by
Nate Silver
@
5:02 PM
The Obama team's impact assessment of its economic recovery was released this morning and is
available for public viewing. It's an interesting read all around, but there's one thing in particular that caught my eye:
These are the Obama economic team's estimates of the multipliers resulting from a permanent increase in government spending equal to 1% of GDP and a permanent tax cut equal to 1% of GDP, respectively.
"Permanent" is an important qualification here, because in reality both the spending increases and the tax cuts are supposed to be temporary. With that caveat in mind, by the Obama administration's own estimates, spending is likely to be considerably more productive than tax cuts, producing a $1.57 gain in GDP for every dollar spent versus a $0.99 gain in GDP for every dollar of tax cuts.
These figures shouldn't be considered especially controversial. On the contrary, they seem fairly close to the average views among economists -- although note that I use the term "average" rather than "consensus" because there is considerable room for disagreement within those averages.
Nevertheless, if Obama thinks tax cuts are liable to be less effective than spending, why is he advocating for them in the first place?
For one thing, the fact that the multiplier on the tax cuts is relatively lower does not mean they wouldn't have some stimulative effects. If I give you $100, and you spend half of it and save the rest, that's still $50 more circulating in the economy then there would be otherwise. This is the direct effect of tax cuts -- the indirect effect is that of the $50 you spend, the businesses whom you spend it on will in turn spend, say, half of that ($25) on hiring new workers, building new machinery, purchasing new inventory, and so on. And then some fraction of that $25 is also recirculated into the economy -- the new workers that I hire will spend some of their new income, the companies that I buy inventory from will in turn purchase additional inventory of their own, etc. The administration assumes that in the long-run, this process will add up to $99 of GDP growth for every $100 of tax cuts. That doesn't sound like a great deal and it isn't, but the $99 is at least money that gets spent now, whereas the $100 is money that will be borne in the form of deficits by future generations. (The tax cuts, of course, may have additional benefits that are normative rather than financial, such as flattening income distributions -- or, you can take the libertarian position that tax cuts are an intrinsic good.)
Nevertheless, Obama posits that $100 spent on tax cuts provide for considerably less bang for the buck than $100 spent on government purchases. The nice thing about the $100 in spending is that the initial $100 is automatically added (quite literally, in fact) to GDP. Then some fraction of that $100 in turn gets reinvested into the economy -- the construction worker whom you hire to build a bridge takes his family out to dinner at his favorite restaurant, which in turn hires a new line cook as a result of the improved business, and so on. The downside to government spending is that it might crowd out private spending. If the $100 I spend is money that the private sector would have spent anyway, then I'm not doing very much good, since private spending usually tends to be more efficient than public spending. But in this case, the administration figures that most of the $100 is money the private sector either can't spend -- private companies don't build their own highways -- or won't spend during a recession because it's become too risk-averse or because capital is too difficult to obtain.
To summarize, people who are arguing that tax cuts are liable to be more effective than government spending in the long-run are arguing in effect that:
a) A significant fraction of tax cuts will be spent rather than saved;
b) Public spending significantly crowds out private spending;
c) Private spending is significantly more efficient than public spending.
And people who are arguing that government spending that is liable to be more effective than tax cuts are arguing just the opposite:
a) A significant fraction of tax cuts will be saved rather than spent;
b) Public spending does not significantly crowd out private spending;
c) Private spending is only marginally more efficient than public spending.
Oops -- didn't mean to go on the long Economics 101 tangent. But the point is, right now, Obama's economists find the arguments for spending more persuasive than the arguments for tax cuts -- as do most (although hardly all) private and academic economists.
So to repeat: If Obama thinks tax cuts are liable to be less effective than spending, why is he advocating for them in the first place?
The rationale his economists give in the paper is that tax cuts are liable to go into effect more quickly than spending, since there are a limited number of "shovel-ready" projects available whereas tax cuts can begin having benefits almost immediately. This is a fine enough argument, but the efficiency gap that Obama posits between tax cuts and spending is large enough that it would seem to warrant at best a small fraction of the stimulus to be spent on tax reductions, rather than the 40 percent or so that Obama has proposed to spend now.
The truth is, however, that the Obama administration is probably thinking more in terms of an 'either' than an 'or': not a stimulus bill but two separate stimuli, one of which is $300b in tax cuts and the other of which is $500b in government purchases. And they seem to be roughly indifferent toward the tax cuts -- it may not be a coincidence that the long-run multiplier they provide on the tax cuts is almost exactly 1.00. They think they'll help a little, but not a lot, maybe just enough to justify running up the deificit, or maybe not quite. Provided they are indifferent toward the tax cuts, however, they can be freely brandished as a weapon to help facilitate the passage of the $500 billion (or more?) in spending, which is the part they're ultimately interested in. Accordingly, I think it's important for advocates for a larger stimulus to be focused on maximizing the $500b number as opposed to minimizing the $300b number; the scent of $300b is something that seems to have thrown both sides off the trail.
NOTE: Yes, this is an oversimplification. Not all types of tax cuts have the same multipliers associated with them, nor do all types of spending. So that's certainly something to fight about.
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Contract Post
by
Nate Silver
@
5:15 PM
So it turns out that the Senate Democrats are
not entirely happy about the Obama administration's proposal to spend "only" $800 billion or so on the economic stimulus package, about $300 billion of which would be devoted to tax cuts. Not just any Senate Democrats are angry, moreover, but a series of VIPs who either hold either very prominent public positions (
Harry Reid), command a great deal of respect on the Hill (
Tom Harkin), are thought to be very close to Obama (
Kent Conrad), or all of the above (
John Kerry).
My question is: can Obama really be entirely surprised that this is happening?
Before you answer, consider who we
haven't heard very much from the past couple of days. We haven't heard very much from Mitch McConnell. And we haven't heard very much from the Blue Dogs. Nobody seems (publicly) to be taking the position that the $800 billion is
too much, at least provided that it comes with $300 billion of tax cuts.
Now consider what Obama told CNBC the other day:
Obama also confirmed that he plans to lay out a roughly $775 billion economic stimulus plan on Thursday but indicated that the amount could grow once it gets taken up by Congress."We've seen ranges from $800 (billion) to $1.3 trillion," he said. "And our attitude was that given the legislative process, if we start towards the low end of that, we'll see how it develops."
Obama isn't picking these numbers out on accident. This range -- $800 billion to $1.3 trillion -- is most likely the range of outcomes that his administration considers acceptable. He says that "given the legislative process", he's deliberately chosen a number on the lower end of that range.
What does this mean? It means he wants the Senate Democrats to do his dirty work for him. All of the sudden, the administration, which is about to spend at least $800 billion, gets to play the role of the fiscally prudent tightwads, negotiating against the Senate Democrats. This has at least two benefits. One, it requires less of the administration's political capital to sell the package. And two, it completely co-opts the conservative opposition. Unless you're Paul Krugman or Greg Mankiw, you probably don't really have any idea whether $300 billion or $800 billion or $1.2 trillion is the right amount to spend; the numbers are too large, the scope of the stimulus too unprecedented, to provide for any absolute frame of reference. So the frame of reference is relative rather than absolute. If you're Mitch McConnell or Mary Landireu or Bob Corker and you see that John Kerry thinks that $800 billion is too little -- well then, 'gal darn it, this Obama fella must be doing something right.
