November 2012

Nate Silver was right. The Gallup Poll was wrong. Silver, the computer expert who gave President Barack Obama a 90 percent chance of winning re-election, predicted on his blog, FiveThirtyEight (for the number of seats in the Electoral College), that the President would receive 51 percent of the popular vote as he called each of the 50 states, including all nine battlegrounds. Silver infuriated conservatives with his model, which uses a number of measurements and calculations, including attention to state polls.

Super PACs and other outside groups made possible by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision spent more than $1 billion on advertising in federal races through Election Day, with 10 organizations accounting for more than half the total.

Conservative groups accounted for roughly 70 percent of spending, including more than $440 million on the presidential race alone, a sum that helped keep Republican Mitt Romney competitive in his bid to unseat President Barack Obama. The spending wasn’t enough to put the former Massachusetts governor in the White House — nor was it enough for Republicans to wrest control of the Senate away from the Democrats, despite the proliferation of Senate and House candidate-specific super PACs.

Political spending on television alone is expected to eclipse $3 billion this election cycle. Online advertising came nowhere near those levels, but it did hit an all-time high, and it will likely finish as the No. 2 medium behind television this election.

The presidential campaigns accounted for most of the internet spending. Perhaps reflecting the Democrats’ outreach to younger voters, who turned out in droves for Barack Obama during the 2008 election, Obama spent $52 million on online ads this year. His rival, Mitt Romney, spent half that, $26 million. That’s according to Federal Election Commission data analyzed by ReTargeter, a San Francisco online marketing agency. Between them, the two candidates spent $78 million online, up 251 percent over the 2008 election, when John McCain and Obama combined spent $22.2 million on digital ads.

[Commentary] One of the most fascinating parts of the aftermath of an election is the construction of post-hoc narratives to “explain” the results. There’s plenty of Web traffic to be gained by meeting the public’s demand for these sorts of tidy explanations, but there’s peril too. Reporters should be wary of telling stories about why President Obama won re-election that are not supported by the available evidence.

The most important fact for understanding what happened in the election is that the fundamentals mattered. As in 2004 and 2008, the results in the presidential race corresponded closely to the forecasting models, which are largely driven by economic variables and presidential approval. In this case, a model-averaged composite forecast published before the election predicted that President Obama would receive 50.3 percent of the two-party vote—quite close to his current total of 51.1 percent. In short, the state of the economy predicted a very close race that narrowly favored President Obama. That’s exactly what we observed. The fact that the result was consistent with the forecasting models does not mean that campaigns don’t matter. Indeed, exposure to campaigns helps move voters toward the outcomes predicted by the fundamentals. However, as John Sides correctly emphasized on The Monkey Cage after both the 2008 election and Nov 6, it is more difficult to show that President Obama (or any other candidate) won due to his campaign’s superior message or organization.