Murphy Wins in NY-20: Let the Spin Begin!

Republican Jim Tedisco has conceded in the race to replace Kirsten Gillibrand in New York's 20th Congressional District, making Scott Murphy the newest Congressman from the Hudson Valley region.

Democrats, certainly, have reason to have an extra round of drinks tonight. But keep in mind the advice that I issued before:

From an analytical standpoint, whether Scott Murphy remains ahead of Jim Tedisco after absentee ballots are counted (and that is anything but a sure thing) is largely immaterial. [...] When elections are decided by hundredths of a percentage point, there is a lot of luck involved.

[The] default expectation is that a district like NY-20 should indeed be a toss-up -- which is exactly what we wound up getting. The contest turned out about the same .... as we might have expected it to had it been held on November 4th.

The status quo, in other words, was more or less preserved.

That is, first, whether Murphy lost by 400 votes or won by 400 votes does not significantly alter the "meaning" of this election. If he had won by 40,000 votes, or 14,000 votes, or maybe even 4,000 votes, that might have required a different interpretation. But winning by a fraction of a point is not much different than losing by a fraction of a point.

And second, a very narrow victory (by either candidate!) is about par for the course in this district based on what we saw in 2006 and 2008. Now, that probably does qualify as good news for the Democrats, since 2006 and 2008 were very good elections for them. The party controlling the White House almost always loses ground in off-year elections, so merely preserving the conditions of 2006/08 would be a very good result for the Democrats. However, as Michael Barone suggested, NY-20 is a somewhat atypical district in which Obama may have had relatively few coattails, and therefore may not be a leading indicator for what Democrats can expect in 2010. These results need to be balanced against others post-election elections like LA-2 and the Georgia Senate runoff, which contained pretty good news for Republicans.

If there is a better reason for Democrats to feel cheerful this Friday, it is from the 1Q Senate fundraising totals. I didn't realize this when I posted those figures yesterday, but Democrats performed way better than Republicans across the board in the First Quarter, raising a collective $31 million (or $27 million if one does not count Texas, where there is not officially a senate race yet) to the Republicans' $12 million.

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Race and the 2008 Election, Revisited

In February, I had the chance to travel to Palm Springs, California to participate in the TED conference, where I gave a 9-minute presentation on race and the 2008 election. In particular, I looked at whether race had negatively impacted Barack Obama's vote in states like Arkansas and Tennessee, where he performed worse than most polls anticipated and also worse, in some cases, than John Kerry had four years earlier.

My conclusion was that race probably had been a factor. In fact, it doesn't exactly take a genius to figure this out, because in about 35 of the 50 states, the exit polls explicitly asked voters whether race had been a factor in their decision. Although there were racist voters in every state -- and although there were also voters in every state who voted for Barack Obama because of his race -- respondents in more rural, less educated states (like Arkansas or Tennessee) were more likely to say that they had voted for John McCain (that is, against Barack Obama) because of the race of the candidates.

This does not mean, however, that we should simply throw up our hands in the face of apparent racism. Rather, the very fact that manifestations of racism are predictable probably also implies that racism is, at least to some extent, solvable. Anyway, I won't give away too many more details away about the talk, which is embedded below the fold.



By the way -- speaking at TED was really hard! Not because I'm shy in front of an audience -- I'm not particularly so -- but because the standards set by others talks is very, very high and most of the people speaking there have accomplished far, far more interesting things than I ever will. For a few of my favorite examples, see here, here and here.

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Messing with Texas

Last week, we discussed the political implications of Texas choosing to secede from the Union, something which -- as is apparently unknown to its governor Rick Perry -- it has no more and no less right to do than any of the other 49 states.

What Texas could choose to do, however, is to divide itself up into as many as five states, a privilege given to it as a condition of its annexation to the Union in 1845. What would Texas look like if it chose to do this? Would dividing a large, red state into five smaller, reddish states benefit Republicans in the Senate? In the Electoral College?

The answers are not so clear. But first things first, we need to come up with a logical way to divde Texas into five parts.

The principal challenge we encounter is that Texas' population is not distributed very evenly throughout the state. Texas has about 24 million people; divided into five equal shares, that would translate into roughly 4.8 million persons per entity. The Dallas-Fort Worth area alone, however, has more than 6 million people, while the Houston metro is at almost 6 million. When dividing Texas' population, therefore, we either have to cleave up these metro areas or accept the fact that the new states will have somewhat unequal populations. I choose to take the latter course, figuring that the good folks of Dallas and Houston probably wouldn't take kindly to having their friends, neighbors, and places of work split up across state lines.

