Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day. 

Have you seen an attack ad recently that made you want to vomit? Run away from your television? Turns out those are perfectly natural responses.According to a recent study in the Journal of Advertising, negative campaign ads actually cause physical repulsion in viewers. But here’s what’s even more interesting: the same study found that a viewer's (ahem) uncomfortable gut reaction isn’t bad news for the politician who's trying to win his or her vote. Negative ads tend to induce a stronger emotional reaction--so they leave a longer impression on whoever sees them.

Here’s how the experiment worked: participants watched 30-second Bush and Gore ads from the 2000 campaign with electrodes under their eyes. Those electrodes detected a “startle response”--basically a hard blink, which is indicative of a larger reflexive desire to move away from an unpleasant situation--much more frequently during negative ads than during positive or neutral ones. You might not notice while vegging on the couch, but negative ads actually activate the initial steps of darting away from danger.

Given the stark divergence in the campaigns’ use of negative ads, the research (which was first published in the winter of 2007) feels particularly pertinent now. According to the Wisconsin Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin, nearly 100 percent of McCain’s Sept. 28 to Oct. 4 spots were negative, compared to 34 percent of Obama’s. “In an ideal world it would be awesome to just run positive ads," says James Angelini, a communications professor at the University of Delaware and one of the study's authors. "But that might not be the best way to get the attention of some undecided voters." The real difficulty, he says, is creating negative ads that are remembered for what they say about the opponent--not for causing a gut-wrenching reaction among viewers. NEWSWEEK’s Sarah Kliff caught up with Angelini to talk about the biology of negative advertising. Excerpts:

So tell me a bit about what’s going on when we view negative political advertising?
What this boils down to is when we are exposed to any sort of negative stimuli, even think back to ancient man having a tiger come into view, a system gets activated that makes you want to avoid it in order to preserve yourself. Nowadays a tiger isn’t going to walk into our line of sight but negative stimuli, even on the TV, activates that same system. It’s so negative, it makes us feel disgust, and we want to flight.

What exactly is similar about being frightened by a tiger and seeing McCain attack Obama?
It’s a biological thing within us. We want to avoid anything negative, be it some sort of physical harm us or something that just make us feel uncomfortable. We want to avoid any sort of negative emotion and that’s what they do, still invoke negative emotions and activate this cognitive system.

And you found that, as creating memorable advertising goes, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing?
When exposed to a negative thing you want to avoid, you have to pay close attention to it. If you go back to the biology of it, and the idea of watching out for lions, you have to pay close attention for survival. When something elicits such strong emotional reactions, you end up paying attention to it. That helps you remember it later because the content is stored.  

So negative ads are more memorable. Is there a positive way to make political ads memorable? You write that the equivalent, in beer advertising, is “scantily clad models” because they elicit a strong emotional response.
Evolutionarily, our main goal is to eat, and to reproduce. Exposure to something like models, for a certain demographic, can elicit a strong, positive emotional response. I really am not sure if there’s an equivalent in campaign advertising. You can’t have Obama and McCain surrounded by scantily clad women. It’s hard to make the same connection [you can with negative advertising] with a positive ad.

Does that mean negative advertising is the way to go?
Not necessarily. People might remember it more, but how are they going to remember it? Are they remembering this candidate putting out this negative ad, and making them uncomfortable, or are they remembering the attacks launched on the opponent? It’s a fine line. You don’t want to go too negative, and produce that gut reaction against your candidate, but also being negative is going to help you be more memorable. 

Is there any research on the reaction to negative ads that looks at the partisan divide--like how you react to a negative ad by the candidate you support versus their opponent?
We measured that in our participants, how they felt about Bush and how they felt about Gore, and there wasn’t a significant difference in how much they startled.

If Obama or McCain read your study, what should they take away from it?
If Obama and McCain were to run a long series of positive ads, it might not be the best thing. They wouldn’t be that memorable and would probably impact the people who are already voting for them. You have to be aware of the few undecideds and what kind of impression you’re leaving them with. If you attack to hard, they might avoid voting for you because of that natural startle reaction. But if you don’t attack at all they forget your ad. In an ideal world it would be awesome to just run positive ads, but that might not be the best thing to get the attention of some undecided voters.

Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day.

By Mary Charmichael

Barack Obama and John McCain have put forth radical—and radically different—proposals to change the way Americans do, or don't, get health insurance. Is it really possible to make sure everyone's covered? Are the candidates even trying for that? And what lessons can we learn from Massachusetts, which has embarked on its own experiment with universal health care? NEWSWEEK's Mary Carmichael spoke with Katherine Swartz, a professor of health policy and economics at Harvard who studies insurance and recently published an in-depth analysis of the McCain plan:

CARMICHAEL: McCain wants to take away the tax break workers get on health insurance at their jobs, and instead give people who buy their own insurance $2,500 in tax credits. Families would get $5,000. What do you make of this idea?
SWARTZ: The positive part is that it would reduce favoritism in the tax system. If you're unemployed, or if you're with a small employer who doesn't provide health insurance, you don't get any special treatment [taxwise] on insurance now. The bad part is that the tax credit could make it harder for low-income people to get insured. In the current system, a lot of low-income people with jobs are getting insurance they could never afford on their own.

