>> to combat frontloading, the republican party offered bonus delegates to states. they said it killed a contest later on in april or may or early june, we will give you more delegates. that was supposed to be an incentive to the state to hold the lid contest, have more delegates and make the contest worth more to the candidates. we see the 2000 republican nomination was frontloaded. it was three weeks earlier than in 1996 calendar began and is

also very frontloaded compared to democratic calendar. the democratic party was more successful in 2000 at holding states back in thing you cannot hold a contest in february and the republican party was. and so by and large, these reforms are seen as a failure. so that brings us to the republican party's second major attempt at reform with accretion of the temporary delegate selection committee that was formed in 2008 in order to make reforms for 2012. the creation of this committee is significant not only because it's one of the rare instances the republican party has become involved over the past 40 years but also because they allow changes to go into effect for the previous nomination. these changes did not need to be approved by the national convention and just need to be approved by the national committee in the summer of 2010 and it would go into effect. the republicans once again try

to reduce frontloading, create a longer nomination season and allow more states and voters a say in selecting the nomination. they did this after reflecting on the 2008 nomination where mccain secure the nomination very quickly, and on the democratic side obama and clinton battled it out for months and with a voter interest and media attention at an all time high in the race. the republican party's goal wasn't hard to create a more exciting, lengthy nomination that would pull voters into the process. they tried to achieve these goals through two major ways. the first was by regulating the calendar. the republicans said the four early carveout states, i will, new hampshire, nevada and south carolina, can vote on or after february 1 and before the first tuesday in march were as all of the states have to vote after the first tuesday in march. but also said that states voting before april 1 had to use

proportionally allocate their delegates were states going on after april 1 could use winner-take-all. this again was supposed to be seen as making states more influential. if yo the state held a contest later they could give all of its delegates to the winning candidate. rather than relying on, sold on incentives as it did in 2000, the republican party said we will enforce the penalty if the states don't abide by our rules. it said we will take 50% of your delegates await if you break these rules. and despite this penalty, the republicans were not able to prevent states from blatantly ignoring the rule and gladly accepting the penalty and scheduling early contest. as they like we should've expected given michigan and florida's actions in 2008. again in 2012 we see movement on florida, michigan and arizona moving the contest earlier than allowed by the republican party

but then creating a ripple effect where iowa, new hampshire, nevada and south carolina are then going to move their contest earlier to preserve the earlier status and influence process. as a result of 2012 calendar looked completely different than the republican party intended it for it to look. we see an rnc spokeswoman give this quote after all this movement happen. while the primaries will start earlier than planned, the overarching goal of the current roles was to allow more states and voters have a role in choosing the next republican nominee for president. this goal will be met. >> and so these graphs depict the location of the states on the calendar with the leftmost point on the ask axis indicating the aisle caucus. while the republicans intend for the race to start later in 2012 the iowa caucuses in both years were held on january 3.

we actually see here that the 2008 calendar appears more frontloaded with more candidates holding -- or more states, excuse me, holding contests on super tuesday where we see that very high bar. super tuesday appears closer to the aisle caucus in 2008 and it did in 2012. and, in fact, the republican reforms were successful in lengthening the process because mccain secure the nomination on march 4, 2008, and romney became the de facto nominee in 2012 on april 11. so the 2008 race was competitive for 61 days, compared to 99 days in 2012. in other words, the 2012 nomination was competitive for 38 days more than the 2008 nomination. so it did lengthen the process but when we looked closer at the goals of the number of states and voters that were allowed to

participate in the process, we see a different story. in 2008, in those 61 days that the race was competitive, 37 states had the opportunity to hold their contest, compared to the 30 states that held their contest in the 99 days that the race was competitive in 2012. we also see fewer voters participated in the republican 2012 race with about 16.15% participating, compared to a little over 1725% participaparticipa ting in 2008. additionally, the participation rates in both years were substantially lower than the participation rates in the democratic 2008 contest. so we see that the temporary delegate selection committee in its reforms are significant departure because it is the republican party becoming involved in the process, something it has not done for a

frequently over the past 40 years of reforms. it has been fairly unsuccessful in achieving its goals and ensuring that the states abide by its rules and regulations. unlike the democratic party that has been fairly successful in ensuring that states abide by its rules, particularly women look at the very quick overhaul of the process in the 1970s. so the rnc has said that it intends to take a harder stance in 2016, and as the chairman has been quoted as saying he will impose a death penalty on states that move early in the process by only allocating the state to break the rules nine delegates to the national convention. but currently few states have laws that would put their primaries earlier than we think will be allowed by the republicans in 2016, and so it is yet to be seen what will happen but the republican party will be reforming the rules and