My solution, then, which we already teased at the top of the article, would look roughly like this:


This is a map -- adapted from the New York Times -- of county-by-county results for Texas' presidential vote in 2008. I have divided Texas into five states along county boundaries, each of these new states would have a somewhat unique set of political and demographic characteristics.

New Texas
Capital: Austin
Other Cities: San Antonio, College Station, Killeen
Population (2008 Estimate): 4,254,922 (about as many as Kentucky)
Congressional Districts: 6
Electoral Votes: 8
Area: 24,784 square miles (9% of former Texas territory, about as large as West Virginia)
Demographics: 39% Hispanic, 8% Black, 3% Asian
Economic: 37% college degree (adults 25+); 15% below poverty line
2008 Vote (Excludes third parties): McCain 771,777 (50.2%), Obama 764,695 (49.8%)

Technically speaking, Texas does not have the right to divide itself up into five new states. Rather, it can spawn as many as four new states; whatever is left over would be called 'Texas', although for clarity I refer to this region as 'New Texas'. This portion of the state gets to keep the Texas moniker because it contains the current state capital, Austin, and because it is in the middle of Texas' present territory. However, it would actually the smallest, area-wise, of the five 'new' states, at about 25,000 square miles.

New Texas would, however, be a swing state, its eight electoral votes in play as Democrats fought to turn out enough votes in Austin and the Hispanic portions of San Antonio to fend off a heavy Republican advantage in the suburban and rural portions of Hill Country. In 2008, Democrats would have lost that battle by the slimmest of margins, with Obama being defeated by McCain by around 7,000 votes, although the advantage could easily have shifted from one party to the other depending on how exactly New Texas' boundaries were drawn.

Trinity
Capital: Dallas
Other Cities: Fort Worth, Arlington, Longview, Tyler, Texarkana
Population (2008 Estimate): 7,549,968 (about as many as Virginia)
Congressional Districts: 10 (would increase to 11 following 2010 reallocation)
Electoral Votes: 12 (would increase to 13 following 2010 reallocation)
Area: 30,648 square miles (12% of former Texas territory, about as large as South Carolina)
Demographics: 24% Hispanic, 14% Black, 4% Asian
Economic: 35% college degree (adults 25+); 13% below poverty line
2008 Vote (Excludes third parties): McCain 1,504,106 (57.6%), Obama 1,107,558 (42.4%)

This region's name, Trinity, is a sort of triple entendre, referring to the Trinity River that flows through much of the region, to the 'trinity' of cities (Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington) that make up the DFW metroplex, and as an homage of sorts to the region's undoubtedly fairly high numbers of religious voters. Trinity would be the wealthiest of the new states of Texas. It would also contain a relatively large African-American population.

Democrats, however, would have little chance of competing for its 12 electoral votes, at least in the near term. Although Barack Obama won Dallas County on November 4th, it was literally the only county that he won in the region, and overall the region would be a point or two redder than the current state of Texas is as a whole. Democrats might have a opportunity, however, at picking up one of its two Senate seats -- they currently hold about one-third of the senate seats in states where they are at roughly this degree of partisan disadvantage (think Arkansas or South Dakota).

Gulfland
Capital: Houston
Other Cities: Corpus Christi, Beaumont, Baytown, Galveston
Population (2008 Estimate): 7,494,089 (about as many as Virginia)
Congressional Districts: 10 (would increase to 11 following 2010 reallocation)
Electoral Votes: 12 (would increase to 13 following 2010 reallocation)
Area: 36,547 square miles (14% of former Texas territory, about as large as Indiana)
Demographics: 32% Hispanic, 16% Black, 5% Asian
Economic: 32% college degree (adults 25+); 16% below poverty line
2008 Vote (Excludes third parties): McCain 1,350,322 (56.1%), Obama 1,058,446 (43.9%)

This somewhat unusually-shaped state, which looks a bit like West Virginia rotated 90 degrees, would contain the Houston metroplex, while then meandering to include nearly the entirety of Texas' Gulf Coast, from the Louisiana border up to (but not including) Texas' southermost reaches in Cameron County. Gulfland's economy would likely be heavily dependant on offshore drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.

However, there are a few things for Democrats to like about Gulfland -- it would be a majority-minority state (although barely) and Barack Obama won Houston's Harris County in November (also barely). Gulfland might be incrementally more competitive than Trinity, although very likely only for the Senate and not the Presidency, as Democrats have been gradually losing ground in this part of the country.

