I have nothing against Nick Clegg, in fact I don’t really even understand who he is. But has Mark Penn ever been right about anything (via Dave Weigel via Atrios)?
Cleggmania shows that even the most tradition-bound electoral systems are facing the pressures of rapid change made possible by modern communications. These movements may not win out of the gate, but they will become significant political factors. … Nick Clegg is a dynamic leader who was able to increase support for his Liberal Democrats through the country’s first televised debates. And he set off a firestorm.
Penn wrote this before the elections. Here’s what actually happened: Clegg’s party went up 1% in the overall vote and lost five seats.
EthylEster
So why *did* the voters piss on the Liberal Dems? Clegg performed better than Cameron and Brown IMO.
Jon H
I think the Lib Dem result was a surprise. It seems like the Lib Dems mostly get covered in the UK media as a running gag. (Doesn’t really help that their most prominent member heretofore was MP Lembit Opik, who frequently gets covered by tabloids for dating no-talent Europop tarts like one of the ‘Cheeky Girls’.)
Clegg’s appearance and performance in the debates made the Lib Dems seem more credible, I think, and there was a temporary poll surge.
frankdawg
so you can now expect a statement from Penn as to how he got it wrong and an explanation on how he will ensure that he does better in the future.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Either that or he just goes on taking money from morons for campaign advice.
Comrade Mary
Stop trying to make Clegg happen.
EconWatcher
Hillary is a very smart person. What did she ever see in Penn? I get that sometimes smart people aren’t “people smart,” but this is a really extreme case.
El Cid
These election results prove that Sean Hannity and Hugh Hewitt are always right. And the way that they do that is SHUT UP.
DougJ
@EconWatcher:
I wonder that too. It makes no sense to me at all. And from what I can tell, Penn might very well be the reason she lost.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@DougJ: Everything I’ve read suggests that Penn and Bubba (Penn’s chief supporter in Clintonland) reinforced all her worst instincts. And I believe it was Penn specifically who was clueless about the delegate counting process.
Catsy
No.
SATSQ.
mai naem
Penn probably thought Liberal Dems meant that they were the leftist party in the UK, not Labor which he probably thought was a pinko/commie party. This is the same phool who thought that the Dem primary wins were winner take alls and not done by percentage and therefor Hillary didn’t have anything to worry about. Honestly, I was anti-Hillary to begin with because I didn’t think she could win the general because the media would have gone ClintonHate mode. Not to take anything away from Obama, but I think she would have been better at governing than Obama is.
beltane
Did Mark Penn ever figure out how the Democratic party’s nomination process works? I wonder if Hillary paid him for his services yet.
Sounds like he is partially reacting to David Ploufe’s handing him his ass in ’08. He took this one scrap of knowledge and used it to form an opinion on the British election. The nicest thing I can say about Penn is that he knows as much about British politics as he does about American politics.
Violet
@EthylEster:
Lots of speculation there, but possible reasons include Clegg’s best debate performance was the first one. He seemed to lose steam as the weeks went on. He started talking about coalitions and negotiating with the other parties before anyone had cast a vote, possibly turning some people off (arrogant, hubris, etc.). Another possibility is that people liked Clegg, but once they looked at the LibDem policies they didn’t like those so much, especially with regard to immigration and the Euro.
beltane
@EconWatcher: Hillary was surrounded by fools, hacks, and others whom I can only describe as weirdos (e.g. Lady Lynne De Rothschild and others). The main reason I did not support her in the primaries was that her inner circle was made up exclusively of people I detested.
Citizen Alan
@DougJ:
My biggest concern about Clinton, and the reason I finally chose Obama over her, was her propensity for surrounding herself with people who I thought were incompetent. I really believe that if she’d gotten the Democratic nomination, she’d have lost to McCain because Penn would have been too stupid to count up the electoral votes properly.
dmsilev
Penn and Kristol (*) should compete in a Who Is More Wrong More Often contest. Winner gets thrown into a shark tank live on national television. Loser also gets thrown into a shark tank, but only only public access cable.
dms
(*) Worst magic show ever
Citizen Alan
@Violet:
Yeah, the nativist impulse totally killed the LibDems in particular. It would be like if Obama had run loudly on an amnesty program for illegals instead of keeping that issue largely off the radar until he got into office.
beltane
@dmsilev: As bad as Mark Penn’s prognosticating is, Bill Kristol would still win that contest. Kristol is the only stopped clock in the history of the universe that somehow manages not to be right twice a day. Give that man a hand.
Evinfuilt
@EthylEster:
Well, due to the stupid system you’d see that Lib-Dems were barely behind Labour in total votes received, yet end up getting a miniscule number of seats.
