What happened and why?

Experts look at election results

—By Lori Craig

From the passage of Prop. 8 to the election of Barack Obama, Nov. 4 brought both surprises and anticipated results a panel of election experts told a packed crowd of students this week..

The Nov. 6 election event, sponsored by the USC Gould School of Law and the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC, examined “What Happened and Why? A Post-Election Conversation about Candidates, Strategies and Ballot Measures in the Race of 2008.” The panel included USC Law Professor Kareem Crayton; Dan Schnur, director of the Unruh Institute and former Sen. John McCain political strategist during the 2000 campaign; Andre Pineda, principal of Pineda Consulting; and John Matsusaka, president of the Initiative and Referendum Institute at USC.

Panelists Andre Pineda, Dan Schnur, John  Matsusaka and Kareem Crayton.

With a North Carolina win for Obama called two days after the polls closed, Crayton noted that Obama’s victory of 364 to 162 electoral votes was a dramatic triumph compared to Pres. George W. Bush’s margin of victory four years earlier.

“This definitely represents a very sizable shift toward the Democratic column,” Crayton said.

Two factors that significantly benefitted Obama were recruiting new voters and getting voters to cast their ballots before Nov. 4. Early voting was decisive in many of the battleground states, including Indiana, Ohio, Florida and Virginia, all of which Obama won.

“That was a huge bank of votes [Obama] relied upon before Election Day,” Crayton said.

Schnur discussed the McCain and Obama campaigns’ strategies of pursuing swing voters, which kept the race through mid-September.

“Then, Wall Street collapsed,” Schnur said. “And essentially, it collapsed on top of John McCain’s campaign. On a broad level, this is a good example of how real-world events matter [in a presidential race]. The Wall Street crisis was a huge benefit to Barack Obama.”

The “NASCAR parents” – blue-collar workers and social conservatives – that the Republican Party had been pursuing suddenly saw a shaky financial outlook and turned to Obama, Schnur said.

Pineda, a Pasadena-based pollster and head of a strategic research and communications firm, said the Obama campaign was “amazingly organized” and made decisions quickly – a trait that possibly helped Florida swing Obama’s way.

“My polling was showing that Obama could do well with Hispanics in Florida altogether, and with Cubans – and that doesn’t happen … [Cubans] always vote Republican,” Pineda said. The campaign mobilized and targeted Hispanic Floridians. “It’s not that Obama won Cubans, but he got a significant percentage of Cubans, much higher than anyone else has.

“This is a tribute to the campaign that they put together.”

Matsusaka, an expert on initiatives and referendums and professor at USC Law and USC Marshall School of Business, pointed to a nationwide trend of ballot propositions that deal with social issues rather than fiscal measures.

“There is a tremendous amount of lawmaking going on at the state level,” Matsusaka said.

One major surprise in California came with the passage of Prop. 8. Though a number of polls showed the measure would fail, voters backed it 52 percent to 48 percent. Matsusaka dismissed the notion of an eleventh-hour groundswell of support for the ban, but said it’s possible the polls were inaccurate.
“There might have been some confusion with voters when they answered these polls” due to the confusing language of the proposition, Matsusaka said. “I don’t think anybody knows the answer yet for what happened there.”