The biggest news out of Iowa this week is a comment by Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA-1), currently the presumptive Democratic nominee to succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin. Here's the video of Rep. Braley at a fundraiser in Texas:
If you can't watch it or don't feel like it, the relevant part is this quote at 0:20:
"You might have a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school, never practiced law, serving as the next chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Because if Democrats lose the majority, [Republican senior Sen. from Iowa] Chuck Grassley will be the next chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee." -- Bruce Braley, at a fundraiser in Texas, March 25, 2014
First, I'm not sure why Rep. Braley decided to include the "from Iowa" phrase, since he himself is running for a Senate seat in Iowa. As a blog devoted to quantitative analysis of news, though, we're not interested in Rep. Braley's campaign skills per se (although we do find it interesting that he has let his mouth run ahead of him before). We are, however, interested in whether his slip-up will affect his campaign. Second, we're no PR experts, but we think it's a pretty bad idea to implicitly disparage farmers when you're running for office in a state whose top five exports are farm products.
When politicians accidentally speak the truth
There's a very large body of research among political scientists about what gaffes do to campaigns. We won't go deep into that; however, for just a glimpse at what happens, here's a graph of the RealClearPolitics polling average for the 2012 presidential election from June 5 (when Romney clinched the Republican nomination) to Election Day, with some of the better-covered gaffes included:
What was the effect of a single gaffe? In this crude analysis we're going to ignore most of the statistics side of my brain to prove a point. We'll be assuming, among other things, that a correlation implies a causation (which it by no means does). Some gaffes precede clear drops in the polls: President Obama's "The private sector is doing fine" in June, or Gov. Romney's "47%" remark in September. The most devastating gaffe of that election cycle was probably Texas Gov. Rick Perry's infamous "oops" during the Republican primary debates, which sank his entire campaign. (If you don't know what that is, I'm not going to spoil the surprise; Jon Stewart's coverage of it is something to behold.) But then there are others that seem to have the opposite effect: Gov. Romney's dismissal of firemen, policemen, and teachers shortly after clinching the nomination was followed by a very modest uptick in the polls, and Vice President Biden's ill-timed "chains" remark to a large group of African-Americans also didn't lead to an immediate drop in the polls. And then the occasional gaffe seems to make no difference at all: Gov. Romney's numbers remained basically steady even after the revelation that he actually didn't know what "middle-class" meant. Much more important than gaffes, as the timeline shows, are conventions: the boost in enthusiasm is easy to underestimate. Both candidates jumped in the polls after their respective conventions; Pres. Obama's healthy 3-point lead was undone only because of his exceptionally poor performance at the Denver debate.
What was the effect of a single gaffe? In this crude analysis we're going to ignore most of the statistics side of my brain to prove a point. We'll be assuming, among other things, that a correlation implies a causation (which it by no means does). Some gaffes precede clear drops in the polls: President Obama's "The private sector is doing fine" in June, or Gov. Romney's "47%" remark in September. The most devastating gaffe of that election cycle was probably Texas Gov. Rick Perry's infamous "oops" during the Republican primary debates, which sank his entire campaign. (If you don't know what that is, I'm not going to spoil the surprise; Jon Stewart's coverage of it is something to behold.) But then there are others that seem to have the opposite effect: Gov. Romney's dismissal of firemen, policemen, and teachers shortly after clinching the nomination was followed by a very modest uptick in the polls, and Vice President Biden's ill-timed "chains" remark to a large group of African-Americans also didn't lead to an immediate drop in the polls. And then the occasional gaffe seems to make no difference at all: Gov. Romney's numbers remained basically steady even after the revelation that he actually didn't know what "middle-class" meant. Much more important than gaffes, as the timeline shows, are conventions: the boost in enthusiasm is easy to underestimate. Both candidates jumped in the polls after their respective conventions; Pres. Obama's healthy 3-point lead was undone only because of his exceptionally poor performance at the Denver debate.
We believe that gaffes are covered extensively by the media because it's easy to focus on them as a singular event and they can predict very simplistically what happens afterward. And sometimes the gaffe is serious--the president's "The private sector is doing fine" or Gov. Romney's "47%" indicated a serious, fundamental misperception about the country. But most of the time, gaffes don't do much permanent damage to the polls. They stir up controversy among pundits and campaign teams and probably get cable news networks better ratings for a few days. But to voters, come Election Day, they don't have an effect.
Will Rep. Braley suffer because of his "farmers" gaffe (which has drawn comparisons to the "47%" gaffe from 2012)? After all, his leading Republican opponent, former Reliant Energy CEO Mark Jacobs, has already produced a thirty-second ad out of it, complete with music that would bring Clint Mansell to tears. We don't think he will. History has shown us two things about gaffes: one, most of them ultimately don't matter, and two, there's plenty of room for Republican gaffes as well.
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