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Thanks for reading our newsletter. In this issue, Chief Research Officer Bryon Allen, Ph.D. reviews how former Vice President Joe Biden’s plan to win the nomination is right on schedule despite the remaining challenge by Senator Bernie Sanders. – Michael D. Cohen, Ph.D., CSO, WPA Intelligence

Bernie Busts and Biden Booms

By Bryon Allen, Ph.D., Chief Research Officer

As the dust clears after Super Tuesday and states not named California or Colorado have wrapped up their vote count, it has become increasingly likely that Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee. Biden has the endorsement advantage and is polling ahead nationally, ahead in Michigan (the next big state to vote), and way ahead in Florida (which votes in two weeks).

The thing is, maybe it was always going to be Biden. A lot of pundits used 2016 as a template for what would happen in this election, especially after Bernie kind of won Iowa and won New Hampshire.

But Bernie isn’t Trump. If anything, he’s the opposite of Trump. Trump was a highly unconventional candidate with pretty orthodox positions on key Republican issues: life, guns, taxes, and border security. Where he diverges from some Republicans, such as on trade and deployments of troops abroad, he still represents one of several strands within the party on issues where there isn’t full agreement.

Bernie, on the other hand, is a highly conventional candidate. With 16 years in the House and 13 in the Senate following almost a decade as a Mayor, he’s been in elected office longer than Pete Buttigieg has been alive. But Bernie is not an orthodox Democrat. His stated positions are on the extreme left flank of the party (and his open affection for communist and socialist dictators) are simply out of step with even a Democratic Party that continues to veer leftward.

While the media was salivating over Bernie as the Democrats’ Trump, Biden was making the argument that he was effectively running for the third Obama term, essentially running the race that he skipped in 2016 due to the death of his son.

The primary calendar worked against Biden as he was never going to beat Bernie in a caucus in Iowa, and New Hampshire posed the dual problem of being in Bernie’s back yard and being a place where they often vote for the heterodox candidate.

Biden called his shot: barely compete in Iowa or New Hampshire, finish second in Nevada (where the caucus structure again worked against him), and then win South Carolina as the “first primary that is representative of the Democratic Party.” It was a risky strategy as fundraising and earned media attention would be running short by South Carolina, but by convincing key establishment Dems to withhold endorsements until after South Carolina, and by relying on a few key old friends like Jim Clyburn to act when needed, it worked out for Biden.

By playing out the script exactly as he had written it, Biden could claim that he was the front-runner all along. We’ve seen the rapid consolidation of establishment support after his South Carolina win, and we will continue to see it after his strong Super Tuesday.

This is another way that 2020 isn’t 2016. The Democratic establishment, which is really the Obama establishment now that the Clintons have embarrassingly exited stage left, is much more unified than the post-Bush Republican establishment was. It’s much easier for them to pull strings, get sitting Senators and Mayors with big aspirations to quit the race, and unify endorsements around Biden.

We’re seeing the rapid consolidation of both support and delegates around Crazy Uncle Joe. If he wins Michigan next week (likely) and has a big win in Florida in two weeks (all but certain), he’s the Democratic nominee before we get more than halfway through March. And perhaps, the pieces are falling exactly as planned.

Bloomberg’s Virtual Candidacy

By Michael Cohen, Ph.D., Chief Strategy Officer

Money might not be able to buy elections, but it’s certainly helped launch Mike Bloomberg’s virtual candidacy for president of the United States. A man out of step with his current party, Bloomberg is an open oppo book for the others on the debate stage tonight. The former Mayor of New York, my hometown, used to be a Republican, used non-disclosures to silence women (and men) in his firm, and enforced “Stop and Frisk,” a policy of overt discrimination aimed at curbing the city’s crime problems of that era.

While we are focused on his campaign for president, Bloomberg pivoted toward the Democratic party with his greatest resource: money. He bought his way into ads with President Obama by funding anti-gun causes, bought his way into Democrat congressional candidates’ hearts and minds, and bought his way on stage at Emily’s List. Bloomberg’s personality may be flat, but so is cold, hard cash. At this point, the result of Bloomberg’s spending spree is third place, nationally, behind Vice President Biden, whose campaign is on life support after disastrous finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire.

If Bloomberg’s business plan was for Biden to fall and Bernie to rise, that’s happening, and it’s earned him an invitation to the debates. He might wish that didn’t happen. The genius of the ads for Bloomberg is that the voice over is better than the candidate’s own voice. Every time someone else speaks of him, he’s better for it. Every time his very New York local voice airs, it’s not great. His ad where he’s on the stump giving a speech is stale and his joke about Trump is not funny, foretelling what it’s going to be like tonight. Flat and humorless.