trying to maintain control of this process in the upcoming election. and so over all, i think this research highlights to tensions. the first is that we typically see frontloading as a negative, something that has negative consequences. we see here in 2008 the frontloaded process actually about more voters in more states to purchase made man in 2012 when the calendar was not as frontloaded on the republican side. finally, the republican party is really in a difficult place here, that if it wants to regulate its calendar, it wants to achieve it its goals, and has demanded that the states follow its rules. something that goes against the core principle of the republican party of protecting state freedom. >> you are good. >> right on time? >> absolutely. the next speaker is when state of depaul university, and his

paper starts with the statement, the party decides among candidates. >> thank you. the title, and thank the bliss institute for hosting this conference, an outstanding opportunity for all of us. this title really builds off of the earlier work by others in which the argument was that the parties decided and basically collude on who the nominee will be even before the caucuses and primaries begin. presidential nominations are really about building a winning coalition within a political party. among diverse constituents, after this coincided to participate in changes over time. in part as kevin mentioned, the transformation of the 1960s into the 1970s as a series of reforms movements really opens up and changes the

nomination who participates. to in the 1970s we see the coalition formation really occurring in the caucuses and primary. by the 1980s we get adaptation by candidates, greater significant efforts during the invisible primary that leads to coalition coalescence or unifying behind a candidate, emerging even before the primaries. and so we really are left with two patterns. some nominations we do see the nomination essentially being wrapped up before the primary and caucuses begin. a clear example of that would be the 2000 nomination on both sides. everybody knew that george w. bush was going to be the republican nominee.

maybe not john mccain and his small band of supporters that year, but it was pretty much wrapped up. and al gore was a pretty convincing democratic nominee. we know that. if we look at other nominations, 2008, 2012 on the republican side, 2008 on the democratic side, it doesn't look at all that those nominations were wrapped up. and, indeed, if look at 2008 on the democratic side, hillary clinton was in essence the establishment candidate. she had more endorsements than any other candidate, and yet she lost. she had more money. she was getting more media coverage. normally the things that we think about winning. and so 2008 looks more like in some ways in 2012 to some extent like the campaigns of the 1970s, where campaign momentum really becomes important to the idea of campaign momentum coming tended to beat expectations,

take a more media coverage. they wind up getting more fund-raising but they're able to build their support in national polls and they kind of do better in subsequent caucuses and primaries. there's a couple of different theoretical arguments. one would be been biking. bandwagon, just jumping on the more popular candidate or alternatively, citizens learning as more and more caucus and primary voters begin to learn more about the candidates across sequential primaries. the idea of the invisible primary explanation, but it's a long national discussion in which insider, activists and group leaders if i were changes and engage in signaling candidates that generate more endorsements also tend to be the ones that raise more money, they gain more media coverage, more support in national polls and importantly and i think they are right, that endorsements and other indicators of a candidate strengthen a presidential nomination campaign.

it really leads us to having to perspective. one is at the political parties coalesced before the caucuses and primaries, what we should see very few candidates are getting many votes in the primaries themselves and we will see very low levels of competition. alternatively, if the parties failed to coalesce sufficiently as they did in 2008, then we should see more viable candidates in the primaries in the distant vision of votes will reflect higher levels of competition. what i've done industries and in others is a used concentration scores come in this case the hirschman index. i'm using two different measures. one basically calculates the number of serious candidates. if we're doing this is market share, the number of big firms in a market. and the second normalized measure, controls with a number of candidates in a race. that measure is used by the justice department to

essentially determine whether mergers should go forward on whether the government should engage in antitrust activity to stop collusion. and important, low levels of the competition indicator reflect more competition. we will come to that. this is my measure, if we look at the primary votes across all the primaries from 1972-2012, what we have going back to 1972, the little -- unfortunately my color scheme here is reversed. i have read diamond for democrats and blue squares for republicans. the red diamonds, the democrats in this case, we had an average of five candidates per primary across all the primaries in 1972. 1976, it was over for. they continued to decline over

time. conversely, the republicans start out with less competition in the 1970s, and in part because of incumbents, and they become more and more competitive more recently. and then in terms of the competition indicator, which is the normalized measure, what we are looking at a really are the same races, and i've got incumbents tend to have the scores near one. a score of one in a competition indicator basically reflects a monopoly. a completely unchallenged incumbent. what you do see is that some incumbents have been challenged. i would point out to the lower left your of 1976, the single most competitive nomination race, whether there was an incumbent president or not was actually that between jerry ford and ronald reagan. jimmy carter was fairly competitive in 1980s with ted kennedy. the horizontal line is really an

