Georgia: We Knew It All Along, Too

By Martin Gottlieb | Wednesday, December 3, 2008, 09:14 PM

I really should have made this post before the George Senate election was decided. That would have been in keeping with the spirit of the blog: call it beforehand, publicly, or shut up.

Nevertheless, I belatedly say: Anybody who is in tune with the Lichtman Keys would have expected a Republican victory. Lichtman has a set of keys for predicting Senate elections, which we haven’t mentioned much here, if at all. In presidential years, he gives a key to a Senate candidate who is in the same party as the presidential candidate who’s victory the Keys predict. (So the Democrat would have gotten it in 2008.) But in mid-term elections, he gives a key to a candidate who is not a member of the sitting president’s party.

Lichtman is certainly not the only one to notice that mid-term elections tend not to be great for the party of the sitting president.

So the question arises: Should the Georgia election be considered part of the 2008 election or the 2010 election?

In watching special elections over the years, it has come to seem to me that they have much the feel of mid-terms. That is, the political problems of the presidential party start immediately upon its victory. Some swing voters start to see some value in balancing off the president even before he does anything.

That logic suggested this election would go to the R. Of course, that’s always a good bet in George, especially when the R is the incumbent (another Key)And, after all, Georgia went for McCain. But the conventional speculation leading up to the run-off was about whether Obama’s current popularity might bring in the D, especially if Obama went down there.

Quite the opposite: Obama’s election became just one more problem for the D.

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Next question

By Martin Gottlieb | Thursday, November 6, 2008, 09:45 PM

Anybody check out how the keys look for 12?

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Meltdown, schmeltdown

By Martin Gottlieb | Friday, October 10, 2008, 06:34 PM

(This kind of expanding on a couple of posts by Tom Q in the string below this one.)

If this blog had audio, the sound you would be hearing would be the gnashing of my teeth.

Maybe I should be pleased that the guy who The Keys say is supposed to win is ahead in the polls. But that’s a minor victory.

What I’m looking for is complete capitulation, wherein every single member of the media, every member of Congress, everybody who works for Congress or works in any political campaigns anyplace signs a confession saying they were wrong all along about everything, that, in fact, campaigns don’t count, in the sense of determining who wins.

But, of course, everybody in the above list has forgotten that some people said all along that it was simply a Democratic year.

Obama’s lead is universally attributed the fact that this is a Democratic month.

Well, yes, of course, the historic financial crisis has been a problem for the incumbent party.

But the crisis is a matter of a bad situation for the nation getting hugely worse. Even if the meitdown hadn’t happen, the badness of the situation would have been enough to cause Obama to prevail when all was said and done.

Let the record show that the poll bounce that McCain got from the Republican convention had ebbed before the financial crisis hit, and Obama had taken a tiny lead, or moved into a tie. It’s clear now that McCain had shot his wad and that the rest of the campaign would have been a matter of the young guy growing on people and becoming an acceptable alternative, which is all it would have taken.

Unfortunately, we are the only ones who know that.

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Lichtman Logic Triumphs

By Martin Gottlieb | Tuesday, September 16, 2008, 05:55 PM

Good points being made here, in the string below. Glad to see it. I’d like to address some of them, in due course.

For now, though, what’s really on my mind is this (a point I just made in my column for my day job):

Seems to me that what’s happening is the triumph of the Lichtman logic. The strategy of both parties is built around it entirely.

Continue reading "Lichtman Logic Triumphs"...

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Where we stand:

By Martin Gottlieb | Friday, September 12, 2008, 11:42 AM

This post came in from Tom Q., for the string below this one. But I think it merits its own string. (It also merits paragraph separations, which are not possible in responses to posts.)

I will respond.

He says:

Okay, to move beyond the charisma question, a few other thoughts:

1) Whether you think the number of Keys lost this cycle is 7, 8 (including recession) or 9 (including charisma), it’s an easy call. Yet out there in journalism/blogosphere land, there’s widespread “McCain surging/Obama doomed!” feeling.

Continue reading "Where we stand:"...

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Lichtman on Charisma and More

By Martin Gottlieb | Saturday, September 6, 2008, 12:03 AM

The Washington Post had an article about Lichtman in late August (by the science writer, not a political guy), and then Lichtman did a chat session. Rather than list interminable urls here, I think I will suggest that you go to WashingtonPost.com and search for “Lichtman.”

In the Q. and A. the charisma issue came up. Here’s the passage:

Q: Professor Lichtman: How do you deal with the question of subjectivity for the two charisma keys? While I support Obama, I don’t find him particularly charismatic, though I can see where some would. McCain seems to me not charismatic at all, but surely others see him as an exciting “maverick” and “war hero” and so on.

Allan Lichtman: The charisma keys are the most subjective or the most judgmental of all 13 keys. No election has ever turned on the charisma keys and this one does not. The point, however, is that there are always individual voters and some voters groups that will find particular candidates charismatic or inspiring. To reach the threshold for charisma under the Keys system, however, the candidate must be broadly recognized as inspirational. Such candidates are very rare. In recent decades only John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan have reached the threshold.

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Obama Charisma Star Still Rising?

By Martin Gottlieb | Tuesday, August 19, 2008, 06:10 PM

Let’s start this thread with a comment that came in on another string. You’ll see why I wanted to do that.

First, however, a word: This blog is monitored. I decide which comments get posted. I am not posting comments that are arguments for or against a candidate. That just isn’t what we’re doing here. Plenty of other places are doing it. I can understand why my post about race was seen by some as pro-Obama. But that wasn’t the idea. Please try to remember that the predictive system in use here predicted Bush on ‘04, not to mention all the other Republican popular-vote victories in recent decades.

OK, here’s the comment. It’s a couple of weeks old. Sorry about that.

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