Imagine instead that Obama had started out at $1.3 trillion, assuming that the conservatives in the Senate would negotiate him down. Then we have some big, old-fashioned brouhaha about economic philosophy, with Obama and the Senate Democrats lining up against the Blue Dogs and the Republicans. This strikes me as a considerably more dangerous negotiation, because while the Senate Democrats can set the ceiling if Obama starts too low, there is nobody really there to set the floor if he starts too high -- the Republicans have no real imperative to compromise on any stimulus. Public sentiment, moreover, which now favors the stimulus, might easily have turned against it if there was some sticker shock on the initial price tag, and once public sentiment turns against something like this, it can be hard to put back into the bottle.
I call this a Price is Right negotiating strategy. When bidding on an item on The Price is Right, you want to come as close as possible to the item's price without going over. But if you do go over, your bid is invalidated. Thus, it is worse to bid $1 too much than $100 too little. Here, analogously, the risks of overbidding seem to be considerably greater to Obama than the risks of underbidding.
Some of you will object: but why even worry about this whole bipartisan song and dance? Don't Democrats have the votes to shove this thing through?
Actually, that is not completely obvious. The Democrats have plenty enough votes in the House, but in the Senate, they'll need either one or two Republican crossovers to break a filibuster, depending on how the situations in Illinois and Minnesota are resolved. And they might need a couple more than that if they lose a Landrieu or a Lincoln. Now, I have argued before that a Republican filibuster is exceptionally unlikely on the stimulus. But this is on the assumption that both Obama and the stimulus itself are reasonably popular. If Obama were perceived as overreaching, on the other hand, the Republicans might have found it much easier to unite themselves against the proposal.
Until Obama takes the Oath of Office and actually stars doing stuff, it is easy for any of us to filter his actions through our preferred narrative about the incoming administration. Is this all some clever jujitsu negotiating ploy from the Boy Genius Campaign? Or is it a sign that the Obama administration just doesn't get it, fetishizes centrism and bipartisanship, and will need constant babysitting from the noble netroots? Neither characterization is liable to be entirely accurate, of course.
But I'm more inclined to argue for the former on the case of the stimulus package. The median expectation a week ago seemed to be that we'd wind up with a stimulus of about $800 billion. Now the question seems to be whether we'll end up at $800 billion or somewhat above $800 billion.
That doesn't mean that those of you who think we need more than $800 billion ought to shut up about it (in fact, Obama's whole strategy falls apart if you do). But for the time being, it would seem, that number has nowhere to go but up.
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Contract Post
by
Nate Silver
@
12:28 PM
Item. Rod Blagojevich
impeached by nearly unanimous vote in Illinois House. Impeachment trial to be held by Illinois Senate next week.
Item. New poll from Glengariff Group says that Illinoisans opposed to seating Burris by 53-32 margin. More Illinoisans
strongly opposed to seating Burris than in favor. More support for either a Pat Quinn appointment and a special election.
Item. Sun Times alleges inconsistencies in Burris testimony to House impeachment panel. Burris said he had no contact with representatives of Blago prior to late December; Sun Times says he talked to Blago confidant at some point during the fall. A venial sin -- but might offer enough pretense for the Senate to deny Burris membership.
Item. Draft of stimulus bill encountering more resistance from Democrats than Republicans. Getting 60 votes in the Senate does not seem like major concern to Senate Leadership; getting "right" package passed does.
Conjecture. Is Burris' appointment to the Senate still a fait accompli?
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Contract Post
by
Nate Silver
@
7:35 PM
A new poll from Politico suggests that the public does not see Barack Obama's stimulus package in the same category as one of the myriad number of bailouts that the Congress has passed, and that Republicans (or Democrats) counting on a populist backlash against the measure have their work cut out for them.
Politico's
poll (.pdf), conducted by the firm Garin-Hart-Yang, reports that 79 percent of Americans favor the stimulus, versus just 17 percent opposed. I would take some issue with GHY's question wording, as it characterizes the stimulus in rather flattering terms ("a proposal to create jobs and strengthen the economy") but does not mention the stimulus's pricetag; this is not too far from message testing as opposed to opinion polling. Nevertheless, it suggests that -- if framed appropriately by the administration -- the stimulus could be quite popular indeed, a finding also implied by
other surveys.
Perhaps the more interesting component of the Politico survey, however, is a series of questions asking Americans what sort of policies they think might or might not be effective at improving the economy.
The percentage of respondents saying they expect a particular policy to be "very" or "fairly" effective is provided below:
Stricter enforcement and stronger regulations on 74
businesses, particularly in the financial sector, to
prevent future abuses
A major government investment in energy to develop 66
alternatives to imported oil and make the United
States a world leader in alternative energy innovation
A long-term effort to balance the budget and lower the 66
national debt
Lower taxes for the middle class 59
An across-the-board reduction in federal government 58
spending
A major government investment in worker training and 57
re-training to ensure that America has a work force
prepared to meet the demands of a modern economy
A major government investment in infrastructure such 57
as roads, bridges, and mass transit to create jobs in
the short term and a strong, vibrant, modern economy
in the long term
A major government commitment to provide more 54
funding and support to community colleges, to ensure
more workers have access to training and education
Lower taxes for all Americans 50
Obviously, some of these responses are a bit contradictory -- the public wants balanced budgets, for instance, but they also want certain types of spending. It's interesting, though, that tax reductions actually aren't all that popular, considering that lower taxes almost always tend to poll well. It's also interesting that, from among the government spending programs that the survey addresses, alternative energy is by some margin the most popular.
I'm not sure why Obama isn't doing more to highlight the green portions of the stimulus bill. The public seems to tolerate the spending on bridges and highways -- but they also see it, perhaps not wholly improperly, as makework. The long-run benefits of the alternative energy programs, on the other hand, are far more intuitively appealing. If the central critique of the stimulus is that the debt we're creating will be burdensome to future generations, that concern could be mitigated if the spending in question is portrayed as a down payment made on behalf of those future generations toward cleaning up the environment and mitigating dependence on fossil fuels. It also provides for some sense of purpose to the stimulus: we'll come out of this, Obama can say, with the greenest, most energy-independent major industrial economy in the world, etc. etc.
Note: See also the Rasmussen poll on the stimulus, which also suggests that a majority of the public sees major government intervention is necessary and that as many people are concerned about the government doing too little as doing too much.
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Contract Post
by
Nate Silver
@
12:32 PM
Missouri's Kit Bond, in a move that was not entirely unexpected,
announced today that he will retire from the Senate after 2010. Bond joins Kansas' Sam Brownback and Florida's Mel Martinez as other retiring Republicans; these things can sometimes come in waves when a party is having a rough year. Democrats have significant opportunities in all three states, although the Kansas one is probably contingent on Kathleen Sebelius running.
