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In early May, when we last checked in on the Massachusetts special election for United States Senate, I noted that while the Republican nominee, Gabriel Gomez, had an outside chance of upsetting the Democrat, Representative Edward J. Markey, the fundamentals ran strongly against an inexperienced candidate in such a blue state. Instead, I wrote, the roughly five-percentage-point deficit that Mr. Gomez had against Mr. Markey in the polls at that time “could also prove to be a high-water mark.â€
In fact, Mr. Markey now leads by margins ranging from 7 to 11 percentage points in a series of recent nonpartisan polls. With the vote to be held in just eight days, on June 25, Mr. Gomez's chances for a victory are even slimmer than before.
How likely is a candidate to overcome a polling deficit in the range of nine percentage points with so little time remaining in the campaign? I searched through our Senate polling database, which covers all November elections for Senate between 1990 and 2012, looking for those candidates who overcame the largest deficit in the polls with 10 days to go in the race. (I limited the search to cases where it was actually possible to construct a polling average rather than relying upon a single poll - meaning those where there had been at least two polls in the field late in the race.)
The award for the largest comeback belongs to Paul Coverdell, the Republican candidate in the Georgia election for Senate in 1992. Mr. Coverdell overcame a huge polling deficit to defeat the Democratic incumbent, Wyche Fowler Jr., having trailed him by 24 percentage points with a month remaining in the campaign and by roughly 19 percentage points in the polling average with 10 days to go. However, Mr. Coverdell's win requires an asterisk of sorts, as Mr. Fowler took the narrow plurality of the vote on Nov. 3, 1992, triggering a runoff that Mr. Coverdell won three weeks later.
Another large comeback in 1992 involved the Republican incumbent from New York, Alfonse M. D'Amato, who trailed the Democratic candidate and state attorney general, Robert Abrams, by nine percentage points in the polls with 10 days remaining. But with Mr. Abrams fighting a series of campaign missteps, Mr. D'Amato held his Senate seat.
In Georgia's Senate race in 2002, the Republican candidate, Saxby Chambliss, trailed the Democratic incumbent, Max Cleland , by eight percentage points in the polling average with 10 days remaining in the race. But Mr. Chambliss wound up winning by a clear margin, roughly seven percentage points. (It's possible that this reflected a case of social desirability bias as some voters were reluctant to tell pollsters about their plans to vote against Mr. Cleland, a triple amputee and war hero.)
So such last-minute comebacks are not impossible. But they are unlikely - these results are plucked from a database that covers approximately 400 Senate races. From an actuarial perspective - based on an analysis of the accuracy of the polling average in each of the several hundred races - the probability of winning a race after trailing by nine points with 10 days to go in the campaign is on the order of 5 percent.
All of these results, however, are from general elections in November, and not special elections that are held at od d times of the year. There are some reasons to think that special elections are associated with more uncertainty in the polling. First, special elections often have low turnout. As a rule, the lower the turnout, the higher the probability of a polling error, because the polls are more likely to misidentify who actually shows up to vote.
Second, special elections typically take place within a compressed time window, so voters may be slower to make their decisions and more reactive to developments late in the campaign.
In the Massachusetts special election for Senate in 2010, the Republican candidate, Scott P. Brown, pulled into a one-point lead against the Democrat, Martha Coakley, in a poll with 10 days to go in the race. However, Mr. Brown had trailed Ms. Coakley by margins ranging from 9 to 17 percentage points in polls just a week or so earlier.
In the 2010 race, however, there was at least one important indicator that testified to Mr. Brown's potential even before he pulled ahead in the polling average. That year, Mr. Brown had raised $15 million in individual contributions as of the special election date, considerably more than Ms. Coakley's $7.5 million.
This year in Massachusetts, Mr. Gomez reported just $2.1 million in individual contributions as of his June 5 Federal Election Commission report (not counting donations that Mr. Gomez made to his own campaign). That compares unfavorably against Mr. Markey, who had brought in $6.8 million as of the same date.
Our fundamentals-based model, which evaluates the public fund-raising totals along with other factors, like the ideological positions of the candidates relative to the state, would now project Mr. Markey to win the contest by roughly 12 percentage points, not far from the recent polls.
By contrast, the same model would have seen the 2 010 race as a tossup by this point in the campaign on the basis of Mr. Brown's superior fund-raising totals and the national political environment, which had already come to be Republican-leaning. This year, while President Obama's approval ratings have been under some recent pressure, it is less clear that this has implications for Congressional races. The most recent “generic ballot†polls have shown either a rough tie between the parties in voter preferences for Congress, or Democrats very slightly ahead.
In short, it is difficult but not impossible for a Republican to win a Senate seat in Massachusetts in a normal political environment. And it is difficult but not impossible for a candidate to overcome a nine-point deficit in the polls at this point in the campaign. For a candidate to do both things â€" when the fundamentals and the polls both point against him - is more unlikely still. Although some news accounts had been describing the race as a tossup until recently, Mr. Gomez's odds of prevailing are remote - probably no more than 10 percent even under optimistic assumptions for his campaign.