The credit is supposed to help.
But you have to purchase health insurance to get the tax credit, and low-income people still may not be able to do that. For a family, insurance premiums in the nongroup markets are typically above $700 a month, and that's with a deductible of at least $5,000. We're talking $8,400 a year in premium payments, but the tax credit is only for $5,000. You still have to pay $3,400, plus the deductible, before the insurance covers medical expenses. Also, the type of coverage on the individual market typically does not cover as many services as group policies. If you buy your own policy, when you get sick, you are going to pay more out of pocket.

Can you explain McCain's plan to help out people with previously existing conditions by expanding "high-risk pools"?
We've had state-sponsored high-risk pools for several decades, but they cover fewer than 200,000 people. They were set up so insurance companies could essentially cede people who they predicted would have very high health-care costs. At one point McCain said he would subsidize high-risk pools with between $7 billion and $10 billion a year. That would cover maybe 3 million people, which is not much of a dent in the 47 million people without insurance now.

How many people would be insured under McCain's proposals, compared to today?
My colleagues and I have predicted that around 21 million people in the first year would lose access to health insurance because their employers would stop offering it. About 21 million higher-income people would take the tax credits and buy their own insurance. So it would be a wash in the first year. We worry that within five years, more employers would stop offering insurance, and we'd end up with more people uninsured than there are now.

Now let's look at Obama's plan. What exactly is an insurance exchange?
The one he's proposing looks a lot like the Health Connector we have in Massachusetts. It acts as a clearinghouse where people can buy insurance policies that are essentially given the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval by the state. In the Obama plan, there's a minimum set of benefits every plan has to offer, and if your income is below some threshold yet to be specified, you would get a subsidy. Small businesses could also use this exchange to provide health insurance. This has worked very well in Massachusetts.

And his national health plan?
It's basically one more choice offered in the exchange. It sets a floor for what kinds of services the other plans would have to offer. Here's where we have to start thinking about the total cost. If the national plan is quite generous in terms of services covered, the proposal's cost will be more than the campaign is estimating.

In Massachusetts, costs have already gotten out of control.
Costs are higher than expected, but that's partly because the original projections underestimated the number of uninsured people who were eligible for subsidies. It's also partly because health-care costs are rising—and that's the case everywhere.

Obama would also require insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions. Wouldn't insurers raise premiums?
Yes, premiums may be higher. I think people need to consider the alternative—if patients are closed off from coverage, they still go to the ER, and we all pay for that.

Does the Obama plan actually provide universal coverage?
No. It requires that children be covered, but there's no mandate for other individuals. Some adults would continue to be uninsured—roughly 6 percent of the nonelderly, compared with 17 percent now, so many more people would have insurance than do now.

Obama's plan is very ambitious. How on earth can we pay for it?
Given the federal deficit, that's a problem for both plans. McCain's plan is not cheap either. I think it will be hard for either candidate to do much in the next few years.

READ THE REST HERE.

Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day.  

Graham, to the right of McCain (AP Photo / Stephen Savoia)

ST. PAUL, Minn.--Very few people know John McCain as well as Lindsey Graham. An old friend and confidant, the South Carolina senator has spent more time on the trail with the Republican nominee this cycle--from Southern barbecue joints to Midwestern mill towns--than any other politician (and even some McCain staffers). Earlier this afternoon, Graham graciously agreed to give panel of NEWSWEEK reporters and editors an exclusive look inside McCain's hush-hush vice presidential selection process. As has been reported, Graham lobbied McCain hard in the final hours to choose their mutual friend, Sen. Joe Lieberman, whom he believed would be a "transforming pick." But in the end, McCain tapped Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin instead--surprising even Graham, who found out "for sure" only last Friday, the day of the announcement.

For me, the most fascinating part of the conversation came when Graham delved into Palin's positives, framing her first and foremost as "the right persona for what [McCain] want[s] to do" and "a compelling story" rather than someone who's ready to occupy the Oval Office at a moment's notice--effectively admitting, in other words, that she's a campaign pick rather than a governing pick. Indeed, Graham believes that the recent flurry of negative news about Palin--her teen daughter's pregnancy, her husband's DUI, her ancient fishing violation and especially the "questions" about whether having a child with Down syndrome should prevent her from running for veep--will only accentuate that narrative and redound to her (and the GOP's) benefit. "People can relate to her more than they can relate to the other three," he said. "Her story in many ways reflects modern America, and I'm thinking that's going to help us--warts and all." Also worth noting: how aggressively Graham turns the tables on Obama when asked about Palin's inexperience (something we predicted would happen the day she was unveiled). Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: What does it tell us about John McCain that he met Sarah Palin twice and offered her the job at the end of the first interview?
Lindsey Graham: I think the basic point here is--I underappreciated it a bit--is that John was committed to making a transforming choice. Pawlenty was by everyone's estimation a safe choice, a solid choice. And if he would've been the pick we would've been talking about an accomplished governor of the state of  Minnesota who stuck with John during difficult times and is a solid conservative. But Tim is Tim.

What do you mean by that?
He's a guy. And at the end of the day John was looking at trying to do something different. Lieberman was one road you could go down. I thought that would be a transforming pick. It would be John telling the country that these are unique times and we're all under siege. Everybody in America is threatened by this radical Islamic movement throughout the world. Joe understands it. Joe has been a great ally. I trust him. Party label don't mean what they used to before the war. That's one story.