Off-hand, indeed, it appears that the Democrats might be slightly favored in this race because of the potential candidacy of Robin Carnahan, the popular Secretary of State from the dynastic Carnahan family who won re-election with 62 percent of the vote in November. The Republican field, by contrast, is a bit less clear. Chris Cillizza
speculates that former Senator Jim Talent, who lost to Claire McCaskill in 2006, may be their leading candidate. My reaction to that is that having a guy who lost his last race at the top of your list is usually not an indicator of a terrific bench, although Talent's loss was close and came in a very Demcoratic year.
We can also look toward Missouri's Congressional Delegation for potential candidates; it presently contains 5 Republicans and 4 Democrats. One very basic indicator of strength that I like to look at is to compare a Congressman's performance in his last election against that predicted by the partisan makeup of his district. For instnace, Todd Akin just won re-election with 63.8 percent of the two-way vote in a district with a PVI of Republican +9. On average, we'd have expected the Republican to have 56.2 percent of the vote in an R+9 district in 2008 (as determined by regression analysis), meaning that Akin overperformed his projection by 7.6 points, a roughly average score for a candidate winning his election. The power rankings for each of Missouri's nine Congressmen are below:
The most impressive performance among the Republicans came from MO-8's Jo Ann Emerson, who won overwhelmingly in a district that is solidly but not incredibly Republican. Emerson, who was reportedly considering a bid for governor in 2008, is somewhat moderate on issues like stem cell research, perhaps making her more appealing to voters in swing areas like the Kansas City suburbs.
Roy Blunt, the Republican Whip in the 110th Congress, may also consider a bid. He too won re-election easily, although since his district is more strongly Republican than Emerson's, his performance was a bit less impressive. It's also unclear whether having held a position in the House leadership would be an asset or a liability to his candidacy.
On the Democratic side, Blue Dog Ike Skeleton would theoretically be an interesting candidate -- but only theoretically, as he's 77 years old. Otherwise, there is nobody who jumps out as obviously having more upside than Robin Carnahan, including her brother Russ.
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Contract Post
by
Nate Silver
@
7:45 AM
The answer to the question in the headline, of course, depends on just who you ask.
According to a
USA Today/Gallup poll conducted last month, 35 percent of Americans think that a "depression" -- which the poll defines as "an economic downturn that is much more severe than most recessions and would last several years" -- is very likely, and another 39 percent think it's at least somewhat likely.
This, however, is a relatively vague definition of a "depression". If, for example, real GDP declined by 4 percent in 2009, a further 2 percent in 2010, and then held steady in 2011 before finally beginning to recover in 2012, that would be by far the worst economic slump since World War II and would meet the USA Today poll's definition of a depression. And there are various other signs and symptoms that we might describe as "depressionary". For example, if unemployment were to hit double digits, or there was a run on one or more major commercial banks, or there was severe price deflation on the order of, say, 4% for a couple of quarters, some people might consider those things to be evidence of a depression, and we'd begin to see the term thrown about more casually.
But there is a somewhat more precise definition of a depression (although by no means is it one universally agreed upon by economists): that is a 10 percent decline in real GDP over the course of a year or more. This is the definition that the predictions market Intrade uses. And the latest trade at Intrade just put the chances of a depression occurring at some point in 2009 at 40 percent -- or about ten times more likely than the odds that Norm Coleman prevails in his election lawsuit in Minnesota.
This is a shockingly high figure, both on its face and because I'm not sure that even the most pessimistic economists would place the chances of a sustained 10 percent decline in GDP at anywhere near 40 percent. The Wall Street Journal, in fact, just completed its monthly economic forecasting survey, a panel of 55 professional and academic economists. The most pessimistic forecast from among the 55 panel members is that the economy will decline by 2 percent in 2009, with the consensus forecast being exactly zero percent growth:
One can find room to criticize the composition of the Journal's panel: it probably does not contain enough liberal economists, and almost certainly does not contain enough what you might call nontraditional economists -- behaviorists or mathematicians or people that think, quote-unquote, "outside the box". Nevertheless, this represents quite a large difference of opinion with the Intrade forecast.
(A technical aside: the economy would meet the Intrade definition of a depression if it declines by 10 percent over any four consecutive quarters ending in 2009 -- for example, 4Q 2008 through 3Q 2008. So it's possible that you could have an Intrade depression even if the economy didn't decline by 10 percent in 2009 proper. The most pessimistic forecasts for quarterly decline in GDP in the Journal survey are 6.2 percent for 4Q 2008 and 5.0 percent for 1Q 2009, still far away from a sustained 10 percent decline in GDP over four consecutive quarters.)
The Journal and Intrade, of course, are not the only source of economic forecasts. The Congressional Budget Office expects GDP to decline by 2.2 percent (.pdf) in 2009 -- but this is explicitly if no stimulus package of any kind is passed. And then there is the stock market, which at its trough had declined by about 45 percent from its summer 2007 peak and is now at more like 35-40 off its peak. The market seems to have priced in a fairly steep recession -- but probably nothing like a depression (the DJIA declined by almost 90 percent from peak to trough in the 1930s).
So do these Intrade folks know something that the rest of us don't? And if not, where do they get off?
As you may know, I am not the biggest fan of Intrade, which I think is a terrific concept in theory but simply does not have the liquidity to sustain efficient prices in the short-run. This is especially true when it comes to the economy. If you thought we were headed toward the next Great Depression, you could make much, much more money by shorting industrial stocks than you could by betting on one at Intrade.
From what I understand about Intrade, however, a lot of the money that is to be made there comes from people who are trying to anticipate future price movements rather than the ultimate resolution of the contract. Say that I think the true chance of a depression is 4 percent, not 40 percent -- I should still buy depression contracts at 40 percent if I think I can sell them for 50 percent when the new jobs report comes out on Friday.
This characteristic is arguably true of all markets, of course, and it is one of the reasons that bubbles develop. But I'd guess that it's especially true of Intrade, where the ratio of fish to sharks (to borrow from poker terminology) is relatively high, as a lot of people participate in Intrade for recreation rather than for profit. To get a bit more technical about it, I'd guess that the possibility for "bubble profits" increases as some nonlinear function of the proportion of dumb money in a particular market, and that the possibility for bubble profits, moreover, tends to beget bubbles, producing some sort of condition of multiple equilbria.
What the Intrade traders may be betting on, in other words, is other traders becoming more pessimistic at some point between now and close of the contact -- a "pessimism bubble", if you will.
But here's the real question. Is there a risk of a "pessimism bubble" in the real economy? And if so, are the real markets and the professional forecasters adequately accounting for it?
