Super Tuesday Aftermath: Handicapping the Campaigns according to Four Key Drivers of the New Politics

There are four key drivers of the New Politics that Simon and I elaborated on in our recent magazine piece “The 50 Year Strategy.” These are four disrupters of the old politics that are restructuring how politics is carried out and will continue to be played in the coming decade. The ones we focused on are the new tools, the young Millennial Generation, the rise of Hispanics, and the emergence of a new 21st century agenda. What’s been incredible about this primary season is how fully realized and important they all have become.

One way to look at the success of the Obama and Clinton campaigns, and their relative strengths and weaknesses, is through the lens of their use of this New Politics. This perspective helps explain the results of Super Tuesday, including what happened in California. The boiled down essence is that Obama is ahead in the tools and Millennial categories, but Clinton is way ahead on Hispanics. As for the agenda, Obama is talking more transformation, while Clinton is talking change, through both are close to each other in specific policies, and they are not yet keeping up to their rhetoric with truly 21st century policy shifts. Let me explain a bit more:

Tools: Obama has done a phenomenal job in the new tools category, while Clinton has been solid and at least kept up. The most dramatic measure is in the online money category. Obama raised an unprecedented $32 million in January, $28 million of it online, and most of it based on 275,000 people who had given $100 or less. Clinton only raised $13.5 million in January, though she has raised $7.5 million since Feb. 1st , mostly online. However, Obama has raised another $7 million in just the 36 hours since Super Tuesday.

The other side of the tools is the online organizing and coordinating. Again, Obama has come out ahead, as I have talked about in other posts. He has an extremely active and virally growing network of people actively campaigning for him. This has been boosted in the last week with the endorsement of the 3.2 million member online organization MoveOn. Then there’s new media, such as the use of video. Obama had been masterful in reworking his campaign speeches via video, something again we have posted on. And his user-generated Yes We Can YouTube video is in a league by itself, now with close to 2.5 million views.

One of the best analyses comparing the two campaigns on this front is Micah Sifry’s recent post at techPresident. He frames Obama as the first in a long line of reform candidates like Ted Kennedy and Bill Bradley to have the staying power precisely because of the new tools. It changed the game.

Millennials: Much has been said about the Millennials in other posts, but it’s worth pointing out that turnout of young people under age 30 has been much bigger than in the past years. For example, of the eight states that were also part of Super Tuesday in 2000, seven saw increases in youth turnout, and in some of these states, youth turnout tripled or quadrupled, according to the numbers at CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. (The reason they use comparisons with 2000 and not 2004 is because they are non-partisan and the uncontested Republican race in 2004 led to few exit polls and poor data on the Republican side.)

The Millennials share of all primary voters in 2008 was in the teens, and even high teens, in all but three states. This category of young voters under age 30 as a share of all voters was up by 4 to 6 percentage points in all eight states that had the data for 2000. For example, in California youth went from 10 percent of those voting in 2000 to 14 percent in 2008. In Massachusetts, from 8 percent to 14 percent.

Obama took the youth vote in 10 of the states, with margins in the high 50s, 60s, and even 75 percent. Two of the states where Clinton took the youth vote were because of the high numbers of Hispanics in those states: Arizona and California. Clinton also nudged out Obama by one percent in Massachusetts. A good overview of all these numbers can be found in this PDF at CIRCLE.

Hispanics: This is the category that Clinton dominates and her campaign has to be credited with foresight on seeing how important this constituency is. The Obama campaign, meanwhile, seems to have grossly underestimated their importance and is playing desperate catch-up, though making good strides, particularly among young Latinos.

The Hispanic vote almost alone can explain what happened in California. As discussed elsewhere, Clinton overwhelmingly took the Hispanic vote in California, 69 to 29. In normal states, that margin could be offset by other factors, but in California, Hispanics made up a full 29 percent of the turnout, compared to 16 percent in 2004. In some calculations we made at NPI based on CNN exit polls, we found that if you took out the Latino and "Other" vote (which includes Asians) in California, Clinton and Obama would have been in a dead heat. When you put them back in, Clinton takes almost every age group, including young people. One thing we all learned here: Hispanics really matter.

Agenda: Change has become the mantra of the race, and implied is not just a change in leadership but a change in agenda. My sense is that craving for a new national agenda is more a part of the equation than the media or the campaigns even recognize. Because if you look closely at the specific policy agendas of Obama and Clinton, they are not representing as dramatic a change as their rhetoric suggests. Nor, in my opinion, are they transformational enough for what the country and the world needs to see. That may well be a function of the primary season. Perhaps we will see more ambitious plans once the nominee is settled and the campaign against the Republicans takes place. Or maybe it will have to wait til after the election.

This final piece of the New Politics equation is the least developed right now. It’s the agenda that boldly takes on the array of 21st century challenges and helps transform America and the world. With that in mind, NDN and the New Politics Institute are putting on a special one-day free event on March 12th in DC to explore whether we might be in a transformational moment. We have a great lineup of people who will be taking about the need for change on that plain. Anyone who is interested is invited to come.

Peter Leyden
Director of the New Politics Institute