You know Senator McCain well. Why did he pick Palin?
With her, I think John was drawn ... and trust me, he's been talking about her for quite awhile in bits and pieces. I think he met her back in February sometime at the governor's conference and mentioned to me how impressed he was with her. If you know anything about John and the appropriators and the battles inside the body this makes perfect sense. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And it just wowed him beyond belief that she would take this group of people on. When you think about it, all the battles between him and Ted [Stevens, the Alaska senator under investigation for corruption] ... he saw in her a lot of himself. The closer we got to having to pick--and the problems you could see going one way versus going the other--I think he was comfortable that she was the right person to send the message he wanted to send.

Did he know enough about her record of reform to be assured? Or was it merely instinct?
I think he knew enough about her confrontations with powerful people in the state to feel like she's the right persona for what I want to do. I don't know if he knew any more about what Tim had done than what she had done. I don't know if he knew any more about what Romney had done in Massachusetts than what she had done. At the end of the day, I think she was ... I honest to God believe it was personal appreciation; chemistry, from the persona that she projects; and what she was willing to do to people in her own party and stand up to corruption. Now compare that to Joe Biden. I love Joe Biden. Everybody likes Joe Biden. But I would argue that he hasn't tried to change the culture in Washington at all when it comes to how we spend money and the way we run the town. Joe Biden is as comfortable as he can be with the way the Congress is operating. We are not.

When did McCain tell you he was going with Palin and what did he say? Tell us about that conversation.
It was pretty late in the process. This was a need-to-know deal. They held this very tight. At the end of the day, it was the reform message that won out. It's the message he feels most comfortable with.

Was it Thursday? They announced it on Friday morning.
I don't know when John made up him mind as to which road to go down, but it was a cliffhanger.

But did you learn Friday morning, the same day everyone else did?
Well, I knew Friday for sure, and we had talks the night before. He held this very close to the vest. I think he was really thinking hard.

What's your sense of where things stand now with all the stuff that's come out over the last day or so?
If this it, we won't be talking about it two weeks from now. Politically, I think what's been accomplished here is that we've energized the base beyond anything I've seen in politics. Not so much just because of her, but for some people [i.e., social conservatives] what didn't happen [i.e., a pro-choice pick]. There's a real sense of relief out there. That said, there are not enough Republicans to win the election. If your model is just to get Republicans fired up, you can't win. They tell me there are about 12 percent of voters who are really undecided. About half of those people are women. With them, I think Governor Palin's personal story is going to connect. When you look at the four people running, I would argue that her story is closer ... that people can relate to her more than they can relate to the other three. Most of us haven't experienced what Joe Biden has experienced. Very few have experienced what John has experienced. And Barack Obama is a unique man--he's had unique experiences. But Governor Palin's story in many ways reflects modern America. I'm thinking that's going to help us--warts and all.

You said "if this is it." That's the big "if" hovering over this convention.
The campaign sent out talking points today about how many pages of forms she filled out and how many lawyers met with her. This idea that John said, "Joe ain't gonna work--what's that lady's name?" That ain't what happened. That's not gonna stick.

But surely your party didn't want to be discussing Palin's daughter's pregnancy on the second day of the convention? What does that say about McCain's management style?
But what is the discussion? Did we know she was pregnant? Yeah, we knew. She knew. It's something that's hard to hide. Would you want to say, here's Governor Palin: great reform governor--and her daughter's pregnant. Is that what you say on the first day? 

Maybe I'm missing something, but what is wrong with what's happening? What if John had said, "No, I'm not going to put you on the ticket because your daughter has this problem"? Most Americans would say, "Whoa, that's unfair." John wouldn't do that. It wouldn't have been right to keep her off the ticket. I think people understand that.

Y'all are playing with fire here if you talk about this too much. You run into the issue of "would you ask this of a man"? Joe Biden lost his wife and his daughter at 29. Was there a real pushback saying, "Joe, you should be home with your two kids that survived"? Joe Biden has proven a couple of things in his life: you can overcome tragedy, raise wonderful kids and be a good senator. Quite frankly, that's what I'm saying. America does not want to hear this. There are elements in America who do, sure, but most Americans have enough going on in their family life--you have a Down syndrome child, the support network for vice president is pretty large. What about the mother and father out there with a Down syndrome child who both have to work? That's where America is at. The idea that she shouldn't go to work because of this is not an option for a lot of people, and they don't want to hear folks say that she should be put in a box and not allowed to fulfill her dreams. The American people can handle this--because a lot of Americans are handling this.

You've focused for years on foreign policy. Are you comfortable that Governor Palin knows enough about world affairs to take over the presidency at a moment's notice?
That's why I want Barack to lose--because I'm not comfortable with him. I'm very comfortable with her. The basic argument that I would make is that John has set the bar very high for Obama. I think that most us would agree, whether we like John or not, that his lengthy experience in the area of foreign policy is right up there at the top with American political leaders. But I think Obama was wrong about Russia and Georgia, he was wrong about Iran and he was wrong about the surge. So when people ask me if she's ready, I say, "Compared to who?" Let's look at what we know about her and what we know about Barack Obama and see if she's as ready as he is. And I would argue absolutely yes. Domestically, she's much closer to where the American people are. She understands energy much better, she's been right on taxes, she's been a true reformer and not a just good speechgiver. And in the arena of foreign policy, she will have John McCain's team around her. Ultimately, she will be able to make these decisions much better than Obama has, because what he has done in decision-making so far has been unnerving. I'd like to have that debate every day between now and Nov. 4. Who's best prepared to be president: Sarah Palin or Barack Obama?

Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day. 

It's not a particularly "grand" time to be a Republican. About 70 percent of Americans disapprove of President George W. Bush's performance. Party identification is at an all-time low. Experts expect the GOP to lose between four and seven seats in the Senate and 10 and 20 seats in the House--giving the Democrats their largest majorities in a generation. And John McCain hasn't led Barack Obama in a single poll since May 3.

Enter Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. Named by David Brooks of the New York Times as "two of the most promising" of "an emerging "group of young and unpredictable rightward-leaning writers," they're editors at the Atlantic Monthly and co-authors of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream," released earlier this week. The book--which Brooks calls "the best single roadmap of where the party should and is likely to head"--claims that Republicans can save themselves only by ditching the country club for Sam's Club and emphasizing policies that link economic security to family values. Will it work? Who knows. But at this point, anything is worth a try. Douthat and Salam spoke with Stumper this morning. Excerpts:

So, the Grand Old Party: what went wrong?
DOUTHAT: The broad argument in our book is that the GOP is, in many ways, a victim of its own success. The first half book is basically a history of how the Republican Party won working-class voters, who used to form the heart of the Roosevelt coalition. And we argue, I think fairly uncontroversially, that they won them on a series of issues--welfare, crime, taxes and the Cold War--that don't have nearly the salience today that they had when the Republican Party was coming together under Ronald Reagan. Welfare has been reformed fairly successfully. Crime rates have fallen dramatically. Marginal tax rates are considerably lower than they were in the late 1970s. And obviously the Soviet Union has ceased to exist. So the GOP is sort of at a crossroads where, particularly on domestic policy, its agenda doesn't map onto the concerns of working-class Americans the way it did in the '70s, the '80s and '90s.

People lay blame at the feet of President Bush. Obviously the historical backdrop has changed over time, but how much do the mistakes of the past eight years contribute to the current collapse of the GOP?
SALAM: There have been plenty of other books that have offered a litany of what went wrong with the Bush Administration. We don't disagree. But it's certainly true that 2000 presented Republicans with a rare opportunity. When you look at the rhetorical shifts that George W. Bush made in his campaign, it seemed like the public and certainly the conservative public was receptive to a broad shift in political orientation toward a domestic, reformist agenda. When you look at a lot of the policies that John McCain was pointing to, you saw a willingness to break with some conservative orthodoxy. But no one really seized that mantle, in part because 9-11 presented such an attractive opportunity to go back to the kind of rock-ribbed conservative fundamentals of the Reagan era--namely, national security, this time under the guise of terrorism rather than communism. There was an ability to draw on the classic tropes that this generation of conservative politicians was very familiar with. But I think there could've large-scale Republican realignment had they married that national-security politics to more meat on the bone domestically.

How can Republicans reclaim their majority and find their voice going forward?
DOUTHAT: We think they should create a pro-family party that doesn't abandon the party's commitment to social conservatism. The GOP should remain--and has to remain--a pro-life party. But a lot of the challenges faced by working-class Americans in the modern economy actually flow from issues of family breakdown. It's interesting. If you look at the marriage rates in the 1950s and 1960s across social classes, the upper-middle class, the working class and the poor all got married and divorced at about the same rate. The all had children in wedlock or out of wedlock at about the same rate. That's changed dramatically over the past 50 years. So upper-middle-class Americans are still behaving like bourgeois, 1950s surburbanites. They're getting married, they have low divorce rates, they're very unlike to have children out of wedlock. That's not true for the working class. What you see in the white working class, in fact, is a trajectory that parallels, in alarming ways, what the black working class went through in terms of collapsing marriage rates and out-of-wedlock birth rates in the 1960s and 1970s. So we argue that that's one of the biggest challenges facing the American working class, and it's at the root of a lot of the inequality and a lot of the economic anxiety that are big factors in this election year.

That's interesting. Most people typically think that poverty causes the breakdown of the family, but if I'm reading you correctly, you're saying the reverse.
DOUTHAT: It's not necessarily the reverse, but rather that you can't separate one from the other. It's a cyclical effect. Poverty creates stress that leads to family breakdown, and family breakdown creates stress that leads to poverty. If you look at, for instance, divorce rates in the United States and how divorce interacts with poverty in terms of splitting up incomes...

SALAM: ... It's very straightforward. When you have a young kid, the sort of supervision that raising a kid or more than one kid takes, it certainly helps to have more than one person. That's very basic and very familiar. But if we're talking about people who are going up the economic ladder, it's interesting because what family breakdown does is it makes mobility harder. Let's say you want to finish college. It becomes much, much harder to do that when you don't have another adult in the household. Unless you have those very thick networks that upper-middle-class people take for granted, you're going to have to go into the paid market for child care. Even renting an apartment. All of these workers who are going to Cape Cod, they actually have to rent rooms in hotels because they don't have the savings that they need in order to put a downpayment or make a deposit on an apartment that they rent for the summer. That's something that really exacerbates the cycle of poverty. And when you don't have family breakdown--when you have two parties who can contribute--then you see a very different picture.