A series of recent polls show President Obama's approval rating at about 46 percent on average. This is somewhat lower than it was in late May, when it averaged 48 percent or 49 percent.
Has the shift been caused by the dominant news story of the last two weeks - the disclosures about the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance programs? That's tough to say since presidential approval ratings rarely provide unambiguous interpretations as to cause and effect. Mr. Obama received a series of mediocre approval numbers toward the very end of May, after we wrote our last story about his approval ratings, but before the N.S.A. disclosures. It's possible that the cumulative effect of stories like the White House's handing of the attacks on Benghazi, Libya, a nd the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups was weighing some on Mr. Obama's numbers. It's possible that the consumer mood about the economy, which has been on an upswing in recent months and may have helped Mr. Obama to stave off an approval-rating decline, has become slightly less chipper. And it's possible that some or much of this is just statistical noise.
Nevertheless, I want to correct an assertion that I made a week ago. Here's what I wrote at that time:
[B]ecause they create as many fractures across the parties as between them, the recent N.S.A. disclosures might not have all that much effect, for instance, on Mr. Obama's approval ratings.
I'm less co ncerned about the outcome of my “prediction†on Mr. Obama's approval ratings than about my reasoning behind it. My claim that if an issue divides awkwardly across the partisan spectrum, a president may be protected from a decline in his approval ratings. I think my point may have been quite wrong.
Consider, for instance, the past episodes (apart from the economy) that did the most damage to Mr. Obama's political standing. The health care debate in late 2009 and early 2010 was one of them, as was the debt ceiling debate in the summer of 2011.
What was noteworthy about each of those cases was that Mr. Obama received plenty of disagreement from his fellow Democrats. In advance of the health care bill's passage, Democrats in Congress argued continuously about the parameters of the legislation. And in the fight over the debt ceiling, many Democratic commentators argued that Mr. Obama had given too much away to the Republicans.
So me of the issue, obviously, is that some Democrats may come to disapprove of Mr. Obama's performance, directly lowering his overall approval rating. As the chart below suggests, however, Mr. Obama's approval rating among Democrats has remained very high throughout his tenure in office. It has also been quite steady. You can certainly see some downward impact among Democrats in the period coinciding with the health care and the debt ceiling debates, but during these periods, there was a larger downturn in Mr. Obama's numbers among independents.
To put some specific numbers around this: performing a regression of Mr. Obama's weekly approval rating among Democrats as a function of his overall approval rating finds that for every one-point shift in his overall rating, his rating among Democrats moves by six-tenths of a point, meaning that Democrats are about 40 percent less sensitive than voters as a whole. Conversely, Mr. Obama's approval rating among independents is 7 percent more sensitive than his numbers as a whole.
Some of this is an artifact of how approval-rating polls require a binary choice among voters, when voters may have varying degrees of approval or disapproval for a president's performance. When a Democrat hears some unfavorable story about Mr. Obama, he or she may go from strongly approving his performance to approving it with more qualifications. When an independent hears the same news, he or she may go from qualified approval of Mr. Obama to qualified disapproval instead.
But there may also be a more subtle effect. Most voters do not have the time or the inclination to follow politics on a daily basis, especially outside of campaign periods. Instead, they may use some quick-and-dirty methods to evaluate how a president is performing.
Independents, for instance, generally follow political news less closely than Democratic or Republican partisans do. When a voter like this sees Republicans on television criticizing the president, and Democrats praising or defending him, he or she may assume that the issue reflects a garden-variety partisan squabble, and may not be swayed very much by either side's arguments, regardless of their substance. After all, Democrats are almost always defending Mr. Obama and Republicans are almost always criticizing him, and whether the debate that particular day revolves around the economy, foreign policy or the I.R.S. scandal may not register all that much.
But when some Democratic partisans begin to criticize the president, that same voter may notice that something unusual has happened, and conclude that the president must have done something objectionable.
Couldn't this be counterbalanced if Republican partisans were praising Mr. Obama at the same time that Democrats were criticizing him? In theory this could occur, but that's not really what we've seen in the N.S.A. debate, even though most Republicans in Congress voted for the programs. Instead, Republican leaders have taken ambiguous stances on the issue in the news media, avoiding the controversy or defending the policies, if not Mr. Obama's role in executing them.
So what our low-information voter might witness is a vigorous debate among Democrats about the N.S.A.'s programs and how they reflect upon Mr. Obama, while Republicans are largely staying quiet on the issue. This may reflect more negatively on Mr. Obama than if the representatives of the two parties were arguing with one another as usual.
It would be hard to prove that this is exactly what is hap pening with Mr. Obama's approval ratings right now. As I mentioned, it's not exactly clear what's behind the recent decline in his numbers, and the decline is small enough that statistical variation could also be a factor.
But I believe I was incorrect to assert that the intraparty divides on domestic surveillance might insulate Mr. Obama from any change in his ratings. Instead, the periods that have shown the most short-term change in Mr. Obama's numbers have been associated with either intraparty criticism (as in the case of heath care and the debt ceiling) or cross-partisan praise (when some Republicans spoke well of Mr. Obama following the killing of Osama bin Laden or his handling of Hurricane Sandy). Precisely because these instances are unusual, even low-information voters may begin to take notice.
