the Dean bubble

On January 14, the day after the non-binding D.C. primary, I analyzed the results of that election for the benefit of Kucinich supporters. Because Kucinich supporters were the intended audience, I phrased my analysis in terms of Kucinich's showing and suggested that it might be better than realized (read it to see what I'm talking about). But I could instead have phrased it in terms of Dean's showing - and a better than expected showing for Kucinich means a worse than expected showing for Dean. And that's exactly what D.C. was for Dean: worse than expected. If the basic presumption in my analysis (that few white people voted for Sharpton and Moseley Braun) is correct, then Dean did very poorly among blacks and he was surprisingly weak among whites, considering that his only opponent for this vote was Dennis "I'm polling at 1%" Kucinich. Thus, a week before Iowa, I started wondering if Dean was weaker than people realized (as a Kucinich supporter, I hoped that it meant Kucinich was stronger than people realized). I saw practically no analysis of the D.C. results. What little there was tended to take the tone that Dean had shown he could appeal to black voters or that Sharpton was weak among black voters because he didn't win (sorry, no; do the math). Here's the only analysis I've come across that suggests the D.C. results as a harbinger of Dean's later collapse and it was written yesterday. I've been wondering why the D.C. results got so little attention. Sure, the primary was non-binding, but it can still serve as an opinion poll. In fact, since it has a much larger sample size than the average opinion poll, and specifically reflects voting behavior, it should be a much better predicter than an opinion poll. It doesn't tell us anything about Kerry, Clark, Edwards, or Lieberman (or Gephardt) but it tells us how Dean did when he in effect had the field to himself. During those spans of time when I was wearing a tinfoil hat, I wondered if that was why there was so little attention on it. Dean versus the three "fringe candidates" the media has been trying to remove from the race¹, and he got less than half the total vote? Dean versus Kucinich for the white vote and he didn't get 99%?² Doesn't fit the media-approved storyline very well, does it? Conspiracy theories aside, it was in the week between D.C. and Iowa that Dean's poll numbers suddenly started to go down and the media stopped gushing quite so much in their coverage of him (see my previous entry on media analysis). What's the cause and what's the effect here? That I don't know. The most obvious way to look at it is that the media adulation of Dean dimmed after his unimpressive showing in D.C. and the polls went down after this. But there's no evidence of this; correlation does not equal causation. And we've also now seen that there were some serious internal problems in the Dean campaign. His internet organization was not as strong in the real world as everybody believed. His campaign manager Trippi seems to have spent nearly all of the huge war chest the campaign had amassed, leaving Dean with little more money on hand than Kucinich has, and apparently the money didn't go to anything that really helped get the vote out for Dean. I tend to think that what we're seeing now is how strong (or, how weak) Dean always was, but the media lovefest and the self-congratulatory attitude of many Dean supporters hid this. It was all a big bubble. Dean still has a good middle-tier campaign (assuming he can get his finances under control) and that's a lot better than anybody would have thought he could achieve with his internet organization. A campaign that can combine this with other forms of organizing should do very well in the future. The real problem was that it got inflated all out of proportion and the deflation process hurts pretty darn bad. Update: Clay Shirky also says that the Dean campaign's "inevitability" was a mirage. ¹ The media is still trying to remove Sharpton from the race - right before South Carolina, where he's expected to do well. Way to respect the African-American vote there - not! ² According to my suggested analysis, Dean only got 75% of the white vote while running against Kucinich. Bush's showing of either 85% or 79% in New Hampshire's Republican primary while running against fringe candidates and write-ins has many progressive commentators crowing about his weakness. If that's true, then Dean's weakness is also true.