DOUTHAT: The GOP is well-positioned to address a lot of these concerns, but it needs to broaden what it means to be a pro-family party.

SALAM: We're not trying to find victims, and we're not trying to point fingers. It's just that policy-makers are paying attention to these interactions across different silos. When you look at the New Deal, they actually had a pretty keen sense of how culture shapes economics and how economics shapes culture. There's this desire to silo these things off. That's Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas" argument: "Oh, these are issues that are just designed to distract you from your real economic interests. Who really cares about marriage? Who really cares about abortion? Who really cares about family values?" And one of the core arguments of this book is, wait a second--actually, those cultural aspects of your life in fact relate to your economic well-being. It's the idea of a conservative politics that is culturally egalitarian and that recognizes government can play a role to help people on the first rungs of the economic ladder.

In your view, how do Democrats typically get this wrong? As a party, they typically seem more in tune, rhetorically at least, with the needs of the working class.
SALAM: Democrats are very reluctant to be judgmental about family structure. They are very uncomfortable saying there's an ideal family structure and that's what we should enshrine in our policies. A big part of what any president can do is occupy the bully pulpit and give a sense of the moral direction of our government and our society. Sure,  that's not enough. But while some Democrats are doing a great job in terms of devising clever policies to aid working families, the problem is that clever policies are only going to take you so far when they're not happening in this broad framework about the value of family values.

But are there really any silver-bullet policies that government can implement to, you know, keep families together?
SALAM: No, not necessarily. But they can reduce some of those burdens and some of that stress.

AFTER THE JUMP: Which Republicans "get it"--and which don't...
 

Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day.

Nate Silver is channeling Nostradamus. As a University of Chicago econ alum slogging through an undemanding post-collegiate consulting gig, he developed a comprehensive historical database that could project the future performance of any pro baseball player by matching him to a comparable predecessor--down to, like, his height, his weight, his career singles and the size of his home stadium. Called PECOTA, it's now recognized as the most accurate baseball forecasting system on the market.

But apparently Silver wasn't satisfied. In October, he started posting anonymously (nom d'écran: "Poblano") at DailyKos, where his detailed district-by-district projections of who would win each Democratic contest (and by how much) soon earned him a massive following. Relying on demographic data from previous primaries and ignoring the usual mishmash of polls, Silver ultimately came within 20 delegates of the final split on Super Tuesday (out of nearly 1,700) and nailed the margins in Indiana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Montana and Kentucky. Taking a break from blogging at FiveThirtyEight.com--not to mention his new duties writing for The Guardian and The New Republic--Silver (whom I profiled in this week's dead-tree Newsweek and who supports Obama) spoke to Stumper about where the McCain-Obama match-up is going next. Excerpts:

So we'll start with an easy question: Who's going to win the election?
Well, if you look at where the polls are right now, it's going to be just as close as it was the last couple of cycles. That said, if anyone wins by a large margin, it's more liable to be Obama. Right now, he's tied with McCain, even though he's losing 20 percent of Democrats to McCain. That number is pretty unprecedented-it's usually about 10 percent. If Obama can get that number down to 15 percent, then that represents a bump of four points overall: you're basically taking two points away from McCain and giving two to Obama. That would represent a landslide compared to recent elections.

The fact is, the fundamentals favor Obama. He is tying McCain among Independents, and there's four-to-three ratio of Democrats to Republicans in terms of voter ID. If those numbers stay the same, he just has to hold his own among Democrats-maybe even losing a few more Democratic voters than John Kerry might have because of race or because some Hillary supporters stay bitter-and he wins. That's especially important states like Ohio where you had big swings at the state level to Democrats, and Hillary picked up the bulk of that support.

Can he win them back? A lot of Clinton supporters say no-they're going to vote for McCain.
I think by the time it gets to September, Hillary die-hard supporters might still not love Obama, but they won't love McCain either. At that point McCain's going to be advertising to his base-Republicans-and Democrats are going to be advertising to theirs. So he's going to look unacceptable to Democrats, even if they supported Hillary. McCain's goal is to win 60 percent of the Independent vote to counteract by the Democrats' edge in party ID, which he'll do by saying Obama is too liberal.

We are talking about this in sort of a macro sense, but it's the electoral college that will decide the election.  It's state by state. Now, I know on your site is keeping track of every state-by-state poll that comes down the pike. How is the map shaping up?  It seems to me that if Obama can pick up New Mexico, Iowa and Colorado, he doesn't have to worry as much about places like Ohio and Florida where he isn't quite as popular as Hillary among Democrats.
Right. Or, if you take the Kerry states, add Ohio-which I think Obama's almost certainly going to win--and then add Colorado and Iowa, then that's a winning map by a few electoral votes for him. Actually, I think it's one of the more likely maps.