I’m hopeful that a union of Conservative and Lib-Dems will happen, they have a lot in common (and for Liberties sake, more than Lib-Dems and Labour.) Of course the Conservatives like the current system which gives them a lock on many seats, and the Lib-Dems main goal is the overhaul of the voting system to give them their honest share of power. John Cleese explained it best.
I also have to agree with Atrios, if I ever run for a political office, I want Mark Penn running the campaign of my competitor.
LosGatosCA
The real question is how does he still get his absurdities published? And who is dumb enough to believe anything he says, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.
I would however pay to see Penn and Dick Morris engage in a political consultant death cage battle of wits as long as they were also allowed RPGs.
Nasty, brutish, and short.
Calouste
American cluenessless about the British elections wasn’t excatly limited to Penn.
I would say the worst performance/expectation ratio was by 538. First they started by handing the coverage to their Geneva-based European correspondent. The only good thing that can be said about his articles is that the corrections posted by other people in the comments were usually pretty insightful.
Their predictions have been quite a way out, and their analysis has been rubbish. Even this morning Nate Silver was still going on about how if the Conservatives would win all the still outstanding seats, they could make a coalition with the DUP, where a quick look at those seat would show that the Tories would be happy to finish third in quite a few of them. From a mathematics perspective it might be interesting to discuss edge scenarios, but from a political analysis perspective discussing scenarios that far out of reality makes you look like a loon.
DanF
Now that’s what I call identifying “the micro-trend”!
Alex S.
I guess Nick Clegg was just a microtrend.
Edit: @Danf: Ouch…. (damnit!)
d.s.
It’s pretty typical for support for third parties to collapse at the end of the campaign. Not sure why the late polls didn’t pick it up, though.
Maybe it’s a “Shy Labour” factor. A few percent of the electorate told pollsters they’d vote LibDem but then voted Labour.
Cameron and Clegg both ran basically feel-good, issue-free campaigns. Brown ran on issues, but he was the incumbent during bad times, and as it turned out he’s a terrible, terrible retail campaigner.
Warren Terra
Oh, sure. He’s been pretty clever about the best ways to extract money for himself, such as the enormous sums he extracted from Hillary’s campaign. It’s just when he’s allegedly looking out for other peoples’ interests that he’s unfailingly wrong.
On the plus side, some times he can be not only wrong but hilariously wrong, especially when the issue at hand is not as important as, say, the next leader of the free world (I strongly favored Obama over Hillary, so my sympathies for Hillary regarding Penn’s record of hoovering up her money and torpedoing her campaign are rather limited – but even so any humor in that Mark Penn performance was rather grim). Take this example, for instance.
Brachiator
@Violet:
I think you may be right on both these areas with respect to Clegg. He did well in the first debate, but not so well when he actually appeared before the voters. Here, he was often anything but the “dynamic leader” that Penn described.
And his immigration platform appeared to be close to pure amnesty which, in the UK or in the US, seems to be a “progressive” position, but also political suicide, especially with a weak economy.
I saw a bit of a later debate where the moderator appeared to treat Clegg as an already also-ran, allowing Cameron and Brown more time to respond and to challenge each other.
@EconWatcher:
Hillary may well be a smart person, but she wasn’t an astute politician or manager of her own campaign. She believed her own hoopla that she had been co-president or president-in-training as First Lady, but it’s one thing to observe or even to give advice, another thing entirely to be the Deciderer (to mix a Dubya metaphor).
Bill E Pilgrim
Is it weird that I get Mark Penn and Dick Morris mixed up?
I actually read Penn’s book– it was 2007 and I had no idea who he was, I was listening to it in the car on a CD and I couldn’t believe how bad the writing was. I kept wanting to stop and note down the contradictions, I mean just in the course of a sentence there would be two or three.
The overall thesis seemed to be the Balkanization of trends, because in his view, there were no more overall macro trends, just micro trends with everyone going their own way, and this was absolutely predictable because everyone was doing it.
The fact that he couldn’t see the inherent contradiction was amazing.
Mark Centz
@11 etal, I read a week or two ago at LGM or possibly elsewhere that the Lib-Dem ground game was utterly lacking, which ill suits a party trying to emerge from a long burial. Figures a seasoned polical insider like Penn would overlook anything like that.
Alex S.
@Warren Terra:
Heh, the sniper example makes me think that Mark Penn is just a very clever sham artist. Microtrends = smaller than the margin of error, which means that you can basically say everything and blame it on something else if it doesn’t happen.
Mark S.
Jesus, Penn’s whole column is a trainwreck. This guy doesn’t know anything about American politics:
Yeah, move on right along:
When, in 2060? Jesus, Michael Steele isn’t this stupid. The GOP can’t win anything without at least some support from the religious right.
He also seems to equate Palin supporters, the religious right, and teabaggers. There’s overlap between those groups, but he’s pretty stupid if he thinks all three are the same.
d.s.
@Calouste:
Yeah, Nate Silver made an ass of himself.
