Kennedy Struggling To Win Over Key Demographic: Women

Here's something interesting from the recent Quinnipiac poll on the New York Senate vacancy. There is essentially no difference among women and men when it comes to picking New York's next Senator. Among New York men, 32 percent want Governor Paterson to appoint Caroline Kennedy to take Hillary Clinton's seat, versus 27 percent for Andrew Cuomo. Among women, 33 percent want Kennedy, and 31 percent Cuomo, a statistically insignificant difference.

Women seem to be able to separate out any personal affections they might have for Kennedy (or her kinfolk) from their perception of her qualifications to serve in the Senate. Exactly 50 percent of women have a favorable view of Kennedy, as opposed to 14 percent unfavorable -- a significantly wider favorability gap than Kennedy gets from men, among whom 42 percent have favorable opinion and 21 percent an unfavorable one. But, women are no more likely than men to say that Kennedy is qualified for the position. Among women, 40 percent think she is qualified to serve in the Senate and 39 percent think she isn't -- not a statistically significant difference from the response among men, of whom 39 percent call her qualified and 43 percent do not.

Of course, there is no hard-and-fast rule that women support other women candidates more than men do. But it usually works out that way -- at least when the woman is a Democrat. Since 2006, Democratic women running for the Senate have gotten an average of 57 percent of the women's vote as compared with 49 percent of the men's vote (these figures exclude women like Kay Hagan that were running against other women). That 8-point gap is twice the size of the gender gap on this year's Generic Congressional Ballot, where 56 percent of women supported the Democrat as opposed to 52 percent of men.

2008              Women       Men
Figures (AL)       39%        32%
Landrieu (LA)      57%        47%
Shaheen (NH)       60%        45%
2006              Women       Men
Klobuchar (MN)     63%        52%
Stabenow (MI)      60%        53%
McCaskill (MO)     51%        46%
Clinton (NY)       73%        61%
Cantwell (WA)      60%        57%
==================================
AVERAGE            57%        49%

As we perhaps learned with Sarah Palin, women are not amused by other women whom they perceive to be unqualified -- and it probably isn't helpful to Kennedy that she has Hillary Clinton's shoes to fill. Still, for a candidate campaigning (yes, she's campaigning) so heavily on personal rather than political qualities, this is not the response that one would expect.

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On Transition Website, Obama Promises More to Gay Community

This is interesting -- and I'm not entirely certain what it means.

Obama's transition website, Change.gov, includes a section called 'Agenda' that outlines the administration's objectives in any of a couple dozen policy areas. For the most part, the 'Agenda' section is a near carbon-copy of the 'Issues' section on Obama's campaign website, BarackObama.com.

In the area of 'Civil Rights', however, there is a significant difference between the campaign website and Change.gov, the transition website. Specifically, the transition website makes a much broader range of commitments to the gay and lesbian community.

Whereas BarackObama.com includes a couple of items of interest to the gay community -- namely, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and expanded hate-crimes statutes -- that is the extent of it. The gay and lesbian community is not mentioned explicitly -- in fact, the word 'gay' does not appear anywhere in the 'Civil Rights' section of BarackObama.com. By contrast, the Change.gov website includes a section addressed explicitly to the gay community, and it covers not only ENDA and hate crimes, but also promises Obama's support for the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, an expansion of adoption rights for gay couples, his backing of "full civil unions that give same-sex couples legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples", and his opposition to a Constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

What to make of the difference? On the one hand, this would seem to demonstrate Obama's (over)sensitivity to the politics embedded in gay rights issues. A waffling, now-you-see-it, now-you-don't attitude toward gay rights is exactly what many in the community fear from the administration. On the other hand, one can argue that Obama is moving in the right direction, now willing to make a more explicit and comprehensive series of commitments to the gay community than he was while in campaign mode.