What will happen, for instance, when the government releases its 4Q GDP estimate? It's going to be an ugly number: -2% if we're lucky, and maybe -6% or worse if we aren't. When this occurs, there will be an awful lot written about it. While the stock market has perhaps priced in this expectation, individual consumers and individual businesses perhaps have not. If they perceive the world as crashing all around them, they may behave in such a way as to actually beget such a catastrophe. We're already to the point where you can't read the food section or the sports section of the New York Times without reading about the recession.
The advance estimate of 4Q GDP is due out on the 30th, timing that intersects in interesting ways with the period during which the Congress is hoping to pass the stimulus package. The number the BEA announces will almost certainly be the worst figure since 1990, when the economy declined at an annualized rate of 3.0 percent in the fourth quarter, and will quite possibly be the worst since the first quarter of 1980, when the economy experienced a 6.6 percent decline. The headlines in the newspapers the next morning will be very grim. A good time for the stimulus to pass, arguably, would be within a few days of the BEA's announcement. Obama could hold an evening press conference after signing the stimulus bill, doing his best to allay the fears of a worried nation -- for fear itself is something we very much do have to fear.
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Contract Post
by
Nate Silver
@
2:23 PM
Sure, Harry Reid has
managed to trap himself now on the subject of Roland Burris, and is getting a lot of criticism for it. But how many of you saw his dilemma coming? At the time the Blagojevich scandal broke, did Reid and the Democrats really have any choice but to distance themselves as much as possible, and assert flatly that they wouldn't seat anyone that he nominated? Did they really have any reason to expect that a quasi-credible candidate like Roland Burris would actually
accept Blagojevich's nomination (as opposed to someone like, say, Patti Blagojevich?)
I think Reid can be criticized for one thing -- for failing to advocate for a special election. But even if the Democrats had made a more earnest push to hold a special election, that would still have provided for the possibility that Blagojevich would attempt to nominate someone in the meantime. What were they supposed to have said? "You know Rod, we really have no legal grounds to block your nominee, so please pretty please with a cherry on top don't do it?"
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Contract Post
by
Nate Silver
@
12:36 PM
FiveThirtyEight is a
2008 Weblog Awards nominee in the category of 'Best Political Coverage', not that you should go and
vote or anything like that.
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Contract Post
by
Nate Silver
@
8:50 AM
Lisa Murkowski had better hope that Sarah Palin doesn't elect to run for the Senate in 2010. That's because a
Research 2000 poll conducted two weeks ago for Daily Kos has Murkowski trailing Palin 55-31 among Republican primary voters.
Sarah Palin had better not be so foolish as to challenge Lisa Murkowski. That's because a
Dittman Research poll for the local blog The Alaska Standard shows her losing to Murkowski 58-31 in a prospective primary matchup.
Huh?
Alaska is perhaps the most difficult state in the country to poll. Its residents are in a strange time zone and keep strange schedules; it has very high rates of cellphone usage; it has highly unusual demographics. Several pollsters, including Research 2000, had no idea that Don Young would hang on to defeat Ethan Berkowitz in November, nor that Ted Stevens would come so close to Mark Begich.
Nevertheless, I think this is pretty unprecedented. Two polls of the same race show a
51-point gap between them, with one having Murkowski leading Palin by 27 points and the other having her trailing her by 24. Which one is right?
Actually, I'm not sure that this one is too hard to adjudicate. The Alaska Standard is an attractive and engaging blog, but its lead author, talk show host Dan Fagan, is most definitely not a fan of Mrs. Palin. In fact, although Fagan is a staunch conservative, virtually all of his posts are anti-Palin in some way, most recently regarding some controversy surrounding Levi Johnston.
Fagan very much is a fan, however, of Lisa Murkowski. Not only that, but Murkowski has written an article for this website, and is listed as one of its contributors along the side panel. The pollster, David Dittman, is also listed as a contributor.
So you'll excuse me if I don't find it terribly shocking that when this website decided to conduct a poll, it contained GREAT NEWS!!! FOR LISA MURKOWSKI!!!
I don't know whether Murkowski was directly involved with commissioning the poll in any way, but will presume that she wasn't. Nevertheless, the Dittman poll should be regarded the same way that a "leaked" internal poll is, which is to say very dubiously. And if Murkowski was for some reason involved in the creation of the poll, the fact that she feels the need to start spinning 18 months before a primary against an opponent who has yet to declare for the race and probably never will suggests to me that she's very scared of the 'Cuda indeed.
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Contract Post
by
Nate Silver
@
8:41 PM
In the wake of Jeb Bush's surprising
announcement today that he will not run for Senate in Florida in 2010, this seems like an appropriate time for the monthly refresh of our ridiculously premature
2010 Senate Rankings.
To review the basic ground rule: the races are ranked
in terms of their likelihood of changing parties. In some cases, the ranking is the result of an incumbent being vulnerable, and in other cases, because the incumbent may retire -- we try our best to mesh these things together into some inkling of probability. Away we go:
1. Florida
(R-Open) 
Without Bush in the race, the field is wide open on both sides. Given an open seat and one of the purplest purple states in the country, that means this race meets the very definition of a toss-up.
2. Nevada
(D-Reid) No, the Republicans don't really have a credible opponent yet, but one thing the past few weeks have made clear is that Reid is going to be a focal point for criticism -- from both the right and the left -- and there's a strong likelihood that someone will come out of the woodwork. I also think people may be underrating the chances that Reid gets sick of it all and retires.
3. Pennsylvania (R-Specter)
Looking more likely that Specter may face a primary challenge, but the general election remains his central concern. The Chris Mathews rumors have cooled off some, but it's not clear whether that's good or bad news for Specter.
4. Ohio (R-Voinovich)
5. Kentucky (R-Bunning)
6. Kansas (R-Open) 
Remains an overlooked race; if Kathleen Sebelius wants the seat, she probably has a leg up. But there are rumors that she'll become chancellor at the University of Kansas rather than running for Senate.
7. Missouri (R-Bond)
8. Illinois (D-??)
I'm not sure what other possible permutation of circumstances could do more to make a generally safely blue seat competitive. Still, the Democratic bench is fairly strong, and they're lucky this is all taking place in Illinois instead of, say, Ohio.
9. Colorado (D-Bennet)
I was prepared to move this race down when it looked like Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper was going to be Ken Salazar's replacement, but with unknown schools superintendent Michael Bennet getting the nod instead, it becomes a much more attractive target for Republicans. Still, the state is turning bluer, and most of their candidates haven't polled very well against nearly any Democrat. They may also wind up punting on this race if they make the mistake of nominating Tom Tancredo.
10. North Carolina (R-Burr)
11. New Hampshire (R-Gregg)
12. Texas (R-Open?)
It appears nearly certain that Kay Bailey Hutchinson will vacate her seat to run for Governor, and now the Republicans will have a formidable opponent, as moderate Dem and Houston Mayor Bill White has declared his interest in the race.