At the Obama 2012 campaign headquarters in Chicago, inside a room nicknamed “the Cave,†a team of data analytics experts helped President Obama build the most technologically advanced campaign in American history. And in their own centers of power, even before those votes were cast, Republican leaders and strategists vowed to hone their high-tech skills for future Election Days.
In ways that are often invisible to voters, Big Data - the suite of powerful technologies and digital measurements that has upended so much in the world of commerce - is reshaping American politics.
This is the new electioneering. Campaigns analyze data like voter files and buying habits to pinpoint potential supporters, donors and volunteers and, crucially, to marshal votes. Political advertising, like all advertising, is increasingly tailored to a particular person's interests through the use of digital information and computer algorithms.
Part of this new world is unfolding in Blue Bell, Pa., near Philadelphia, where a small company called BehaviorMatrix is trying to sharpen the Republican Party's technical prowess.
The company's co-founder and chief technology officer, Charles Davis, has helped develop a set of technologies and algorithms that quantify and measure voter emotion and opinion online. The company is tracking what people are saying on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and elsewhere to determine how people think and feel about issues that might matter at the polls.
Whether Republicans can close or even reverse the Democrats' current edge in data analytics in time for the 2014 midterm elections - and, of course, the 2016 presidential campaigns - is uncertain. But BehaviorMatrix has already teamed up with a digital shop, CrowdVerb, on behalf of South Carolina Republicans for work on a special Congressional election this year. They are also working on the re-election campaign of Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and t he Senate minority leader.
Data-driven campaign techniques like microtargeting - using data mining to deliver a tailored message to a specific subgroup of the electorate - cannot change the fundamentals of an election or make an unlikable candidate suddenly likable. But the value of every vote became clear to political operatives after the hair-thin margin in the 2000 presidential election. During the last several election cycles, microtargeting has become a critical tool of politics. Campaigns use voting history as well as demographic and consumer data to determine who is likely to vote, and for whom, and direct customized advertising messages and fund-raising appeals to those specific voters.
“We can pretty accurately predict who is going to vote based on what they've done before,†said Rayid Ghani, the chief scientist of the Obama 2012 campaign's data analytics team.
Mr. Ghani says adding social-media data like someone's Twitter feed probably would n ot add much insight. But BehaviorMatrix and CrowdVerb are betting that campaigns will want all the real-time data they can get.
Until now, most microtargeting was based on backward-looking data - the car someone bought or the magazines they subscribed to, says Cyrus Krohn, a co-founder of CrowdVerb. But as more people communicate online, particularly via social media, the Web has become an alluring source of up-to-the-moment insights.
“The social angle is clearly where this is going,†said Patrick Ruffini, a Republican strategist and president of Engage, another digital agency. “There's only so much you can do with ‘So-and-so drives a Volvo.' â€
Mr. Davis said he had an idea of where things might be heading in the late 1990s, while he was chief technology officer at Millward-Brown Interactive. “It was clear to me,†he said, “even at that early stage, that the Internet was an evolving socio-behavioral phenomenon and that new tools and methods needed to be developed to effectively measure trends and attitudes.â€
Over the next decade, Mr. Davis established the intellectual foundation that would underlie BehaviorMatrix, and in 2008, while seeking start-up funds, he met William M. Thompson, the former chairman and chief executive of Innovative Tech Systems, a software developer. Mr. Thompson invested in BehaviorMatrix and came out of retirement to run it.
Other data scientists and mathematicians at BehaviorMatrix built on Mr. Davis's work, and the algorithms they use today try to analyze online speech and interactions, quantifying how people feel about a candidate or issue and building a model to predict how individuals may vote or whether they will buy a product. By analyzing the interplay of networks online, BehaviorMatrix also seeks to identify which individuals are influencing the opinion of others, Mr. Davis said.
BehaviorMatrix has done work for corporations and governments, but in its partne rship with CrowdVerb it has dived into electoral politics. And Mr. Davis, 41, who grew up in a family of Democrats in the liberal San Francisco Bay Area, has found himself in the odd position of working to improve data analytics for the Republican Party.
“Does it make for some interesting conversations when I'm back home at Christmastime?†said Mr. Davis, a registered independent. “Sure it does.â€
While BehaviorMatrix has measured and modeled online opinion and emotion for clients before, it has just begun trying to link online profiles with flesh-and-blood voters.
The company's algorithms also use publicly available information, like a person's name and address, to tie a name in a voter file to a comment on a blog or Twitter post.
Tying the two identities together “allows you to use data you've collected about someone online to model offline behavior, and vice versa,†said Sasha Issenberg, a reporter at Slate and the author of “The Victo ry Lab,†a book about the science of campaigning.
This is what CrowdVerb and BehaviorMatrix did during the special election in May for the First Congressional District in South Carolina, which Mark Sanford, whose tenure as state governor was nearly ended by scandal, won handily.