One consequence of the Rick Warren controversy is that Obama may now be under a greater amount of pressure from Democrats to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell, to pass ENDA, and to expand hate crimes statutes, and to do all of the above relatively quickly. As we have pointed out before, large majorities of the public are in line with the Obama position on all three issues. If Obama is not willing to expend the relatively modest amount of political capital required on those, then one can reasonably anticipate that he won't be willing to touch more controversial subject areas like adoption or civil unions.

UPDATE: Several readers write in to point out that BarackObama.com does contain some of the aforementioned text on gay rights, but it's buried about four clicks deep under the 'People' tab rather than under the 'Issues' tab. The point is, these are not exactly things that Obama was putting front and center.

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Red States Gaining Ground, but Migration Slowing Down

With the Census Bureau having recently released its 2008 population estimates, organizations like Election Data Services have revised their estimates (.pdf) of which states are likely to gain or lose seats in the Congress following the reapportionment triggered by the 2010 Census. Seats gained in the Congress, of course, also mean seats gained in the Electoral College.

In general, migration into the South has slowed down slightly. As recently as a year ago, it appeared almost certain that Florida would gain two seats in the reapportionment and North Carolina would gain one. But now, it looks that Florida may only gain one, and North Carolina might not gain any. The seats being "saved" are those in the Northeast and the Midwest. Whereas it appeared at one point, for instance, as though New York and Pennsylvania would each lose two seats, they may now lose just one each.

Migration into the West, unlike the South, has not really slowed down any.

Keep in mind that the interim population estimates released by the Census Bureau are not nearly as comprehensive as the actual, decennial Census; as such, these estimates should be treated as having fairly high margins of error. In addition, the Census itself has a fairly high margin of error depending on things like what sampling procedures are used how effective the
Census is at accounting for illegal immigrants.

It is nevertheless clear that, on balance, blue states are losing population and red states are gaining it; a net transfer of somewhere between 5-10 electoral votes should occur between blue states and red states as based on the 2000/04 electoral map. It should be kept in mind, however, that the same factors that are causing red states to gain population from blue states are also making red states more purple. It's the new residents in North Carolina, for instance, most of whom game from the East Coast, who allowed Barack Obama to win the state in November. Furthermore, Congressional appointments must not only be balanced for population between the different states but also within a given state. While Texas will probably gain four seats, for instance, if those gains come in relatively blue parts of the state like South Texas and the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, it might not hurt the Democrats very much.

A rundown of the states likely to gain or lose seats follows.

States gaining seats:

Arizona appears to be locked into gaining two seats, although there is an outside chance it could be held to just one.

Florida originally appeared on track to gain two seats, but more recent estimates have it gaining one instead.

Georgia will almost certainly gain exactly one seat.

...likewise, Nevada will gain a seat.

North Carolina may gain one seat, or it might not.

Oregon is about even money to gain a seat.

South Carolina is better than even money to gain a seat.

Texas will gain at least three seats, and will probably gain four, although a slowdown in migration could prevent that.

Utah will definitely gain a seat.

Washington might gain a seat.

States losing seats:

California may lose a seat, although the most recent estimates show that as being less likely. Another significant factor with California (and Texas, Florida, etc.) is how efficient the Census is in accounting for illegal immigrants, who like it or not do count toward Congressional appointments.

Illinois will probably, although not certainly, lose one seat.

Iowa will definitely lose a seat.

Likewise, Louisiana will lose one (thanks, Hurricane Katrina!)

Massachusetts will also lose a seat.

...as will Michigan (thanks, failing domestic auto industry!)

Minnesota will probably lose a seat, although it might be able to prevent that.

Missouri, likewise, will probably, although not certainly, lose a seat.

New Jersey will lose a seat.

New York, which previously appeared in peril of losing two seats, now may lose just one, although it may be pretty close if people migrate out of the state following the financial sector collapse.

Ohio is locked in to losing two seats.

Pennsylvania will lose one seat, and is not completely out of the woods for losing a second.

