Prop. 14 and California’s Minor Parties

So after not posting anything new for a while, you get a couple posts one right after the other.

My article, “Proposition 14 and California’s Minor Parties: A Case Study of Electoral Reform and Party Response,” is now available from the California Journal of Politics and Policy here (gated unfortunately; here’s the version I will be presenting at MPSA next month). Here’s the abstract:

In 2010, California voters enacted Proposition 14, the Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act, which changed California’s electoral system from single-member, plurality district elections to a top two (majority) runoff system. Although literature in comparative politics and formal theory suggests this change should help third parties in California, almost 80% fewer minor-party candidates filed for office in 2012 than in 2010. Indeed, 2012 saw the smallest number of minor-party candidates in California since 1966. Employing a mixed-methods approach, this paper examines different explanations for the decline in minor-party candidacies. Although most observers argue that Proposition 14 directly discouraged minor-party candidates from filing for office (because they likely would not make the runoff ballot), I argue that the decline results from three other factors: (1) a long-run decline in the California Libertarian Party, (2) a legislature-driven increase in the filing fee required from minor-party candidates, and, most importantly, (3) party elites foregoing candidate recruitment in 2012.

If their publishing schedule looks like last year’s, it will be in the upcoming June issue.

The Future of California Politics?

The California Department of Finance released its new population projections for California counties through 2060. There are a whole bunch of goodies in the report, so I thought I would highlight a few of them here.

First, by 2050, Hispanics are projected to be the plurality ethnicity in California. Here’s the projected ethnic makeup (see p. 6) of California in 2010 and 2060:

By 2060, Hispanics will make up 48% of the population (up from 38%), Whites will be 30% of the population (down from 40%), Asian and Pacific Islanders will be 13% (same), African Americans will be 4% (down from 6%), and everyone else will be 5% of the population.

In terms of future voters, these changes have potentially significant implications for California politics. I am not one of the people who thinks that “demographics are destiny” in terms of party politics, at least over the long run, so I don’t think these changes mean that the Republican Party is looking at long term irrelevance in California. If the party keeps its current platform, sure, but there is no reason it has to. Both parties, though, are going to have to adapt to the changing electorate as the issue sets of Hispanic voters are different than the issue sets of white voters.

Second, California will remain relatively young relative to the rest of the country. Our economy (and our budget) will not be as heavily impacted by the Baby Boomers and Generation X moving into retirement. There will still be significant demand, and resources, for public education. The aging of the population will not be uniformly distributed across ethnicities, which will also have significant implications for politics. Whites will grow older faster than any other ethnic group. By 2030, there will be more whites over the age of 65 than under the age of 25 in California. In contrast, there will by almost three times as many Hispanics under the age of 25 as there are Hispanics over the age of 65.

Third, the population–and therefore power–will continue to move inland. Southern California (particularly Los Angeles County) will remain the 800-pound gorilla in California politics, but the Central Valley (Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys) and the Inland Empire (San Bernardino and Riverside) will see their relative populations grow with the rest of the state seeing their relative populations decline. The Central Valley will see its relative population grow 27% between 2010 and 2060. The Inland Empire will see relative growth of 28%. The Bay Area, in contrast, is projected to see the steepest decline in its relative population (down 10%). These changes mean that over time the Central Valley and Inland Empire will gain representatives in Sacramento and Washington DC while other areas see their representation decine.

Fourth, San Joaquin County will more than double in size between 2010 and 2060. San Joaquin will go from being the 15th largest county in California (with just under 700,000 residents) to the 12th largest county (with over 1.5 million residents). Hispanics will account for more than half of this growth.

 

Your 112th Congress: Most. Polarized. Ever.

The DW-NOMINATE scores for the 112th Congress were released by VoteView yesterday (original post). The title of this post gives the punchline away, but according to the NOMINATE measure the 112th Congress was the most polarized since Reconstruction. Here’s the graph to go with it:

NOMINATE uses every vote cast during a congress to estimate the ideological positions of each member. Since membership overlaps and individual members’ ideologies do not change much over time, it is possible to compare comparing the ideology of members today with members from the past. The measure is scaled from -1 (the most liberal member) to +1 (the most conservative member). What you see above is the ideological distance between the average Republican and the average Democrat in the House and Senate over time.

Where does all that polarization come from? Mostly the Republican Party, though note that this is not anything new. The average Republican has been getting more conservative since the mid-1970′s.

Here’s VoteView’s statement:

The 112th Congress closed unceremoniously this month with a series of votes (by the House and Senate) to avert the “fiscal cliff”. With this data, we can now analyze roll call voting in the 112th Congress in its entirety and place the amount of Congressional polarization seen over the last two years in historical context. … And … this phenomenon has been asymmetric: contemporary polarization of the parties is almost entirely due to the movement of congressional Republicans to the right. Polarization is measured as the difference between the Republican and Democratic means on the first DW-NOMINATE dimension, which represents the ideological (liberal-conservative) scale.

