TREND LINES - September 27, 2008

The problem with following trends is that messy events come along to

clutter up the trend lines. A week ago

the US political media were consumed

by discussion of whether McCain had transformed the race by choosing

Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential nominee. A week later, the Republican convention bounce having faded, Sarah Palin no longer looks like a transformative figure in US politics. Most recent polling, in fact, now once again shows a narrow Obama lead – he leads by 3 points in the Gallup daily tracking poll [1], and by two point in

the rival Rasmussen daily [2].

It should be emphasized once again that there is no special virtue to these tracking polls except that each provides a time series of results using the same methodology. Although polling is done and results reported daily, the tracking polls are best for assessing trends over a week or more. A couple of weeks ago we predicted in this space that only after the parties' transient convention bounces faded would the polling again give a reliable picture of the underlying race. This prediction seems borne out by the return of the tracking polls to their pre-convention status quo of an effective tie or slender Obama lead.

But in the meanwhile events have intruded on the race, in the form of the last week's financial crisis. The sudden collapse of long-established leading brokerage houses triggered turmoil on the stock market, and has now led to a proposal for a staggering $700 billion bailout. The crisis was a godsend for the Obama campaign, however unseemly it would be for Obama strategists to say so (and of course they did not). Suddenly the news media were no longer talking about the cultural politics embodioed by the Sarah Palin VP nomination. Instead the TV talk is now all about economic worries – just what the Obama camp wants people to hear.

A focus on the economy favors Obama for several reasons. One surviving heritage of the Depression and New Deal is that the US public still has more confidence in Democrats during economic hard times, or when hard times might be looming. Republicans carry the more immediate burden of being the incumbent presidential party, whose economic policies have been in force for the past eight years. McCain rarely mentions his party on the campaign trail, and never mentions Bush, but the Obama campaign mentions both regularly. McCain himself, though he has a genuine claim to be a reformer on some issues such as campaign finance, has hewn largely to Republican economic orthodoxy, including support for deregulation of financial markets.

Obama himself, following the line laid down in his nomination acceptance speech, is running as a traditional lunch bucket Democrat, using his formidable rhetorical powers not to evoke hope, as he did in the primaries, but to say "enough is enough." Most of the Obama campaign's – uniquely well-funded – effort is going into efforts to drive up Democratic turnout in key swing states. This activity takes place largely below the radar of the national media, and its impact cannot be measured in advance. There has been much speculation among progressive blog habitués about younger voters, many of whom rely entirely on cell phones, being missed by conventional telephone polling. No evidence yet supports this contention, and indeed standard polling shows that younger people tilt strongly toward Obama.

Either the new voters show up or they don't. In the primaries Democrats turned out in exceptional numbers to vote for both Obama and Hillary Clinton. If they turn out in exceptional numbers to vote for Obama in November, he will win handily. The online betting pools continue to favor Obama, Rasmussen's only narrowly [3], while the Iowa Electronic Markets pool, after narrowing briefly following the Republican convention, has returned to a roughly 60/40 margin in favor of Obama [4].

What lasting effect, then, did the two national conventions have, if any? The Democratic convention seems in retrospect to have featured a manufactured TV psychodrama about Obama and the Clintons, both Hillary and Bill. Would they cast a golden glow of party unity on Obama's convention, or would the much-reported tensions continue? In fact there should never have been much doubt that consummate political professionals like the Clintons would play their part, and they did. Joe Biden has proven to be a safe, cautious VP choice, bringing Obama few political benefits but causing him no problems.

The Republican convention, and the choice of Palin, have evidently done what McCain needed most: solidifying the Republican base. At least in the days coming out of the convention, GOP crowds have been far more electrified by their VP nominee than by their presidential nominee. Her appeal to base Republican voters seems to be largely symbolic. Like most of the electorate few had ever heard of her before, but she was successfully presented to them as a television sitcom character: a conservative suburban mom who happens to be governor of Alaska. The initial wave of media speculation about her family sealed the GOP base's affection for her; in their eyes anyone the media dislike can't be all bad.

The Democratic base has picked up a corresponding dislike for Palin, again based less on her previously inconspicuous public career than on TV sitcom symbolism and reflexive distaste for anyone suddenly so popular with Republicans. But in the wake of the market rumblings she no longer dominates the news. The Republican convention, like its Democratic counterpart and all modern US national political conventions, amounted to a televised rally for party loyalists, and did what it was supposed to do without changing the dynamics of the race.

The Republican convention and the Palin hoopla do underline the reliance of the GOP on cultural issues, or more precisely on a sort of tribal solidarity. Familiar "hot button" issues such as abortion have scarcely been mentioned. They do not need to be mentioned; they are conveyed as subtext by the Palin family narrative, implying a conservative lifestyle if not precisely conservative values. This is sufficient to rally the Republican base. Whether it will be sufficient to overcome bad economic news remains to be seen.

Rick Robinson

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Author of the article holds B.A. degree in Economics from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and M.A. degree in English from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California . Mr. Robinson worked as a county-level campaigner in Dukakis (1988) and Clinton (1992) presidential campaigns. He presently works as a journalist and political commentator.

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