So to summarize:

Arizona +1 or +2
California 0 or -1
Florida +1 or +2
Georgia +1
Illinois 0 or -1
Iowa -1
Louisiana -1
Massachusetts -1
Michigan -1
Minnesota 0 or -1
Missouri 0 or -1
Nevada +1
New Jersey -1
New York -1 or -2
North Carolina 0 or +1
Ohio -2
Oregon 0 or +1
Pennsylvania -1 or -2
South Carolina 0 or +1
Texas +3 or +4
Utah +1
Washington 0 or +1

See also: Swing State Project.

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A Day Without Politics

Merry Christmas, and/or Happy Chinese Food. It's cold up here in Michigan!



We're going to be taking it easy today. There are presents to unwrap -- hopefully, more exciting ones than in 2006, when my entire family dutifully bought one another copies of the Iraq Study Group Report -- and I'm hoping to make progress on my backlog of e-mails in between sips of egg nog. In the meantime, travel safe, and we'll be back at you tomorrow.

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Supremes Deny Coleman on Duplicate Ballots

In a brief, unanimous decision handed out earlier this afternoon, the Minnesota Supreme Court denied Norm Coleman's request to prevent certification of the recount until claims regarding alleged double-counted ballots are resolved. Nor will it require any further efforts from the counties in pursuit of such ballots.

The Court decided simply that Coleman hadn't presented enough evidence, essentially challenging him to contest the election if he could come back with more. As we pointed out yesterday, while it is nearly guaranteed that there were at least some instances of double-counting, the same discrepancies could be explained by other phenomena, an Coleman's case relied on what might could best be described as circumstantial evidence.

It now appears almost certain that Al Franken will be certified by the state as the winner of the election at some point in early January. Although Franken's lead over Coleman is narrow -- 46 votes -- the only substantial group of ballots remaining to be counted are rejected absentees. But both campaigns have been operating under the assumption that those absentee ballots are more likely to add to Franken's margin than subtract from it.

Coleman's attorneys, however, have strongly hinted that he will be back in court to contest Franken's victory if and when that result is certified.

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Mommy, What's an Environmentalist?

Not to go all Media Matters on you, but the Washington Post's lead today strikes me as a bit off-kilter:

In one of the first internal struggles of the incoming Obama administration, environmentalists and smart-growth advocates are trying to shift the priorities of the economic stimulus plan that will be introduced in Congress next month away from allocating tens of billions of dollars to highways, bridges and other traditional infrastructure spending to more projects that create "green-collar" jobs.

The debate has centered on two competing principles in the evolving plan: the desire to spend money on what President-elect Barack Obama calls "shovel-ready projects," such as highway and bridge construction, vs. spending on more environmentally conscious projects, such as grids for wind and solar power.

Lawmakers opposed to the emerging-technology projects accuse their colleagues of using the financial crisis to push through pricey policy proposals that they say would do little to boost the economy in the immediate future.

"If we're going to call it a stimulus package, it has to be stimulating and has to be stimulating now. I think there are members of our caucus who are trying to create a Christmas tree out of this," said Rep. Baron P. Hill (Ind.), incoming co-chairman of the Blue Dog Coalition, a caucus of 51 fiscally conservative House Democrats.

A couple of questions.

Firstly, is it really appropriate to use the somewhat loaded term "environmentalists" to describe people who want greener energy? There are very good economic reasons, and very good national security reasons, to want an alternative to carbon-based fuels. This has very little to do with the save-the-spotted-owls kind of stuff that the term "environmentalists" tends to invoke. It's a bit like using "feminists" when "women" would do.

Secondly, how is it that it's these "environmentalists" who are solely responsible for "trying to shift the priorities" of the economic stimulus package? What are they shifting away from? Had the details of the stimulus been worked out when no one was paying attention? And had they forbidden alternative-energy and "green collar" projects, even though Barack Obama had been talking about such things from his first days on the campaign trail?