If you had to predict a couple of surprises, what would they be?
You want to get exotic? If Obama just won Colorado and Iowa-not Ohio--and picked up one electoral vote from Omaha, in Nebraska, then he would tie 269 to 269. Now, McCain is going to win Nebraska. He'll totally clobber Obama. Republicans usually win the state by 20 points or more. But the thing is, Nebraska divides its electors up by congressional district, and there are two districts out of three where Obama might be competitive. One is the city of Omaha, where Obama is running about 10 points better than the state overall, and the other is focused around Lincoln and the University of Nebraska and borders Iowa, where people seem to love Obama for some reason. He could win one of those districts, and with things being so close, that could be the technicality that decides the election. In light of what happened in Florida in 2000, it would almost be fitting, no? Tying 269-269 by winning the city of Omaha, then having it go to the House, where the Democrats would vote for him. Farfetched, but possible. That one electoral vote could matter.

Any other possible surprises?
Indiana is an interesting state. It's always a state that maybe shouldn't be as red as it is. Like, the Bill Clinton maps from '92 and '96--Bill won in a lot of states where Democrats don't often win. Indiana is a little lake of red in the middle of a lot of blue. It's unusual that it hasn't gone more Democratic. I think part of the reason is that some of these states haven't really had a democrat campaign there for years.  Indiana, they've just written off. It's usually voted Republican, but it's also a state that has a huge manufacturing industry. It has the same concerns that Ohio has. Which is why, I think, our current projections show Obama losing by less than four. North Carolina is another state that might be reasonably competitive; McCain's up by about six in our system. I think in the course of the long Democratic primary campaign, Obama discovered a couple of hidden swing states where he can compete that he otherwise would've written off.

What about Virginia?  That's another one that people toss out there.
I think in four years Virginia is going to kind of a solid blue state, because it's becoming more northern. So while Virginia is a good opportunity for Obama, whether it gets there right away, I don't know.  The western panhandle of Virginia reaches into Appalachia, where he's going to lose pretty badly. But Virginia-along with Missouri, where Obama is also polling pretty well-are going to be the only Southern tossups. But I think he's not likely to win a state like Mississippi, which the campaign says it's targeting. They talk about turning out the African-American vote out in Mississippi, but even if you do that, it's not going to happen. Turnout among African-Americans is pretty good already. 

That said, I'm watching Georgia.  I'm fascinated by it. The polls show Obama trailing McCain by about ten points, but they also have former Congressman Bob Barr drawing six to eight percent. So if Obama can increase African-American turnout and inch up a few points, it seems like he might have a shot.
Don't forget: it's also one of the youngest states in the country. Alaska could be interesting, too.  Thanks to its harsh climate and hard-core industries, it attracts a very hearty, very male population. Historically, there's a lot of affection for third-party candidates in Alaska, so it's a state where Barr could get five or six or seven percent of the vote-which is about how far behind Obama is in the latest polls. It might be enough to tip it. In which case, we'll be up until 4:00 in the morning waiting for the returns from Juneau.

What about the reverse?  We have been talking optimistically about Obama, but what about McCain?  He's more competitive in places like Pennsylvania or New Jersey or Michigan than any other Republican would be.
There are a lot of Independents in Michigan, and they certainly seem to have a lot of affection for John McCain.  They certainly did in 2000, and right now he's leading in our projections by a tiny, tiny margin-one-tenth of one percent. I think that the fact that Obama didn't get to mobilize there in the primary campaign probably hurts him, but that at the end of the day, Michigan leans Democrat. Still, McCain's could win. He's got a special relationship with the state. Wouldn't be interesting if Obama wins Ohio and loses Michigan? That's what our map shows him doing right now. It's one of millions of permutations, but it's possible.

Overall, though, Obama is in a better position than John Kerry was.  In Pennsylvania, Obama has pulled enough ahead now where it's not likely to be supercompetitive. And in states where McCain otherwise might be especially strong-- like in the West-any "native son," regional advantage is probably outweighed at this point by changes in demographics and the local political cultures. Arizona won't be competitive, of course, but those neighboring states-New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada-will be.

Where McCain does better than Bush did, actually, is on the East Coast. He might stay within eight or ten points in Massachusetts, whereas Bush lost by 20. Or Connecticut might be within in seven points But he's not going to do well enough to actually win then. Because it's his strongest region, he gains popular votes--but not necessarily electoral votes.

Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day. This edition is cross-posted from NEWSWEEK's June 16 print issue.

Carlos Javier Ortiz / Rapport for Newsweek

On May 6, expectations were high for Hillary Clinton. After all, the latest polls suggested the former First Lady had built up a 5-point cushion in Indiana and slashed Barack Obama's 20-point lead in North Carolina to 8. But over at FiveThirty Eight.com, an anonymous blogger (nom d'écran: "Poblano") wasn't convinced. Relying on demographic data from previous primaries and ignoring the usual mishmash of polls, the mysterious upstart projected that Clinton would win Indiana by 2 percent and lose North Carolina by 17—a far-less favorable outcome. When the results finally rolled in—1 in Indiana, 15 in North Carolina—Poblano had outperformed every established pollster. Clinton never recovered, but with the National Journal, the Guardian and the New York Post suddenly dissecting or demanding the secrets of his success, Poblano became an Internet sensation. "It was kind of amazing," he says.