Plainland
Capital: Lubbock
Other Cities: Amarillo, Waco, Abeline, Wichita Falls, Odessa, Midland, San Angelo
Population (2008 Estimate): 2,500,681 (about as many as Nevada)
Congressional Districts: 3 (would increase to 4 following 2010 reallocation)
Electoral Votes: 5 (would increase to 6 following 2010 reallocation)
Area: 106,853 square miles (41% of former Texas territory, about as large as Colorado)
Demographics: 27% Hispanic, 6% Black, 1% Asian
Economic: 29% college degree (adults 25+); 17% below poverty line
2008 Vote (Excludes third parties): McCain 656,934 (74.0%), Obama 229,949 (26.0%)

I have drawn Plainland's boundaries as generously as possible to extend beyond the Texas panhandle to include mid-size cities like Waco and Wichita Falls. Nevertheless, while containing more than 40 percent of Texas' former territory, Plainland would have barely more than 2.5 million people. It would also be an exceptionally conservative state -- quite possibly the most conservative in the country, as John McCain defeated Barack Obama here by nearly 3:1 last November. Five electoral votes, two Senators and three congressmen would be all but certain for the Republicans.

El Norte
Capital: El Paso
Other Cities: McAllen, Brownsville, Laredo
Population (2008 Estimate): 2,527,314 (about as many as Nevada)
Congressional Districts: 3 (would increase to 4 following 2010 reallocation)
Electoral Votes: 5 (would increase to 6 following 2010 reallocation)
Area: 63,083 square miles (24% of former Texas territory, about as large as Wisconsin)
Demographics: 85% Hispanic, 1% Black, 1% Asian
Economic: 22% college degree (adults 25+); 33% below poverty line
2008 Vote (Excludes third parties): Obama 360,516 (65.9%), McCain 186,609 (34.1%)

To our final region we give the ironic name El Norte -- ironic because, although 'El Norte' is the Spanish term for 'The North', this would actually be Texas' southermost (and westernmost) region. But it would be impossible to define El Norte by anything other than through reference to its Hispanic culture and its proximity to Mexico, as about 85 percent of its residents have Hispanic ancestry. El Norte would also be the poorest state in the Union, with one-third of its residents living below the poverty line.

Electorally speaking, El Norte wouldn't be highly competitive -- Democrats would win Presidential and Congressional elections going away, until and unless the GOP found some better way to reach out to Latino voters. It might, however, become a focal point for Republican angst about immigration, bilingualism, the welfare state, and other issues.

Net Effects on Balance of Power

Texas currently holds 34 electoral votes, 32 for its Representatives and two for its Senators. These electoral votes have been won by Republicans every year since 1980 and look to be relatively safely in the Republican column for at least the next two elections, although a Southern or Hispanic Democrat might have a chance at them in play given an excellent overall year for the party.

If Texas were divided into five states, its number of senators would increase from two to ten, and its number of electoral votes from 34 to 42. This would seem at first glance to benefit Republicans, but it actually might not if the state were divided along the lines I have suggested. This is because, if Democrats merely won El Norte (5 electoral votes), which they would be almost assured of doing, they would give up a net of 32 electoral votes to the Republicans (37 less 5), which is slightly better than the 34-vote gain that Republicans get by winning Texas currently. If Democrats also turned out enough voters in Austin to win New Texas (8 electoral votes), moreover, this would really put the Republicans at a disadvantage, as they'd then gain a net of just 16 votes (29 less 13) from Texas' former territories.

Texas will gain additional electoral votes -- probably four although possibly just three -- from the re-apportionment following the 2010 Census. Those additional electoral votes would be awarded, in order, to Trinity (giving it 13 electoral votes rather than 12), Gulfland (likewise), El Norte (6 rather than 5) and Plainland (ditto); New Texas would have some ways to go before picking up a 9th electoral vote.

The disposition of four of the ten Senate seats from the new states of Texas would be foregone conclusions; Republicans would win the two seats in Plainland, and Democrats would win two from El Norte. The senate seats in New Texas would most likely be split, while on average the Democrats would stand to pick off one of the four Senate seats between Trinity and Gulfland. This would give them a total of 4 seats to the Republicans' 6, a net loss of two seats that is no worse than the 2-0 disadvantage they are operating from currently. However, the shift in the senatorial balance of power would be slightly unfavorable to the Democrats overall, as the eight new senators created would increase the number of votes required to break a filibuster to 65, leaving the Democrats two votes short of a filibuster-proof majority, even if they managed to add four senators from the region. In addition, it is not out of the question that Democrats will gain Kay Bailey Hutchison's seat in the status quo if and when she decides to run for governor in 2010.