There are, obviously, a lot of valid points for discussion about how the government ought to spent hundreds of billions of dollars. But the Post seems to want to frame this is latte-sipping, Sierra Club hippies versus hard-workin', Chevy-drivin', everyday Amur-i-cuns. If that's the paradigm through which this gets reported, it's potentially a pretty damaging one to the Obama administration, and to the cause of energy independence.

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Like Smaller Government? How About 98 Senators?

With the situation in Illinois seeming to move backward, and the news today that Minnesota will require until at least early January until it certifies a winner in its Senate race, it now appears that the 111th Congress will open for business on January 3rd with only 98 members, and that condition might persist for several weeks.

It has commonly believed that, if Minnesota has not certified a winner by the time the Senate convenes, Governor Tim Pawlenty can appoint anyone he likes to fill the vacancy -- perhaps including Coleman himself! The problem with this, as John Fortier of the American Enterprise Institute points out, is that the seat doesn't become vacant unless the Senate declares it so; instead, it's in a sort of purgatory. Harry Reid also told Minnesota Public Radio today that the Senate would not require the seat to be filled: "It's perfectly acceptable for us to just wait to seat somebody until somebody is certified by the state," Reid's office said.

One interesting application of this is that I believe it will temporarily only require 59 votes to break a filibuster. The Rules of the Senate declare that a cloture motion can pass with "three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn". From the Senate's perspective, a senator will have been neither chosen or sworn in Minnesota -- nor in Illinois, unless the state gets its act together fast. And three-fifths of 98 is 59 rather than 60.

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A Passing Thought On Rick Warren

One reason that cultural issues like abortion have been successful rallying points for Republicans is because such issues tend to beget an asymmetry of passion. While a majority of the country supports abortion rights under most circumstances, the average pro-lifer is probably more engaged by the issue than the average pro-choicer, thereby enabling the 45 percent to outweigh the 55 percent under certain conditions.

That may still be the case for abortion, where public opinion has been static for many years. But it may no longer be the case on gay rights. Just who is on what side of the 55/45 split depends on what question you're asking -- a majority of the public now supports civil unions, although not yet gay marriage. That's beside the point, though; what I think the Warren dust-up reveals is that the left is now willing to raise at least as much ruckus about the issue as the right. The left, of course, has always had its own moral compass, but it's now beginning to convert that into more focused, overtly political action. If John Kerry had won four years ago, and invited Warren or some analogous pastor to give his invocation, would there have been this much debate about it? It's hard to say for sure, but I don't think we would have heard very much about it at all. This all feels very recent, stemming from a renewed self-confidence on the part of the left, coupled in this particular instance with the aftermath of Proposition 8.

I say this as someone, by the way, who buys into the "Can't we all just get along?" side of the argument. There's a difference between feeling as though you have superior morals and feeling morally superior, and some of the discussion has veered toward the wrong side of that equation. Nevertheless, I think the passion aroused among the left on the issue has been fairly impressive, and is potentially fairly consequential.

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Franken to Coleman: Where's The Beef?

EDIT (8:10 AM): The Uptake, which we've recommended to you many times, will have a live streaming feed of the Canvassing Board's activities today beginning at 9 AM Minnesota time. This is separate and distinct from the Supreme Court's ruling, which probably wont come until later in the day.

____
In a 26-page response (.pdf) filed on Monday with the Minnesota Supreme Court, Al Franken's campaign disputes Norm Coleman's claim that a significant number of ballots were double-counted in Minnesota, chiding Coleman's petition for a lack of evidence.

To briefly review the mechanics of the dispute: under certain circumstances in Minnesota, a duplicate ballot must be created on Election Day. This happens when the ballot cannot be read properly by a machine scanner, either because it is has been damaged in some way or -- as in the case of many overseas absentee ballots -- it has been printed out on a non-regulation type of paper. When this occurs, both the original ballots and the duplicates are supposed to be labeled carefully; i.e. "Original #1", "Original #2", "Original #3", and "Duplicate #1", "Duplicate #2", "Duplicate #3". The duplicates are then run through the scanners and the originals segregated and preserved for safe-keeping.

