expectations. The empirical application focuses on the responses of daily polling data to the release of voting returns in the 2004 presidential primary. We find that Kerry benefited from surprising wins in early states and took votes away from Dean, who held a strong lead prior to the beginning of the primary season. The voting weights implied by the estimated model demonstrate that early voters have up to 20 times the influence of late voters in the selection of candidates, demonstrating a significant departure from the ideal of “one person, one vote.” We then address several alternative, non-learning explanations for our results. Finally, we run simulations under different electoral structures and find that a simultaneous election would have been more competitive due to the absence of herding and that alternative sequential structures would have yielded different outcomes.”
– Knight & Schiff, Momentum and Social Learning in Presidential Primaries
“Iowa should have a chance to lead the nation as one of the first states in which voters register their choices for president . . . every 16 years or so. Not every four.”
“Iowa is terribly unrepresentative of the rest of America. It has only about 2.9 million people, barely a decent-sized large city, and it is largely rural, whereas most Americans live in the equivalent of New Jersey.”
“Farewell, Iowa – with your flat frozen land, ethanol subsidies[,] and cosy neighbourly values.”
“some U.S. editorials said the midwestern state was too unrepresentative and voter turnout too small to merit such an outsized role in the U.S. presidential election process”
“That’s why the first-in-the-nation primary elections should rotate. Pick some formula in which two different states get picked every four years. You could have rules accounting for geographic diversity – back-to-back events in North and South Carolina, for example, would be silly. But move it around so that the country isn’t held hostage by the same left-wing and right-wing populists every four years.
But we’d better act now. Because by next week, the Iowans start taking hostages again.”
“80 per cent of respondents call for a system in which states take turns in holding their primaries and caucuses first, while 18 per cent are content with having Iowa and New Hampshire always come first.”
“If Iowa loses its first-in-the-nation status, we won’t miss the nightly phone calls from candidates. But we will miss this unique opportunity to help shape the national political race. It could be the last time Iowans have such a voice. If you want to have a say in party politics, this is your chance to be heard.”