One of the sillier popular conspiracy theories is that Bush somehow stole the 2004 election. In reality, his performance improved slightly from 2000 in almost every state and every demographic group. That’s absolutely the wrong way to steal an election. The way you really do it is to hold back votes in particular strongholds until the other guy lays his hand on the table and then you make up the votes you need to win, as Mayor Daley I did in Cook County in 1960 or the GOP machine did in DuPage County in the 1982 Illinois gubernatorial race.

In fact, John F. Kerry almost won the election in the Electoral College by nearly snagging Ohio despite getting beaten narrowly but thoroughly all across the country.

This underscores how similar by state the 2004 results were, relatively speaking, to 2000. Bush’s share increased a little bit in just about every state from 2000 to 2004. Right after the 2004 election I wrote: “In contrast, Bush lost share in only 2 of 51 states (although this may change slightly as final vote counts come in).”

Michael Barone, Patrick Ruffini, and Ross Douthat are talking about whether an Obama-McCain race would reshuffle the red state-blue state stasis of the last two elections. The question is not who will win the national election, but will the relative partisanship of the states change? Will Utah remain much more Republican than the rest of the country and Vermont much more Democratic?

Bush’s share of the vote in 2004 by state correlated at the 0.98 level with his performance by state in 2000. What that means is that if you spent the last four years in a cave and just surfaced today and asked “What happened in the election?” you could be 96% (that’s 0.98 squared) accurate in guessing Bush’s share in each state with just three kinds of information: his 2000 performance, his new intercept (start Bush off 3.9 percentage points higher), and his new slope (for each 10 percentage points his 2000 share goes up per state, his 2004 share goes up 9.77 percentage points). For example, if he earned a 50% share in a particular state last time, you would expect him to earn 52.7 points this time (3.9 + (5 * 9.77).

Yet, holding the candidates’ constant from one election to the next doesn’t necessarily mean stability of results at the state level. In sharp contrast, consider the 1952 and 1956 races between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. Eisenhower’s overall share grew 2.3 points from 1952 to 1956, only a little less than Bush’s improvement from 2000 to 2004, but Ike’s share fell in 19 of 48 states.

The 1952 and 1956 races correlated only at the 0.78 level, meaning you could only be 61% accurate at plotting Eisenhower’s 1956 results knowing his 1952 results and Eisenhower’s intercept and slope for 1956. In other words, there was hugely more shifting at the state level between 1952 and 1956 than between 2000 and 2004. I do not know why this was.

I made up a table of stability of state-by-state voting over time. Below are the r-squareds for state-by-state correlations for the last eight elections. The similarity of the 2000 and 2004 elections by state were the highest in recent history.

For 1992 and 1996, I’ve laid out the correlations both with the GOP candidate by himself and with the GOP candidate plus Perot (i.e., the non-Democratic share of the vote). There seems to be an upward trend over time for elections to become more stable, although 1984 to 1988 was 88%, which is low only compared to 2000 to 2004 (96%). The 1992 and 1996 elections were somewhat perturbed by Perot and by Clinton, who had a certain amount of Southern appeal.
[See table here.]

Theodore Dalrymple made a point that is key to understanding African politics: the typical corrupt Big Man does not see himself as a greedy person. Instead, every time he climbs the ladder of success, more relatives show up insisting that he subsidize them, and his closer relatives all agree with them and nag him to take on even broader responsibilities for supporting the ever extending family. Barack Obama Sr. was undone, in part, by this requirement to play the Big Man with his relatives even when he could no longer afford it.

Barack Obama Jr. has come under the same pressures during his brief visits to Kenya. Nicholas Kristof writes in the New York Times:

Senator Obama barely knew his father and does not know his Kenyan relatives well. He has visited Kenya three times, most recently very briefly in 2006.

On his last visit, Mr. Obama visited two area schools that had been renamed for him. The intention in renaming the schools seems to have been partly to attract funding. One person after another noted pointedly that it was a shame that a school named for a great American should be so dilapidated.

Some of Mr. Obama’s innumerable relatives also see him as a meal ticket. They have made arrangements with a tour group to bring buses of visitors to have tea with Mama Sarah.

They are also trying to raise money from interviews with her. I had made arrangements to visit Mama Sarah weeks ago, and she had agreed to speak. But when I showed up, she said that her children had told her to keep quiet. Frantic phone calls. Fierce arguments. Hints that money might make an interview possible. I didn’t pay. I didn’t get the interview.

From the NY Post, a comic story that’s part of a growing trend that nobody expected even a few years ago: the interpenetration of American and Kenyan politics:

TRIBES RAGE AT HILL

By GEOFF EARLE Post Correspondent

February 29, 2008 — WASHINGTON - Angry tribal elders in Kenya are calling on Hillary Rodham Clinton to “clear her name” over any involvement in publication of photos of Barack Obama wearing a turban and African garb on a trip to his ancestral homeland.

The leaders are planning a protest in their community today, and are turning up the heat on the US government over the incident. The photos appeared nationwide after they were published earlier this week on the Drudge Report Web site with a report that they had been circulated by Clinton staffers. Obama aides blasted the Clinton campaign for “shameful, offensive fear-mongering.” The pictures show Obama wearing traditional Somalian garb on a 2006 visit to the Wajir region of Kenya, where his late father was born.