In advance of the manual recount, however, the campaigns agreed that rather than counting the duplicate ballots, they would instead count the originals. Why the change of course? The problem with the originals is that they can't be read by a machine scanner. In the recount, however, all ballots are counted by hand, rendering this problem moot. The original ballots, the campaigns seemed to believe, preserved a purer, more foolproof impression of voter's intent. Therefore, during the recount, any ballots identified as duplicates were pulled from the pile and not counted, and the originals counted in their place.

The problem is that in some cases -- likely involving a couple hundred ballots statewide -- there was a discrepancy between the number of originals and the number of duplicates. So, for example, you might have original ballots labeled #1-#4, but only duplicates #1, 2, and 4 were found during the hand recount, with no match for #3. Or, worse still, you might not find any ballots labeled as duplicates at all.

The Coleman campaign's claim is that where such discrepancies arose, the cause was that the elections worker failed to properly label the duplicate ballots. These duplicates could therefore not have been pulled from the pile, and both the duplicate and the original would wind up being counted. As evidence of this, the Coleman campaign cites a number of instances in which more ballots were counted during the recount than on Election Day.

Franken's response proposes, in essence, a number of alternative hypothesis for the discrepancies, which would not have implied double-counting. In particular, Franken proposes the following:

1. Duplicate ballots were never created. This would also result in an absence of ballots labeled as duplicates during the hand recount, as well as an increase in the number of ballots counted between Election Day and the recount phase.

2. Duplicate ballots were created on Election Day, counted on Election Day, then set aside. In other words, the duplicate ballots were lost after Election Day. This would also result in an absence of duplicate ballots, although it would not result in an increase in the number of ballots counted over Election Day.

3. Duplicate ballots were created on Election Day, but set aside and never counted. The same as above, except the ballots were never counted in the first place; this permutation would result in an increase in the number of ballots counted versus Election Day.

The Franken campaign claims that each of these possibilities is "equally likely" as the Coleman campaign's hypothesis that duplicates were created but not labeled. While that seems like a stretch -- I can't imagine that #2 and #3 happened very frequently -- #1 is a problem for Coleman, as the Franken campaign has produced affidavits from at least two precincts claiming that the precinct workers forgot to create duplicate ballots.

Franken's response also cites another problem with the Coleman campaign's complaint. Namely, it isn't really dispositive if the number of ballots counted during the recount exceeds the number counted on Election Day. This could result from any of several of the permutations discussed above, as well as a number of other circumstances not related to duplicate ballots, such as a machine scanner having malfunctioned on Election Day.

What would be more powerful evidence, Franken claims, is if the number of votes counted during the recount exceeded the number of voters present on Election Day, as recorded on sign-in sheets and the like. The Coleman campaign, however, has conspicuously presented no evidence of instances where there were more votes than voters.

That's really the thrust of Franken's response (which, it must be said, is annoyingly repetitive at times). It's basically a "Where's The Beef?" sort of argument.

And it's one that might persuade the Court. Suppose that you have two hypotheses to explain missing duplicate ballots. If one hypothesis is true, then you'll have double-counted certain votes. But if the court acts upon that hypothesis, and it turns out to be false, the result will be that you'll have thrown out certain (legal) votes.

Coleman's proposed remedy is that original ballots should be thrown out in any instances where they can't be paired with duplicates. If that remedy is adopted, then each of two things will happen: (#1) The state will prevent some ballots from being double-counted, and (#2) The state will also throw out some perfectly legal ballots. The process of identifying potential double-counted ballots is simply too imprecise to have the one thing without the other.

Can these two harms be weighed against one another? Suppose that if you rule on Coleman's behalf, you'll prevent 20 votes from being counted twice, but also throw out 20 legal votes. Most of us would probably not consider that to be a productive trade-off. But what if you could prevent 30 votes from being double-counted, in exchange for throwing out 10 legal ballots? Does the trade-off then become acceptable? Should you double-count 50 ballots if it prevents one voter from having his vote thrown out? Or, does the right of a voter to have his vote counted inherently trump that of the risk of counting some other voter's ballot twice?

