In light of today’s results in the preliminary election for Mayor of Boston, I was struck by how different the performances of the various candidates were when it came to dollars raised vs. votes obtained. So here’s a chart looking at who overperformed and who, well, didn’t. Click for a larger view.
Especially impressive was Charlotte Golar Richie, who wildly overperformed: she came in third with about 14% of the vote (to Walsh’s 18% and Connolly’s 17%), yet she only raised a little over $300,000, whereas Walsh and Connolly both cleared a million. In contrast, Dan Conley and Mike Ross underperformed. Conley raised almost as much as Connolly but finished fourth with 11%, well behind Golar Richie who raised about a third as much money; and Mike Ross raised almost $800,000 but came in a disappointing 8th, behind the much less well-funded Felix Arroyo and John Barros (in addition to Golar Richie).
Of course, what mattered in the end is who went 1-2, and that was Walsh and Connolly, both when it came to fundraising and when it came to votes. So, there ya go.
David:
Is this a proper best fit line, or is this just “eyeballing” a line? If it’s best fit, could you kindly post the equation and R^2?
The machine makes the pretty line.
I think it’s pretty obvious that Golar Richie overperformed, and Ross and Conley underperformed.
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There aren’t that many data points (12 for each axis). The visual shows it’s a relatively high R^2, but not super-close to 1. Golar-Richie is really the only major outlier, maybe Ross. I’d guess somewhere above 0.8. I am wondering, since Walsh’s dot is the end of the line, if the program just does it that way or if it’s just coincidence that his data matches the line so well.
Of course, it’s the deviation from 1 that measures how much the election was determined by something other than fundraising, so a high R^2 doesn’t speak so well of our system.
Her strong finish makes me wonder what a strong start would have done for her.
Whoever wins has to worry about her next time out, in my arrogant opinion.
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In her speech last night it sounded like she’s not going to run again, but that her campaigned “Opened the door” and that it was a huge victory in many ways. Out of the #s, hers was a big victory and it would have been great to see her be a contender. With 12 candidates, many performed well and got this city reengaged and energized. I don’t think we should assume Boston will have another 20 yr mayor for a while.
Also, I think that both finalists will have a lot of work to do to appeal to the other 65% that didn’t vote for them. A lot of work to unify the city.
Walsh doesn’t get as good a bang for his buck when you include the $427k in outside group spending.
It was $720K in outside spending (here plus here). That changes the graph significantly.
Did Arroyo, Barros and Golar Richie spend in a similar way as compared to, say, Consalvo and Ross or Connolly and Walsh? Did they all hit upon something that we need to understand? Or did their successes have more to do with each having sizable natural constituencies? This, to me, is the main thing that we want to get to the bottom of. Elections are changing and the way we spend money needs to change, as well. For instance, de Blasio trounced the rest of the field down in NYC yet spent not even one dime on direct mail. In Colorado’s recent recall elections, Democrats massively outspent Republicans, dominating the airwaves, and yet still lost and in Dem-leaning districts, to boot.
to which I don’t have the answers. This was just a quick look based on readily available data.
My faith is badly shaken. 🙂
In New York, DiBlasio prioritized television spots over direct contact and mailings.
In Colorado, the NRA was the major presence on the ground and outhustled pro-gun control forces, despite being outspent five to one.
In both cases anti-Bloomberg sentiment on the ground was instrumental. The mere fact that he donated money to gun control efforts in Colorado was sufficient to help the NRA; just as his support for Christine Quinn croaked her campaign.
Though I think your analysis of NYC is a bit off/too simplistic (Quinn ran a terrible campaign and Bloomberg wasn’t all that vocally supportive of her), let’s assume that you’re correct. So does this mean that Connolly or Walsh needs to position himself as the anti-Bloomberg candidate? And should they go big with television, since it was so successful in NYC, or not focus so much on it, since it clearly was ineffective in CO? And more importantly than Walsh and Connolly, what should others do in future races?
My initial reason for bringing up those two examples was merely to point out that the traditional model, in which both television and direct mail were important parts of any successful campaign, is clearly breaking down. What’s the evolving model? And is there anything about the relative over-performance of Arroyo, Barros and Golar Richie that might point toward this possible new model?
Neither the New York, nor the Colorado models apply in Boston. I was referring to those two cases in isolation. The link to the Times article was meant to document the nuances involved.
Bloomberg didn’t support Quinn? He pulled out the stops for her as you can see here, and here. Her suck-ups to Bloomberg blew up in her face. Bill Thompson’s support evaporated, due to his qualified support of “stop and frisk”. DiBlasio picked up the pieces
As things currently stand in Boston, the dynamic is Populist (Walsh) versus Reformer (Connolly), with Walsh having an edge for the following reasons:
Expectations: Walsh was presumed to be slipping from a possible second-place spot; instead he topped the ticket.
Field: In the preliminary election Walsh had more warm bodies working for him on the ground.
Apropos the latter, Connolly has enough of an organization to put boots on the ground himself, which augurs for a knock-down-drag-out field battle in the final.