indicator used by the justice department. below that it's really a competitive market. above that line it's not competitive. would you see is in most years most presidential nominations are not particularly competitive. of those below the line occurring more frequently in the '70s and '80s are. so kind of the patterns that we see here, the first one i would simply point out is that presidents when they get renominated generally these are not competitive races. the two that we saw that were particularly competitive were 1976, 1980. the number of unique circumstances occurring with ford. he had not obviously been nominated by his own party. he was appointed, both to the vice presidency and the presidency. he had the watergate scandal a post you had a wide open nominating process with the new rules that were implemented as kate mentioned. carter is associate with a

minority wing of his party and the democratic party in 1980s. 1970s was very divided. the conditions and basically enable kennedy to have a more effective nomination challenge. but aside from that what we typically see our nominations are much closer to a monopoly. there's no competition when the incumbent president runs. and an open nominations they're close to being what we would call competitive. you can kind of see this in open nominations -- i don't have my line in there, but you only have a few that are not competitive. versus incumbent we nominations that rarely are these things competitive. a second difference between these indicators, democrats versus republicans because there is a distinct party difference for this timeframe. democratic campaigns on agenda of the more competitive and have republican campaigns, both overall as well as open nominations.

republican campaigns typically are not as competitive. intraparty trends. this is perhaps the more fascinating thing as far as looking ahead, towards 2016 and beyond. democratic nominations have become somewhat less competitive overtime. this is suggesting -- a couple things. one, the democratic party is a little more unified. it also could mean that prospective candidates are a little more strategic about calculating their chances and not running, which is also a possibility. republican nominations in contrast hastily were competitive in the 1970s. reagan comes along. you get a great deal of unity within the republican party and that may be fragmenting in the last two -- in the post-george w. bush era. we can see those two patterns practices the same slide as earlier. what i argue in this paper and

in a forthcoming book is that these two different patterns and the variation that we see emerges from two basic factors. one is variation in coalition or unity. the democratic party to a lesser extent, the republican party, they were less unified in the 1970s. this reflects the growing all recession but internally they have become more unified. and that's that happened we are seeing less competition, less intraparty fighting over the nominations. and in terms of this coalition coalescence, what i argue is a more unified party should be able to figure out and coalesce earlier before the caucuses and primaries ever begin, a more divided party that's going to be a very, very tough challenge. as the republican party come if they are unraveling in the wake of the george w. bush administration, they are going to see a much harder time coalescing behind candidates before the caucuses and primaries begin. and i think we see that in 2008.

we see it in 2012 to a lesser extent. and i think we'll see it in 2016. the second source of variation really goes to candidate entry and exit decisions. who runs in presidential nominations matter a great deal. the simple reason is that some candidates are more appealing to its more apparent to more different segments of the party mentorship that this is going to be a strong candidate. if you don't have one of those strong candidates, it becomes somewhat of an uncertainty, a great uncertainty situation a much different segments of the party are kind of bigo figure ot who's going to be viable, who can win, is going to be a good candidate for us in the general election. in that scenario what you see is a lot more division among the parties, at least in the invisible primary. and what i know here, if we look at the democratic races, a great deal of their competitive races have occurred when the candidate

is leading in national polls three years before the election. so right now, doesn't run. ted kennedy in 1972 and again in 1976, three years before the primaries he was the leading candidate. he didn't run. gary hart ran but dropped out in january 1987. mari cuomo didn't run in 1992. hillary clinton didn't run into thousand four. each of those democratic years wound up being more competitive. we see a whole lot less agreement among party insiders. i'm not showing it in this paper but the endorsement data for these elections, there's a lot less consensus among democrats. they are dividing their support among different candidates, but also very importantly, much more of the democratic party establishment sits out. they don't make an endorsement at all. i think we see that in the republican side of it in 2008 and 2012. the republicans in those years, mitt romney, for example, was

kind of the consensus pick of the establishment but very little of the establishment weight gain in that year. they by and large waited until the primaries and caucuses begin. the parties decide tha they dece among the candidates who decide to run. when we look at presidential nominations, party nomination, it's really an interactive process of coalition building. sometimes the coalition coalescence really occurs before the primaries, and sometimes it's going to happen during the primaries. that's it. >> now we'll move on to reformations. our next paper is called scandal and researchers. is presented by jeff smith of the new school and david nir of trenton. >> thank you very much. we know that in the study of