These are the sorts of questions that the Court will have to ask itself. My layman's opinion is that Coleman will need to present stronger evidence before the Court is willing to run the risk of throwing out legal ballots, particularly as Coleman signed off on the procedures that governed the recount in the first place. But, we will know soon enough, and it's unlikely that anything the Court rules now would preclude Coleman from contesting the results of the election later.

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Fox News Finds Typo, Blames Liberal Conspiracy

Who was this ballot cast for?



Norm Coleman, right?

No, this is not a trick question. Unless your name is John Lott, Jr., Ph.D. and you just published an analysis at FoxNews.com.

The ballot in question, from Minnesota's 4th Ward, 8th Precinct, was originally cast and counted for Norm Coleman. It was challenged by the Franken campaign, which claimed that it was a duplicate ballot, and designated as the 3rd challenge from that precinct. The challenge was subsequently withdrawn, as the Franken campaign withdraw essentially all of his challenges on supposed duplicate ballots. And appropriately, the Canvassing Board added the vote back into Coleman's column (.xls).



So where did Lott get the idea that the vote had been counted for Franken? Apparently from the Star Tribune's website, which had it listed it that way. The Star Tribune, keeping an unofficial tally of more than 6,000 challenged ballots, apparently made a boo-boo.

This possibility appears not to have crossed Lott's mind. Faced with two alternatives...

1. The Canvassing Board somehow determined that this was a Franken ballot;
2. The Star Tribune screwed up.

...Lott took Occam's Razor and cut himself with it, and concluded that the former must be true, using it as his primary piece of evidence to allege the recount was slanted in Al Franken's favor. The ballot is now featured prominently on the front page of the FoxNews.com website:



It's been a bad day all around for the mainstream media. We can only assume that an upstanding organization like Fox News will be quick to post its retraction and apology...

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Franken Maintains 48-Vote Lead

The Star Tribune reports that Al Franken holds a 48-vote lead over Norm Coleman, with thousands of withdrawn challenges having been added back in to the respective candidates' totals. This number would be roughly in accordance with the 35-50 vote lead projected by the Franken campaign.

The Star Tribune's reckoning appears to come from a spreadsheet (.xls) available on the Minnesota Secretary of State's website. The spreadsheet appears to show 3,191 challenged ballots resolved for Franken and 2,955 for Coleman -- a net gain of 236 for Franken, which would put him 48 votes ahead given Norm Coleman's 188 vote lead prior to the challenge phase of the recount process. An additional group of 542 challenges ballots were deemed to be illegal votes (undervotes, overvotes, etc.), or were assigned to third-party candidates.

Challenged By         Ballot Allocated To______
__                    Franken Coleman Other
Franken               66      2923    295
__                    2.0%    89.0%   9.0%
Coleman               3120    29      243
__                    92.0%   0.9%    7.2%
Both                  5       3       4
__                    41.7%   25.0%   33.3%
Total                 3191    2955    542
__                    47.7%   44.2%   8.1%

These are draft numbers, and as such are subject to change. Minnesota's Canvassing Board will meet again tomorrow morning to resolve a few odds and ends, apparently including the resolution of a small number of remaining challenged ballots.

In all likelihood, however, Coleman will need to rely on the addition of rejected absentee ballots or the subtraction of so-called duplicate ballots in order to regain the lead from Franken. The former class of ballots will be resolved by the counties between now and December 31; the latter group may or may not be reviewed, depending on a ruling from the Minnesota Supreme Court anticipated tomorrow.

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Mental Recession?

Gallup:

Thus, on average, there appears to have been about a five-point increase in the percentage of Americans who worry about money, when the current situation is compared to that which obtained for the first eight months of the year. The large sample sizes involved in this tracking -- about 3,500 interviews per seven-day rolling average -- underscore the conclusion that while the increase in worry is not large on an absolute basis, it is significant and meaningful.