He made a bunch of posts insisting that the entire British media’s assumption of a “uniform swing” was crazy and underestimated Conservative gains. Heaven forbid they understand their own elections better than we do.
As it turns out, the “uniform swing” predictions turned out to be extremely accurate (although there was wide variation in swings), and the model that Silver invented vastly overestimated Conservative gains.
He needs to stick to his day job.
Calouste
@d.s.:
Silver wasn’t even the first that invented that particular model. It’s been suggested IIRC in either 1997 or 2001, and performed worse than UNS. Maybe if the LibDems actually got 30-32% that model could have worked better, but in the end most constituences are a two horse race, although the horses are not always the same.
Of course Silver wasn’t exactly helped by the polls leading up to election day vastly overestimating the LibDem share (although the exit poll was spot on), but even then he seemed to overestimate the Conservative gains.
Brachiator
@d.s.:
Could be worse. Here’s a bit from the BBC news election blog site.
MikeJ
Everybody knows the elections don’t count. They allowed black people to vote, and they had districts that had been won by conservatives in the past. When you count only the districts where Clegg won, Clegg won. The
superdelegatesHouse of Lords will give the people what they really want.Clifton
@mai naem: “Not to take anything away from Obama, but I think she would have been better at governing than Obama is”
My question for you is based on what?
Especially considering that this thread is mocking her chief strategist, you know the person she put in charge of proving that she would be good at governing. I was never anti-Hillary but her campaign lowered my expectations about her ability to surround herself with intelligent people or developing substantive solutions to problems.
Alex S.
@Mark S.:
A bit off-topic, but I have to cringe everytime someone says, “the country is moving to the center”… It can’t move to the center!!! The center is where the country already is, by defnition!
Same thing with “center-right country”. Although that is unintentionally true, because if you declare that the center is center-right, you might be saying that, for you, the country is always in the process of moving to the right. And that has been true, at least for the GOP, in the past 30 years.
Anyway, “the country is moving to the center”, is the typical look-how-clever-i-am-by-using-CW statement.
PS
As a former Brit who was tempted by the LibDems, I suggest that lots of traditional Labour supporters hated this Labour government for very good reasons (Iraq, especially; generally pro-capitalist trickle-down-style policies; also general law’n’order authoritarianism) but when it came down to biting the bullet quite a few looked at the options and reverted to type, i.e. voted Labour as usual. I may be projecting, of course, but it seems as likely as anything. There may also be a number who did the same thing from/to the Conservatives. In Them and Us terms, Brown and Cameron are pretty well defined; Clegg (like his predecessors) rather falls between the two stools.
Calouste
@Brachiator:
PaddyPower (large Irish bookmaker with quite a few operations in the UK) paid out the day before the elections on bets laid on a Tory majority. They have done that before, because it generates free publicity, but it might have been a bit expensive this time around.
Tom Q
I’d guess the case PS describes right above accounts for most of it — and is the reason why most third party candidates in the US flourish until actual voting day. It’s easy to entertain the concept of a possibly-thrown-away vote, but in the immediacy of Election Day the reality of one will lose/another will win narrows one’s thinking.
Josh Marshall put it pretty perfectly at TPM — all three candidates somehow managed to lose yesterday. Brown is of course punished for all of Labour’s latter-day deficiencies, and Clegg fails to benefit from bountiful coverage and appealing debate performance. But Cameron, the leader, can hardly be thought to have done much better. Labour had all those bad-for-incumbent circumstances to which PS refers, along with the general handicap of a crap economy, yet the main opposition party remains so disliked/distrusted that they couldn’t manage a majority, let alone a mandate.
It reminds me a bit of our 1976 election — even after the horrors of Watergate, the last helicopter out of Vietnam, long gas lines and a two-year recession, the inoffensive Carter could barely pull the Dems over the finish line. In retrospect, it made Reagan’s win four years later seem inevitable. I wonder if the same is indicated by this British result.
Just Some Fuckhead
Yeah, ya tend to lose stuff in a firestorm.
kay
He said it because it’s part of his stupid pet theory. Verbatim. “Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes”.
That’s where small groups of people (three million) influence large chunks of the broader population and bring about “rapid change made possible by modern communications”.
Everything he says is a variation on this theme. It’s why he loves tea baggers. He’s probably wrong about their profound and massive influence too, as he was here, with the Gleggmania he pulled out of his ass.
The Clintons really had a propensity to get duped by con artists. For all the Right’s screeching about what cynical, savvy operators Bill and Hillary were, they got played by some real clowns.
Calouste
@Tom Q:
If Cameron becomes PM, it wouldn’t be unlikely that he is going to lose badly at the next election. He said he is going to implement some serious cuts to public services, similar to Thatcher, who is still despised for that by a significant percentage of the population 20 years later. Even if he makes a deal with the LibDems, he gives them an ideal opportunity to put the knife in when Tory support is low and the Tory government proposes some high profile cuts.