american politics, there has been of course increasing literature develop around the politics of scandal. early on a lot of this literature first focus at the presidential level and really centered on the media dynamics that created an environment ripe for scandal. more recently, kind of moving before the presidential level, we are seeing more and more research including as cases proliferate of a quantitative nature that really thinks through what scandals matter the most in terms of having electoral impacts, what is the lingering effects of the scandals across time. and we no scandals matter most together to try to stay in office initially and then that goes across time. we also know increasing with scandals -- which scales of the biggest impact in terms of the electoral, future electoral promise the candidates. we look at a different question, and this is of course a question, an issue that is

getting increasing attention, and that is candidates believe the electoral scene because the scandals but then tried to come back at a later date. this is what we call the politics of recovery. we think this is something worth caring about because of its increasing commonality, and i think because of some the dynamics of the last year we are going to see more and more of these cases in the future. secondly, because when a scandal, a candidate with the scandals past comes back into politics, the media environment is simply dominated by the candidate and the dynamics around that scandal. so that's the question that we look at in this paper. we -- there we go. we hypothesize that three forces really matter the most in shaping the politics of recovery. that is, whether a candidate who tries to come back to succeed or

fail. these three cities include first and foremost context. the electoral context in which that candidate seeks to recover. context takes on a lot of different dimensions, perhaps most important is the partisan confirmation -- competition in which the candidate tries to come back and, obviously, we think that a candidate can only come back if he or she has the advantage of partisan when at the backs in the disagree but it's not just about party. it is also about ideology and certainly districts that are dominant by one party or the other have important ideological flavors that maybe particularly advantageous, or at least not disadvantageous to the same degree the scandal laden candidates. we all know the geography

matters enormously and should the outcome of races, specifically if the candidate with the scandal, scandals past really have some ongoing geographical connection to a place. but context also is turned by the social context of an environment, especially the composition of the district that may be racially or ethnically homogenous in one way or another, or religiously homogenous. we know in politics context always matters but it matters enormously. the three of us lost elections our first time and i think context is very important. we think that context matters a lot more in scandal cases than in other cases. secondly, we know that the nature of the scandals themselves matter. that from previous research. we make the case in this paper that what matters is as much, and perhaps even more, is the way in which the candidate

grapples with the scandal itself as they present themselves to voters to our initial hypothesis focused heavily on the need for ongoing in genuine attrition on the part of candidates. but as we will talk about, we come to find that while contrition matters enormously in certain contexts, that a different kind of reaction to the scandal, a form of competitiveness, you actually be as effective as the candidate faces the voting public that knows about his or her scandal. and, finally, the third hypothesis we have is about the way in which candidates run campaigns. we think that more than in other elections where money, organization, as other traditional measures of a candidates success matter, in these cases we believe that a candidates ability to personally

connect with voters, to go over the heads of the meeting in in ways that often in which money is fairly irrelevant are credibly important. ongoing to turn it over to david is going to toggle bit about how they come up with the cases we examine and we'll all talk about those cases. >> so, as jane mentioned, the politics of recovery seemed to be of increasing importance, and it was the examples of we mr. thomas and stanford that goes to this topic in the first place, but we wanted to see how often this kind of example had occurred in the past. and it hasn't been the most frequent sort of experience to

see a candidate who had to leave office because of scandal take time off and didn't attempt to come back. so we tried an interesting experiment. we try to crowdsourced part of research on the website daily kos where i work, we explained our conditions for the situation were hoping to look at, and this is the universe a candidates we came up with. we bounded ourselves limiting to members of congress, senators, governors, statewide elected officials and judges, federal judges. while we certain welcome anymore examples that we have not managed to encounter on this list here. and we did not want to limit ourselves simply to the trio mentioned in the title of the paper. we were looking for greater variance in the case studies that we want to engage in, and this list of research year, this list of names here helped us to guide our focus.

and we chose alcee hastings it was an impeached federal judge in florida, marion barry, the former mayor of d.c., and mel reynolds, a former member of congress from illinois because we felt that these examples, particularly along all three of the variables that we cited offered real variance four as compared with spitzer, weiner and stanford examples, and jeff will talk about those latter three cases. >> thanks very much, david. so don't hang me that real quick? thanks. i'm going to talk about the three african-american cases, marion barry, alcee hastings and mel reynolds, former congressman from chicago. i'm going to talk about vim buffers were going to talk about variables. after i finished talking about those three, david's going to talk about the new york cases and jay will close about talking about stanford. the first variable that so

critical is context. one of the most important aspects of that is what kind of race do you choose in your comeback race, which is the most important one. the three candidates that i researched, of the three, one of them made a brilliant strategic decision in choosing a comeback race. that was marion barry. one kind of got it wrong the first time but then the second comeback attempt was more successful. that's alcee hastings. then the third, mel reynolds, just made too big a there is. let me explain why briefly. marion barry had been a three-term mayor of washington, d.c. we he came back he didn't run for mayor immediately. he ran for city council and had a choice in running for city council the eu a run for out large council said or he could run in his home base which was the eighth ward when he sort of originally nurtured his political ties back in the early

