Nate Silver's Graphical Overview of the 2012 GOP Field

"Ms. Palin, if she runs, may find herself in a crowd"
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With the Iowa caucuses just one year ahead of us, New York Times political blogger and number cruncher Nate Silver has devised a graphical representation of the 17 most likely candidates for the 2012 GOP nomination. His spatial approach to the task shows each candidate's relative political philosophy, insider/outsider status, probability of winning the nomination (based on present Intrade numbers), position relative to each other, and from what region of the country each one hails:

One dimension is obvious: we can classify the candidates from left to right, from relatively more moderate to relatively more conservative. But another dimension that is often salient in the primaries, and perhaps especially so for Republicans next year, is what we might think of as the insider/outsider axis: whether the candidate is viewed as part of the Republican establishment, or as a critic of it.

Let me show you the chart, and then we can begin to work our way through it:

One can certainly debate exactly what it means to be a moderate or a conservative, and exactly where any particular candidate falls along this spectrum. Likewise, the insider/outsider dimension is somewhat blurry: is a potential candidate like Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who aligns himself with the Tea Party but is also an influential senator, a part of the Republican establishment or an opponent of it? So my placement of the candidates is necessarily approximate.

With that said, it is exceptionally important to consider how the candidates are positioned relative to one another. Too often, I see analyses of candidates that operate through what I’d call a checkbox paradigm, tallying up individual candidates’ strengths and weaknesses but not thinking deeply about how they will compete with one another for votes. If you like, you can think of the circles on my chart as stars or planets that exert gravitational forces on one another, seeking to clear their own safe space in the galaxy while at the same time stealing matter (voters) from their opponents.

There are two more kinds of information embedded in the chart...

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An interesting effort by Silver. We do have our reservations, mainly with his decision to show the candidates' relative strength in terms of chances of winning the Republican Presidential nomination based on current Intrade wagering a year ahead of the Iowa caucuses. But that's as useful a device as any this far out from the GOP convention at summer's end. Still, as a snapshot in time, i.e., today, it's quite a useful chart.

- JP

Nate Silver: The 800-Pound Grizzly on the Web

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Political number cruncher Nate Silver theorizes that Google search traffic "may be a reasonably good proxy for how much interest the candidate generates among the public at large." So he ran Tim Pawlenty's numbers and remarked that the Minnesota governor’s traffic "somewhat lags behind that of several other potential Republican contenders." But those differences pale into insignificance, Silver observes, compared with the gap between Sarah Palin and every other Republican candidate:

Ms. Palin’s search traffic, since the start of 2010, is roughly 16 times that of Mitt Romney, 14 times that of Newt Gingrich, 38 times that of Mike Huckabee, and 87 times that of Mr. Pawlenty. (It is about six times greater than these other four candidates combined.)

Ms. Palin, in fact, draws almost as much search traffic worldwide as the man she would face if she wins the Republican nomination: Barack Obama. And her name is searched for about 30 percent more often than the President’s among Google users in the United States.

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Mentions of the candidates in media outlets tracked by Google News have been nearly as asymmetrical. Sarah Palin’s name has been mentioned in about 20,300 articles since the start of the year, according to Google News, versus 3,640 for Mr. Romney, 3,280 for Mr. Gingrich, 2,980 for Mr. Pawlenty, and 1,870 for Mr. Huckabee. The ratio of candidate mentions in The Times since the beginning of 2010 has largely followed the same pattern: Ms. Palin’s name has been mentioned in 870 stories, against 540 for the other four candidates combined.

This poses a problem, says Silver, for the rest of those in the GOP pack who imagine themselves behind the big desk of the former president of their choice in the Oval Office. His reasoning is that "if and when Ms. Palin declares her candidacy for the White House, it could consume much of the media oxygen literally for months." The numbers man concludes:

Ms. Palin may not be the front-runner in a traditional sense (although it’s not clear that any of the other candidates are either). But she literally commands as much of the public’s attention as the President of the United States, and the strategy for the other candidates will have to revolve around her to some significant degree. In fact, since it is uncertain whether she will run or not, they will effectively have to develop two separate sets of strategies, one contingent upon the assumption that she will enter the race and the other on the bet that she won’t.

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- JP