At the same time, it is worth noting that fewer Americans report personally having worried about money than report a negative evaluation of the U.S. economy. The latter has been running at about a 75% to 80% negative rating in recent days, almost twice as high as the financial worry number. In other words, Americans are much more likely to report having a negative view of the overall economy than they are to say they personally worried about money. This is another indication that Americans remain personally resilient in the face of the highly negative economic news and environment that engulf the country at this time.

If you're a person of means, then get out there and splurge a little bit, preferably on American-made goods or services. Stuff's cheap right now! Take your significant other out to your favorite local bistro, which will have a good table available. Plan a trip to Vegas, which has some bargain-basement hotel rates available. Buy your teenager that copy of Rock Band; she'll enjoy it, and it's probably on her Christmas list anyway. Take the family out to a good movie. Pick up a copy of that book your friend was telling you about.

This is not to diminish the realities of the recession. But, after a decade or so of spending outside their means, Americans seem almost to feel guilty right now about spending money. This is exactly the opposite of what the economy needs. The structural problems of the financial sector are liable to take a long time to untangle, but if consumers signal that they've weathered the storm and are prepared to start consuming again, then jobs and investment capital will follow.

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In Employee Free Choice Act, a Numbers Game for Labor

Why are we likely to hear so much about EFCA -- the Employee Free Choice Act -- a seemingly obscure piece of legislation that amends the conditions for the formation of unions? This is why:



The percentage of the workforce participating in unions has been in a steady decline for at least 35 years. It might be tempting to attribute this to the more broad-based decline of the American manufacturing sector in general in the epoch of global commerce -- and this is certainly a part of the story. In 1973, about 27 percent of the American workforce was engaged in manufacturing; as of last year, that number was down to 12 percent.

Even controlling for that, however, the unionization of the private sector has been in a precipitous decline. The percentage of manufacturing employees participating in unions dropped from 38.9 percent in 1973 to 11.3 percent in 2007. A similar tend has manifested itself in the construction sector, an industry which (until very recently) had been doing quite well for itself: just 13.9 percent of workers engaged in construction and mining are unionized now, as compared with 39.5 percent in 1973.

Public sector unions, by contrast, have had considerably more success, gaining membership throughout the 1970s and then holding in what amounts to a steady state ever since. Unions have also had some progress in hedging their decline in the service sector.

But the private sector unions, particularly in the manufacturing trades, may see this as an existential crisis. Unions are by definition about strength in numbers, and the unions worry about dropping below some critical mass beyond which they have no way to reverse their decline, and are no longer key players on the American political scene. EFCA, which makes it considerably easier to form unions (too easy, its opponents say) might be the way -- perhaps the only way -- for them to stem that decline.

And here we run into another sort of numbers game: the margin of error between the passage and failure of the bill in the Senate is going to be very, very thin.

In 2007, 51 senators voted for cloture on EFCA -- all Democrats except Tim Johnson, who was still absent from the Senate at that time, plus a lone Republican, Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter. That left the Democrats 9 votes short of passage -- votes which, in theory, they might now have. Johnson is back in the Senate, and they have picked up seats in Alaska, Colorado, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Virginia, and are on the verge of doing so in Minnesota. That would give them 60 votes and 60 exactly, if and when replacement senators are appointed in Illinois, Colorado and New York.

Except that, Democrats are in danger of losing at least one vote: Arkansas' Blanche Lincoln, who has suggested that she is "undecided" on the measure. Arkansas has very low union participation: between its manufacturing and construction sectors, 6.0 percent of its workforce participates in unions, about half the national average.