That’s going to be a problem for him against a field who has debated several times and are already in fighting shape. There’s no evidence that Bloomberg has any presence, debating chops, or ability to think well on his feet. Because he has skipped all four of the first nominating contests and the debates, he has got one shot to show he belongs and can lead the charge. It’s a recipe for underperforming expectations like Biden or Jeb Bush did. If he fails to handle the stage and the expected incoming, he becomes a wealthier New York version of Tom Steyer.

But if he does reasonably well, Bloomberg certainly has enough money to make campaign lives very complicated on Super Tuesday, specifically for former Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar, who also banked on Biden’s fall meaning their rise. What is just as likely to happen, though, is that the minimal viable product launch tonight of candidate Mike Bloomberg is a final release – and a well-funded mess. You can’t win the presidency as an avatar. Ultimately, the business plan fades and what’s left is the real you.

Thanks for reading our newsletter. In the wake of Monday’s first-in-the-nation debacle, Dr. Bryon Allen, Chief Research Officer, reminds us of why Iowa matters and how the character of each state’s primaries and caucuses should reflect each state’s sensibilities. It’s a compelling counter-narrative piece. In addition, you can read my piece on Medium where I critique the tech and the politics of having an app for “that” was ill-advised. For intelligence like this and much more, reply to this email and I’ll connect you with our outstanding team. I look forward to hearing from you!

– Michael D. Cohen, Ph.D., CSO, WPA Intelligence

In Defense of Iowa

By Bryon Allen, Ph.D., Chief Research Officer

This was going to be a piece about the implications of *insert name here* winning the Iowa Caucuses, but I have to submit it and we don’t know who won. By the time you’re reading this we might, who knows?

As of late morning Tuesday, we don’t know who won Iowa, but we know who people think lost—the Caucuses themselves. A combination of frustrated candidate boosters (led by teams Bernie and Buttigieg), political operatives who have long hated the caucus process, and political scientists and election reform busybodies are all piling on Iowa.

But the Iowa Caucuses are good. They represent a type of community-based democracy that is particularly midwestern and rural. You get together in a school gym, a parish hall, or at the VFW with your neighbors and you argue a bit about the candidates. Then you visibly and publicly support someone. That’s a kind of democracy that is peculiar and special to its setting.

I like when states have systems that fit their character. I like that California has extremely long mail voting and then takes weeks or even months to count its ballots. It’s a perfect combination of come-as-you-are-when-you-want individualism and institutional incompetence. Even Joan Didion hasn’t captured the zeitgeist of California quite so well as its election system does. I like that Pennsylvania has a primary that technically binds none of its delegates.

It’s a wonderful and flagrant example of country’s character as a collection of sovereign states rather than as a central federal system with administrative cantons that we have so many different and weird ways of administering primaries.

The problem with Iowa isn’t Iowa, it’s what we want Iowa to do. We want a slow, rural community process to rapidly produce a centralized count to feed to beast of 24-hour news. We want it to go first and be gatekeeper to a nomination while the Democrats apparently wanted to foist off some post-modern political science experiment of three different “official” counts on a system that kind of meanders its way toward getting even one.

What the Democrats tried to do in Iowa obviously failed… and always had a high chance of failing. Trying to patch over a human administration challenge with a quick-and-dirty tech solution was always a recipe for hilarity, but I hope that doesn’t cause us to give up on caucuses, just give them a chance to be themselves. Maybe take a lesson from the caucuses instead. Go talk to your neighbors, have a potluck, the results will be along eventually.

Thanks for reading our newsletter. This issue focuses on the political environment with pieces from Dr. Trevor Smith, Director of Research at WPA Intelligence and myself. Trevor looks at how competitive congressional races were in 2018 and what opportunities that provides our Republican Party in response. My piece opens with a look at the widely–heckled (by Democrats!) New York Times dual-endorsement and whether or not these kinds of endorsements matter. For intelligence like this and much more, reply to this email and I’ll connect you with our outstanding team. I look forward to hearing from you!

– Michael D. Cohen, Ph.D., CSO, WPA Intelligence

Competition is Good
By Trevor Smith, Ph.D., Director of Research

Perhaps the laziest theory of American politics is that voters have become more polarized than ever and the political parties are now vessels of extremism. This theory has some observables that make sense on their face: the rise of extreme policies on the Left, the self-owned bias of the news that used to be impartial, and the effects of gerrymandering, which have theoretically sorted voters into safer districts. That all might be true but what really matters is elections.