The South Carolina Republican Party hired the companies to check voter files. BehaviorMatrix ran the files against a database of online profiles and pulled a sample of more than 4,000 matches, weighted to represent the district's electorate, Mr. Davis said.
Among those matches, discrepancies were found between what BehaviorMatrix predicted a voter would do based on what that voter was saying online and what the traditional identification work predicted about that voter.
It is not yet clear whether the data CrowdVerb and BehaviorMatrix generated was more predictive than the traditional voter file. Once the South Carolina State Election Commission releases the voter rolls, Cro wdVerb will do follow-up interviews to check if the digital profiling was better than the traditional voter profiling, and if so by how much, Mr. Krohn said.
But some wonder if adding online data to voter files will prove hugely beneficial.
“I don't think the next big step will be about a new source of data,†said Joseph Rospars, the Obama campaigns's digital strategist and co-founder of Blue State Digital. “It will be about better understanding the data we have.â€
Still, Republicans are eager to expand their technological tool kit, and BehaviorMatrix and CrowdVerb have already moved on to Mr. McConnell's campaign in Kentucky. Even if Mr. McConnell does not face a top-tier challenger, either in the Republican primary or the general election, Mr. Davis said he hoped the technology he helped develop will prove beneficial beyond who wins and loses, or even righting the Republican's technological ship.
“This isn't just about figuring out who's go ing to vote and how they're going to vote,†Mr. Davis said. “One of the most important things that the candidate does when they use our systems is they actually understand why people are voting for them or why they're not, and that has the effect of hopefully being able to change policy in a more meaningful and democratic way.â€
On Thursday, after LeBron James and the Miami Heat won their second consecutive N.B.A. championship, I noted on Twitter that James was on the same pace as the Chicago Bulls great Michael Jordan. Both James and Jordan won their first championship at 27 and their second at 28, I wrote. Jordan went on to win four more N.B.A. titles, for a total of six.
Mike Segar/Reuters LeBron James and Michael Jordan were about the same age when they won a second championship.My statement depended on a technicality, I later discovered: Jordan's biological age was 28 when he won his f irst championship, in 1991, and 29 when he won his second, in 1992. However, basketball statisticians generally define a player's age differently: by how old he was as of Feb. 1 of an N.B.A. season, the rough midpoint of the basketball calendar. Jordan's birthday is Feb. 17.
Those semantics aside, it is worth considering just how likely James might be to match or exceed Jordan's six titles. (From this point on, we'll use basketball statisticians' definition of age.)
Players like Jordan and James are so rare that it can be risky to compare them with anyone. Still, one reasonably useful benchmark is to evaluate players who, like James and Jordan, had won at least one Most Valuable Player award and at least one N.B.A. title as of their age-28 season, meaning that they had achieved the pinnacle of both individual and team success.
By my count, there were 13 such players before James. On average, they won about two additional championships (more precisely, an av erage of 1.9) after their age-28 season. So a reasonable over-under line for James might be two more N.B.A. titles, or four total.
It is tough to say exactly what James's odds of catching Jordan might be, because the average conceals a wide range of outcomes among the individual players. Four of the players on the list - Magic Johnson, Moses Malone, Bob Pettit and Dave Cowens - never won another championship after their age-28 season. But four others - Jordan, Bill Russell, Bob Cousy and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - won at least four more titles.
James needs four more championships to catch Jordan, so one estimate of his odds might be 4 chances out of 13, or about 30 percent. But some of the favor able precedents, like Russell, came in an era when teams had far more ability to retain their players. Among the players on the list who played their age-28 season during the salary-cap era (since 1984-85), only Jordan won four or more titles.
Jeff Haynes/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images Jordan after his fifth title with the Bulls.It seems safe to say that you would not want to bet on James at even money. There are just too many things that can go wrong with a player's career as he ages: injury or illness, early retirement, bad teammates or bad luck.
Even this year's Heat began the season with only about a 30 percent chance of winning the title, according to the Las Vegas odds. That percentage roughly matches the historical likelihood of an N.B.A. team's repeating as champion, which is 33 percent.
So James's chances of winning a third title next season in Miami are probably about 1 in 3. After that, his chances begin to decline. For one thing, it is less certain that James will be surrounded by strong teammates. (James has the right to opt out of his contract after next season, and even if he stays in Miami, teammates like Dwyane Wade are already seeing their skills atrophy.)
More important, players in team sports typically peak in skill in their mid- to late 20s, meaning that James's game may begin to wane. The N.B.A. is a superstar's league, and if James goes from being M.V.P.-caliber to mere All-Star within a few years, it will considerably hurt his odds of winni ng more titles.
I have estimated a player's chances of winning an N.B.A. title based on his win shares, a statistic calculated by Basketball-Reference.com that measures overall value to a team. Since the introduction of the salary cap in 1984-85, excluding the two regular seasons (1998-99 and 2011-12) that were shortened by labor disputes, the best player in the league in a given season has averaged about 18 win shares, which is a reasonably good match for James's performance over the last several years. The model estimates that such a player has about a 20 percent or 25 percent chance of winning the championship in today's N.B.A. environment.