So, How Did the Minor Party and No Preference Candidates Do?

One consequence of Proposition 14 is that there were almost no legislative contests this year featuring minor-party candidates. As I previously argued, Proposition 14 combined with the legislature’s increase in filing fees essentially ended the idea of a third-party candidacy in California. As a result, just three minor-party candidates (all from the Peace and Freedom Party) and five No Party Preference (NPP) candidates appeared on the November ballot.

How did these eight candidates do against their major-party opposition? With two notable exceptions (discussed below), they performed as well as past candidates in similar situations– i.e., not well at all. Over the last five election cycles, there have been 31 contests where a major-party candidate (Democratic or Republican) faced just one independent or minor-party candidate. In every case, the major-party candidate won, usually by a lot. The following table shows the average vote share for the major-party candidate in these contests:

The average vote share for major-party candidates was a little lower in 2012 than in prior years. Whereas the average winning vote share was about 80% previously, in 2012 these candidates still averaged just 75% of the vote across the eight contests.

The following figure shows the average vote share for each of these 31 candidates by election cycle. The large standard deviations for 2008 and 2012 in Table 1 are the result of three contests, all against independent or NPP candidates. In 2008, Abel Maldonado (R), who was instrumental in giving California Proposition 14, faced a strong independent challenger, Jim Fitzgerald. Maldonado won with 63% of the vote. This year, Henry Waxman (D) beat Bill Bloomfield (NPP) with just 53% of the vote. Also in 2012, incumbent Democratic Assemblyman James Paul Fong beat Chad Walsh (NPP) with 62% of the vote. Pull these three contests out, and 2008 and 2012 look just like 2006 in Table 1.

So, to sum up. Did independents (NPP) and minor-party candidates do any better under the top two system than under California’s previous system? Not really. The Fong and Waxman contests are worth some additional exploration in this regard, but even with these contests the major party candidates won by quite a lot on average.

Update [11/16]: The above graph doesn’t appropriately convey the futility of candidates running against otherwise unopposed major-party candidates. Here’s another take:

Did Outside Money Matter in House Races?

In our local congressional contest, Jerry McNerney’s campaign was not only out raised and out spent by Ricky Gill’s campaign (at least through the third quarter), but Republican aligned outside groups also spent far more money on behave of Gill than Democratic aligned groups spent on behalf of McNerney. The Center for Responsive Politics data show a nearly 5:1 advantage for Gill in outside spending. (Outside groups spent $4.80 on behalf of Gill for every $1 spent on behalf of McNerney.) Despite this imbalance, Gill lost.

What about other House contests? Did outside spending make a difference across the country? In a word, no. The result we saw here, according to an analysis by Lee Drutman, Alexander Furnas, Amy Cesal and Alex Engler at the Sunlight Foundation, was repeated in House races across the country.

They write:

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.

The kicker in the analysis is this chart:

The vertical axis is the Republican’s vote share. The horizontal axis is the Republican’s advantage in outside spending. Can you spot a relationship? I can’t.

So why didn’t outside spending matter much in 2012? Drutman and his colleagues offer a handful of explanations:

1. National factors were more important.
2. Outside spending produced a backlash.
3. Money has diminishing marginal returns.
4. Outside spending is more about offense.
5. Candidate spending matters more.

I’m not sure which of these I agree with most. What about you?

[h/t the Monkey Cage]

The Popular Vote and the Electoral Vote

I did something like this in 2008, but it’s worth another mention in the context of the 2012 election. The Electoral College exaggerates the support that the winning presidential candidate receives. The graph below shows the percentage of the two-party (Republican and Democratic) popular vote received by the winner and the percentage of the electoral vote received by the winner. The 45-degree line shows what a one-to-one relationship would be between these two measures.

The 2012 election is buried in the bottom, left-hand corner of the graph. President Obama won 51.2% of the two-party popular vote this year. Now that Gov. Romney has conceded Florida, and assuming all the electors remain faithful, President Obama will receive 61.7% of the electoral vote. Both numbers are down from 2008, when Pres. Obama received 51.9% of the two-party popular vote and 64.5% of the electoral vote.

More on Jerry McNerney’s Big Win

For all his strength as a fundraiser ($2.6 million as of Oct. 17; $5.6 million with outside money added in) and his admirable qualities as a candidate, Ricky Gill did slightly worse than either of Jerry McNerney’s other recent challengers. In 2008, Dean Andal received 45% of the vote. In 2010, David Harmer received 47% of the vote. Ricky Gill got just 44% of the vote.

Why did Ricky Gill do so poorly, especially since he was a much better candidate than either Andal or Harmer? While Gill is ideologically out of step with the district (far more conservative), I don’t think that’s the explanation. Gill and his campaign did a good job dissembling on that fact and emphasizing those dimensions and issues that cast Gill in a positive light.