What if I told you if congressional races were more competitive in 2018, a bad year for our party but the best one for democracy in a decade? Let’s take a 10% margin of victory as a benchmark for a competitive House race and look at the past four elections. How many of them, do you figure, would be considered “competitive?” I’ve done the math and it shows just how competitive of a year 2018 was among congressional races, removing at-large seats; an excellent opportunity to use data and messaging based on data to win back the House.

Sure, competitive districts, by this definition, almost halved from 2012 to 2016 but it rebounded to the tune of more than 2x in 2018 due to a motivated Democratic base. Again, the rebound was hard on the GOP, but as the party of competition this is an opportunity to learn from the mistakes made, listen to voters, and act accordingly. Running the same old campaigns are not going to work in 2020, regardless of who the Democrats run at the top of the ticket even if it is likely, in my view, a weak one.

Relying on President Trump’s support among blue collar voters is not going to be enough for your race. Instead, focus on who is going to vote and who they intend to choose. Understand who the persuadable voters are and who will vote for you if you get them to the polls on Election Day. What messages will matter most, do you know where your ad dollars should go, and on what platforms? That’s what we do best, put that altogether to enhance your chances of victory.

If you think you are in a non-competitive district, just remember that there were far more of them in 2016 than there were now. There is more opportunity now, not less. Ignore the noise of polarization and extremism and focus on the signals that will get you there by knowing which voters get you there. The question really comes down to this: what will you do to capitalize on these openings?

Endorsement Irrelevance
By Michael Cohen, Ph.D., Chief Strategy Officer

“If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice,” Freewill by Rush.

By choosing to endorse both Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, the New York Times unintentionally highlighted how insignificant newspaper endorsements are and how much opinions of voters matter more. Warren has dropped from her peak, now polling well behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, nationally and in early states; her odds of winning the nomination have plummeted. Klobuchar is a margin-of-error candidate, virtually everywhere. By endorsing two fading candidates, the New York Times has inadvertently chosen to benefit neither. This is peak endorsement irrelevance.

Pulling it back, what value do newspaper opinion section endorsements even provide candidates in an era of strong partisanship and polarization? Are these important signals to leverage or just campaign noise? This is something we research on behalf of our clients at WPA Intelligence. The consensus from newspapers themselves and our team’s experience is, well, not really. Moreover, in the runup to the 2016 election, Jeb Bush had 30 major endorsements while future President Donald Trump had none … and we all know how that turned out (please clap).

Somewhat more important signals are local leadership endorsements but, really, only to people who are well-connected to the political dynamics in their communities. At this point, Joe Biden’s decades-long Washington tenure has paid off in endorsements, where he leads Warren and Klobuchar by 207 to 77 and 50, respectively. Still, it’s who’s endorsing that matters, with Biden holding onto many of the endorsements gained through his association with Barack Obama, signaling to black voters, in particular, that he’s their best choice.

Still, normies don’t care. They don’t read the NYT or FiveThirtyEight. In fact, there is some evidence that a relatively small pool of moderates, who Biden and Klobuchar are courting, are actually low-information and low-participation voters, meaning that they’re not watching debates, aware of newspaper endorsements, or who their representatives will vote for in the primaries. These kinds of endorsements matter more within the pool of party activists rather than for external signaling to move voters.

So, does a NYT endorsement matter? No, but other endorsements can help with those voters, donors, and activists who pay attention to these kinds of developments. Endorsements certainly matter to political hobbyists, who believe they’re engaged and certainly follow news cycles and social media. They matter a bit if your bias aligns.

Will the NYT endorsements propel Warren or Klobuchar to the top of the polls in Iowa? No. Iowans still will make a choice and the NYT endorsement will sit where it deserves: irrelevant.

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Thanks for reading our newsletter. This issue features important pieces from two of our senior leaders at WPA Intelligence. Amanda Iovino advocates for fine-tuning messaging with swing vote women view security issues, which have shifted over the past several years. Matt Knee takes you under the hood of how we built our “Trump Effect” model, which offers clients the opportunity to gauge the impact of an endorsement by the president.

– Michael D. Cohen, Ph.D., CSO, WPA Intelligence

Swing Women – Still Swinging: Security Issues

By Amanda Iovino, Senior Client Strategist

Last month, we looked at how swing women are thinking about health care as a pocketbook issue (and how the GOP needs to meet them where they are).

