CAPS Panel Profs Analyse Elections

Four political experts gathered on Friday at the Center for American Political Studies to probe the dynamics of the imminent presidential election.

The panel discussion, moderated by government professor Stephen D. Ansolabehere, featured D. Sunshine Hillygus, also a government professor and the director of the Program on Survey Research; Columbia Graduate School of Journalism professor Thomas B. Edsall; and Morris P. Fiorina, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and political science professor at Stanford.

Ansolabehere began with a discussion on campaign finance and the parallel contests of the presidential and congressional elections, stressing the tough decision facing the Republican Party.

“Are they going to put the money in races to keep the McCain campaign going, or are they going to put their money in a set of embattled Senate seats?” Ansolabehere said. “The Republican National Committee has a very difficult choice.”

The panel then explored opinions on polling models used for the elections.

Edsall, who is also the political editor of the liberal-leaning Huffington Post, said that he believes in the accuracy of models that are predicting Obama’s victory, even though their performance “has been a little spotty over the years.”

“The models are all based on fundamentals,” Edsall said. “Those include the performance of the current administration, the condition of the economy, whether there is a war going on.”

Hillygus focused on the common misconceptions of swing voters.

“Independents are actually not the appropriate measure of whether somebody is going to be influenced by the campaign.” she said. “More than a third of the independents have been consistent Obama or McCain supporters.”

Demographic groups, such as “hockey moms” or “working class wives,” are not the best measure of persuadable voters either, said Hillygus. “If you look at working class wives, and we broke by income you get wildly different predictions of how someone is going to pay.”

“The thing we know as political scientists is that demography is not destiny,” she added.

Fiorina, the author of “Divided Government,” discussed split-ticket voters that intentionally choose one party for president and another for Congress, taking this path because of its perceived benefits.

More than 80 faculty members, graduate and undergraduate students, and residents of the community packed the conference room at CGIS for the panel.

“American politics looks very obscure to me. This is why I want to come here,” said Stefano Versace, an MIT graduate student from Italy. “I’m very interested in it, especially at such a crucial point when there is also the economic crisis.”