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Thread: At @fivethirtyeight, @natesilver has put forward an interesting schema for understanding the 2020 Dem primary, looking at who has support in “five corners” of the Dem primary electorate: fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-5… But I think there's a more useful schema to consider. 1/
The “five corners” schema may or may not be a good way to understand primary voting in 2020, but there may be a better way to examine the #invisibleprimary competition in *2019*: competition over resources instead of competition over support. 2/
Call it a resource theory of the #invisibleprimary. Especially in a large field of candidates with a front-loaded primary cycle, candidates need to go into 2020 not necessarily with overwhelming support, but with a perception of viability. 3/
And to produce that perception of viability, candidates need (at least) four resources: Money, Staff, Volunteers, and Media Attention. Therefore, at this point in the cycle, journalists covering the contest should focus not on competition for support, but for these resources. 4/
These resources are, to some extent, fungible. Candidates can raise money off of media attention (e.g. James Fowler’s paper on the Colbert Bump): fowler.ucsd.edu/colbert_bump.p…. And conversely big fundraising hauls can generate media attention and create a sense of viability. 5/
(To be clear, I view this as sort of an adaptation of the Party Decides theory, which highlights the ways that party elites can provide resources. But we also saw how Trump - who was capable of providing his own money and generating his own media attention -- was able to rise) 6/
As a result, I would suggest that news media track (1) the extent to which the candidate have been attracting these resources, and (2) which candidates are in most direct competition for the same sources of these resources. And these questions can be posed in quantitative ways 7/
Money: Which candidates have the most success at fundraising, from small and large donors, in the past? Which candidates have the greatest overlap among individual donors? 8/
Staff: Which candidates have staffed up the most? Which have used the same consultants in the past, and are in most direct competition for the same pools of staffers? 9/
Volunteers: Which candidates have received endorsements from which interest groups in past primary elections? How have those interest groups been capable of mobilizing volunteers in the past? Which candidates have the most overlapping set of past interest group endorsements? 10/
Media Attention: Which candidates have received the most coverage, nationally and in key early battlegrounds? Which candidates are most followed on twitter by which journalists, and can patterns of follows tell us something about who is most directly competing with whom? 11/
Finally, polling is still relevant, because the point of these resources is about viability. But we shouldn’t be asking about voters’ first choices just yet. Rather, we should be asking about candidates who voters would consider supporting (and those they wouldn’t consider). 12/
And second we should be asking elites -- who still can help provide candidates these resources -- about who they are considering, as @smotus has done here: vox.com/mischiefs-of-f… 13/
The point of this approach is not to deliver a definitive view of who is winning and who is losing. The winning and losing doesn’t start until people start casting votes that determine convention delegates. 15/
Rather, the point of this approach is to assess who might be viable once that voting starts, and to assess which candidates are most directly in competition with one another during the #invisibleprimary, without relying on not-very-useful biographical facts as heuristics. 16/
And additionally, to foreground the role that media play in the process, rather than pretending the political press merely operates as observers. 17/end