The effects on representation to the House would be relatively unchanged. Texas would neither gain nor lose House seats if it split itself five ways, although many Congressional District boundaries would need to be redrawn, which might benefit Democrats in the very near term as the 2003 redistricting plan was quite unfavorable to them.

Of course, one could easily draw Texas' new boundaries in any number of ways other than how I've drawn them. For example, if one wanted to create five states of roughly equal population, Fort Worth and Arlington could be split from Dallas and given to Plainland, while everything to the immediate west of Houston's city center (meaning suburbs like Sugar Land and Bellaire, as well as Gulf Coast cities like Corpus Christi) could be adjoined to El Norte. This would make El Norte somewhat competitive for Republicans, although Democrats would still probably be favored and the Republicans would be putting more electoral votes at risk. The net effects on the other new states would be relatively minor, although Democrats might become incrementally more competitive in Gulfland.

Overall, dividing Texas into five states would probably slightly hurt Democrats in the Senate while slightly helping them in the Electoral College. That's not much of a rationale for Republicans -- or anyone, really -- to mess with it.

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Why Doesn't Mike Huckabee Get More Respect?

Mike Huckabee, in spite of having a weekly show on Fox News, is getting very little attention these days. Over the last month, Huckabee has 271 Google News hits, as compared with 1,209 for Mitt Romney, 3,292 for Newt Gingrich, or 9,653 for Sarah Palin.

But when it comes time to actually poll these candidates, Huckabee comes out looking pretty good. A new PPP poll, for instance, for the 2012 (!) Presidential Election shows Huckabee being more competitive than his Republican rivals against Barack Obama.



Huckabee gets the highest percentage of Democratic support (17%) among any of the four candidates PPP tested. He also does the best job of consolidating Republican voters, getting 77% of their support.

Yes, it's ridiculously early to be polling an election four years into the future. Still, one wonders whether the Republican establishment will notice that the same things that make Huckabee unpopular with them (such as his 'unorthodox' positions on cap-and-trade and education) may make him more appealing to actual voters, and whether the media establishment will notice that he's every bit as likely to become President someday as someone like Palin.

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Senate Fundraising All-Stars

Although we're more than 18 months away from the November 2010 elections, incumbents and challengers for the United States Senate nevertheless raised at least $40 million in the just-completed 1Q fundraising period. Early fundraising totals are important for at least three reasons. Firstly, money can be exchanged for goods and services, such as top-notch talent to plan and run one's campaign. Secondly, money is often a proxy for "intangibles" that are otherwise hard to capture, such as organizational strength or enthusiasm within one's base. Thirdly, and particularly early in a campaign, a strong fundraising total can discourage potential opposition whereas a weak one might attract it.

Here then are what in my judgment were the strongest and weakest fundraising totals in the 1st Quarter, broken down into incumbent and challenger divisions. We do grade somewhat on a curve: incumbents, all else being equal, should raise more money than challengers, candidates from larger states more than those from smaller ones, and candidates in competitive races more than those with only token opposition. Fundraising totals were found at the excellent SenateGuru.com.

Most Impressive Fundraising Totals, Incumbent Division

1. Blanche Lincoln, D-Arkansas ($1,722,483). Lincoln has always relied far more on corporate PAC contributions than most Senators, and that revenue stream appeared to be in full force in the first quarter of 2009. Perhaps this was because corporations were soliciting her opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act, although Lincoln also received a small amount of donations from labor PACs like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Either way, this is an impressive fundraising total for a Senator from a relatively small state who has been considered a relatively safe bet for re-election. It may be exactly the sort of total that is intended to deter serious Republican (or Democratic?) opposition.

2. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-New York ($2,347,245). Raising money in New York isn't much more difficult than finding a good slice of pizza. Nevertheless, this is a tidy sum to raise for someone whom the general public feels quite ambivalently about. As elements of the Democratic establishment begin to consolidate around Gillibrand, it may discourage challenges both from the left and the right.

3. Harry Reid, D-Nevada ($2,234,309). Reid's position is not entirely dissimilar from Lincoln's -- someone who could quite possibly be vulnerable under the right circumstances, but who benefits from being in a state where the opposition party has an exceptionally weak bench. With Democrats fearing a beheading like the one that happened to Tom Daschle in 2004, Reid will receive plenty of protection from institutional donors.