This second installment on swing women focuses on another issue area where Republican talking points have stayed relatively the same even as swing women’s perspectives have changed: Security Issues.

Republicans tend to do well when security is top of mind with women (see: 2002, 2014). But women today aren’t as worried about foreign-born terrorists coming to the U.S. as they were in those cycles. Instead, they’re worried about the attack being perpetrated by one of our own with a gun.

Adjusting our talking points is going to involve a mental shift for many of us on the Right. Republicans tend to think about the Second Amendment as a Constitutional issue, or as a cultural one, but swing women are viewing gun policy as a security issue. It does not matter that the Las Vegas shooter from 2017 did not fit into the FBI’s definition of “domestic terrorist,” to many women, that’s exactly what he was.

Let me be clear: I am in no way advocating for a Republican candidate to change their position on these issues. But it is vital for our candidates, especially those in swing states and districts, to understand how swing women are thinking about these issues, to put ourselves in their shoes as we figure out how to message to these key voters.

Last fall, Republicans in Virginia tried to stay quiet on the issue of gun control even while it was a top issue among voters, and they lost control of both houses of the Legislature, handing complete control of the state over to Democrats for the first time in a generation.

More broadly, two-thirds (67%) of women nationwide labeled gun violence as a “big problem” in a National Geographic/Ipsos poll late last year (another 19% called it a “moderate problem”).

Credit: National Geographic/Ipsos

Gun control means different things to different voters. Some want the laws on the books evenly enforced, others want universal background checks or red flag laws instituted. Few want Beto’s policies enacted and even fewer are looking for a full repeal of the Second Amendment.

How can candidates better message to swing women on this issue? It all starts with better data. WPAi not only has simple off-the-shelf models of voters’ basic beliefs on the Second Amendment but we can help candidates create custom models designed to pinpoint areas of commonality between a candidate’s and voters’ views on gun policy, allowing each campaign to navigate their unique electorate in a way that is true to the candidate and answers voters’ concerns.

The Trump Effect

By Matt Knee, Director of Analytics

The 2016 election was a powerful reminder of the power of leading figures to fundamentally reshape public opinion. Once Donald Trump became the Republican Party’s standard bearer, partisans on both sides polarized around that new reality on issues from trade to opinions of Russia. Seeing this powerful effect in the wild, we decided to apply social science to harness it for our clients.

We conducted a 6,200-person survey experiment, asking a control group if they supported a congressional bill called the “Government Efficiency Act,” opposed it, or did not know enough to form an opinion. This was chosen because it is ideologically neutral, and no one could possibly have a real opinion about this bill because it doesn’t exist. We made it up for purposes of this study. The treatment group received the same question, instead with the added information that President Trump supported it.

This way, the only thing driving real opinion change on the issue was the endorsement. This information moved 67% to have an opinion, up from 19%.

We then modeled the responses from the treatment and control groups, providing scores for every registered voter in the country. We found that compared to the control group, the information that President Trump supported this fictional bill moved Republicans a net 25 points toward support. Conversely, Trump’s support moved Democrats 20 points in opposition.

These models are available to help primary candidates who have been endorsed by the president best leverage it, those who do not have his endorsement (or are running against a Trump endorsed candidate) have the best chance of victory. Furthermore, these data help advocacy groups navigate the effects of presidential support or opposition and companies that may be mentioned in a Trump tweet or speech best deal with the impact.

The Trump models themselves are ready-made to help primary and general election candidates and advocacy organizations understand and target around the most influential and largest share of voice in American politics. We built a widely applicable model with scientific rigor. If President Trump has weighed in on a candidate, company or issue, for or against, a model like this is a must to leverage or evade it.

President Trump may be the most powerful example, but he is far from the only entity whose support or opposition is invoked to drive people to or from a particular candidate or opinion.

Other high-profile politicians are routinely invoked in political messaging. Much political and advocacy messaging and decision-making rests on people’s inclinations to side with business or labor, with industry or environmentalists, etc. Organizations such as the NRA and Planned Parenthood are routinely invoked in both political and policy debates.

So not only does this model have clear and innovative applications directly, but it is a proof of concept for a broader technique we will deploy in a wide variety of political, corporate and advocacy contexts. This method, based on a controlled experiment, models the causal effect of hearing a politician or organization supports a position. This technique can be used by candidates or advocacy groups to judiciously use outside endorsements or hold opponents’ responsible for theirs, and by advocacy groups to know who would benefit from hearing of their support or opposition (or for whom it should be downplayed or withheld).

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