Josh Patashnik: Veeps won't change the math of the election in November
[Josh Patashnik is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.]
There's a strain of logic in recent presidential campaign discourse that goes something like this: Though Barack Obama sports a modest lead over John McCain in national polling, his apparent weakness in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida could lead to a loss in the electoral college even if he wins the national popular vote by a wide margin. But his salvation could lie in picking someone from one of those states, like Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell or Ohio governor Ted Strickland, as his running mate....
... it's certainly possible that the election will be so close as to make a split conceivable. So Obama had better pick a Rendell or a Strickland as V.P., right? Well, no. Summing up the work of the political scientists who have explored the question, David W. Romero of the University of Texas at San Antonio concluded in a 2001 paper that "vice presidential candidates have no influence on the voters' choice for president." (Bolding mine.) Events like the announcement of a running mate or the vice presidential debates can produce a momentary blip in polls--like the ten-point bounce Kerry got when he selected John Edwards--but it soon disappears.
There's little evidence vice presidential candidates make a difference even in their home states. A 1989 analysis by Robert Dudley and Ronald Rapoport in the American Journal of Political Science found that, on average, a vice-presidential candidate improves his ticket's performance in his home state by only a statistically insignificant 0.3 percent. (Presidential candidates, by contrast, get a sizable four-percent boost in their home states.) Their result has been borne out in the years since--remember when Edwards was supposed to put North Carolina in play for Kerry? They lost by 12 points. What's more, the effect tends to be strongest in small states--Edmund Muskie pretty clearly put the Democratic ticket over the top in Maine in 1968--but nonexistent in large states where retail politics count for less. Even the edge LBJ supposedly gave JFK in Texas is debatable: It was a heavily Democratic state, and Kennedy fared well in other Southern states with similar demographics.
These questions are part of a larger debate in political science: Can the outcomes of presidential campaigns shift significantly as a result of campaign quirks, or are they determined largely by underlying economic and political fundamentals? For the most part, the latter view has won out--and it suggests that the Democratic nominee is headed for a relatively comfortable win. Of course, the candidacy of Barack Obama (or Hillary Clinton, for that matter) makes 2008 the first election that won't have two white male candidates, and therefore something of a historical anomaly. The race could end up being a 2000-style nail-biter--and, in that case, there's a small possibility that electoral math and running mates will make a difference. But if things do play out as they have for decades, a lot of hyperventilating pundits will have egg on their faces.
Read entire article at New Republic
There's a strain of logic in recent presidential campaign discourse that goes something like this: Though Barack Obama sports a modest lead over John McCain in national polling, his apparent weakness in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida could lead to a loss in the electoral college even if he wins the national popular vote by a wide margin. But his salvation could lie in picking someone from one of those states, like Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell or Ohio governor Ted Strickland, as his running mate....
... it's certainly possible that the election will be so close as to make a split conceivable. So Obama had better pick a Rendell or a Strickland as V.P., right? Well, no. Summing up the work of the political scientists who have explored the question, David W. Romero of the University of Texas at San Antonio concluded in a 2001 paper that "vice presidential candidates have no influence on the voters' choice for president." (Bolding mine.) Events like the announcement of a running mate or the vice presidential debates can produce a momentary blip in polls--like the ten-point bounce Kerry got when he selected John Edwards--but it soon disappears.
There's little evidence vice presidential candidates make a difference even in their home states. A 1989 analysis by Robert Dudley and Ronald Rapoport in the American Journal of Political Science found that, on average, a vice-presidential candidate improves his ticket's performance in his home state by only a statistically insignificant 0.3 percent. (Presidential candidates, by contrast, get a sizable four-percent boost in their home states.) Their result has been borne out in the years since--remember when Edwards was supposed to put North Carolina in play for Kerry? They lost by 12 points. What's more, the effect tends to be strongest in small states--Edmund Muskie pretty clearly put the Democratic ticket over the top in Maine in 1968--but nonexistent in large states where retail politics count for less. Even the edge LBJ supposedly gave JFK in Texas is debatable: It was a heavily Democratic state, and Kennedy fared well in other Southern states with similar demographics.
These questions are part of a larger debate in political science: Can the outcomes of presidential campaigns shift significantly as a result of campaign quirks, or are they determined largely by underlying economic and political fundamentals? For the most part, the latter view has won out--and it suggests that the Democratic nominee is headed for a relatively comfortable win. Of course, the candidacy of Barack Obama (or Hillary Clinton, for that matter) makes 2008 the first election that won't have two white male candidates, and therefore something of a historical anomaly. The race could end up being a 2000-style nail-biter--and, in that case, there's a small possibility that electoral math and running mates will make a difference. But if things do play out as they have for decades, a lot of hyperventilating pundits will have egg on their faces.