1970s. coincidentally that district is also, but word is also the poorest ward in washington and the most overwhelmingly like. and he believed, and apparently wisely, that he would find the most sympathetic audience for his return in that ward. he won and ended up going to be, going on to be elected mayor after that. but that probably would not have happened if you chose and run from it in his first time back out. second case, alcee hastings, he probably made a mistake his first time back. the ring in a statewide primary for secretary of state in florida. now, one of the reasons that was a difficult, again, race is i think preeminent here. florida statewide is about 20% african american state. democratic primary electorate that tends to be between 25-29% african-american. in his first secretary of state race, his percentage pretty much

trended, pretty much was right about the percentage of african-americans in the electorate according to exit polls. in a runoff he didn't move at all. he finished second in the original primary, and then didn't add any additional votes in the runoff. his second comeback race, he'd been in a majority black congressional district and was more successful, and was seated in the house of representatives in 1992, where two-thirds of his colleagues had just voted to impeach him. so that's pretty interesting. the third case is mel reynolds, and one of the things that he did not do, unlike marion barry, he didn't go down a level. he tried to run for congress, sort of the same cd applause, and he is scandal which i'm not sure if we mentioned at the outset, he was having an affair, a two-year long affair with a 15 year-old campaign volunteer. that was not easily forgiven. he came back in his seat and

tried to enforce former congressional seat, and only 16% of the vote. the next important variable is attrition versus competitivene competitiveness. one of the things that's a constant, th the african-americn candidates we looked at out of six tended to be more on the side of competitiveness. would've a lot of the way that is more successful a more combative than contrite. marion barry was probably actually the most contrite. you might remember his statement line upon being caught on the tape, he said the sipping a. he was actually more contrite than the other two candidates we look at. [laughter] so if that provides some context. no reynolds a vaguely alluded to some mistakes he had made, and alcee hastings said he never made any mistakes at all, even

though the house of representatives found convincing evidence that he took $150,000 in bribes, that they voted for hundred 13-3, democratic majority, house of representatives voted to impeach him. and then he was convicted. so that was kind of the level of contrition and combativeness among the three i looked at it and then finally charisma and personal credibility is very important to marion barry had 20 years of experience in the civil rights movement went back to his days in nashville, helping organize lunch counter sit it. been in washington, d.c. after the rights he was one of being figures in delivering, like literally driving trucks to deliver food throughout southeast washington, d.c. he had a tremendous amount of credibility from community and civic work, and that really put him in good stead when it was time for his comeback. hastings had somewhat, decent

amount of charisma and personal credibility based on his work. mel reynolds third had the least and that was probably a critical factor that led to his poor outcomes in his comeback. as opposed to hastings and very good been commuted leaders before the ran for office, reynolds was a rhodes scholar. he didn't have deep community ties. you sort of seen as an outsider when he first ran in the primary against an incumbent who had been enmeshed in scandal. and so clearly scored lower on the charisma and personal credibility scale than the other two. >> so we can, actually maybe go back to the last slide and we will work our way back. so for weiner and spitzer, spitzer started off with a lot of credibility in his race for city comptroller, but mostly having to do with his work as attorney general and he became

the sheriff of wall street. he was very eager to forget and not at all talk about his brief disasters one year term as governor. weiner was a very outspoken msnbc type progressive who is capable of commanding a lot of media attention and relating back to the context in which he was running, he's running against a field that hadn't really gelled for new city mayor and the democratic primary but no one had really caught fire, no one was exciting voters. the moment the weiner jump into the race, he instantly caught fire, shot to the top of the polls. masontown artist name recognition and the circus that surrounded him and that was enough to initially believed him, a point that jeff made was sort of a lot like the 2012 republican nomination for the president with immediate and to a certain extent voters can at least express by polls can't jump on the flavor of the month.

