They’re walking in the footsteps of several high-profile self-funding failures, though. Michael Huffington, then a one-term congressman, dumped $28 million of his own money in a bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 1994. He lost by 2 points. Four years later, Al Checchi, the former chairman of Northwest Airlines, ponied up $40 million to run for governor — only to lose in the Democratic primary to then-Lt. Gov. Gray Davis (who raised $7 million the old-fashioned way).

And the phenomenon of failing self-funders isn’t limited to California. The Center for Responsive Politics found that in the 2008 cycle 49 candidates for the Senate or House put in at least $500,000 of their own money. Of them, only six House candidates and one Senate candidate won. (The one senator is a longtime incumbent, New Jersey Democrat Frank Lautenberg, a former CEO at ADP who has long written his own checks.)

For all the money she’s spent in California this year, Whitman is struggling to keep her head above water. Most recent polls, from Research 2000, PPIC and even often-Republican-leaning Rasmussen, have her still trailing former Gov. Jerry Brown, the presumed Democratic nominee, by single digits — with Brown having spent almost nothing on his campaign yet. And that assumes she even survives her primary against Poizner, who has positioned himself to Whitman’s right and who is within striking distance in some recent polls. (Although a survey released Tuesday gave Whitman a 25-point advantage.) 

Whitman and Poizner aren’t the only extravagant self-funders this cycle. Republican professional wrestling impresario Linda McMahon has plopped down $14 million in trying to pick up the Senate seat in Connecticut vacated by Chris Dodd, with plans to spend up to $50 million. But Whitman has already shattered that, and if California’s curse holds, she’ll end this campaign as the biggest self-funding flop in history.

In a two-person race, the winner would, naturally, break 50 percent. However, unbeknownst to many national observers, this is a three-person race: The other candidate is D.C. Morrison, who’s been running to Lincoln’s right and employing a variety of Tea Party-ish talking points. Morrison polled at 6 percent in the Research 2000 survey and at 7 in Mason-Dixon’s.

Two factors will decide whether Lincoln avoids the runoff.

The first is what happens with Morrison’s supporters. “Third wheels” in races usually poll much better in advance of an election than they do when the votes are actually cast. Most voters, it seems, make a last-minute tactical decision not to “waste” their vote. A recent example of this came last November in New Jersey, where independent Chris Daggett, who had often polled near 20 percent, finished with 6 percent. It seems logical to assume that Morrison’s votes will disperse to Lincoln, as she’s considered more conservative than Halter. But it also may be that Morrison’s voters are motivated less by ideology and more by anti-incumbent fervor in this agitas-filled year. Thus, they may instead gravitate toward Halter as a protest vote against Lincoln and Beltway politics in general.

The second issue involves the “incumbent rule,” which holds that those who are still undecided at the end of a campaign (11 percent of the Arkansas Democratic electorate, according to Research 2000) tend to break for the challenger. There is some validity to this, but in most cases only a majority of undecideds — not anywhere near all of them — break for the challenger. More important, analyses of the “incumbent rule” suggest that it’s weakening over time. It was, in fact, broken in both George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign and in Joe Lieberman’s 2006 Senate run.

This all suggests that Arkansas will, in fact, be a nail-biter on Tuesday. Halter should finish comfortably ahead of Halter. But whether she can bump her current support past the 50 percent mark will be a game of inches.

Three months after the earthquake in Haiti, it is clear that it’s not only domestic problems that  receive this kind of attention. Indeed, a comparison of New York Times stories about three recent natural disasters — Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, and the earthquake in Haiti — shows that the issue-attention cycle characterizes news coverage of each.

The graph below begins seven days before each disaster and continues for 90 days thereafter. With the exception of Hurricane Katrina, which garnered a few stories as it approached the Gulf Coast, coverage began in earnest right after each disaster struck. In each case, it then quickly reached a peak (which is, unsurprisingly, highest for Katrina, the lone domestic disaster) before quickly declining. In the case of Haiti, it declined to a trickle, with perhaps one story a day.

 

 

These cases match Downs’ account well. He described how the cycle begins with an “alarmed discovery” of a problem that had long existed. Of course, natural disasters are by their nature sudden, but the problems they illuminate — vulnerable levees, dire poverty, weak political institutions — are chronic. The Onion’s headline about Haiti was fitting: “Massive Earthquake Reveals Entire Island Civilization Called ‘Haiti.’”

“Euphoric enthusiasm” ensues, as citizens and governments muster aid. But as the “cost of significant progress” becomes clear, few people or leaders are willing to make the necessary sacrifices. There is a “gradual decline of intense public interest” — perhaps not even gradual in these cases. And the news knows it. Not two weeks after the earthquake, CNN’s Sanjay Gupta told the New York Times: “We all know what’s going to happen. People are just going to lose interest in this as a story. They’re going to stop watching.” 

News coverage can even help assuage people’s guilt. Two weeks after the disaster, the New York Times saw “signs of revival in Haiti.”  Seven weeks after that, the Dallas Morning News found “signs of normal life.”  Such signs may be real, but these sorts of stories aren’t likely to sustain the public’s interest.

Sometimes, in Downs’ words, the cycle begets “new institutions, programs, and policies” that “persist and often have some impact even after public attention has shifted elsewhere.” This may be Haiti’s best hope, and certainly relief efforts continue. But will they prove sufficient?

About a week after the earthquake, economist Tyler Cowen wrote that Obama looked like the “Haiti president”:

Obama will (and should) do something about this situation … Yet he will have a festering situation on his hands for the rest of his term … Obama now stands a higher chance of being a one-term President. Foreign aid programs are especially unpopular, especially relative to their small fiscal cost … Just as it’s not easy to pull out of Iraq or Afghanistan, it won’t be easy to pull out of Haiti.

