Last week I looked at whether the various Republican presidential candidates’ space-related campaigning had any effect on the outcome of the primary in Brevard County, Florida, the “Space Coast”. The answer appeared to be no: the results in Brevard were essentially identical to the statewide results, with no bump for candidates like Rudy Giuliani who took strong positions on space policy.
In a similar vein, I looked at the results from Super Tuesday in Madison County, Alabama, which is home to Huntsville and the Marshall Space Flight Center. The area did not see the same level of campaigning as Brevard did, because Alabama was one of many states up for grabs on Tuesday, although both Bill Clinton and Mike Huckabee paid visits to the city on Saturday. Would Barack Obama’s proposal to delay Constellation for five years hurt him in the county? Would John McCain’s space policy statement help him there?
You can probably already guess the answer now. In the Democratic primary Obama won Madison County, 60-39, over Hillary Clinton. That’s actually better than he did statewide, where he captured 56% of the vote. Among the Republicans, Huckabee narrowly beat McCain, 33-32%, closer than the 41-37 margin of victory statewide for Huckabee. However, Mitt Romney did much better in the county than he did statewide, coming in a very close third in the county versus a distant third throughout the state. In Florida, Romney declined to make any funding commitments or even explicitly agree to close the Shuttle-Constellation gap, something which probably didn’t go over any better in Huntsville than it did on the Space Coast.
One issue is weather or not candidates space policies had an effect on the primaries.
Another is if the primaries had an effect on the candidates. Did Mitt visit the Florida EDC because he thought it would help him with the Florida primaries? Did Huckebee and the Clinton campaign give more attention to their space policies because they were campaigning in Huntsville?
Was the Science article correct in linking pressure from the space community on Barack to his “updating” of his policy?
Military and DOD issues are of far greater concern to residents in Madison county.
The big problem is that it’s incredibly difficult to gague what, if any, impact the space community is having. It’s not like Obama is going to come out and say that he updated his policy because a lot of people contacted him over it. Vote analyses like this one, while interesting, are probably not very useful, because virtually no space supporter is a single-issue voter with space as that issue (kind of tough to do when you don’t know how all of the candidates feel on the subject).
I think that people in the space community need to be patient and continue hammering away at the issue even if there are no tangible results — because the alternative of not reaching out to policymakers is liable to leave us in an even worse position.
The funding of space endeavours is a third tier issue for most people in almost any county of the US today. Top tier would have to be the economy and the Iraq war. Second tier issues for the average taxpayer include things like health care, the environment including climate change, trade policy, social security and medicare, educational reforms, etc. The candidates have quite different views on this issues. So without exit polling data, you haven’t a chance of discerning the effects on voters of the presidential candidate’s positions on space, particularly when they are all pretty much the same–keep spending on space.
I have tracked people coming to my site from IP addresses associated with the house of representatives. I have also had many people coming to the site who come from google with the phone numbers of the candidates offices in the search strings. I assume that they are trying to figure out where people are getting the number to call from. I don’t know if that is because people are calling after being alerted from my site, but these are some little details that are encouraging me to continue.
Realist: The funding of space endeavours is a third tier issue for most people in almost any county of the US today. Top tier would have to be the economy and the Iraq war. Second tier issues for the average taxpayer include things like health care, the environment including climate change, trade policy, social security and medicare, educational reforms, etc.
This is an interesting comment, and probably very accurate. Even for me, spaceflight would fit somewhere in the second tier, with Iraq and the economy in the first tier, except to the degree that I think success in spaceflight will affect the long-term future of our economy.
— Donald
The Constellation program is a joke. It doesn’t do any of the things that NASA needs in order to establish a permanent human presence on the surface of the moon or Mars. Nor does it build a reusable space transportation system that gives NASA and private industry easy access to orbit and to the rest of the solar system.
Only the Ares heavy lift vehicle serves any useful to pursue, IMO. But even this vehicle shouldn’t take over a decade to build. It took NASA just five years to test launch the first Saturn V vehicle.