It only gets better. For the man behind the blog, outpredicting the experts wasn't anything new—even if outpredicting political experts was. On May 30, Poblano finally revealed his offline name: Nate Silver. Doesn't ring a bell? Chances are you're not a baseball geek. Silver, 30, is already celebrated among ball fans for inventing something called PECOTA. Developed while the University of Chicago econ alum slogged through a post-collegiate consulting gig—"I'm used to not sleeping," he tells NEWSWEEK—PECOTA is now recognized as the most accurate system for forecasting how athletes and teams will perform in the future (down to the number of singles). In 2007, Silver's algorithm enraged at least half of Chicago when it said the White Sox—2005 champs—would post a 72–90 record. Turned out PECOTA was exactly right. For laypeople, the leap from the national pastime to national politics might seem like a stretch. But not for Silver (who posted his first political item on Daily Kos in October). "Baseball and politics are data-driven," he's written. "But a lot of the time, that data might be used badly. In baseball, that may mean looking at a statistic like batting average when things like on-base percentage and slugging percentage are far more correlated with winning ballgames. In politics, that might mean cherry-picking a certain polling result." In other words, different sport—same skill set.

From the start, Silver took pride in myth-busting the MSM, which has tended to reduce 2008's complex calculus—delegate distribution, demographic coalitions—into not-quite-true narratives. Obama has a problem with working-class whites? Actually, he has a problem with Appalachian working-class whites—and not their cousins in Oregon and Wisconsin. And so on. The response was ecstatic, and FiveThirtyEight's daily traffic increased 5,000 percent between March and June. But the main attraction was always Silver's primary predictions. Taking a page from PECOTA—a comprehensive historical database, it projects future performance by matching current players to comparable predecessors—Poblano predicted the results in, say, Pittsburgh by measuring how Clinton and Obama did in demographically similar congressional districts earlier on (once set, their coalitions were remarkably stable). Silver's score wasn't perfect—he underestimated Clinton in Kentucky and South Dakota. But ultimately, he came within 20 delegates of the final split on Super Tuesday (out of nearly 1,700) and 2.5 percent, on average, in the other six post-March primaries. "Nate's work is innovative," says Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com.

So who will win in November? Silver says Obama (full disclosure: he's a supporter). Predicting the Election Day outcome is not like predicting a primary; with no previous head-to-head results to mine, Silver is relying on Census data to balance out the polls. So far, Silver's system shows Obama and McCain splitting the popular vote 50.0 percent to 50.0 percent, with Obama winning the Electoral College 274.4 to 263.6. Today, McCain runs about 10 points better than Bush in parts of the Northeast—his strongest region, comparatively—but it's only enough to swing tiny New Hampshire. The Arizonan's best chance for a big flip? Michigan. Obama, on the other hand, currently swipes Colorado, New Mexico and Iowa from the GOP, and is within striking distance in Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia and even Alaska. And thanks to Nebraska, where electors are awarded by congressional district, Silver even suspects that McCain and Obama could, um, tie. "Right now, Obama's losing the state by 10 points, but that's 10 points better than Dems usually do," he says. "If Obama wins Colorado, Iowa and the city of Omaha, where he's popular, it would end up 269–269 and go to the House of Representatives. Crazier things could happen."

They could. And Silver would probably be the first to know.

NB: This map is a SurveyUSA projection from a few weeks back; I included it here because Thomas Schaller mentioned it in our interview. Based on current polling, Obama is unlikely to lose either Pennsylvania or New Jersey in a general-election battle against John McCain. He currently leads by an average of six points in the former and nine points in the latter, and trails in Virginia by one. Apologies for any confusion.

Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day.

The next--and last--contests on the Democratic primary calendar are Puerto Rico on Sunday and South Dakota and Montana next Tuesday, but you'd hardly know it from tracking Barack Obama's recent travel schedule. Instead of stumping in Sioux Falls and backslapping in Billings, Obama spent Monday hunting for military votes in Las Cruces, N.M. and Tuesday talking about the mortgage crisis in Las Vegas, Nev.; today he lands in Denver and Thornton, Colo. to raise money and tout his education plan. Meanwhile, McCain made all the same stops: Monday in New Mexico, Tuesday in Denver and today in Las Vegas. Welcome to the brewing battle over the Southwest. McCain, an Arizonan, arrives with an edge--but Obama's early swing suggests that he hopes to put at least three of the region's four Republican-leaning states in play. Can he win here? To find out, Stumper talked with Thomas Schaller, the author of 2006's "Whistling Past Dixie," who has argued for years that Democrats should skip the South and turn their attention westward instead. Seems like someone is finally listening. Excerpts:

This week, Obama is stumping in Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. How important is the Southwest to his general-election strategy? Does he need to win there? Can he win there?
The three states you hit on are obviously the most important and the most likely states. They're among the three fastest growing states in the union: Arizona's first and Colorado and Nevada are right behind it. So long-term, they're important states for the Democratic coalition. Short-term, if you can put together the three non-Arizona Southwestern states--Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico--that's 19 electoral votes. Add them to Kerry's 252 electoral votes and you're over 270 [the amount required to win]. That's Obama right there.

There are five ways that Obama can get from Kerry's 252 over the top, and that's one of them. Florida is obviously one. Ohio is one. Then there are what I call the "36th Parallel" strategies: Virginia and West Virginia, or Missouri and Kentucky, both of which are unlikely. I think of all five, Ohio is the most probable--but the Southwest troika is Obama's second most likely path to the White House.