4. John McCain, R-Arizona ($2,577,178). Slightly less than half of this is a carryover from McCain's Presidential campaign fund. Still, McCain's senate fundraising committee has more than $3.6 million in cash-on-hand. This is another reason why he probably doesn't have much to fear from Minuteman Project co-founder Chris Simcox, who will challenge McCain for the Republican nomination.

5. Byron Dorgan, D-North Dakota ($1,322,385). While this is not intrinsically a huge fundraising haul, it's quite good for a small-state Senator who seems unlikely to face serious opposition. It seems intended to deter a challenge from North Dakota's popular Republican governor, John Hoeven, who would probably still be an underdog to Dorgan but is the one GOPer who could keep things interesting.

Least Impressive Fundraising Totals, Incumbent Division

1. Roland Burris, D-Illinois ($845). No typo: Burris raised a grand total of eight-hundred and forty five dollars in the 1Q. In fact, as he's accumulated more than $100,000 in debt, his campaign is already in the red. Burris, whose favorable ratings are in the teens, will need a miracle to survive an extremely competitive Democratic primary.

2. Jim Bunning, R-Kentucky ($262,981). Bunning, who is receiving little support from the Republican establishment, is going to have an awfully difficult time drawing enough money in to mount a fully-functional campaign. He was out-fundraised in the 1Q by Lieutenant Governor Daniel Mongiardo ($429,553), who nearly defeated him in 2004 and is one of several prospective Democratic opponents this time around.

3. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma ($17,189). This is a conspicuously low figure from Coburn, who seems less than entirely certain about whether he wants to run for re-election. If Dr. No exits stage (far) right, that could encourage popular Democratic governor Brad Henry, whose term will be up in 2010, to enter the Senate derby.

4. Barbara Boxer, D-California ($905,354). This wouldn't be such a bad fundraising haul in Delaware or Kansas, but in California it could leave Boxer somewhat vulnerable, particularly to Carly Fiorina, whose experience as HP's CEO will more likely than not translate into strong fundraising.

5. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa ($290,540). Grassley has denied rumors of retirement and should coast to victory if he runs, but this fundraising total is a little tepid and suggests he may still be hedging his bets.

Most Impressive Fundraising Totals, Challenger Division

1. Bill White, D-Texas ($1,876,173). John Cornyn's public lamentations about losing a 60th seat to the Democrats seems in part intended as a last-ditch effort to prevent his colleague Kay Bailey Hutchison from bolting the Senate for the governor's race, where business-friendly Democrats like White, the current Mayor of Houston, may be extremely competitive in an open-seat race.

2. Kendrick Meek, D-Florida ($1,512,602). In contrast to the relatively, uh, meek fundraising totals for Republican candidates in Florida (FL-13's Vern Buchanan did the best at $526,104), Meek's solid 1Q should have Democrats feeling better about his chances, and may give him a head start against non-Charlie Crist Republicans, although Meek still has a ways to go to translate that cash into popular support.

3. Rob Portman, R-Ohio ($1,704,501). Portman was expected to be a strong fundraiser so this is not surprising, but he is increasingly looking like a mild frontrunner in the race to replace George Voinovich, even if polling has showed him slightly behind the Democratic opposition.

4. Alexi Gioannoulias, D-Illinois ($1,145,220). Making this total more impressive is that it was collected in less than a month after Giannoulias announced his candidacy. With Democrats wanting to avoid any scenario in which their primary vote is divided up enough ways to make Roland Burris competitive, it could give him some significant momentum in Illinois.

5. John Sharp, D-Texas ($2,516,833). An undisclosed amount of this total comes from a personal loan from Sharp, the former Texas Comptroller and currently a wealthy principal in a Dallas-based consulting firm. But it reiterates the point that there's a lot of Democratic money to chase down a prospective open seat in Texas.

Least Impressive Fundraising Totals, Challenger Division

1 (tie) Roy Blunt, R-Missouri ($559,620); Paul Hodes, D-New Hampshire ($301,997). These are not terrific numbers for two guys who are already in the Congress and who ought to be clear frontrunners for their party's respective nominations. Although Blunt's total was a little stronger than Hodes's, he is also more vulnerable than Hodes to opposition both within his party and outside of it, as Democratic frontrunner Robin Carnahan, Missouri's Secretary of State, raised more than $1 million last quarter.

3. Jennifer Brunner, D-Ohio ($207,236). Brunner's totals significantly lagged those of Lieutenant Governor Lee Fisher, who brought in $1,035,673 last quarter. With Democrats having good reason to fear Rob Portman's organizational strength, Brunner will be under substantial pressure to improve her fundraising or Buckeye State Democrats may lose their appetite for a competitive primary.

