A Chronicle of a Political Death Foretold

A small consensus is forming around the idea that Romney's campaign is now officially "dead." After several weeks of very bad messaging - including a conversation with a chair, bad judgement in his statements on the Middle East crisis, reports of infighting and an already notorious secret video - criticism from moderate stalwarts like David Brooks has been fierce. Unfortunately, these proclamations of imminent campaign collapse are widely exaggerated.

This is a close campaign. It was always going to be a close campaign. As Matthew Dickinson writes,

As I’ve discussed previously, these remarks tend not to have much impact largely because they are filtered through voters’ preexisting ideological beliefs. For this reason, I doubt Mitt’s 47% comment is the game changer that partisan pundits predict/hope it will be. Remember, campaigns tend not to change votes so much as they activate latent predispositions among voters. Yes, it’s possible this time will be different, and that Mitt’s remarks really are a turning point. But in the absence of evidence indicating why this time should be different, forgive me if I don’t take the partisan pundits’ words for it.

Dickinson refers to the following chart from John Sides, discussing the strong evidence that gaffes don't really influence polling data.

Now some liberals, including most of the people that would read this post, would look at some of the "gaffes" highlighted above and scoff. But that's the point. While you, liberal reader, don't think  that UDBT is a big deal, people on the right say otherwise. This is clearly framing, based on ideological preferences. It's also why we see, over and over again, that "gaffes" don't seem to have too much of an immediate, short-term effect. One side goes up in arms over them; the other shrugs; those in the middle, who hate "politics," mostly ignore it all.

John Sides shows this effect in his discussion of George Allen's "Macaca moment." While there was an immediate negative effect, similar to the polling shift observed by Nate Silver, it becomes very difficult to see how this influenced the final election results. A few weeks after the statement, once the election finally came around, the race was tied. And even if Macaca did a lot to damage Allen as a candidate, it does nothing to explain how Webb's campaign grew in stature and how that candidate finished so strongly.

So maybe the media makes a little too much out of gaffes (gasp!), and maybe we're blowing the current situation out of proportion. Nonetheless, I think there's another issue, relating to general impression, which I think that this outweighs any short-term reference. While it would be much harder to track, there's clearly a point in a campaign where a candidate just isn't taken as seriously anymore. It could be Al Gore's statements on the Internet, John Kerry "for it before I was against it." These sort of lasting impressions, which persist with us even to this day. They form the kinds of halos that permanently color our impression of these politicians. Jon Stewart continues to show zero respect for John Kerry.

The challenge about this sort of thing, though, is that we don't have any sort of testable hypothesis to work on. The only real evidence about the existence of damning impressions is counterfactual. As Sides explains,

The best argument you can make about these gaffes is sort of a woolly counterfactual: “Well, if it hadn’t been for the release of Romney’s video today, Romney would have been able to accomplish X, Y, and Z, which would have helped him win the election.” Like any counterfactual, there is some plausibility—yes, Romney would rather talk about the unemployment rate than these comments.

But like any counterfactual, it’s predicated on assumptions about what the world would have looked like without these comments. And given the tenuousness of any such assumptions, and the (at best) small effects that single events in any presidential general election campaign tend to have, I would stop well short of calling this video “devastating.”

So pay attention to public impression, more so than the actual statements. There is some signs that this isn't really going well for Romney, and his campaign is losing most of its credibility. Take this video from Key and Peele for example. But it is still too early to say. It's going to be a very close election.