But it’s now clear that Haiti won’t affect Obama’s political future in any significant way. In part, this is because the worst fears about the earthquake’s aftermath weren’t realized; Haiti didn’t descend to utter lawlessness. Still, it faces extraordinary challenges. The problem is that these are largely invisible in American news and thus among American voters, who are therefore less likely to hold Obama accountable for Haiti’s struggles.

The seeds of Haiti’s irrelevance were always there, in the surge and decline of the issue-attention cycle.

Maeve Carey assisted with research for this piece.

Two things tripped up Crist during his victory lap: 1) Florida’s once-humming economy collapsed, as its unemployment rate (currently 12.2 percent) became one of the nation’s worst; and 2) Rubio, the conservative and charismatic former state House speaker, caught on with Tea Party activists, who’d been looking for a vehicle to take on Crist (who infuriated them when he literally embraced President Obama and promoted his stimulus package last year).

But does the decision to launch an independent bid help Crist? Well, it can’t hurt him. Compared with his terrible prospects in the Republican primary, he has a fighting chance in a three-way general election — maybe even a slim advantage.

That same Quinnipiac poll from last week found Crist winning the three-way race with 32 percent of the vote (compared to 30 percent for Rubio and 24 percent for Democratic Rep. Kendrick Meek). The good news for Crist is that much of his support comes from independents and moderate Democrats, who can’t help him in the primary, but who can vote for him in the general. This is bad news for Meek, since Crist’s strength among Democrats means he is likely to drain votes that would otherwise go to the Democratic nominee. In a two-way race against Rubio — with no Crist — Meek actually comes close, trailing just by just 4 points (42 to 38 percent).

Then again, two surveys from last month showed a different result. Research 2000, polling on behalf of Daily Kos, gave a small edge to Rubio in the three-way race, who led with 32 percent, with Crist at 29 percent and Meek at 27. And Rasmussen Reports (often accused of leaning Republican) gave an even bigger edge to Rubio, who led with 42 percent, with Meek at 25 and Crist at 22.

By breaking ranks with the GOP, Crist is rolling the dice in a big way. But it’s still a better bet for him than staying in the Republican primary, where he has no chance at all.

Interestingly, despite the frequent framing of the Tea Partiers as a predominantly blue-collar, the NYT poll also found that they are wealthier and better-educated than the public as a whole. And half of them think the Obama administration’s policies favor the poor.

If you stopped there, you might think this is largely a class-based movement, built on the principle of “I got mine.” But there’s more to it than that: 25 percent of the movement’s supporters think that the administration favors blacks over whites (compared with 11 percent of the general public).

This point is reinforced by a study released last week by the University of Washington, which discovered that people who think that “the U.S. government has done too much to support blacks” were 36 percent more likely to support the Tea Party than those who didn’t think so. Among whites who approve of the Tea Party, only 35 percent said they believe blacks are hard-working, only 45 percent believe blacks are intelligent, and just 41 percent believe that they’re trustworthy. (Curiously, the UW poll was only conducted in seven battleground states.)

While the Tea Partiers take pains to avoid appearing racist, they’re still operating at the nexus of class and race. This seems to have reached a head with healthcare reform. The UW survey’s director, Christopher Parker, summed it up this way: “While it’s clear that the Tea Party in one sense is about limited government, it’s also clear from the data that people who want limited government don’t want certain services for certain kinds of people. Those services include health care.”

The UW survey shows Tea Partiers’ concerns with federal government spending are bound up with fears of having to share “their” benefits with people who aren’t deserving – and who also happen to be non-white.

Reid’s purported confidence stems from the prospect two other candidates on the fall ballot eating up the rest of the electorate’s votes.

One is Jon Scott Ashjian, the candidate of Nevada’s newly-created official Tea Party. Ashjian may not be the best horse for Reid to bet on, though. For starters, Ashjian, who’s right now facing felony charges for writing bad checks, may be likelier to be in jail in November than on the ballot. There’s also the reality that third-party candidates, ranging from John Anderson in his 1980 presidential campaign to Chris Daggett in the 2009 New Jersey gubernatorial race, tend to flame out at the end, falling far short of their pre-election poll numbers on Election Day as voters worry about wasting their votes. (For what it’s worth, Ashjian takes 5 percent of the vote against Reid and Lowden in the most recent survey; he also takes 11 percent against Reid and Danny Tarkanian, the less-likely GOP nominee, helping Reid to tie Tarkanian 39-39.)

The other candidate Reid is banking on isn’t even a human: it’s “None of the Above.” Nevada is alone among states in having this as an option on every ballot. NOTA, as it’s often called, isn’t a very fearsome opponent; it almost never wins (its biggest victory was probably the 1976 Republican primary for Nevada’s only House seat, where NOTA got the most votes) and even if it does, it’s non-binding, so the second-place human finisher wins the race instead of there being a do-over. Reid may be remembering his 1998 race, when he narrowly beat John Ensign (elected in 2000 to Nevada’s other Senate seat). Reid won 47.9%-47.8%, while NOTA finished 3rd at 1.8 percent.

Still, NOTA’s 8,125 votes vastly exceeded Reid’s 428-vote margin. However, there’s no reason to think NOTA will ride to Reid’s rescue in 2010. Unlike the Tea Party candidate, who should attract mainly Republican-leaning votes, NOTA’s support figures to cut equally across the political spectrum. For every right-winger who votes for NOTA instead of RINO Lowden, there may be just as many centrists wishing poxes on both major party candidates, or liberals unhappy with Reid’s stewardship of healthcare reform.

Reid needs a vast improvement in his own share of the vote to hope for a victory in November.