The Creation of a Front-Runner

[Ethelk2044]

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/horseraceblog/2007/09/the_creation_of_a_frontrunner.html

The Creation of a Front-Runner
Adam Nagourney of the New York Times makes a good effort this morning to attack the idea that a summer frontrunner is invincible. His major concern, of course, is Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. Thompson, Giuliani, and Romney are so scrunched together according to one metric or another that it is hard to identify any one of the three as the GOP frontrunner.

While I applaud Nagourney's attempt to do some pushback on all this Hillary-Is-Invincible stuff, I think his argument is not as strong as it could be. He writes:

Typically, a candidate is adjudged a front-runner because he -- or she -- leads in the polls, has the most endorsements, is ahead in fund-raising, gets the most media attention, draws the biggest crowds and, well, just comes across as a front-runner.
Mrs. Clinton has been helped considerably by the perception in Democratic circles that she has outpaced her competitors at most of the candidate debates.

Yet Mrs. Clinton may be a good example of why the front-runner designation is so ephemeral. Mr. Obama has arguably outpaced her in fund-raising and crowds. Both Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards have held their own in winning endorsements.

Mrs. Clinton may have the lead in national polls and polls in New Hampshire. But most polls show a tight three-way race in Iowa, where many Democrats consider Mr. Edwards the, um, front-runner. Anyway, polls in Iowa and New Hampshire in the fall do not tell you very much about what is going to happen in January.

The truth is, there is no evidence that the Democratic primary voters have fallen head-over-heels for Mrs. Clinton. And any event that reminds Democratic voters of the lingering concerns about her could topple her from her perch.



I agree with Nagourney's general argument. However, he does not deploy it as well as he could have. His problem actually comes in the first paragraph. He wrongly puts the polls first in his list of reasons of how a frontrunner is identified. Now, this is a laundry list - and an item's position in it does not necessarily matter. The problem is that, at least with Nagourney's list, the polls are largely caused by the rest of the items on the list. So, while Nagourney is attacking the conclusion that Hillary is inevitable, he allows to go unassailed the false presumption that the summer polls are independent of the media dialogue. This false premise about the polls undergirds all of the arguments about Clinton being inevitable.

This is how I would say that a summer frontrunner is created. We start with the fact that voters right now are paying little attention to the race. Not only that, they do not have very much information about the state of the race. Now, this might sound surprising to you, but the reality is that the ways that most voters acquire political information are quite different from the ways that you acquire it. Right now, their ways are not offering them a lot of information. And, as a consequence, they are not thinking about or paying much attention to the race.



So, voters are not thinking about politics much right now. Out of the blue, they get a call from a pollster. They're asked to indicate a preference that they have not really formed just yet. How do they answer the question? They draw upon the available information that they have on the race - which is culled from, to quote Nagourney, who "has the most endorsements, is ahead in fund-raising, gets the most media attention, draws the biggest crowds and, well, just comes across as a front-runner." In other words, they draw from what little they know of the dialogue among political elites. And what is the elite dialogue at the moment? As Dan Balz notes, elites are asking: Can Hillary Clinton Be Stopped? So, polling respondents select Hillary Clinton.

[illinoisprogressive]

1. the media has been promoting her as god all summer. Now that it's fall, she falls.