and anthony weiner, for may delivery a month or two months was, in fact, the flavor of the month. spitzer was running against manhattan borough president scott stringer was a very colorless sort of politician, not very prominent, and the other factor here is that stringer bring much expect a coronation. he had no opposition. spencer got in right at the filing deadline and spitzer seem to think he could take advantage of stringer's lack of preparation. but getting back into the context of this race, pretty much the entire city establishment across a remarkable spectrum was arrayed against spitzer. it's pretty rare that you have the entire labor movement which very much like skouching and the wall street and business committee which couldn't stand specter, thanks to his crusading activist as attorney general, they were all o on the same sid, and a public that, newspaper endorsements all went to stringer.

and so anyway, spitzer sort of perhaps round of biting off more than he could chew. maybe we could flip back to the contrition versus competitiveness notion. for weiner, definitely tried to present himself as having a toned, definitely being contrite, and having gotten past the 16th scandal that forced him to resign from congress to begin with. he made it seem as all his past but he did this sort of very glowing interview with his wife that appeared in the new york times magazine, that he turned over a new leaf. of course, that turned out not to be at all the case, and the contrition routine will totally fail if you're a recidivist. weiner wound up looking like a junkie who kept promising that he had quit, only to actually still be getting high. and once voters start to realize

that, he cratered in the polls and wound up finishing in fifth place behind a candidate whose campaign finance director had been indicted for campaign finance fraud. so he wound up a total failure. spitzer sort of come he's right in the middle on this chart and i think that suited him quite well. spencer did not really seem quite willing to be contrite, but he played up his combativeness and particularly succeeded among the black community. the problem was the black committee share of the vote while to being a little bit too small, and he fell just four points short of stringer. spent we'll come back to context if we need to on that, but i'll talk a little bit about sanford. context is crucially important to his success. heavily republican district in south carolina, but importantly a district where business conservatives really dominated. very well educated district.

it was a perfect fit i think ideologically for mark sanford. in addition he had represented that area in congress, most of that area but it'd been redrawn and he exceeded expectations in the part of the district where he represented before. he perform poorly in parts of the district would've not been part of his original congressional district. i think one thing, especially in environments where there's a lot of anti-washington or antigovernment sentiment, the fact you try to come back from scandal really can kind of president you as an outsider. and sanford did a particularly the job of playing up on that, that theme. he was all contrite all the time from his introduction in his television ad, his media rollout. it was ongoing contrition. there were subtle allusion to religious redemption, and there

was also a real emphasis on the normalization of what did happen with him and jenny sanford that was there at the beginning but became very important after jenny sanford's charges about his arrival at the home to watch the super bowl, and the fact that marriage is just have problems and divorced couples have problems. and this is an ongoing challenge. but he was very contrite throughout. and most importantly -- excuse me. most importantly mark sanford had always been a tv candy, a candidate who believed deeply in the power of television to the voters. he moved away from that dramatically in this campaign. he became the guy who went out with a staffer, drove all over the district and really emphasize personal connections with the voters. that was a 180 in terms of who he was as a candidate, and the folks who worked with him most closely see that as the secret to his success early this year

in coming back. and so we have these six cases, big, a long paper, we are grappling with how to get a little control over this very complicated topic that we think is going to be increasingly common topic in american politics. >> we're going to open it up to questions. i would ask that you wait until you have a microphone in front of you to ask questions because this is being recorded potentially for c-span. do we have another microphone in the audience? so basically everybody has the same rules. went into the microphone is in front of your face into utah. >> you have all described therein degrees a role or a lack of role for political parties, even in the sex scandals it seems the parties have to liberally in those cases stepped

away from it all and said, if you're going to come back, you're going to come back without our help. you also have everything from introduction of civil service, the citizen schneider decision that seems to be making less and less relevance. [inaudible] i'm sorry. okay. what d.c. that says that the parties have all our doing anything other than rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic? it's an open question. jump in. >> i would say our paper is an example actually of how parties can be very much involved in an environment that is somewhat hostile to them. the reforms in california, the new top two primaries was specifically designed to weaken the parties. and here we are showing they can continue to play a role in continuing to have an influence on the outcome of races, even

when all of the rules are set against them. also, there's some work but it did on the california primary outcome. i just said, all right, let's imagine that we can try and predict the outcome of the sort of partisan vote in each district, you know, the total vote for democrats, total vote for republicans, predict that from the district's party registration in past elections and then sort of project forward and say how well does that predict what we saw in the 2012 primary? and it turns out pretty darn well, which suggest, there's also some new surveys done the suggest really people were largely voting, choosing among candidates of a given party, even though they have the option of the top two primaries to vote for anybody that wanted to. i think parties are still an important key. it appears they can be an important sort of formal q. in

