Did Romney change his narrative?

We are slowly exiting the turbulent Convention/Debate polling period, and now we can begin to discern the effects of each party's efforts to change the race over the past month and a half. Obama entered September (late August) with about a two point lead, and it appears that he will exit with a lead in the 2-4 point range. The Democratic convention and Romney's 47% comments gave Obama the opportunity to run away with the race, but Romney's dramatic pivot from Tea Party severe conservative to Bush style compassionate conservative at the Denver debate, and Obama's lackluster performance there, cut off a real breakout by Obama.

Did Romney change the narrative of his campaign? He made a rhetorical change in the Denver debate, appearing to repudiate much of what he campaigned on during the primaries. His new approach was on display in late September at the Univision forum, so new Romney didn't come totally out of the blue. But it was a big change very late in the campaign, the kind of change voters can usually see through. It appears to have given voters cause to look at Romney again, and there are signs that women were particularly more open to voting for Romney after the first debate. Denver changed the media's tone about Romney, they decided that he was still in the race, but it didn't change how the media and voters view Romney, Obama's critique, embodied in Romney's 47% remark, stands.

The change in the polls looks to be mostly driven by changes in enthusiasm rather than by voters incorporating new information about a candidate. Democrats were not impressed by Obama's performance, and that lost enthusiasm showed up as Democratic voters dropping out in likely voter screens. Republicans were excited by a Romney who appeared to be able to connect to voters, and in some sense a moderate Romney gave them permission to support him, their rising enthusiasm pushed more Republican voters through the likely voter screens and buoyed Romney's numbers. Romney changed his narrative to the extent that his moderation gave Republicans permission to support him.

The Obama campaign reacted to defeat by doubling down on women's issues in their advertising and in the second presidential debate, and it looks like that solidified an eroding gender gap. Obama effectively maneuvered Romney into appearing to be a hectoring, overbearing, ignorant bully in the second debate, most dramatically in Romney's overreach on "act of terror" regarding the Benghazi attack ("Please proceed, Governor.")


Voters were very engaged with the debates, with more people watching both Presidential debates than watched the pivotal Bush/Clinton debates in '92. If there were ever an opportunity to change the course of a campaign these debates were it.


But in the end it does not appear that Romney changed the narrative of his campaign or the trajectory of the election. He may have accelerated Republicans coming home by a week or two (oddly by repudiating the Tea Party), but he didn't find new voters. If anything Obama comes out of the conventions and debates in a stronger position than he went in.

Building Android Cyanogenmod 10 for the Nook Color/encore

UPDATE: latest local_manifest.

A crew at xda have been working on CM10 for the Nook color, and I finally got around to building a copy for myself. I'm documenting my steps here.

I launch a c1.xlarge (High CPU) Amazon AWS spot instance, Ubuntu Server 12.04.1 LTS, with a bid of $0.20. The process below takes just over two hours, and the market price for a c1.xlarge is $0.07, so the total cost to build is about $0.21. I bid high to keep the box from being terminated.

You should be able to cut and paste the following into a terminal.

http://pastebin.com/TZwXbpXM

screen -S admin
sudo mkdir /mnt/android
sudo chown ubuntu /mnt/android
ln -s /mnt/android ~/
mkdir ~/android/system
mkdir ~/bin
export PATH=$PATH:~/bin
sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get -y install git-core gnupg flex bison gperf libsdl1.2-dev libesd0-dev libwxgtk2.6-dev squashfs-tools build-essential zip curl libncurses5-dev zlib1g-dev pngcrush schedtool libxml2-utils libxslt1.1 g++-multilib lib32z1-dev lib32ncurses5-dev lib32readline-gplv2-dev xsltproc openjdk-6-jdk

git config --global user.email 'john@example.com'
git config --global user.name 'Android Build'
git config --global color.ui true

cd ~/android/system/
curl https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/googlesource/git-repo/repo > ~/bin/repo
chmod a+x ~/bin/repo
repo init -u git://github.com/CyanogenMod/android.git -b jellybean
curl 'http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=vZFKdc8m' > .repo/local_manifest.xml
repo sync -j8
cd ~/android/system/device/bn/encore/
./setup-makefiles.sh
cd ~/android/system/vendor/cm/
./get-prebuilts
cd ~/android/system/
. build/envsetup.sh
brunch encore


All Done! Just copy the /mnt/android/system/out/target/product/encore/cm-10-*.zip file somewhere.

Amazing work by fattire, @krylon360, eyeballer, keyodi, sluo et al.

The debates are too late for Romney

Markos Moulitsas wrote a nice post on how narrative works in presidential campaigns, using Romney as an example:

From Day 1, all of Mitt Romney's foes had a clear narrative about him—he was a callous, heartless, elitist, vulture capitalist. In other words, "a dick." 

The stage was set by Occupy with their "99 percent" narrative, which allowed Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich to get mileage with their "vulture capitalist" attacks against Romney before the party establishment shut them down.
...
And why is that narrative important? Because as people become aware of such narratives, they then try to decide whether it's legit. If you can reinforce a negative narrative, you're winning.