Arkansas is not the only state with a Democratic senator and low union membership. Pretty much the entirety of the South is in the same boat, with the important exception of Louisiana. But, while there aren't many union members in Virginia, North Carolina or Florida -- nor in some states like New Mexico outside of the South -- Barack Obama is quite popular in all of those areas, which he is not in Arkansas. Arkansas and really Arkansas alone presents the unique combination of Obama being unpopular and the union movement being virtually nonexistent, and among the two Democratic senators in Arkansas, Lincoln is up for re-election in 2010, whereas Mark Pryor is not. It's not a coincidence that she's hemming and hawing on EFCA.

If Lincoln leaves the caucus on EFCA, the Democrats' task becomes exponentially more difficult. Arlen Specter's vote is probably safe. His circumstances are pretty much kitty-corner to Lincoln's: Obama won comfortably in Pennsylvania, and unions are reasonably powerful there. Specter, moreover, has received as much support from unions as almost any Democrat, including many of their endorsements the last time he ran for election in 2004. If he bucked them on EFCA, however, Specter would become public enemy #1 to the unions, which could contribute to his defeat in 2010.

But if they lose Lincoln, then Specter only gets the Democrats to 59. Are there any other Republicans who might flip? Three others -- Ohio's George Voinovich, and Maine's Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe -- have received at least $100,000 in union contributions since 2003. Another wild card might be Alaska's Lisa Murkowski; Alaska is a highly unionized state, and the unions have sometimes been supportive of her. If Sarah Palin decides to run against her in 2010, Murkowski will need substantial support from union members to have a chance of defending her seat. Still, all four voted against cloture when the bill came up in 2007, and if Obama's coattails would ordinarily be worth something, that momentum is mitigated by the loss of face that the unions suffered on the auto bailout, when the UAW's public relations effort when nightmarishly.

Most likely, then, the Democrats will need to hold both Lincoln and Specter, as well as win the seat in Minnesota. If any of these contingencies fall through, EFCA faces an uphill battle.

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Franken Claims to Have Lead of 35-50 Votes

Missed this story yesterday, but:

Al Franken’s campaign is as close to declaring victory as it has throughout the weeks-long recount in the Minnesota Senate race.

Franken’s campaign attorney Marc Elias said he expects Franken to be leading Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) by “between 35 and 50 votes” when the Canvassing Board finishes counting all the disputed ballots on Tuesday.

“On Tuesday, I will stand before you with that work completed. Al Franken will have a lead of between 35 and 50 votes. And, at some point not too long after that, Al Franken will stand before you as the senator-elect from Minnesota,” Elias said at a press conference Saturday.

That would be a 35-50 point lead after withdrawn challenges are reconciled in the state's totals, a process that will certianly result in a net gain for Norm Coleman -- but not enough, it seems, to place him back ahead of Franken. For that, he'll need to have some luck with either the counting of absentee ballots (unlikely -- those are more likely to help Franken) or the un-counting of potential duplicate ballots.

Should we take the Franken campaign's claims seriously? In this case, I think so. Number one, they'll have a lot of egg on their face if they're wrong, at a time and place when credibility actually somewhat matters. Number two, Franken's range is more conservative than the Star Tribune's guess of a 78-vote lead for him. And number three, the Coleman people aren't really pushing back on the specifics of Franken's claim. They say they'll have a lead once the recount is "fully completed" -- what else are they going to say? -- but not that they're leading now, or that they'll be leading after the withdrawn challenges are added to the totals. In other words, they need to find votes somewhere (or find some way to take some of Franken's votes away from him).

Still, it's at least moderately good news for Coleman if Franken's lead is only 35-50 votes, rather than the 78 that the Star Tribune projected. Coleman's path to victory at this point is pretty much that (i) the court mandates a review of duplicate ballots, and that (ii) identifying and removing the duplicates -- which as far as I can tell are going to arise essentially at random during the counting process -- just so happens to help him. The way that the math tends to work out for this stuff, a lead of 35 votes is much easier to overcome than a lead of 70 votes, in somewhat the same way that you're much more likely to have a coin come up heads 4 times in a row than 8 times in a row.

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