Insofar as new models are concerned, Walsh’s results prove that, to the contrary, old-style grassroots personal contact works in Boston (as opposed to New York, where low-turnout races are the rule – at least at present). The results in Colorado also showed the primacy of field over media.
… re: Connolly or Walsh becoming the anti-Bloomberg, but I felt as if you were missing the point of the question that I am asking. I still kind of feel like you are.
As for your analysis of the NYC race, maybe we’re just going to disagree on this. But neither of the articles that you link to say that Bloomberg was actively supporting Quinn. One says that ed boards endorsed Quinn because of her support of him. And the other is one man’s opinion that Quinn had Bloomberg’s “de facto” support. For job security reasons, I can’t offer you any proof, so you’ll have to trust me or not, but as someone who has spent the last six years working in the Bloomberg administration — two in communications and the last four doing community outreach (I’m a Boston expat) — I can tell you for a fact that we were not “pull[ing] out all the stops” for Quinn. Had the Mayor wanted us to, there’s all kinds of things that I and my coworkers across all the various city agencies could have done. But we didn’t. Perhaps it’s splitting hairs, but it wasn’t Bloomberg’s support of Quinn that killed her; it was her support of him.
You’re right that de Blasio focused on television over direct mail, but wrong about a lack of emphasis on direct contact. Much of de Blasio’s grassroots efforts were carried out by the progressive Dem clubs (such as the club that I belong to in Northern Manhattan). We phone banked and door knocked plenty for de Blasio, as did the members of numerous other clubs.
Finally, claiming that de Blasio “picked up the pieces” from a Thompson whose support was “evaporating” (for any reason), is simply wrong. Check out the polling data at Real Clear Politics. If we focus on Quinnipiac, in particular, (and they pretty much nailed this race), Thompson’s support grew throughout the campaign, with his highest numbers coming in the final weeks. His support certainly wasn’t evaporating.
It’s simply too easy to take a surface look at CO and NYC and call them oranges to Boston’s apple. I think we can most likely learn things from both of these races.
And I hope we’ll learn something once we know if there was anything special that Arroyo, Barros and Golar Richie were up to.
…and I’ll defer to your knowledge re: Bloomberg.
I spend a lot of time in the City, but I guess I was misinformed.
It won’t be the first time.
Give me a shout. (sethjp03@gmail.com) We could grab a couple of beers and talk MA politics (or NYC politics, for that matter). And if it’s in the next month or so, maybe we could even watch the Sox at the Riv or the Hairy Monk.
to voters, IMO:
Regardless of who supported whom, Quinn was seen by the legacy candidate of Bloomberg by NYC democrats and was punished for it. I don’t really think it’s that important to voters that Bloomberg wasn’t actually as gung-ho for her as most people thought.
So, I agree with you on your main points, actually. I just don’t think it matters much to voters. Quinn was the Bloomberg candidate to democrats in that primary whether Bloomberg liked it or not. 😛
I couldn’t agree with you more.
I do think it’s important, though, that people understand that Quinn did it to herself. It was a colossal blunder. Running as a fourth Bloomberg term might have worked for her in the general, but it was never going to work in the primary. Anybody who paid any attention to the feelings of the city’s Democratic base had to understand that the Dems were sick of Bloomberg. The fact that Quinn didn’t understand this proved that she just wasn’t ready for prime time.
are all listed here
The other way to look at the chart is that Charlotte’s campaign was ineffective in turning her support into financial support.
Both Walsh and Connolly stated she was the candidate they did not want to face in the final. Her campaign was unable to put together a fundraising strategy that matched her experience and support.
It appears that the regression line does not go through (0,0). In other words, it predicts that a candidate who spends $0 gets close to 4000 votes instead of 0.
But I see a different pattern, specifically, there are 2 separate groups of candidates with 2 separate sets of rules on the same graph.
If you take all the white candidates, you get a shallow-sloped line of best fit, which goes really close to (0,0). (I’m eyeballing here.)
if you take the non-white candidates, you get a much steeper line which also comes in very close to (0,0).
With a two line analysis, a few things become clear…
– As stated above, no $ = no votes.
– Non-white candidates got a LOT more bang (= votes) for each dollar raised. Though it’s quite possible that they relationship would’ve changed a lot above a certain dollar level.
– Charlotte G-R almost certainly could’ve made it into the top 2 with a bit more $. Pure staring at graphs aside, a commanding amount of $ might’ve led to the much of the black vote coalescing around her rather than dispersing over half a dozen candidates.
– Compared to other non-white candidates, Felix Arroyo underperformed a bit relative to his $ raised, rather than overperformed as the single regression line suggests. Of course, one could make an argument that, as the one Latino candidate (and also an at-large member of the city council and thus well known), he may have been in his own category.
The white candidates were Walczak + everyone who raised over $500K.
I live in Boston, and don’t like to look at things in racial terms in general, but the pattern is really clear. Sometimes, such as with Bill DiBlasio in NYC, a candidate erases the racial divide, but it didn’t happen here. It’ll be interesting to see how Walsh & Connolly do reaching out beyond their primary bases.