And those goals are to find a nominee who can win, but who is also someone they can trust. Whether they can trust them because they’re in the right place ideologically is part of it, but it’s richer than that. It’s someone who they think will advance party goals over their own personal goals. One of the problems with someone like John McCain in 2000 is that one of his signature issues was campaign finance reform, which many Republicans were not pleased with. So, here’s somebody who, with the power he has as senator is doing things we don’t like. We make him president, and maybe he’ll do even more things we don’t like. You don’t want to nominate that person.
So what is the process through which this group makes its decision? And what are some of the key indicators of that decision?
They make their decision by talking to each other. These are people who are interacting with each other at various conventions, and in social settings. And they are debating amongst themselves the merits of the candidates, just as there is a debate in the media and ordinary voters are debating and so forth. But they’re listening to each other in particular because they know that they have particular insights beyond what some voter who just heard about the candidate knows.
These folks might not tell you what they’re thinking while they’re still figuring it out, but one way to see it happening is through endorsements. When one of the elite actors says, I support Mitt Romney, that’s part of that conversation. And it’s a signal to other people that the private conversation about the person being for Mitt Romney is for real.
A moment ago you said voters were typically less important than party elites in this process. Of course, the decision is ultimately made by voters in primaries and caucuses. What role do endorsements play in shaping that choice?
When endorsements start to converge, voters can sense that most of or all of the party is for a particular candidate. For the most part, people who are voting in the primaries are partisan, and they listen to that party signal. We show in the book that the relationship between who has the most endorsements and who does well is strongest among partisan voters. Independent voters don’t pay much attention, but then independent voters are a smaller share of the primary electorate.
But probably the biggest way in which endorsements matter is that they’re a way for us to observe the support that’s going on behind the scenes. If the governor of a state says I’m for this candidate, it might also mean he’s going to give some advice and say in my state, these are some things you want to know. Or his staff, or people who have campaigned for him, are going to be willing to campaign for the candidate. When you show up in South Carolina to build a campaign, there are only so many people who you want to hire who know how to do that. So those people are going to have a choice of which candidate they want to run with, and they might choose the candidate who their governor supported.
I should add, we spend a lot of time in the book talking about who has the most endorsements. But the argument isn’t that whoever has the most endorsements wins. It’s that whoever the party is supporting wins, and endorsements are one way of getting at that.
There’s a passage in the book where you and your co-authors write that the 2008 Republican race was not you what would have expected; there’s even a reference to the then-impending nomination of McCain as “an embarrassment” to your argument, because he’s historically not someone the party trusted. And you wrote that come 2012, you expected the party to take steps to avoid a repeat scenario. Do you see those expectations being fulfilled now?
One thing that would have satisfied that expectation would have been changes in the rules, like the changes that the Democratic Party made after Carter’s nomination. And I don’t see that, no. That isn’t happening.
"The Party Decides" sounds like a great read. A couple of logical conclusions based on the book's argument:
1) The news media should start to focus more on the "behind-the-scenes" power players in each party if they want to really get a scoop on which candidates are likely to be nominated. On the Republican side, who do the Koch brothers like this year? Who is T. Boone backing? Who is Rupert Murdoch channeling funds to? Imagine the sound bites the public could get if a reporter was able to infiltrate one of these closed-door, high-powered conservative retreats in Aspen or Palm Springs: http://nyulocal.com/national/2011/02/01/conservative-retreat-demonstrates-lack-of-donor-transparency/ AND http://usuncutmn.blogspot.com/2011/06/prominent-closed-door-conservative.html.
2) It seems to me Professor Noel overlooks local media's potential value in understanding the electoral terrain of a given county, state or region. While the task of understanding Orange County, Florida, might be daunting for the New York Times, the Orlando Sentinel probably (hopefully) has a decent grip on it already and could therefore prove more accurate and insightful than the national media when it comes to covering primary action in that area.
3) Finally, though I haven't read it, I hope the book does not miss the chance to emphasize the importance of this peculiar American primary system to the overall functioning of our democracy. Out of over 300 million citizens, the primary system narrows America's choice, essentially, down to two people. That process of narrowing our collective choice, if corrupted by outsized corporate influence, say, or hijacked by radical ideologues, can obviously produce candidates who are, shall we say, not entirely preoccupied with the public interest.
#1 Posted by Taylor W., CJR on Wed 6 Jul 2011 at 10:08 AM
You didn't talk about public opinion polls -- not at all! That's a major omission, since all the hoopla about front-runners and the rise and fall of Iowa candidates in 2011-12 was based on the repeated polls, and the paucity (I write this in early January, I know it will change) of such polls in South Carolina.
#2 Posted by howard, CJR on Thu 5 Jan 2012 at 11:58 AM