13. Iowa (R-Grassley)
Although polling suggests that Tom Vilsack could make a race of things, it's improbable that he'll run unless Grassley retires -- and what I'm hearing from Iowa constituents is that Grassley is unlikely to do so. (ed: Forgot that Vilsack will become Secretary of Agriculture. Still, if Grassley retires, there will be no shortage of strong Democratic challengers for the seat --nrs).
14. Delaware (D-Open)
15. Arizona (R-McCain)
16. New York (Jr.) (D-??)
Long Island Congressman Peter King is apparently interested in challenging Caroline Kennedy -- or whomever else Governor Paterson puts in this seat. Although King himself is not very likely to win, the fact that he's willing to give up a House seat that he'll probably never win back suggests that Republicans don't consider the race off-limits. Democrats might not consider the seat off-limits either, potentially giving Kennedy a vigorous primary challenge.
17. Arkansas (D-Lincoln)
18. California (D-Boxer)
19. North Dakota (D-Dorgan)
20. Connecticut (D-Dodd)
21. Alaska (R-Murkowski)
New polling in this race suggests that Lisa Murkowski is vulnerable, most certainly to a primary challenge by Sarah Palin and possibly in the general election too. But, the Democratic bench in Alaska is not strong.
22. Oklahoma (R-Coburn)
23. Wisconsin (D-Feingold)
24. Hawaii (D-Inoyue)
25. Georgia (R-Isakson)
26. Louisiana (R-Vitter)
27. Maryland (D-Mikulski)
28. South Carolina (R-DeMint)
29. Washington (D-Murray)
30. Vermont (D-Leahy)
31. Alabama (R-Shelby)
32. South Dakota (R-Thune)
33. Indiana (D-Bayh)
34. Oregon (D-Wyden)
35. Utah (R-Bennett)
36. New York (Sr.) (D-Schumer)
37. Idaho (R-Crapo)
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Contract Post
by
Nate Silver
@
6:19 PM
My
wish is Gallup's command. A new poll commissioned by
Gallup and USA Today shows that 51 percent of Americans think that Roland Burris should be blocked from filling his seat in the United States Senate, while just 27 percent support seating him.
The results are a fairly close match for our
unscientific poll of FiveThirtyEight.com readers; 57 percent of you are opposed to Burris taking his seat, and 43 percent in favor
I would say that I'm modestly surprised by these results. I didn't necessarily expect the majority to support seating Burris -- but, I thought he had become a somewhat more sympathetic figure, perhaps having some success in his myriad media appearances portraying himself as an innocent bystander (victim?) in all of this. What's interesting, though, is that there are not particularly large partisan differences in all of this. In the Gallup poll, Democrats were opposed to seating Burris by a 49-30 margin, and Republicans by a 61-25 margin. Americans seem to see this as a Good Government issue rather than a partisan one.
Still, as Chris Cillizza outlines, Harry Reid is left with few good options. The problem in a nutshell is that there's no easy way to block Burris from taking his seat. Doing so would entail several more confrontational and potentially embarrassing moments on the Hill followed by a protracted legal battle. Nor do any of the "deals" making the rounds seem particularly viable; Burris could tell read that he wouldn't run in 2010 in exchange for being seated, for instance, but nothing would bind him to that promise. Perhaps as a result of this, both a majority of our readers and the punters at Intrade think it more likely than not that Burris will eventually be seated.
The exception, of course, might be if Reid were to persuade the Illinois legislature to pass a special elections law, while probably allowing Burris to take his seat on an interim basis until the special election was held. There are numerous benefits to this: the special election option is quite popular both with Americans and Illinoisans; the Democrats could get Burris's vote in the meantime with little political fallout and no risk of a legal battle; and, if a Democrat won the special election, they would probably put the Rod Blagojevich issue to rest and enter as the heavy favorite in 2010, when the seat is up for a full six-year term.
The risk, naturally, is that the Democrats might lose the seat to Mark Kirk or another Republican. But given that all of the alternatives to a special election carry their own risks, we're getting pretty close to the point where it is the best option even from a zerosum, partisan perspective. And if a special election is anywhere close to the best option from a capital-D Democratic perspective, surely the fact that is the best option from a lower-case-D democratic perspective should carry some weight.
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Nate Silver
@
1:30 PM
Those of you who will be in Washington for the Inauguration are advised to do two things. Firstly, dress warmly, because we wouldn't want the whole William Henry Harrison thing to happen to any of you. And secondly, please come to the
party that we are co-hosting in conjunction with Netroots Nation and many of my favorite bloggers. The party will be held on Monday the 19th, the evening
before the inauguration, because that's how the cool kids do it.
Tickets are going fast and are a mere 90 bones, which includes four drink tickets and a relaxed and rollicking time. Guaranteed to be more fun than a quorum call!
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Nate Silver
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8:50 AM
The consensus among the blogosphere seems to be that Obama's
proposal for a $300 billion tax cut is intended as a preemptive concession to the right in order to build bipartisan support for his economic stimulus initiative. Obama, certainly, has a lot of incentives to get Republicans on board with his bill. As his first major initiative out of the gate, building a "bipartisan" stimulus might allow Obama to maintain the pretense of being post-partisan (something which, for all the left's skepticism of it, probably helps his approval ratings and thereby his political capital). It might insulate him from taking all of the criticism if the stimulus fails to stimulate. Arguably, a larger majority might also do more to bolster consumer and investor confidence. Still, the feeling on the left is that Obama is mistaking this for an opportunity to build political capital, when it should be one of the times that he spends it.
What this analysis seems to be taking for granted is that the tax cuts are something the Obama administration does not want on their own merits. This, however, is far from self-evident.
Obama's economic team is fairly centrist, number one. Obama campaigned on a tax cut, number two (albeit a tax cut paired with a tax hike for the wealthy). And number three, even most liberal economists seem to think that some measure of tax cuts are a decent idea, although there are questions about which taxes should be cut and in what amounts. (Likewise, most conservative economists seem to think that some measure of spending increases are a good idea -- it's just a question of how much).
Basically, I would resist the temptation on either side to see the stimulus in too overtly ideological terms. The ordinary rules are suspended during a severe recession: what matters is -- empirically, theoretically -- What Works. Instead, I would encourage everyone to cut down on their consumption of political blogs for the next few weeks and instead read more of Brad DeLong and Greg Mankiw and Paul Krugman and Tyler Cohen. Those are the sorts of people I'm interested in listening to on this; all others must bring data.
Where I think there is more room for partisanship is in discussing how we spend what we spend, and how we cut taxes where we cut them. An $800 billion stimulus package that consisted of $500 billion in alt.energy investments and $300 billion in FICA tax cuts would be quite progressive -- and quite different from one that contained $500 billion in defense spending and $300 billion in capital gains tax cuts, even if the proposals happened to be relatively similar in terms of the immediate-term objective of ending the recession.
This is not to say that the how much questions are entirely within the domain of economic analysis, nor that the how questions are entirely within the domain of political analysis -- there are obviously some overlaps between the two. But the trade-off between, say, building bridges and building solar power grids is easier for political folk to understand than the relative abstraction of whether to spend a marginal $100 billion at the cost of running up the deficit. For the latter sorts of questions, I would tend to defer to the economists in the audience.