4. Peter King, R-New York ($130,568). While there's no particular reason for Democrats to worry about the bombastic King, who would be a heavy underdog against Gillibrand or any other Democratic opponent, this unimpressive fundraising total may deter him from even trying.

5. Marco Rubio, R-Florida ($254,498). Rubio, a telegenic young Cuban-American who is currently the Speaker of Florida's House of Representatives, is an attractive candidate on paper, but is having trouble gaining traction either in the polls or in the fundraising game.

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The Pope and the Planet

The institution of the Catholic Church is often unpopular with liberals for its position on issues like family planning, but it can also be a force for social progress.

In particular, the first thing I noticed from this Gallup survey on attitudes toward global warming is that the percentage of persons who think global warming is manmade appears to be much higher in predominately Catholic nations than in Protestant ones:



Countries are classified based on their majority religion as according to adherents.com, with an assist from InfoPlease in ambiguous cases. In majority-Catholic nations, on average, 65 percent of adults believe that global warming is manmade, versus 47 percent in Protestant ones (the figure for the United States, which has a Protestant majority, is 49 percent). Countries with an Orthodox majority are somewhere in the middle, as are those where a majority is Christian, but neither Catholic or Protestant theologies predominate. Buddhist countries also seem more inclined toward environmental protection; Islamic ones appear less so.

It can't be said for certain that religion itself is the cause of these differences, because we haven't controlled for other sorts of variables. For instance, there is some tendency for Catholic countries to be concentrated in warmer-weather latitudes, where people might naturally have more reason to be concerned about planetary warming. Still, the differences generally seem to hold even within particular regions; in (Catholic) Ireland for instance, 66 percent believe global warming is the result of human activity, versus 48 percent for the (Protestant) United Kingdom.

Poling in the United States, meanwhile, has suggested that Catholics are considerably more concerned about climate change than evangelical Protestants, although not more than mainline or black Protestant denominations, and less so than Jewish or atheist voters.

The Vatican, for its part, has generally been quite sympathetic toward concerns about climate change. Its adherents could be the swing votes in determining whether policies like cap-and-trade move forward, both in the United States and around the world.

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When Hope is the Enemy of Change

The environment is having a rough go of things in the polls.

A Pew survey in January showed a precipitous 15-point decline in the number of American adults who describe global warming as a 'top priority'. Meanwhile, a Gallup poll released last month showed a record number of Americans -- 41 percent -- who claimed that the seriousness of global warming is 'generally exaggerated'. And just last week, a Rasmussen poll had likely voters increasingly skeptical of the idea that global warming is manmade. (Although Rasmussen's results were quite out of step with other agencies' polling on the issue, they nevertheless represented a substantial decline from Rasmussen's previous polling of this question).



The conventional wisdom -- which I do not necessarily dispute -- is that when the economy declines, so does concern over global warming. People have other things on their minds, like losing their jobs or 401K's. They also may suffer from a sort of bad-news fatigue (there is still plenty of bad news on the environment).

The environment, however, may have another problem as well. Because of Barack Obama's election, many Americans assume that the environment is getting better, whether or not it actually is.

That is the result suggested by a Gallup poll released yesterday. Fully 41 percent of Americans now think the environment is getting better; this is up from 26 percent just last year.

When I first saw this result, I assumed the change was mostly triggered by conservatives, who are either tired of talking about environmental protection or are spending too much time reading George F. Will and his misleading interpretations of climate science. Alternatively, people may simply have short memories. Last year, 2008, was cooler than most recent ones, particularly in North America (see map above), although still very warm historically.

This environmental optimism is not being driven by conservatives, however: Republicans are essentially no more likely to take an optimistic position on the environment than they were a year earlier. Rather, it is being driven by independents and, especially, Democrats:





Note the 25-point jump in the number of Democrats who think the environment is getting better, which is paralleled by an 18-point bounce among unaffiliated voters. This is accompanied, not coincidentally, by extremely high expectations for what Barack Obama will be able to accomplish on behalf of the environment.

The environment, we should pause to mention, has caught a couple of breaks recently. The global economic slowdown has lowered the rate of industrial production, and therefore slowed the rate of increase in carbon output. Americans were driving less throughout most of 2008 (the trend has yet to really reverse itself in spite of a significant abatement in gas prices).

The Obama administration, moreover, has done some good for the environment through the powers of the Executive Branch -- giving the EPA greater authority to regulate carbon, while permitting states greater latitude to regulate vehicle emissions. The stimulus package passed in February included significant funding for green energy development, although much less than some advocates were hoping for.