What about the fifth-best player in the league - someone equivalent to the worst player on the All-N.B.A. team? That player has averaged about 13 win shares, which translates to only about a 10 percent chance of winning the championship.
The 10th-best player in the N.B.A. at a given time has only about a 7 percent chance of winning a title, according to the model. And the 25th-best player - someone who might be the last reserve added to one of the conference All-Star teams - has about a 5 percent chance.
That is not much better than an N.B.A. player chosen at random, who has a 3.3 percent chance of becoming a champion by virtue of being on one of the 30 teams. A borderline All-Star in the N.B.A., in other words, is much closer to being a role player than a superstar, at least when it comes to his odds of winning a championship.
James, of course, will have considerable freedom to pick his employe r. If he puts winning titles above all other considerations, he could sign on for any role with the team he perceived as having the best chance to win the championship in a given season.
Few players in N.B.A. history have been willing to take things to quite that extreme. Instead, superstars expect teams to build around them - even if they are past their prime, and even if it means something as inglorious as Jordan's late years spent with the Washington Wizards.
One can forgive Jordan, who did not have anything left to prove. But to match him, James will need to win two or three more titles over the next several seasons while he still plays at an M.V.P. level, which will require good health and some good luck. Then he may need to chase the last couple of titles by being willing to play the right role with the right club.
Two Republican senators reached a deal this week on a plan to strengthen the border security provisions of the immigration overhaul currently working its way through the Senate. Many G.O.P. legislators have said that tough border security measures are needed to garner enough Republican votes to pass a bill that also provides a path to citizenship for immigrants living in the United States illegally.
But while Republicans in Congress may be focused on border security, public opinion surveys suggest that the best way to get Republican voters on board may be to emphasize the difficulty of the path itself.
Polls that describe the many requirements immigrants may have to meet to gain citizenship - for example, paying fines and back taxes, undergoing a criminal background check and waiting many years - have found much higher Republican sup port than polls that do not mention the obstacles to citizenship or refer generally to “requirements.â€
Among Democrats and independents, too, more requirements generally translate into more support, but the difference is not nearly as great.
Republican support nearly doubles, on average, in polls that specify the citizenship requirements compared with those that do not.
In surveys that do not specify more than one requirement, just 37 percent of Republicans support a path to citizenship. (Most polls have released partisan breakdowns, but those that have not are not included in the average.) In contrast, 72 percent of G.O.P. respondents favored citizenship in polls that laid out th e obstacles immigrants here illegally would have to navigate. In other words, Republican support increased by an average of 35 percent.
As a result, in surveys that spell out the criteria immigrants may have to meet to become citizens, there is little difference in support among the three major partisan groups. They are within 11 percentage points of one another: 72 percent of Republicans support a path to citizenship with multiple, specified requirements, as do 77 percent of independents and 83 percent of Democrats.
It is less clear that linking citizenship to border control would have the same effect on Republican opinion.
A survey released this week by CNN was one of the few polls to ask about a path to citizenship and border security in a single question. It found that nearly half of Republican respondents, 48 percent, supported “an immigration bill that would attempt to increase b order security and create a path to citizenship.†Including border security in the question does not appear to have increased G.O.P. support. When you average all the surveys conducted this year, including both polls that specified requirements and those that did not, 55 percent of self-identified Republicans favor a path to citizenship.
In a National Journal/United Technologies survey also released this week, only a bare majority of Republican respondents supported linking border security to citizenship: 52 percent agreed that immigrants here illegally “should not be placed on a path to citizenship until the government meets high standards for securing our borders against further illegal immigration,†and 39 percent were against linking the two.
The most recent push to pass immigration refo rm, during the George W. Bush administration, was scuttled in large part because grass-roots conservatives rose up against the effort. That has not yet happened this time around, although there are those who think it will.
So far, immigration reform advocates have highlighted the bill's border security measures. But, if the polls are right, Democrats and pro-reform Republicans might do better in limiting a conservative backlash by emphasizing that the path to citizenship is a long and winding one.
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Peter Kramer/NBC Paula Deen cooking on the “Today†show earlier this year.
Paula Deen, the self-proclaimed queen of Southern cooking and a sugary mainstay of the Food Network, was dropped by the network on Friday, after a bewildering day in which she failed to show up for an interview on the “Today†show and then in two online videos begged her family and audience to forgive her for using racist language.
Paula Deen issued an apology on a YouTube video on Friday.
A network spokeswoman said it would not renew Ms. Deen's contract when it expired at the end of June. Ms. Deen has faced a volley of criticism this week over her remarks in a deposition for a discrimination lawsuit by a former employee. In the document, she admitted she had used racial epithets, tolerated racist jokes and condoned pornography in the workplace.