The first step in changing the trajectory of a campaign is to lay out a new narrative, a narrative that can reinforce people's preconceptions (Alinsky's rule number 2: "Never go outside the experience of your people.") but work to your advantage. When people talk about the debates as Romney's last chance to turn this around they are referring to the way debates can be key to communicating a narrative. As Paul Waldman points out, a debate can turn an underlying critique into an open criticism that explains the whole campaign:

what happened was that reporters decided those were the key moments, and kept writing and talking about them in the subsequent days and weeks. Not coincidentally, the moments that get chosen are those that reinforce the conclusions the press has already come to about a candidate's character weaknesses.

The first debate is scheduled for October 3rd, just under a week away. Romney has not settled on a narrative for Obama, or even for his own campaign:

While Obama doles out his sustained-applause lines freely, Romney is still honing his message. The GOP nominee has rolled out tougher rhetoric on China as a currency manipulator in recent days in order to tug at Ohioans who have been hit by outsourced jobs. He also speaks in front of a tally board that features the historic level of national indebtedness.

Romney is not building any coherent narrative this week, he has nothing to build on next Wednesday. He's still auditioning new lines of attack. With nothing to build on, he has no chance to use the debates to change anything about the election.

Medicare could win the House for Dems

A new Gallup poll, completed before Romney's 47% tape aired, show Obama with a growing advantage on Medicare, 50% to 44% in swing states, larger nationally. A new Reuters poll is showing Romney support collapsing among seniors:

Romney's double-digit advantages among older voters on the issues of healthcare and Medicare - the nation's health insurance program for those over 65 and the disabled - also have evaporated, and Obama has begun to build an advantage in both areas.

This kind of collapse, where a core constituency of one party becomes disenchanted with the party's platform, usually shows up as a collapse of party id and a growth of independents, then in a growth of the opposition party's id. And sure enough, that is what we see Republican id collapsing in Huffpost's party id trend:





This large change in party id of suggests a wave election, and Nancy Pelosi now puts the Democrat's chances of picking up the 25 seats they need to win the House at 60%. Her strategy? "Medicare, Medicare, Medicare."

Romney's done, Senate's held, House?

The campaign will downplay their chances, and they have to keep the pressure up all the way through, but the Presidential election has been over since July, and the Senate was locked down over the Democratic convention. So the strategic question for the Obama campaign is how can they use Romney to help us take back the House?

Romney's 47% video, and his doubling down on that view of the electorate, gives Obama the opportunity to frame him and the Republican party as a Goldwater extremists, when the Democrats won the largest share of seats since the New Deal. Talk of improving House chances has erupted across the Democratic Internet, sparked by Sam Wang's house outlook giving Democrats a 74% chance of taking over (Dylan Matthews at the Post dug into Wang's data a bit more):

In summer polls leading up to the 2012 conventions, Republicans were behindDemocrats by a median of 2%, a 9-point swing from 2010. Consequently, many seats won in that Republican wave are now at risk

Karl Rove's American Crossroads appears to be pulling back from Romney to focus down-ballot. Josh Marshall of TPM posted a note from a correspondent suggesting TPM shift focus to the House. Nate Silver pointed out in August that the GOP majority was at risk, and since then polls have moved to suggest the Democratic wave he saw as a possibility. The Obama campaign has seen a party ID shift in their polling (they lower the Democratic numbers internally in case the shift is a mirage), which is another indication of a wave. The Huffington Post House outlook has more Republican than Democratic races to watch,  and as more congressional polling becomes available we should be able to test Wang's predictions from the national polls.

Post convention, last chances for Romney

Conventions are one of the few opportunities a presidential candidate has to change how they are perceived by the broad American public, and with that change the trajectory of the election.  It is clear that Romney has wasted his convention, neither the convention nor his choice of Ryan changed anything about the way he is perceived by the electorate. Instead both reinforced the story the Obama campaign has been telling about Romney. Romney's remaining opportunities to significantly impact the election are the debates, but with no groundwork laid for a new story of Romney's candidacy he faces an impossible task. With the polls at status quo Romney loses.

Meanwhile the Obama campaign is more and more confident that they have this thing sown up. It's hard to argue with them, though Rahm and Democratic insiders I've talked to warn of hubris. The natural growth of minority share of the electorate, combined with Romney's disastrous performance among Hispanics, put this election out of reach for the Republicans. The election appears to be close, and will be fought on the ground to the last day, but the Obama campaign has a margin for error and Romney is out of opportunities to take that away.

I would bet the Democratic convention organizers are shifting emphasis from engaging Romney to outlining what Obama intends to do with another four years. Obama may use convention starting tomorrow as an occasion to set a course for America, rather than to reintroduce himself to the public.

The late season of a presidential campaign

Some of my rules for understanding the endgame of a presidential election:

• Voters draw their economic verdict on the incumbent by June.
• Late summer polls, after the primary bump and before the convention bumps, show the underlying state of the race.
• National polls become volatile and misleading through the convention and debate season.
• The results of a campaign's actions take a few weeks to show up in polls, immediate poll reactions are often misleading.
• The candidate making 'bold' or 'dramatic' moves late in the campaign is losing.

Presidential campaigns are large, slow moving things. It takes a lot of thought and effort to shape the opinions of a couple hundred million people. There is little room to change things in the last quarter of a campaign, if your strategy is not working and the underlying trend is against you, then you are probably out of time to change strategies.