I think the story is Gill’s strategic choice to cast himself as the “San Joaquin” candidate. Boiled down to its essence, Gill’s campaign message was, “I am from San Joaquin; my opponent is not.” Gill emphasized his ties to Lodi and the local agriculture community. There are two (three) problems with this message as far as CD-9 is concerned:

First, while agriculture is an important part of the San Joaquin economy, it’s not the whole of the economy. There are a lot of other economic interests–especially the Port of Stockton–that are important. Gill essentially wrote those off in his campaign.

Second, and relatedly, a lot of the district is outside San Joaquin County. About 30 percent of the district lives in Contra Costa County–outside the valley that Gill so emphasized in his campaign–and Contra Costa went heavily for McNerney (59-41). Contra Costa supplied over 70 percent of McNerney’s margin of victory over Gill. Again, Gill wrote off a large portion of the electorate with his primary campaign message.

Update 2: Given McNerney’s advantage in Contra Costa County, and assuming the same level of turnout in San Joaquin, Gill needed to win at least 54.5% of the San Joaquin vote. He didn’t come close to that.

The third problem for Gill–not related to the strategic choice his campaign made–was that he is a Republican running in a Democratic district at a time when party labels are very important to voters. San Joaquin County voted 53-44 for President Obama. It voted 52-48 for McNerney. In that regard, Gill did well. Ultimately, when combined with the strategic miscalculation, though, it proved fatal.

Edit/Update 1: In the background is also the fact that Jerry McNerney ran a very effective, low-key, and workman-like campaign that did all the things it was supposed to do. It registered voters. It targeted its appeals well. It used valence issues (Gill is too young and inexperienced) effectively. These are important contributors to this election’s outcome. I think the main story given Gill’s strengths, however, is that Gill made a major strategic mistake and it cost him important votes.

Update 3: See here for some more thoughts.

Obligatory “What Does It All Mean” Post

I don’t think the election changed much or told us anything we didn’t already know about American politics. It was pretty much a status quo election. Sorry to disappoint. Here’s some collected thoughts instead.

National

Evidence-based claims generally win out over faith-based claims. The poll-driven election forecast models (e.g., Pollster, 538) were right. “Vibrations” and claims that the polls just seemed wrong were not. Also, Dick Morris still doesn’t have a clue. At least he’s good for a laugh.

It’s hard to beat an incumbent president when things are getting better. Also, when the primary point of comparison is still George W. Bush.

The basic dynamics of national politics haven’t changed. It will still be hard for President Obama to get what he wants from Congress. Republican policy preferences, and the intensity with which they are held, haven’t changed.

The House Florida crazy quotient changed sides of the aisle. West lost. Grayson won.

California

Holding schools hostage works. Prop. 30 passed.

California voters still like to be tough on crime. Prop. 35 won and Prop. 34 lost.

Voters can read. Prop. 40 passed by a wide margin.

Local

It’s hard to win if you are mayor when the city declares bankruptcy. Mayor Johnston lost.

That said, it’s possible to win even if you voted for the bankruptcy. Eggman won.

Basing your entire campaign on “being from here” (San Joaquin) is great so long as (1) a significant portion of the district isn’t somewhere other than “here,” (2) you aren’t running against an incumbent, and (3) the district isn’t titled toward the other party. McNerney–outspent nearly two to one–beat the upstart Gill by a healthy, seven eight-point margin (53.5-46.5 54-46). Contra Costa County, about 30% of the district, went heavily (58-42 59-41) for McNerney. San Joaquin voted 52-48 for McNerney, slightly less than it voted for President Obama.

Pundit Class Predictions

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post rounded up all several of the pundit class predictions for the Electoral College vote. Here they are in graph form (because, as regular readers know, I loves me some graphs).

Here are the predictions of the Pacific Political Science faculty who would go on record:

• Prof. Benedetti: 275 Obama / 260 Romney
• Prof. O’Neill: 281 Obama / 257 Romney
• Prof. Sample: 294 Obama / 244 Romney
• Prof. Becker: 303 Obama / 235 Romney
• Prof. Smith: 303 Obama / 235 Romney
• Prof. Klunk: 323 Obama / 215 Romney

Election Day! Election Day! Elections Day!

Go vote!

Demonstrate civic virtue like others! Exercise democratic norms! Fulfill your citizenship duty! Express your policy preferences! Help the candidate or policy you think will be better for everyone to win! Help your preferred candidate or policy win!

(That’s a lot of exclamation points. Sorry.)

And, yes, voting can be a rational act.

Don’t know where to vote? Go here (for California) or just Google your address to find out where you polling place is. If you are on campus, there is a polling place in the UC Ballroom.

Finally, come hang out with us tonight in the Lair as we watch and talk about the returns. My Campaigns & Elections class will give some short presentations starting a 4:30 PM, then we’ll turn on the TV’s and watch the results come in.