The Food Network statement did not elaborate on its reasons for dropping her, but a person close to the network said its shows featuring her sons, Jamie and Bobby, would not be affected. Ms. Deen currently has three regular programs on the network, including “Paula's Best Dishes.â€
Those shows were part of a small culinary business empire run by Ms. Deen, 66, who has produced numerous cookbooks, lent her name to household products from butter to mattresses, and served as a spokeswoman for Philadelphia Cream Cheese and Smithfield Foods. She and her sons own and operate The Lady and Sons restaurant in Savannah, Ga. Her magazine “Cooking with Paula Deen,†has a circulation of nearly one million, her Web site says.
In her first video on Friday, posted on YouTube and later removed, Ms. Deen, near tears, said: “I want to apologize to everybody for the wrong that I've done. I want to learn and grow from this. Inappropriate and hurtful language is totally, totally unacceptable.â€
In a longer video posted later in the afternoon, she appeared more composed. “Your color of your skin, your religion, your sexual preference does not matter,†she said.
She added: “I was wrong, yes, I've worked hard, and I have made mistakes, but that is no excuse and I offer my sincere apology to those that I have hurt, and I hope that you forgive me because this comes from the deepest part of my heart.â€
In yet a third video on YouTube, posted Friday afternoon, Ms. Deen apologized to Matt Lauer, the host of “Today,†for not appearing for a scheduled exclusive interview earlier in the day. She had agreed to the interview, extensively promoted by NBC News, to address the uproar generated by her deposition.
Clearly irritated by the absence of Ms. Deen, a regular guest on the show, Mr. Lauer told viewers that she had spoken with him on Thursday, agreed to an “open and candid†discussion and had flown to New York City. But in the morning, he said, she had her representatives cancel, citing exhaustion.
Ms. Deen has managed to offend even her most uncritical fans before, most recently in January 2012 when she announced she had Type 2 diabetes on the same day she endorsed the diabetes drug Victoza and a lucrative collaboration with Novo Nordisk, the drug's manufacturer. Because she had built her career on a no-holds-barred approach to sugar and fat (creating recipes like a cheeseburger patty sandwiched between two doughnuts and a Better than Sex cake made with cake mix, pudding mix, and heavy cream), she was roundly criticized for encouraging an unhealthy diet for others, hiding her illness and then trying to profit from it.
On Thursday, criticism of her racial remarks mounted on Twitter - even spawning a sarcastic hashtag, #paulasbestdishes - and on Ms. Deen's own Facebook page.
The lawsuit against her was filed in March 2012 by Lisa T. Jackson, the general manager of Uncle Bubba's Oyster House, a restaurant that Ms. Deen owned with her brother, Earl (Bubba) Hiers. Ms. Jackson, who is white, said that her father was Sicilian, with dark skin, and that she had suffered prejudice as a result.
In the deposition, Ms. Deen said that she had used a racial slur in the past, though not in the restaurant, but that she and her family did not tolerate prejudice. “Bubba and I, neither one of us, care what the color of your skin is†or what gender a person is, she said. “It's what's in your heart and in your head that matters to us.â€
She also stated that “most jokes†are about Jews, gay people, black people and “rednecks.â€
“I can't, myself, determine what offends another person,†she said.
A version of this article appeared in print on June 22, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: After Slurs, Food Network Won't Renew Paula Deen.
Chrysler Group RECYCLED Making its debut for the 2014 model year is a new Jeep with a name from the brand's past: Cherokee.
Coming to a showroom near you for 2014: the first sport utility vehicle in its class equipped with a 9-speed automatic transmission. It's also the first to offer a parallel-parking feature. And, in 4-wheel-drive models, the rear axle disconnects automatically, for fuel efficiency.
Oh, yes: its name is the Jeep Cherokee.
Hold on - wasn't that model name retired more than a decade ago? Wasn't it replaced by the Jeep Liberty for 2002?
Yet now, in a time of heightened sensitivity over stereotypes, years after ethnic, racial and gender labeling has been largely erased from sports teams, products and services, Jeep is reviving an American Indian model name. Why?
“In the automobile business, you constantly have to reinvent yourself, and sometimes it's best to go back to the future,†said Allen Adamson, managing director of the New York office of Landor Associates, a brand and corporate identity consultancy.
Jeep, a division of the Chrysler Group, explained that its market research revealed a marked fondness for the name. The 2014 version, said Jim Morrison, director of Jeep marketing, “is a new, very capable vehicle that has the Cherokee name and Cherokee heritage. Our challenge was, as a brand, to link the past image to the present.â€
The company says it respects changed attitudes toward stereotyping. “We want to be politically correct, and we don't want to offend anybody,†Mr. Morrison said. Regarding the Cherokee name, he added: “We just haven't gotten any feedback that was disparaging.â€
Well, here's some: “We are really opposed to stereotypes,†said Amanda Clinton, a spokeswoman for the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. “It would have been nice for them to have consulted us in the very least.â€
But, she added, the Cherokee name is not copyrighted, and the tribe has been offered no royalties for the use of the name. “We have encouraged and applauded schools and universities for dropping offensive mascots,†she said, but stopped short of condemning the revived Jeep Cherokee because, “institutionally, the tribe does not have a stance on this.â€
So far, marketing materials for the 2014 Cherokee model have eschewed references to, or portrayals of, American Indians and their symbols. That's a far cry from the excesses of past years, when marketers went beyond embracing stereotyping to reveling in it. Indeed, Chrysler's restraint seems an indication of just how much things have changed.