That seems unusual. We usually hear more about Florida and Ohio.
It's interesting that as Obama began to move after North Carolina to a more general-election posture, you'll notice that he started traveling to places that weren't on the upcoming calendar. That included Florida and Michigan for obvious reasons. But he's also been, as you know, recently in Colorado and Nevada. So one of the things that I learned when I was writing the book is that neither Gore nor Kerry spent enough time out there, and Democrats in those states I talked to complained vociferously about that. Kerry did some whistle stops on his train ride out there, but largely he wrote both those states off.  That turned out to be a major mistake, especially in a state like Colorado where he did a lot better than Gore.

Why didn't Kerry make a bigger investment in the West?
I think the problem for Kerry is that he knew he'd have to win all three, because 252 plus 19 gets you 271--which is basically the same as if you only got Ohio instead. So I think they just decided to roll the dice on Ohio. That's not necessarily a bad strategy if you have to make a choice over scarce resources--to one-shot Ohio. You know, the economic situation there is better, in theory, for Dems. But I think the thing that's different this year is that Obama will be loaded for bear, and he's not going to have to make that choice. Obviously, time is a fixed commodity. Every day you spend in one state is a day you can't spend in another. But in terms of resources and campaign staff, field and money, Obama will have no problem going after the Southwest. He has field staff in these states that he more or less left there after the primaries.

So this interminable nominating contest has helped him after all.
Right. And the difference in resources compared with Kerry is going to be very, very dramatic. Not to mention the technical integration, the online stuff.

People have probably forgotten, but the margins in these states were really close in 2004--five points in Colorado, three in Nevada, one in New Mexico.
That's right. There were only twelve states decided by five points or fewer, and eight of them were in the Midwest or Southwest alone, including the three states we just talked about. Now, Arizona is obviously out of play because of McCain and his home court advantage there. What's interesting is if you go back to... remember about seven weeks ago SurveyUSA released head-to-head match-ups of Clinton vs. McCain and Obama vs. McCain [see map above]? They both had enough electoral votes to beat McCain, but their coalitions were different. [NB: Versus McCain, Obama still performs better than Clinton in New Mexico and Colorado.] And the once place that was strikingly different was that Hillary Clinton was losing those states out west to McCain, with the exception of New Mexico, and Obama was winning them. He was winning Colorado and Nevada. What's ironic here is that those were the states she carried in the primaries, except for Colorado. She carried Nevada, she carried New Mexico and she carried Arizona on the strength of the Hispanic vote.

Do you think Obama can win these three states--Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada?
I don't know that he'll win all three, but I think he's going to win two. I think he'll win New Mexico; the Hispanic vote is so big there, and it's trending back toward the Democrats. Bush did pretty well among Hispanics in 2004, about 40 percent, but Republicans fell right back to 29 percent by 2006. Congressional cycles are a little different than presidential cycles, but I suspect that Democratic support for Obama in New Mexico will be at least 65 percent. You get to that threshold and it's at your fingertips. In Colorado, there's Obama's strong showing in the caucuses; there's the changing nature of the population; there's the fact that the Rev. James Dobson early on said that he'd never support McCain. Given Dobson's clout in that state and the fact that Colorado Springs is very powerful there, if you get a little slippage or stay-at-home rate, that'll help give Colorado to Obama. It's a different coalition in Colorado, more driven by Independents in Colorado than New Mexico, which is driven by Latinos. But I think Obama can win both states. Now, that's not enough for him. It gives him 14. It puts him very close. So he's going to need to flip an Iowa or a Missouri or a Kentucky. 

AFTER THE JUMP: OBAMA'S WEAKNESSES AND MCCAIN'S STRENGTHS...
 

Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day. 

In “Alpha Dogs,” London Times editor James Harding investigates the slick and misleading nature of modern political campaigns, and points to a culprit: the Sawyer Miller Group. Founded in the 1970s, the firm pioneered the practice of packaging and selling politicians like consumer goods, and its acolytes have served as backroom strategists in every U.S. presidential contest from Nixon to today. Harding spoke with Newsweek’s Tony Dokoupil. Excerpts:

You call this book an “archaeology of the present.” What did you dig up?
I found that the big ideological differences between the parties and politicians have blurred, while campaign tactics have sharpened. We now live in a tactical age, not an ideological one. Managers, speechwriters, pollsters and get-out-the-vote specialists have more power than we’d like to admit—and a substantial impact on election outcomes. This is the political equivalent of the medium is the message: communication is the candidate.

How is that Sawyer Miller’s fault?
The men at Sawyer Miller pioneered the field of political consulting, turning the age-old whisper into a candidate’s ear into a modern, global industry. Just as the old party machines were losing their clout in picking candidates, they brought the new marketing techniques of Madison Avenue to work in politics. They framed the message; they made over the candidate’s image; they peddled spin; they generally encouraged their people to go negative; they polled relentlessly; they emphasized personal character over policy. And it worked: they won and their techniques have become the standard playbook for any politician seeking high office.

Has democracy been cheapened as a result?
The people at Sawyer Miller started out as idealists. They believed that clever messaging and the savvy use of TV would break politics out of the smoke-filled backrooms and engage people in the national debate as never before. Instead, politicians appeared more slick, more prone to soundbytes and, courtesy of the relentless stage-management, more phony. Across the western democracies, the Sawyer Miller tactics have turned voters off in droves. Television was supposed to make politics more immediate and more intimate. Instead, it seemed to become more insubstantial and insincere. Thanks