These actions, however, even if successful, merely mean that the environment is getting worse less quickly, not that it's actually improving. Yes, perhaps, that is a semantic distinction to the average American responding to one of these polls; it is certainly not one to the planet.

I think there is something else here, however, and it is potentially very dangerous to the Administration. Namely, there is the risk that Americans assume -- by Obama's mere presence in the White House -- that more is being done to help the environment than actually is. "This was the moment", Obama told the country in a speech last June after winning the Democratic nomination, "when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal". Some Americans may be taking that too literally.

Passing cap-and-trade -- or carbon tax -- legislation is not going to be easy in this economic environment, with Republicans like John McCain having begun campaigning against it, Blue Dog democrats expressing skepticism, and innumerate editorials in small-town newspapers bemoaning its effect on local businesses. There may be risks to advocates of environmental reform in attempting to scare the public into submission -- but for the time being, there are probably greater risks in complacency.

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Are the Republicans Going Galt?

Are Republicans turning into libertarians?

Last week's Tea Party protests had their origins in the libertarian movement. Although many conservative groups were eager to co-opt their purpose, the core of the message -- anti-tax, anti-big government -- was about as libertarian as it gets. Participation in the rallies was also proportionately quite high in areas like New Hampshire and the Interior West, which are traditionally more sympathetic toward libertarian concerns.

We can argue about the significance of the tea paries and we can argue about whether they represent the way forward for Republicans. But they are just one manifesation of what seems like an increasing drift toward libertariansim within the party. Consdier also:

-- A new Gallup survey suggests that 80 percent of Republicans think that big government is a bigger threat to the government than big business, versus just 10 percent who think the opposite. This represents an enormous partisan split from Democrats, among whom a majority think that big business is the greater threat. Moreover, the partisan split has grown significantly since 2006; it has now become almost a definitional issue for Republicans.



-- The Republican alternative budget could be considered a somewhat radical experiment in libertarianism, dramatically slashing taxes while promising to balance budgets -- an achievement that would only be possible if the size of the government were cut enormously. Meanwhile, the Republicans, with help from some Democrats, stuck into the budget debate an amendment to curb the estate tax, which will cost the government about $100 billion in revenue annually.
-- Republican insiders are increasingly uncertain about whether gay marriage, which was such an important issue for the party over 2000-2004, is any longer a winning issue at all for them. Reaction to the Iowa Supreme Court decision was surprisingly muted in conservative circles. Meanwhile, at least one prominent Republican presidential candidate, Utah's John Huntsman, has come out in favor of civil unions (although not gay marriage itself).
-- If gay bashing is becoming less in vogue among Republicans, it's unclear which other cultural issues -- areas where Republicans sometimes favor bigger, more statist government -- might take its place. Yes, there's always abortion. But I'm surprised there hasn't been more anti-immigrant sentiment, as often happens when jobs are scarce; perhaps the Republicans' poor performance among Latino voters on November 4th might have scared them away from that issue. Marijuana legalization seems to be gaining some traction (although more among pundits than policymakers), but about half the conservative commentariat (see Glenn Beck, for instance, who calls himself a libertarian) seems to embrace it.

Maybe you see a pattern there and maybe you don't. But of the roughly four different pathways the Republicans could take in the post-Obama universe -- toward Ron Paulesque libertarianism, toward Sarah Palinesque cultural populism, toward Mike Huckabeesque big-government conservatism, or toward Olympia Snowesque moderation/ good-governmentism -- the libertarian side would seem to have had the best go of things in the First 100 Days.

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Plurality of New Yorkers Support Same Sex Marriage

As embattled Governor David Patterson seeks to push a gay marriage bill through the New York State Senate, two new polls suggest a plurality and perhaps outright majority of New York State residents support full marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples. One poll, from Siena College, shows an outright majority of 53 percent of New York registered voters in favor of same sex marriage, with 39 percent opposed. The other poll, of 500 adults from SurveyUSA, has same-sex marriage favored by a 49-44 plurality.

A comparison of the demographic crosstabs from these polls, which are interesting if somewhat predictable, is produced below.



(Note: SurveyUSA's age-based demographics are interpolated slightly to match Siena's).