For decades, American Indian tribal names have helped to propel automobiles out of showrooms. Return with us now to the era when Pontiac's sales brochures carried illustrations comparing its 6-cylinder engines to six red-painted, feathered cartoon Indian braves rowing a canoe.
Or review Pontiac's marketing copy, which proclaimed that “among the names of able Indian warriors known to the white race in America, that of Pontiac, chief of the Ottawas and accepted leader of the Algonquin family of tribes, stands pre-eminent.†Of course, the visage of the chief was appropriated as a hood ornament.
Many other tribes were adopted as marketing tools. Long gone is the Jeep Comanche pickup truck, sold in the late 1980s, along with the Jeep Comanche Eliminator.
Certainly, American Indian names are still in the market: consider Indian motorcycles, about to resurface under yet another new owner, Polaris Industries. And Chrysler's full-sized S.U.V., the Grand Cherokee, introduced in 1992 as a larger version of the Cherokee and still a market leader. In fact, its success was a reason for the revival of the Cherokee name for a midsize S.U.V.
American Indians have hardly been alone in the cavalcade of automobile cultural stereotyping. In the 1950s, advertising for the Studebaker Scotsman didn't actually use the word cheapskate, but prospective buyers were informed that “when you and your family sit in your thrifty Scotsman...this great Studebaker body cradles you, your family and friends in safety.†It should be noted, though, that the Scotsman featured cardboard door panels and its hubcaps and trim weren't chrome-plated: they were painted silver.
A version of this article appeared in print on June 23, 2013, on page BU10 of the National edition with the headline: When Cars Assume Ethnic Identities .
Todd Dudek/Associated Press Frank Perdue, left, former chief of Perdue Farms, with his son and successor, Jim, in 1995.
Companies can fire a founder. Â But they can't fire his brand.
Wendy's removed its founder, Dave Thomas, from ads after his death but, underestimating his tie with consumers, had its locations display this poster.
Kentucky Fried Chicken had actors like Bob Thompson impersonate its founder.
George Zimmer, the former executive chairman of men's Wearhouse, in a 1988 ad.
That's the dilemma Men's Wearhouse is left with after dumping its founder and spokesman, George Zimmer, a decision announced Wednesday. Mr. Zimmer had starred in the suit retailer's commercials for almost 30 years, guaranteeing men that “you're going to like the way you look.â€
On Thursday, a day after the company's terse announcement, reaction on social media continued to be fast and furious, indicating that Mr. Zimmer had made the jump from business executive to cultural icon. “George Zimmer†was one of the top searches on Google on Wednesday, and news of the firing made the gossip sites TMZ and Gawker.
And the Men's Wearhouse Facebook page had more than 200 comments criticizing the company for ousting Mr. Zimmer, with sentiments like “If George Zimmer isn't coming back, neither am I!†and riffs on Mr. Zimmer's signature ad closer like “You're going to miss the way I shopped. I guarantee it.â€
Men's Wearhouse has not said whether it will continue running the television commercials featuring Mr. Zimmer; the company had recently been evaluating their effectiveness, Richard Jaffe, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, said.
Companies do face risks when they tie an executive's personality to their businesses, advertising executives said. But it is a popular approach, with executives like Dave Thomas at Wendy's, Frank Perdue at Perdue Farms and Martha Stewart becoming the face and voice of their companies.
The appeal of doing so is obvious, said Ellis Verdi, co-founder of the ad agency DeVito/Verdi, which has made ads for retailers like Kohl's and Coldwater Creek. It's relatively cheap, rather than hiring, say, celebrities like LeBron James or Taylor Swift, and it allows for flexibility - an executive can credibly promote a Presidents' Day sale or talk about the brand's origins.
Mr. Perdue, the former chief of Perdue Farms, was one of the first corporate executives to appear in ads for his company. His “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken†commercials are considered legends.
“It was the first time someone branded a commodity,†said Adam Hanft, a brand strategist. “Without that, there would be no Perdue as we know it today.â€
That type of marketing can be highly successful until the executive ages, leaves, dies or gets into trouble.
When Mr. Perdue handed the company to his son, Jim, Perdue's ad agency ran spots featuring both men before using Jim as the lone spokesman.
Other transitions have not been as smooth.
When Orville Redenbacher turned 88, he was bounced from his popcorn ads as the company tried to appeal to a younger, microwave-popcorn-eating demographic.
When the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Col. Harland Sanders, died, the company could not decide how to react. It tried ads with an actor impersonating the colonel, and a cartoon version of him, leaving consumers confused.
And after the Wendy's founder and ad star, Mr. Thomas, died in 2002 after appearing in more than 800 commercials, Wendy's immediately edited ads to remove him. But the company underestimated his bond with consumers, executives later said. Within five months, Wendy's released new ads promising diners its food was still done “Dave's way,†and sent posters featuring Mr. Thomas to its locations nationwide. Almost a decade after he died, Wendy's started featuring the original Wendy - Mr. Thomas's daughter Melinda Lou Morse, nicknamed Wendy, and by then 50 - in its ads.