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Nate Silver
@
10:03 PM
by
Nate Silver
@
7:29 PM
...is that the Minnesota Supreme Court's
order (.pdf) today didn't make any judgment whatsoever about the merits of Coleman's case on absentee ballots. It merely said that the time to resolve these things is during an election contest, not during the recount itself. And
since there's an election contest coming, Coleman's argument will get, quite literally, its day in court.
Coleman's problem, however, is not so much that his argument is legally unsound but that it's not especially likely to benefit him even if the Court rules in his favor.
The Court had previously asked the counties to double-check their absentee ballots and identify any that might have been rejected in error; the counties did that, and came up with a collective 1,300 or so. The process the Court set up required both campaigns to agree on a ballot before it was counted, and about 400 ballots were vetoed by one or the other campaign. The other 900 were forwarded to the Canvassing Board and were counted on Saturday.
My guess is that the 400 vetoed ballots have a pretty strong chance of being counted at some point. (Will they benefit Coleman? Given that the absentees that were counted went strongly for Franken, the odds are probably not.) But this is not the subject of Coleman's claim -- instead, he's stating that there are some 650 additional erroneously rejected ballots that the counties missed during their sweep of absentees.
What Coleman wants the Court to do, in other words, is to order that the counties re-re-examine their absentee ballots. What might happen if that takes place?
First of all, I doubt that very many of the ballots on Coleman's list of 650 are going to be found to have been rejected improperly. Remember, the counties have already sorted through their absentees at least twice -- once on Election Night, and then a second time in accordance with the court order. Some counties, in fact, have even gone through their absentees a third time in accordance with the wishes of the Coleman campaign, and where they have, such as in Ramsey and Pipestone counties, the counties found that all the ballots on the Coleman list had been rejected properly. The process is somewhat analogous to vacuuming your floor; you aren't going to gobble up nearly as much dust on your second sweep through the living room as you did the first time around, even if you'd done a haphazard job. So this is problem #1 for Coleman. His list of 650 ballots is going to be significantly pared down, and will probably wind up closer to 65 than 650.
Secondly, those absentee ballots are sealed, so we don't know how many of them will turn out to be votes for Coleman. Presumably, the Coleman campaign thinks that the ballots are more likely than not to favor him, or he would not have included them on his list. But "more likely than not" might mean 50% Coleman ballots, 35% Franken ballots, and 15% other. If all 650 ballots were counted with those percentages, Coleman wouldn't get more than a 98-ballot net gain, less than half of his present deficit with Franken.
And thirdly, precisely because the ballots on Coleman's list are likely to favor Coleman, that also means there is some undetermined number of ballots that were also rejected in error but which are likely to favor Franken. Let's say that the Coleman campaign is sorting through a spreadsheet of rejected absentee ballots, and identifies one from Stanley Terwilliger of Eden Prarie, Minnesota, who has voted Democratic in every election since 1964, contributed $2,300 to the Franken campaign, and once got in an ice hockey brawl with Norm Coleman's twin brother Lars. Is that ballot going to make Coleman's list? Uh, probably not. But if the Court ordered a comprehensive re-recounting of the absentee ballots, it probably would get swept in -- and would turn out to be a Franken ballot.
Let's be frank: Norm Coleman doesn't have much of a future in electoral politics. Defeated Presidential candidates sometimes have nine lives, but defeated Senatorial candidates rarely do, and in his career running for statewide office, Coleman has lost to a professional wrestler, beaten a dead guy, and then tied a comedian. He doesn't have much to lose by fighting this to its bitter conclusion. But it's hard to envision how he'll come up with enough ballots to overtake Franken.
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Nate Silver
@
4:41 PM
The Wall Street Journal is bar none one of the best newspapers in the country -- except when its Editorial Board is having a bad day. And today the Board is having a very bad day, having published an
editorial that declares Al Franken's provisional win in Minnesota, which the state
just certified moments ago, to be illegitimate, while accusing Minnesota's Canvassing Board of being inconsistent and biased in favor of Franken.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with taking such a position. The Journal's editorial, however, has several basic facts wrong, makes several other assertions based on flimsy or nonexistent evidence, and generally has little understanding of the process that has taken place to date.
Let's go through the editorial paragraph by paragraph.
Strange things keep happening in Minnesota, where the disputed recount in the Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken may be nearing a dubious outcome. Thanks to the machinations of Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and a meek state Canvassing Board, Mr. Franken may emerge as an illegitimate victory
"Machinations": there's a ten-dollar word. Ritchie may be a Democrat, but he was also democratically elected -- lower case 'D' -- by the people of Minnesota. And as for the Canvassing Board, it arguably leans to the right, consisting of two members appointed by Tim Pawlenty, one appointed by Jesse Ventura, one elected member, and Ritchie.
Mr. Franken started the recount 215 votes behind Senator Coleman, but he now claims a 225-vote lead and suddenly the man who was insisting on "counting every vote" wants to shut the process down. He's getting help from Mr. Ritchie and his four fellow Canvassing Board members, who have delivered inconsistent rulings and are ignoring glaring problems with the tallies.
Actually, Coleman is having far more trouble with the Minnesota Supreme Court, which generally has a conservative reputation, than he is with the Canvassing Board. They're the ones who rejected his petition on duplicate ballots, and they're the ones who rejected his notion of wanting to tack on additional ballots to the absentee ballot counting.
Under Minnesota law, election officials are required to make a duplicate ballot if the original is damaged during Election Night counting. Officials are supposed to mark these as "duplicate" and segregate the original ballots. But it appears some officials may have failed to mark ballots as duplicates, which are now being counted in addition to the originals. This helps explain why more than 25 precincts now have more ballots than voters who signed in to vote. By some estimates this double counting has yielded Mr. Franken an additional 80 to 100 votes.
There are 25 precincts with more ballots than voters? I'm not sure this is actually true. There were certain precincts with more votes counted during the recount than there were on Election Night -- which is not surprising, considering that the whole purpose of a hand recount is to find votes that the machine scanners missed the first time around. I have not seen any evidence, on the other hand, that there are precincts with more votes than voters as recorded on sign-in sheets. And the Coleman campaign evidently hasn't either, or it presumably would have presented it to the Court, which rejected its petition for lack of evidence.
Also, note the weasel-wordy phrase "by some estimates", which translates as "by the Coleman campaign's estimate". There is no intrinsic reason why Franken ballots are more likely to be duplicated than Coleman ballots, especially when one significant source of duplicate ballots is military absentees, a group that presumably favors the Republicans. Coleman, indeed, only became interested in the issue of duplicates once he fell behind in the recount and needed some way to extend his clock. Before then, his lead attorney had sent an e-mail to Franken which said that challenges on the issue of duplicate ballots were "groundless and frivolous".