Bill Murray
The last projections I saw from Silver had 308 C; 198 L and 113 LD. The results were 306 C, 258 L and 57 LD. He blew the L/LD split, but the C prediction was right on as was the total of L/LD
BombIranForChrist
1. Get a job as a consultant.
2. Say a bunch of random shit.
3. Profit.
Chris
@Violet:
You have to understand the systemic obstacles to Lib Dem success here. The first debate unleashed the full extent of the disenchantment with labor/lack of confidence in a tory alternative. The polls shifted for lib/dem massively after the first (ever) debate as people expressed this, and never actually declined meaningfully after the later debates but in the last few days “tactical” voting took over and the reality is, for lots of people not having Tories became the priority – which meant voting labor.
The reality is, unless the system is changed, first past the post favors the two parties as they are now. Lib Dem need to extract reforms that will allow them to translate the potential support into actual seats in parliament. Tories won’t be able to deliver this as part of a deal, as it would be at their expense. Labor, in their desperation, have offered this today as part of a deal – but its unlikely they can legitimately govern as part of a coalition.
Lib Dems will not kick the tories out, but will become the viable alternative with reform. Labor, however, could replace Brown as they should have last year and return to power under certain scenarios in the second election.
Sadly, Mark Penn isn’t totally wrong, just doesn’t understand anything about the system here that would compel tactical voting.
Brachiator
@Calouste:
Wow. This was kinda dumb.
I don’t see how this works out for the LibDems. If they make a deal with Cameron and Cameron is later tossed out, the LibDems would be tainted by some of the failure, and Labour would hold a grudge and never have a reason to help them in the future.
On the other hand, if the LibDems tried to save Labour, the Libs might continue to be a small party with relatively little influence. That the Libs did not do as well as they had hoped may be telling.
Calouste
@Bill Murray:
They not exactly independent. Once the polls made clear that the SNP wasn’t going to gain much, the minor party seats were always going to be 28 +/- 2, and thus the three major parties would share 622 +/- 2 seats between them.
toujoursdan
The other thing may be the struggle people in multiparty systems always have with when these elections happen.
Do you vote for the Lib-Dems, which takes away a Labour vote and could allow the Tories (whose policies you really oppose) a win, or do you hold your nose and vote for Labour? I suspect that a few Lib-Dems voted Labour and some may have voted Tory for the opposite reason (They’re sick of Labour.)
As a dues paying member of Canada’s (soçialist-lite) New Democratic Party, these are the kind of questions I always struggle with. I have voted Liberal and even Parti Québécois instead of for the candidate I went door to door to support in the past. It boiled down to how well the Conservative candidate in my riding (congressional district) was doing and who his/her most effective challenger was.
Being a 3rd party candidate is always tough in a First Past the Post system. That’s why they all advocate for some kind of proportional representation instead.
pseudonymous in nc
I think it’s fair to say that voters ‘came home’ somewhat, squeezing the Lib Dems. Cameron’s talk of cuts to the public sector in those parts of the UK that were hurt most by Thatcher’s indifference to the (industrial) private sector brought back a lot of bad memories. You also had voters who’d gone with Blair in outer suburban constituencies going back to the Tories, and there’s a bit of irony there, given that their economic complaints had at least something to do with the failings of the Tory press’s obsession with house prices.
One interesting aspect: in spite of the debates focusing on the party leaders and talk of ‘presidential’ politics, the wide variation in swings suggested greater focus on local candidates in the final days, with some incumbents punished (sometimes because of the expenses scandal) and others spared.
As for the aftermath: I think you’ll see two rounds of unsuccessful horse-trading (LD-Con, then LD-Lab) and then Cameron taking over with a minority government that, like Harper in Canada, places the onus on the opposition to vote it down and force a new election.
In that situation, where the opposition has the finger on the trigger, it’ll be up to the Tories either to seek out an issue that they can lose and take to the country to gain a working majority, or for Labour and the LDs to pick the right moment to bring them down. In that situation, depending on the polls, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a limited anti-Tory deal in certain constituencies to avoid splitting the vote.
Calouste
@toujoursdan:
Only in cases where multi party systems are combined with first-past-the-post. If you have a form of proportional representation or single transferable vote, there is no need to vote tactically.
Alien-Radio
interestingly the Lib Dems held onto seats they took from the conservatives in 2005 in what was basically an anti iraq swing, that boosted the number of Lib Dem seats quite significantly, they held onto all but 5 of those seats in a conservative year, and registered some of the biggest swings of the night unfortunately often in seats they already held. I think this election represents consolidated gains, and the next one could see more.
bob h
Clegg was a “Nation” magazine intern back in the 90’s, suggesting Liberal Dem is pretty damn liberal by our standards.