“The US government must apologize to us as a clan and the old man,” Mohamed Ibrahim told Reuters, referring to a highly respected tribal elder who is also shown in the photos. “We have been offended, and we cannot afford to just watch and stay silent.” He also said it was essential that Clinton “clear her name.” …

“He [Hassan] was the right person to perform any such activity like dressing a visitor like Obama with traditional Somali clothes,” Mukhtar Sheik Nur, another leader, told Reuters.

The elders said if they did not get an apology, they would demand the expulsion of US troops based near the town of Garissa in their region.

The serious issue is that we actually do have Marines in Garissa, which is on the road (such as it is) to Somalia, as this 2006 article “The Mystery Mission” details. We’ve been quietly building up our military presence in Kenya for a number of years to attack people within Somalia. We recently sponsored Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia.

Is all this a good idea or a bad idea? Does what happen in Somalia matter much? Are we likely to get drawn into more pointless tribal conflicts, a la Iraq?

Beats me, but it would be interesting to hear the candidates give their views on it. Obama’s thoughts would be particularly interesting, since he has strong ties of blood and emotion to the Luo tribe in Kenya. Presumably, he knows more about American foreign policy in relation to Kenya than to any other country, relatively speaking, so hearing him speak about Kenya in depth would be a good test of his foreign policy instincts overall, which remain murky in general.

Personally, I have a bad feeling about U.S. involvement in Northeastern Africa. Places like Darfur and Somalia strike me as of almost zero strategic interest to us, but they’re also the kind of places where we could get in and wallow around for decades. But, I really don’t know much about the region.

At his Citizen Lobbyist blog, Craig Nelsen recalls:

During the 2000 primary season, I made it a point to ask each presidential candidate in person the following question at least once:

Current immigration policy is doubling US population within the lifetimes of today’s children. Since you support this policy, will you at least say when we should stop?

One billion people? Two billion? Three? …

Vice President Al Gore’s campaign event in New Hampshire was tightly controlled. It required a bit of creativity even to get in. There was no question and answer period, so I had to shout out my question as Gore was striding off the stage. He froze. He turned. He strode back to the podium. A hush fell over the auditorium as the vice president leaned into the microphone. With his Tennessee accent booming out over the loudspeakers, Al Gore said, and he said it firmly, “Diversity is our strength.” And the crowd went nuts. They cheered wildly as he marched triumphantly off stage and back to his waiting limousine. The Secret Service collared me, holding me at the auditorium exit while the Gore campaign decided whether to have me arrested. As the audience members filed out, a few shot me dirty looks, but not a single person commented on the fact that I was being detained by guys with guns for participating in my democracy without permission. Live Free or Die, my ass. …

I caught up with the Straight Talk Express in Darlington, SC. McCain finished his stump speech and said he’d take some questions.

My hand shot up. He pointed to me. I stood up and asked [my standard question]…

McCain’s eyes narrowed, and his head drew down into his shoulders. “You and I, sir,” he began slowly, emphasizing each word and glaring at me as if I were a poisonous insect, “obviously have differing views on immigration.

“But let me make one thing perfectly clear,” he continued, his voice rising, “there is no room in the Republican Party for bigots, xenophobes, or racists.”

I’ll say this for South Carolina Republicans as compared to New Hampshire Democrats: no one applauded McCain.

As I’ve been pointing out for years, in both 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush’s share of the vote by state correlated closely with the rate of family formation among whites, which in turn correlated with the affordability of housing and decent schooling.

Will this pattern be seen again in 2008?

Keep in mind that the theory of affordable family formation doesn’t tell you who’s going to get elected President. It merely says that the relative voting orientation of a state is driven by how affordable marriage and children are among non-Hispanic whites in that state.

My first guess regarding 2008 would be that the correlations will almost certainly go down because they were so high in the last two elections that they can hardly go up any further.

Back in 1988, the correlations between white total fertility and Bush the Elder’s share of the vote by state was about 70% as large as in 2000/2004. In 1992 and 1996, the relationship either dropped sharply or grew, depending on how you treat Perot’s votes. The correlation between white total fertility and the GOP candidate’s share by state went way down versus 1988, but if you add Perot’s votes to Bush/Dole’s votes, the center-right share’s correlation with white total fertility went up.

Bush the Younger, for all his peculiarities, was apparently seen by voters as a fairly generic Republican candidate, and they also viewed Gore and Kerry as fairly generic Democratic candidates, allowing the underlying dynamic of affordability of family formation to drive the voting.

On the other hand, unusual candidates could upset the relationship. My guess would be that if the candidates in 2008 were Hillary, the feminist with one child, and Romney, the business executive with five children (especially if Romney weren’t a Mormon), affordable family formation would again rule the day.

On the other hand, I can’t really begin to guess what impact McCain and Obama would have on the distribution of voting among states.

Another issue is that I don’t have enough to see how fast voting patterns respond to changes in, say, total fertility. The latest Census Bureau statistics on non-Hispanic white total fertility by state, for example, is a report on 2002. My guess would be that numbers from a half-decade ago would remains reasonably useful — that this isn’t the kind of thing that changes year-to-year.

Any thoughts on what we’ll likely see at the state level in 2008?