This disenfranchises Minnesotans whose vote counted only once. And one Canvassing Board member, State Supreme Court Justice G. Barry Anderson, has acknowledged that "very likely there was a double counting." Yet the board insists that it lacks the authority to question local officials and it is merely adding the inflated numbers to the totals.
The Canvassing Board indeed determined that it lacked the jurisidiction to handle duplicate ballots, telling Coleman that he had to go to court. Which he did. And the court threw the case out because Coleman didn't have any evidence.
In other cases, the board has been flagrantly inconsistent. Last month, Mr. Franken's campaign charged that one Hennepin County (Minneapolis) precinct had "lost" 133 votes, since the hand recount showed fewer ballots than machine votes recorded on Election Night. Though there is no proof to this missing vote charge -- officials may have accidentally run the ballots through the machine twice on Election Night -- the Canvassing Board chose to go with the Election Night total, rather than the actual number of ballots in the recount. That decision gave Mr. Franken a gain of 46 votes.
Actually, there is some proof: the number of votes identified during the recount fell 134 short of the number of voters who signed in on Election Night in this precinct.
Meanwhile, a Ramsey County precinct ended up with 177 more ballots than there were recorded votes on Election Night. In that case, the board decided to go with the extra ballots, rather than the Election Night total, even though the county is now showing more ballots than voters in the precinct. This gave Mr. Franken a net gain of 37 votes, which means he's benefited both ways from the board's inconsistency.
The decisions are not inconsistent if the Canvassing Board's objective is wanting to count every vote.
And here again the Journal is going on about the county "showing more ballots than voters in the precinct". If there is evidence of this, it would be news not just to me but also to the Coleman campaign.
And then there are the absentee ballots. The Franken campaign initially howled that some absentee votes had been erroneously rejected by local officials. Counties were supposed to review their absentees and create a list of those they believed were mistakenly rejected. Many Franken-leaning counties did so, submitting 1,350 ballots to include in the results. But many Coleman-leaning counties have yet to complete a re-examination. Despite this lack of uniformity, and though the state Supreme Court has yet to rule on a Coleman request to standardize this absentee review, Mr. Ritchie's office nonetheless plowed through the incomplete pile of 1,350 absentees this weekend, padding Mr. Franken's edge by a further 176 votes.
This is just blatantly false. All counties, red and blue alike, were instructed by the Supreme Court to identify any wrongly-rejected absentee ballots, and all of them did. In certain counties, Coleman claims to have identified additional wrongly-rejected absentee ballots above and beyond the ones that county officials identified -- but these were counties that nevertheless complied with the court's order and turned in their lists of ballots to the state.
Both campaigns have also suggested that Mr. Ritchie's office made mistakes in tabulating votes that had been challenged by either of the campaigns. And the Canvassing Board appears to have applied inconsistent standards in how it decided some of these challenged votes -- in ways that, again on net, have favored Mr. Franken.
I watched the video feed of the challenge adjudication process and did think there were some number of inconsistencies, particularly in the ways that ballots with 'X's on them were handled. But, I was looking at .pdfs of the ballots, whereas the Canvassing Board got to look at full-color, three-dimensional copies, which may make some difference in borderline cases. More to the point, however: (1) both candidates had their lawyers in the room when this adjudication was taking place, and had every right to press the Board on perceived inconsistencies, and (2) there is no evidence whatsoever that these inconsistencies hurt any one candidate particularly more than the other.
The question is how the board can certify a fair and accurate election result given these multiple recount problems. Yet that is precisely what the five members seem prepared to do when they meet today. Some members seem to have concluded that because one of the candidates will challenge the result in any event, why not get on with it and leave it to the courts? Mr. Coleman will certainly have grounds to contest the result in court, but he'll be at a disadvantage given that courts are understandably reluctant to overrule a certified outcome.
He'll be at a disadvantage because fewer people voted for him.
Meanwhile, Minnesota's other Senator, Amy Klobuchar, is already saying her fellow Democrats should seat Mr. Franken when the 111th Congress begins this week if the Canvassing Board certifies him as the winner. This contradicts Minnesota law, which says the state cannot award a certificate of election if one party contests the results. Ms. Klobuchar is trying to create the public perception of a fait accompli, all the better to make Mr. Coleman look like a sore loser and build pressure on him to drop his legal challenge despite the funny recount business.
But it doesn't contradict Congressional precedent, as the Congress generally has seated provisional winners while challenges were taking place, including Republican Representative Vern Buchanan in 2007 and Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu in 1997.
Minnesotans like to think that their state isn't like New Jersey or Louisiana, and typically it isn't. But we can't recall a similar recount involving optical scanning machines that has changed so many votes, and in which nearly every crucial decision worked to the advantage of the same candidate. The Coleman campaign clearly misjudged the politics here, and the apparent willingness of a partisan like Mr. Ritchie to help his preferred candidate, Mr. Franken. If the Canvassing Board certifies Mr. Franken as the winner based on the current count, it will be anointing a tainted and undeserving Senator.
New Jerseyites! Louisianans! Cancel your subscriptions! And the rest of you might as well too.
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by
Nate Silver
@
10:41 AM
When the House of Representatives convenes tomorrow, it will contain 39 African-American members, not including non-voting delegates in places like the Virgin Islands and the District of Columbia. This number, representing about 9 percent of the Congress, falls somewhat short of the fraction of African-Americans in the population as a whole -- a truly representative House would have about 55 black members -- but perhaps not dramatically so. The situation at first glance would appear to be much better than it was prior to 1990, when there were generally only about 20 black members in the House at any given time.
The districts these 39 Congressmen serve, however, are not very representative at all. All 39 contain a higher percentage of African-Americans than the population as a whole, ranging from Keith Ellison's district in Minneapolis, which is just barely more black than the national average, to Jesse Jackson Jr.'s on the South Side of Chicago, which is 68 percent African-American. About 64 percent of the members -- 25 of 39 -- come from districts that contain an outright black majority. The districts are also much more Democratic than the country as a whole, with an average
PVI of D +25; only Sanford Bishop's district in Georgia, which has a PVI of D+2, is anywhere close to the national average.
The chart below estimates the percentage chance that the Representative in a given Congressional District is black given the African-American population in that district, as based on a
logistic regression. The chances of having a black Representative are virtually nil until the African-American share of the population hits 25 percent, at which time it begins to accelerate rapidly until the black population hits 60 percent, after which point having a black congressman is virtually certain.
The problem with this is that, while there are a decent number of Congressional Districts that have African-American populations of 25 percent or more, only six states do, and five of the six are culturally conservative areas in the Deep South. Suppose that we treat each state as though it were a Congressional District and evaluate its chances of having a black congressman based on two factors: its African-American population and its Partisan Voting Index.