terms of endorsement but also just in terms of the party label on ballot. voters are still hurting along that basis spent let's jump to jeff and then caitlin. >> what we're going to see this cycle and in the 2016 cycle as well is that parties are offering basically under different name. almost like a pseudonym. you see this guy, the private equity guy, he and a bunch of other wall street guys are putting together millions of dollars to basically be a proxy for the republican party only because they understand the antipathy with which the party is greeted, or the parties favorite can is often greeted by grassroots republicans. so they are just going to do in a different name. but i think they will be operating much as the party otherwise would. on the democratic side you see something kind of similar at the state legislative level this cycle but one of the largest nude superbikes is basically just devoted to getting

immigrants elected at the state level so there's not another redistricting debacle for democrats like it was after 2010. is incorporated as a super pac. it operates as a super pac but it's basically just party operatives have migrated over super pacs who are acting as proxies for the party. maybe they won't be as powerful as we knew them, but i think they will be powerful under a different guise. >> i think an underlying message of my research is that the rules that the parties second life really do structure the presidential nomination said he becomes a candidate and how the campaign and how voters have a say in the process. so while i think the role of the party has changed over time it's just that the parties operating in a different way. they're trying to regulate the calendar and does have implications for both candidates and voters. i also think the breaking of the

rules and the party's reactions to show the parties can have different levels of effectiveness if they want to the democratic party is able to keep candidates from campaigning in florida and michigan in 2008, and meanwhile, in florida in 2012 the candidates spent massive amounts of money despite the fact that florida willingly broke the rules set by the republican party. so that is the opportunity for the parties to take a stand and really shape the nomination, whether it is through setting the rules or endorsing and coalescing around a candidate, as wayne talks about. >> i think though political parties are going to continue to be the dominant factor in american elections, as long as the candidates are party nominees. it's that straightforward. parties organize the conflict. they were the ones generating the ideas, along which lines

grassroots activists are falling in picking sides. they affect how we perceive politics, at least we, the politically active segment of the population. they create the rules for nominating candidates. they are the organizational muster for getting out the vote. in almost every respect, the parties are the vehicle. you can't understand elections without it. the form changes. there's no question, the form, the tactics change. parties are more network oriented, more diffuse. i think that the weakness that parties face in the modern technological world that we live in with the internet and blogs is that the parties be, so multifaceted that they're really hard to provide direction to. i think that's the great challenges that they face. >> i just wanted to echo some of what wayne and jeff were saying. about a decade ago one of the

major concerns was the rise of 527. people were saying we don't know if they're going to undermine what the parties and what again is going to do. it could be some random rich people with their own message kind of advertising. i've got a couple of papers i did with david dooley and richard scammon in which we tried to look at this in terms of campaign finance networks have found basically the parties are skilled at co-oping these 527s, were very much on board with what they're doing and help them. get around some of the campaign finance rules. so the parties are very adept at this sort of thing. and adapting to new rules, new campaign finance regimes and remaining as relevant as ever if not more so. >> in ohio on tuesday, we had roughly 25% turnout in a general election. granted, it was all local races but a 25% turnout increasing

says people are not tuned in. they're not paying attention. so the parties made very adept at adapting to the assiduous and like a lot of other folks are outside that structure. anybody can jump in. >> it's an odd number year. you're lucky to get 25%, that's a great. >> okay, other folks? we have mics. >> this one i is for wing but if you would apply your analysis to 2012 for us, was romney the presumptive nominee based upon your standards and you compare it with, say, with 2000 with gore and bush? if not, why not? was this in part due to super pacs but many question for staff and eric, and that is what role to superbikes play in a top two primary? i'm think specifically of the berman race. >> i think 2012, romney i think

was in fishery of the sequential decision-making process during the invisible primary, where he was initially unacceptable to large numbers of people within the republican party. that preferred somebody else there and as they look at who the other alternatives were, they didn't pan out either, and all of a sudden they are -- before the voting starts. to ride on eve of the iowa caucuses. i think romney had reemerged as wow, you know, it can be gingrich. they can't be santorum. you know, these guys aren't going to be able to win. and i think he did reemerge. and they say that, it's a most exactly the same pattern that you saw with john mccain in 2000. john mccain does arrive back as a weak front runner. and so i portray this in his paper is really two different alternative scenarios, but it's

