Mutual Referandum Silly Season in 2012

By Dave Anderson:

Great campaigns for high profile, high information races might move matters a point or two past the fundamentals.  Utterly crappy campaigns can cost their candidates several points beyond the fundamentals, but on the wash, most high profile elections turn on the fundamentals of fundraising, incumbency, and general economic performance.  No race is this more true in the United States than the race for the White House.  Obama's 2008 campaign was acknowledged to be a very good machine, yet his margin and topline two party vote share was about what had been predicted by the political science models months before the elections. 

Campaign tactics and political wedgies are effective but limited to marginal changes.  If the models indicate an on-coming blow-out in a high profile race, the best political team is extremely unlikely to change the end results.  However if the models indicate a close race, political brilliance and hustle can tip a race.  This is true at the top-line results, and even more true as we go down ballot to less familiar and less important races. 

In 2004, one of the marginal voter mobilization techniques the Republicans used was a series of anti-marriage amendments and referandums.  These techniques may have pushed up the GOP vote share by a point or two, but mostly it was a way to mobilize base Republican voters who otherwise would have remembered that they truly are conservative Republicans and liked to vote for conservative Republicans. 

The Democrats, in 2012, are thinking of using ballot initiatives on marijuana legalization to mobilize base liberal voters who need marginally more motivation to vote in 2012.  The Huffington Post has more:

Surge voters, single women under 40 and Hispanics all told America
Votes pollsters that if a legalization measure were on the Colorado
ballot, they'd be more likely to come out to vote. Forty-five percent of
surge voters and 47 percent of single women said they'd be more
interested in voting if the question was on the ballot.....

Whether it can pass isn't some Democrats' top concern: As long as it can
get unlikely voters to a polling station they'd otherwise avoid, it's a
success...

With Judge Walker's decision to throw-out Prop-8 yesterday, and the highly likely affirmation of that decision by the 9th Circuit, Republicans will attempt to mobilize their base voters by embarking on another round of gay bashing via the ballot box in 2012.  However, short of a federal amendment, of which there is already a minimal blocking coalition in place, there is very little exploitable territory left for gay-bashing referandum to aid Republicans. 

So the silly season for ballot initiatives in 2012 has already begun, with liberals pushing weed and conservatives bashing the 14th Amendment, but these two efforts should roughly cancel each other out as each will mobilize their respective marginal base voters.