A different situation confronted Macy's when Martha Stewart was released from prison in 2005 as the department store chain considered considering carrying her housewares line. It conducted extensive research to gauge how consumers felt about Ms. Stewart post-prison, learning that her image had been tarnished but not her brand.
“Lots of people don't like her, but they like her products and will happily buy them from Macy's,†the company's chief executive, Terry Lundgren, wrote in a 2006 e-mail, summing up research a public relations firm did for Macy's. It began selling Martha Stewart goods in 2007.
Advertising executives say Men's Wearhouse is in a particular bind because the ads featuring Mr. Zimmer have been remarkably effective.
“You have to ask yourself how many campaigns in this country last for 25 years,†Mr. Verdi said. “It's part of our culture - you have comedians riffing on it, you have the tagline that people talk about all the time. So you have what on judgment what would probably be one of the most successful campaigns, in my opinion, in retailing history.â€
Men's Wearhouse spends less than competitors on ads - just $92.2 million in 2012, according to a regulatory filing, or 3.8 percent of sales. Macy's spends 4.3 percent of its sales on advertising.
“He's very closely associated with Men's Wearhouse and the brand, and as a result I think there's some downside to a company eliminating his persona too quickly,†Mr. Verdi said. (One customer on Facebook likened his removal to what would happen if a certain fast food chain dumped Ronald McDonald.)
Initially, the ads featuring Mr. Zimmer in the mid-'80s were an attempt to make Men's Wearhouse less tacky.
The company had been using “this short, baldheaded guy who would jump out from behind a rack of suits and do his spiel,†said Richie Goldman, an early partner, in an interview now on YouTube, adding, “We wondered why we had an image problem.â€
“Finally one day George said, you know what? If we're going to get ourselves out of this, we have to change our tone. Let me go on the air, and if people are not going to believe the president and C.E.O. of the company, who are they going to believe?†Mr. Goldman said.
He had planned to finish his first ad with “That's the fact, Jack,†from the movie “Stripes,†but at the last minute, swapped it out with the more long-lived “I guarantee it.â€
The company did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday, but in a recent regulatory filing, noted that “George Zimmer has been very important to the success of the company and is the primary advertising spokesman.â€
“The extended loss of the services of Mr. Zimmer or other key personnel could have a material adverse effect on the securities markets' view of our prospects and materially harm our business,†the company said.
The company has fiddled with the ads over the years. Sometimes Mr. Zimmer appeared on the selling floor or reclining on a patio. In other ads, he gave advice to employees and at one point, standing at a “Suits University†lectern, told men to don mock turtlenecks. (It was the '90s.)
In 2010, the company experimented with a different tagline for Mr. Zimmer: “There's a place men belong. That place is Men's Wearhouse. I guarantee it.†But that didn't stick, and the company quickly reverted to the original.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 22, 2013
An article on Friday about the risks faced by brands that tie an executive's personality to their businesses erroneously included one company among those that spend more on advertising than Men's Wearhouse, whose founder and promotional face, George Zimmer, was recently fired. Though Macy's spends more, it is not known if Jos. A. Bank's advertising costs exceed those of Men's Wearhouse. (The 39 percent of revenue figure given for Jos. A. Bank represents the amount it spends on marketing and sales, a category that includes store payroll and other expenses; the company does not break out its advertising expenses.)
A version of this article appeared in print on June 21, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: When a Founder Is the Face of a Brand.
The Miami Heat's defeat of the San Antonio Spurs in the N.B.A. finals averaged nearly 17.7 million viewers on ABC, the most to watch the Spurs play for the league championship. The higher numbers were helped by a series that went seven games and because the Spurs' opponent was the LeBron James-led Heat.
The Spurs have generally needed a larger market team as a partner in the finals to help attract viewers. In 1999, the Spurs-Knicks finals were seen by an average of 16.0 million viewers. But the Spurs' sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2007 averaged just 9.3 million. Only slightly better was the Spurs' 2003 finals victory over the Nets, which averaged 9.86 million viewers.
Game 7 on Thursday night drew 26.3 million viewers, the second most to watch an N.B.A. game on ABC. The viewership peaked from 11:30 to 11:45 p.m. Eastern, at 34.2 million viewers.
A version of this article appeared in print on June 22, 2013, on page D4 of the New York edition with the headline: Heat-Spurs Game 7 Draws High TV Ratings.
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times Jane Eisner, 57, who in 2008 was named the first female editor in chief in the history of the 116-year-old Jewish Daily Forward, moved to New York last year after four years of long-distance commuting from the Philadelphia suburbs. She and her husband, Dr. Mark Berger, an oncologist, live in a three-bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive in the 80s with their dog, Charlie. The couple try to spend Sundays taking in the culture of the city, in between running, doing some work and seeing their grown daughter - one of three - who lives in Brooklyn.