a continuum between them. i do think the party establishment, the party activist group leaders had come around to looking at romney, but he was nowhere near as strong or as sure of a thing as say a george w. bush was in 2000 going into the iowa caucuses, if that makes any sense. >> what role will superbikes play? >> i think that there's two things that are going on. super pacs are one of them, and i write about this in the book i'm coming out next year, but romney can one thing with superbikes basically enable candidates who is somebody or some group of people really would like to see nominated can also give them a cash infusion that we never saw before. and the candidates who in a sense knocked out in reemerge. and i think we saw that particularly with newt gingrich and rick santorum. these guys didn't have a

broad-based appeal. woman talk about campaign finance, what does that indicate? traditionally the about of money they raise really reflected kind of support among money network of donors. in the air of the internet now we have to look at how many donors are getting come and visit small donors, big donors? when we seek candidates who are raising money from a few big donors, it doesn't tell us a lot about their support. and their appeal. i don't think it changes whether they are electable or not, but i do think it makes them competitive. they can run and muck things up. more generally, the internet, the ability to raise money in a very short period of time with large numbers of people. i think as we integrate the idea of momentum as the possibility of presidential nominations, simply because from roughly the 1970s through 2000, maybe arguably 2004, candidates couldn't have the capacity

within increasingly frontloaded primary scheduled to raise the money and make a difference. now they can. i mean, they can raise money really, really quickly. that gives the potential for a candidate who beats expectations, like a barack obama. obama in 2008 was well-funded but man, he really shot forward with his campaign fund-raising there after. and it helped him enormously. the internet as a fund-raising vehicle, super pacs clearly have changed the game and made greater potential for momentum during the primaries. but it's going to matter in races in which the party already hasn't come together. >> and so the other question was what role to super pacs play in the primary process? [inaudible] spent all, so in the general

election. that's a good question. i haven't looked in depth in particular tha but i did collecl the super pacs spending at one point in the general election, but didn't fill it out after the election was over. but at that point that was sort of early october. at that point there was a lot going into certain races. i don't recall how much in particular. they were managing to raise a lot of money regardless. gary miller, i've been ended up in the same party raised in a district, he's a republican running against another republican in a district that really probably should be elected democrat. there was a ton of money from realtors but actually at that point in time in october there really wasn't a lot going into, formed specifically to if you look at the universe super pac

money, most of it was going to the presidential election. there was certainly some going into these races. when i saw them and change the predicted outcome of the house elections nationally, didn't move the needle much. summit county on the super pac is that it goes in with race is already highly competitive. i will say in california, there's also a lot of super pac activity for state legislative candidates, state legislative races are hugely expensive. and campaign finance law in has allowed something very much like super pacs for about, and encourage them for about a dozen years now, and there's tremendous super pac activity at the legislative level, in both the primary and the general. i don't think it was quite as big a deal into congressional races, though again, i haven't followed up with it. >> one thing i think that we will see in 2014 and 2016 as

well is not just more super pac involvement in primaries more super pac involvement in the other party's primary. after what happened with todd akin, with claire mccaskill spinning and million dollars to run ads that basically promoted todd akin during the primary, some of the operatives that i talk to see that as a pretty effective model going forward to just sort of make mischief, and republicans might have control of the senate if it weren't for o'donnell and murdoch and buck and people that when i made the last few years but i think the republicans are not interested in maybe trying to turn the table and make mischief in democratic primaries as well. >> other questions? >> i'm with you can't buy an ethnic campaign finance institute. i don't want to ask both super pacs.

i was fascinated by the findings, and i have a three-part question, and the third part, other people might want to weigh in on. you were writing about california races. i gathered mostly legislative races, maybe a mix of races. but to what extent do you think your findings were shaped by the fact that the first round election, i'm not even sure what to call the primary, the first round election involved both democrats and republicans and, therefore, party cues are perhaps more important to the voters? that is, this is speculation on your part but to what extent do you expect to find this transform to a more normal primary where party label is not as important?

number two, to what extent do you think your findings are influenced by the level of race or the specific office, the visibility of the election to the voters? and then three, totally speculative part, to what extent -- i know a lot of party operatives are sticking their toes in the water and saying that they would get involved in primaries at the congressional level, but to what extent do you really expect that to happen, given that there our cost when you lose? >> let me try and answer the first part, i guess, just how unique was this particular election, doesn't matter that much it was the first top two election in california. so this wasn't the first election in which california parties have issued endorsements. we are still trying to attain the data on those county level

endorsements for, say, 2010 or earlier. it's hard. you basically need someone on inside and we happen to have that for this one election cycle. but we like to get. were hoping to do just to get a sense -- i don't think they endorsed nearly as widely in previous races. they didn't see as much of an urgency but in some cases they did that and we're hoping to measure that. .. >> these are mostly state legislative race a