Mostly Colorblind

Not pictured: "Filing tax returns like Mitt Romney for Dummies" Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan says many things about the state of the campaign. At first glance, one must agree with Nate Silver , it doesn’t seem like a choice a candidate confident in his chances would make. However, the right is elated that Boston picked a certified, card-carrying fiscal conservative – and crowds have grown as the Romney campaign finally has some juice. At the same time, the Ryan pick has the potential to undermine Romney’s key argument. This is that the most important issue is the country’s poor economic performance, which he can change, and nothing else matters. In her book The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns , Lynn Vavreck argues for the primacy of the economy in the general election. Campaigns then, fall into two categories: clarifying and insurgent. A clarifying campaign has the economy on its side. This can be an incumbent party riding an economic wa...

“McCain greeted the day of Lehman’s demise at a rally in Jacksonville, Florida. The Dow was already plunging its way toward a five-hundred-point decline between the opening and closing bells. “There’s been tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and Wall Street, and it is—people are frightened by these events,” McCain said. “ The fundamentals of our economy are strong , but these are very, very difficult times.  ( Game Change , p. 379 )                 Today, Team Obama breathed a sigh of relief with the news that the country added 163,000 jobs in July. However, it also finds itself in a precarious position. While a strong economy would almost certainly guarantee the President a second term, that’s not what we have. We have an economy that’s teetering on the edge, exhibiting signs of strength and signs of weakness from one month to the next, and sometimes simultaneously (Deep in today’s report was ...

Political scientists will be the first to tell you that campaigns are driven by the fundamentals. The most important variables in an incumbent president’s reelection are if the country is at war and the state of the economy. At the same time, more recent work has found innovative ways that campaigns can induce turnout, cross-pressure voters, and ultimately influence the behavior of voters in a number of ways. But are these two interpretations at odds? A seemingly innocuous Twitter conversation between journalists and political scientists yesterday casted that doubt, calling it “ironic” in a perjorative sense. The prevailing consensus in that thread: it’s not ironic if different political scientists hold different opinions. But the field at large is still plagued by this impression of cognitive dissonance between campaigns determining elections and fundamentals driving the result. So what is it? Structure or Agency? @ symbol overload The easy answer: both. The better que...