I recently had a discussion with a friend about Governor Patrick’s parole crackdown. Parole is routinely being denied to eligible prisoners who have life sentences because the Governor is scared of political fallout after Dominic Cinelli. From a policy standpoint, there are a lot of problems with this, including the fact that homicide, the usual source of a life sentence, has the lowest recidivism rate of any crime.
But that’s a discussion for another time. Right now I want to look at the political side of this. Conventional wisdom is that there’s a political price for trying to make the justice system fair: show any leniency to convicted (or even accused!) criminals and you’ll pay for it the next time you run for office. Especially if anything goes wrong. Willie Horton doomed the Dukakis campaign.
Except he didn’t. Willie Horton had minimal or no effect on the outcome of the 1988 Presidential race. See the appendix of the report at: http://apr.sagepub.com/content/19/1/59.full.pdf+html for 1988 polling data.
The “Weekend Furlough” ad campaign started on September 21, 1988. Polls taken in the month prior to the beginning of the ad campaign showed Bush with an average lead of 4%. Polls taken between 9/21, when the ad campaign started, and 10/5, the date of the first debate, gave Bush an average lead of 5%. This difference is small enough to be meaningless. In fact, if you removed the (erratic and possibly unreliable) WP/ABC polls from the calculation, Bush actually led by 6% before the Horton ads started and 5% between the ads and the first debate. Whatever sunk Dukakis, Willie Horton wasn’t it.
Even when you think you know the facts you can be fooled by root causes. I would feel more confident in your assertion if you truly did know the reason for his loss.