The line is now drawing so clearly as to shew, on one side, 1. the fashionable circles of Phila., N. York, Boston and Charleston (natural aristocrats),4 2. merchants trading on British capitals. 3. paper men, (all the old tories are found in some one of these three descriptions). On the other side are 1. merchants trading on their own capitals. 2. Irish merchants, 3. tradesmen, mechanics, farmers and every other possible description of our citizens.
Now this is the whole matter. In substance, it is this: The people say to Gen: Taylor ``If you are elected, shall we have a national bank?'' He answers ``Your will, gentlemen, not mine'' ``What about the Tariff?'' ``Say yourselves.'' ``Shall our rivers and harbours be improved?'' ``Just as you please'' ``If you desire a bank, an alteration of the tariff, internal improvements, any, or all, I will not hinder you; if you do not desire them, I will not attempt to force them on you'' ``Send up your members of congress from the va[rious] districts, with opinions according to your own; and if they are for these measures, or any of them, I shall have nothing to oppose; if they are not for them, I shall not, by any appliances whatever, attempt to dragoon them into their adoption[.]'' Now, can there be any difficulty in understanding this? To you democrats, it may not seem like principle; but surely you can not fail to perceive the position plainly enough. The distinction between it, and the position of your candidate is broad and obvious; and I admit, you have a clear right to show it is wrong if you can; but you have no right to pretend you can not see it at all. We see it; and to us it appears like principle, and the best sort of principle at that---the principle of allowing the people to do as they please with their own business.III. Civil War, Reconstruction, and Aftermath
Scheduling the first four primary contests for February 2016, so that those states (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada) don't hold their contests any earlier in January or December.
Holding their convention earlier, at some point between late June and mid-July. Campaign finance laws forbid nominees from spending funds raised for the general election until after the convention. Moving the convention forward allows the nominee to spend those funds much sooner, so he or she is not defenseless against attack ads through much of the summer, as Romney was in 2012.
They also want to avoid having a primary that is decided in one day or even a few weeks. If the primary is too short, it gives an advantage to candidates with more money and name recognition, and does not vet the party's nominee as thoroughly.
This means:
Penalizing heavily any state that holds its primary before March 1, by taking away most of its delegates to the convention. Loss of delegates means that candidates don't have an incentive to come to your state. It's also likely your delegation to the convention ends up in a hotel located farther away from the convention hall, and with the worst seats inside the hall.
Exempting the first four states from those penalties to prevent any mutually assured destruction affect. For example, without exemptions for the first four states, another state like Florida could try to leap-frog ahead of them on the calendar, knowing that any penalty it might face would be negated when the first four jump back ahead. Without the exemption, the penalties are far less meaningful.
Requiring any state that holds its primary between March 1 and March 15 to award its delegates to candidates proportionally, according to the percentage of the vote won rather than awarding all of them to the winner. This allows candidates running second or third after the first four states to stay in the game and in the delegate hunt.
“Moneyball did not win the election. Even Obama’s data crunchers will freely tell you that,” Lynn Vavreck of UCLA and John Sides of George Washington University wrote in an article in the online Pacific Standard. The article extends the analysis the two produced in their book on the 2012 campaign, “The Gamble.”
The Obama campaign innovated in several areas involving data. ..Perhaps most important, an experiment in February 2012 involving 300,000 phone calls by volunteers allowed the campaign to build a model to estimate how “persuadable” different types of voters might be. That model helped guide subsequent voter contacts.
But some widely hyped aspects of data analysis actually contributed little or nothing, Sides and Vavreck report. For example, despite reports to the contrary, the campaign made very little use of consumer data, such as the favorite sports of potential voters, what beers they prefer or what cars they drive. In the end, a person’s race, income, gender and voting history tell campaigns pretty much everything they need to know, data analysts from both parties said.
And micro-targeted messages aimed at specific voting groups turn out to be not all that useful in the context of a presidential campaign. When they compared targeted messages with broader ones, “Usually the winning email was universal,” the two political scientists quote Obama’s director of digital analytics, Amelia Showalter, as saying.
In all, the campaign’s efforts probably contributed “two points … at most” to Obama’s eventual four-point victory margin, Elan Kriegel, who directed Obama’s analytics efforts in battleground states, told the two. Other senior campaign officials said they wouldn’t hazard a guess on how much difference the work made in the final margin.
The Hillary Hoodie with the "Herculean H" logo goes for $38. Asphalt gray. One hundred percent cotton fleece. The mobile-phone cover features that badass photo of the former secretary of State in dark sunglasses looking intently at her phone. T-shirts and water bottles come in hip shades of fluorescent yellow, pink, and green.
"It was madness here over the holidays," said Seth Bringman, a spokesman for the Ready for Hillary super PAC, showing off a T-shirt-strewn storeroom that recalled an understaffed Gap store on Black Friday.
With 2013 sales of more than $350,000, the online store is one sign of the group's yearlong maturation from a shoestring gig run by a couple of junior-varsity Clinton staffers to a $4 million operation with the imprimatur of the Obama campaign.
Ready for Hillary claims to have an e-mail list that's bigger than Clinton's 2008 campaign database and more donors combined than major presidential super PACS like Crossroads, Restore our Future, Priorities USA, and American Bridge. The idea is to turn all of that over to Clinton, if and when she launches a presidential campaign.