State Black PVI Prob
------------------------------------
Maryland 28.9 D +9 15.2%
Mississippi 37.4 R +8 9.0%
Louisiana 31.6 R +6 5.6%
Georgia 29.8 R +6 4.3%
Delaware 20.7 D +7 4.3%
New York 15.5 D +15 3.9%
South Carolina 28.6 R +7 3.3%
Alabama 26.3 R +9 2.1%
Illinois 14.8 D +7 1.5%
North Carolina 21.4 R +5 1.5%
New Jersey 13.6 D +8 1.5%
Virginia 19.6 R +3 1.4%
Michigan 14.1 D +4 1.1%
Florida 15.4 D +1 1.0%
Tennessee 16.8 R +3 0.8%
Arkansas 15.6 R +3 0.7%
Connecticut 9.5 D +9 0.6%
Massachusetts 6.1 D +14 0.5%
If the states were Congressional Districts, then the most likely one to elect a black Representative would be Maryland, which nevertheless has only a 15 percent chance of doing so. All other states are below 10 percent, and in most cases, the probabilities are very small indeed.
Of course, the states are effectively big Congressional Districts for purposes of electing senators and governors. Suppose you added up the probabilities of each state electing a black congressman, and then multiplied it by two since each state gets to elect two senators. How many black senators would you expect? You'd expect there to be about one -- or more precisely, 1.2. And you'd need to halve that number to estimate the expected number of black governors, which would be 0.6.
If one looks at the composition of the House of Representatives, then, one shouldn't be surprised that there are so few black senators and black governors, because states are far more heterogeneous (racially and otherwise) than individual Congressional Districts, and African-Americans are by and large not getting elected to the House outside of a certain number of highly black, largely homogeneous, and often heavily gerrymandered Congressional Districts in the urban North and the rural South.
The question, of course, is why African-Americans aren't getting elected in these districts. Racism is undoubtedly part of the answer, but it probably can't be a complete one now that the country has just elected Barack Obama to the White House.
It would be helpful to know where in the chain the link has been broken. Are African-Americans declining to become candidates in swing districts? Are they becoming candidates, but losing their party's nomination? Or are they winning the nomination, but losing in the general election? I don't have this sort of information handy, and so I cannot say for sure.
I suspect that a lot of the problem, however, is that as Congressional Districts have become more and more gerrymandered, leading to the creation of more and more majority-minority districts following the 1980 and 1990 censuses, the black political apparatus has become more and more 'ghettoized'. Black candidates have not had to develop a message that appeals to white voters, because most of them don't have very many white voters in their districts (about half the nation's African-American population is limited to the 60 blackest Congressional Districts). Nor do they have very many conservative voters in their districts, and so they have not had to develop a message that appeals to conservatives, even though the black population itself is far more diverse in its political views than is generally acknowledged.
Because they are not very representative of their states as a whole, moreover, these districts are also not likely to be very good launching pads for ascension to the Senate or to the governor's mansion. Do I think Jesse Jackson Jr. would have some trouble winning statewide office? I do -- but I also think that Pete Stark, who lives in a mostly white and Asian but extremely liberal district in the Bay Area, would have trouble becoming a senator in California.
Conversely, of course, the majority-minority districts drain black voters from surrounding districts, and so white politicians have not had to develop messages that appeal to black voters. This may be particularly problematic for Republicans, who went from winning 16-18 percent of the black vote for the Presidency in the 1970s to only about half of that now.
Democrats ought to be mindful of these things when redistricting occurs again after 2010, aggressively challenging Republicans on both the wisdom and the legality of creating ghettoized Congressional Districts. Majority-minority districts harm Democrats by creating surplus Democratic votes, and in the long run, they probably hurt African-Americans too.
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Nate Silver
@
8:51 PM
Granted, it's been an unusually active political weekend, but there's been surprisingly little reaction to today's
news that Virginia Governor Tim Kaine will become chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
My first reaction is that this is all very ... predictable. Kaine was facing a very challenging set of circumstances if he wanted to continue to hold elected office: Virginia has an unusual law that prevents governors from serving consecutive terms (although Kaine could, theoretically, run again in 2013), and meanwhile, both of Virginia's Senate seats are now filled by Democrats, and relatively young ones at that. Kaine's political aspirations for at least the next four years, therefore, were going to be pretty much limited either to this particular job or to a position in Barack Obama's cabinet. Given that Kaine was one of the first politicians anywhere to jump on the Obama bandwagon, it's not surprising that he was paid back.
Kaine does strike me as being a pretty good fit for this position, though.
He oozes a certain sort of optimistic sincerity that ought to play pretty well on television, where he's liable to be deployed ubiquitously on the Sunday Morning talk circuit, perhaps sometimes playing "good cop" to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. It seems probable that Kaine's role is going to be more about public relations than tactics, with the latter function to be fulfilled in large part by elements of the Obama apparatus itself.
The appointment will also give Kaine quite an opportunity to define himself as a candidate for national office, something that Kaine is plenty young enough to be thinking about.
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Nate Silver
@
10:33 AM
One of the quirks of the unresolved senate race in Minnesota and Illinois is that it really does the Democrats no good to have just one of Al Franken and Roland Burris seated -- they only gain ground if and when both get sworn in.
This is why. Presently the Democrats have a 57-member caucus, counting neither Burris nor Franken. However, because there are currently only 98 senators, this reduces the number of votes required to break a filibuster from 60 to 59. (Vacancies are not counted when calculating the number of votes needed to break a filibuster; three-fifths of 98 is 58.8, which rounds up to 59). Therefore, the Democrats would need two crossover votes to pass a cloture resolution.
But now, suppose that Franken gets seated but Burris doesn't. The Democrats add a member to their caucus, brining them to 58 members. However, with 99 senators rather than 98, the filibuster threshold goes back up to 60 votes (three-fifths of 99 is 59.4, but the rule in this instance requires rounding up). Thus, the Democrats remain two votes shy of breaking a filibuster.
Once the Democrats get senators seated in both Illinois and Minnesota, however, they'll have 59 votes out of the 60 they need, leaving them just one vote shy -- and Sens. Specter, Snowe, et. al. ripe for the picking.
So long as it looked as though the Minnesota race was going to take a long time to resolve, then, the Democrats really weren't giving anything up by failing to seat Burris -- his vote only really helps them if Franken has been seated too. Suddenly, however, with Franken having amassed a 225-vote lead on Norm Coleman, the landscape looks different. While the Coleman campaign is still suggesting that it will contest the election, one wonders what sort of appetite Coleman will have to accumulate more and more legal bills if he determines his situation is hopeless. At the very least, the likelihood has improved that the race will be resolved within two or three weeks, rather than two or three months.
So the stakes are a now a little higher for Harry Reid: Illinois, rather than Minnesota, now appears as though it may be the limiting factor in getting the Democrats into as advantageous a position as possible.
One option that hasn't been much discussed, by the way, is that of seating Burris temporarily and then holding a special election later on. This would allow the Democrats to sort of have their cake and eat it too, getting their 59th vote for several months while still creating a relatively clean break from Blagojevich. Of course, the Democrats would risk losing their seat in the special election, but perhaps the Republicans would reward them for that risk by agreeing to seat Franken while Coleman's election challenges are pending, something they seem disinclined to do so far.
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