The Warden

Hence the basic irony inherent in the Obama presidency: He campaigned as a post-partisan, but his most lasting accomplishments will be those of a partisan.

We first conducted a detailed analysis of local newspaper coverage of House races in nearly 350 congressional districts across the country. Analyzing 4,748 articles, we found virtually no gender differences whatsoever.

(via John Sides)

Does this suggest that Mr. Romney’s campaign was smart to invest resources in Pennsylvania in the closing days of the campaign?

The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that it might have been better served by contesting Pennsylvania throughout the campaign, rather than just at the last minute.

One of the emerging post-campaign narratives is that all the outside money (more than $1.3 billion) that poured into the 2012 election didn’t buy much in the way of victories. And as we dig through the results in detail (our extensive data visualizations and analysis are below), the story holds up: we can find no statistically observable relationship between the outside spending and the likelihood of victory.

(via John Sides)

So let’s get the facts straight. Elections are rarely mandates. Brendan said this in 2004. I said it in 2008. Nolan said it yesterday. I’ll say it again. Voters don’t make choices by first formulating views on all sorts of issues, then figuring out where the candidates stand on these issues, and then choosing the candidate whose views best represent their own. In fact, often that story runs in reverse: they choose a candidate based on party or whatever, and then line up their views on issues to match the candidates.

Last night, President Obama accused Mitt Romney of saying Russia is the “biggest geopolitical threat facing America”? According to Politifact, this charge was true. According to FactCheck.org it was false. So each campaign can cite a “neutral” fact-checking organization in defense of their candidate. Who’s right? Decide for yourself. Here’s the transcript of the CNN interview in which the initial comment was made.

You can argue that Obama clearly won (he did). You can argue that Romney didn’t bring his A-game (he didn’t). But you also can’t say that Candy Crowley’s jab was what a wholly unbiased moderator would have done.

You could say that Obama was calling this attack an “act of terror.” Or you could say that Obama was using the phrase “act of terror” in the vicinity of discussing the “attack” to come close to labeling it an act of terror without actually, logically doing so, preserving his freedom to not do so in the future. He only used the phrase after talking about the original 2001 9/11 attacks, after all. Maybe those were the “acts of terror” that wouldn’t shake our resolve, etc. that Obama was talking about. The antecedent is ambigious, presumably intentionally so.

The main reason Romney’s effective rate is so low is that the American tax code contains a lot of preferences for investment income over labor income. That’s something that strikes many people as unfair on its face, and particularly unfair since it often means very low rates for extremely rich people like Rommey. And Rommey himself as a rich guy who’s also a member of the political party seen as favoring the rich, and who’s been recorded as whining that the working poor are undertaxed is perhaps not an ideal messenger for a defense of this policy. 

But this is definitely an issue where the conservative position is in line with what most experts think is the right course, and Democrats are outside the mainstream.

Democrats are now favored to retain control of the Senate when the new Congress convenes in January, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast, breaking a summer stalemate during which control of the chamber appeared about equally likely to go either way.

Sure, she took one shot — like every other RNC speaker — at Obama’s “you didn’t build that” line. But, unlike many RNC speakers, she landed hers cleanly, bringing up the national debt, and crediting, “He did build that.”   But most effective was her discussion of her own conversion from Democrat to Republican. And she told a story that led up to the best punch line of the convention, by far: going back to one of her early races for District Attorney — as a Democrat — and describing a dinner conversation with local Republicans in which she discovered common ground.   On welfare: “Is it a way of life, or a hand up?” On big government: “How much should it tax families and small businesses?” And at the end of that dinner, turning to her husband and saying, “I’ll be damned — we’re Republicans!”   It’s not just a good tagline — you’ll hear it again in the future. It highlights the overlap between what conservatives preach and what reaches voters in communities of color.