The interesting finding here -- although small sample size caveats apply -- is that same-sex marriage is narrowly favored even by upstate New Yorkers. That could place pressure upon upstate Democrats David Valesky of Oneida, Darrel Aubertine of Cape Vincent, and Bill Stachowski of Buffalo, who have voiced opposition to full-fledged marriage rights, to change their positions. Bronx-based Democrat Ruben Diaz Sr., however, who is a Pentecostal minister, is considered somewhat intractable on the issue, and so Patterson will need to find support from at least a couple of Republicans in addition to trying to lobby the upstate Democrats. Democrats have a very narrow 32-30 advantage in the Senate; New York's lower chamber, the State Assembly, is expected to pass the bill easily.

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When Does 'Close' Become Too-Close-to-Call?

The Wall Street Journal's Editorial Board, whose previous coverage of the Minnesota recount has tended to reflect a lack of command of the facts and circumstances of the case, is now back for another round, this time pressing for a re-vote:

Even after the recount and panel-findings, the 312-vote margin separating the two men equals about .01% of the 2.9 million votes cast. Even without any irregularities, this is as close to a "tie" as it gets. And there have been plenty of irregularities. By the end of the recount, the state was awash with evidence of duplicate ballot counting, newly discovered ballots, missing ballots, illegal voting, and wildly diverse standards as to which votes were counted. Any one of these issues was enough to throw the outcome into doubt. Combined, they created a taint more worthy of New Jersey than Minnesota. [...]

Another solution is to hold a special Senate election. Minnesota law does not specifically provide for such a runoff. However, the U.S. Constitution's 17th amendment does provide states with a roadmap for filling "vacancies," which might be a legal starting point for a do-over. Even before the shifting standards of the contest trial, the St. Paul Pioneer Press looked at the ballot-counting evidence and called for a revote. It could be that this is where the court case is leading in any event.

Is a 312-vote margin "as close to a 'tie' as it gets?". Well, of course not. A 311-vote margin would be closer to a tie than a 312-vote margin, and a 310-vote margin would be even closer. Plenty of elections have been closer than Minnesota's, including the somewhat infamous New Hampshire Senate election of 1974, when the Senate actually did order a re-vote. In that case, different recounts yielded different conclusions, with the Democrat -- who had lost the Election Night count -- winning the first recount by 10 votes and the Republican winning the second recount by 2 votes. Two votes is a heck of a lot closer to a tie than 312.

The practical question is at what point there is significant doubt about which candidate in fact had more legal ballots cast on his behalf. If I spilled a jar filled with several thousand red and blue marbles onto the floor and asked you to count them, there would probably be some margin of error in your calculations. Maybe you'd group the marbles into piles of 20, but get tired at some point and build one pile that contained 19 marbles, or 21. Maybe you'd return from a lunch break to think you'd counted a certain pile of marbles when in fact you hadn't -- or maybe you'd wind up counting those marbles twice. Your estimates would undoubtedly be pretty good -- probably very good -- but they might not be exact. If there were a roughly (but not exactly) equal number of red and blue marbles and I wanted you to tell me which type was more abundant, you might occasionally get the answer wrong.

There is some point, in other words, at which an election is so close that it is subject to tabulation errors that might change its outcome. In such cases, I think the argument for a re-vote is reasonably strong.

However, the margin of separation between the candidates might need to be very small indeed before the risk of tabulation errors becomes sufficient to alter the outcome of an election. Suppose, for example, that you have an election in which 3 million votes were cast -- about as many as were cast in Minnesota. Suppose furthermore that you know you've made some mistakes in counting -- but you didn't know which candidates you'd made them on behalf of.

If we assume that tabulation errors are unbiased -- meaning they're equally likely to have been made on behalf of either candidate -- and independent -- meaning that the probability of one ballot having been miscounted does not affect the probability of the next one being miscounted -- then we can estimate the chance of a mis-called election based on a binomial distribution:



Given these assumptions, elections are actually fairly resistant to tabulation errors (even if such occurring at relatively high rates). This is because in most cases the errors will cancel out: you'll miss some blue marbles but also some red marbles. For instance, given a 5% error rate -- that would be 150,000 miscounted ballots (!) out of 3 million -- a 900-vote lead should hold up about 99% of the time given these assumptions. At more plausible (i.e. lower) rates of error, leads in the low triple-digits, or even the double digits, are generally quite robust.

Indeed, while Election Night tabulations from machine methods are relatively error-prone (although the optical scan ballots that Minnesota uses are far better than alternatives like punch cards), the rates of tabulation errors following manual recounts, as has occurred in Minnesota, are presumably fairly low. I'm not sure exactly how low they are, because there have been very few cases where there have been multiple manual recounts in a given election -- but in the New Hampshire Senate race of 1974, the one that did trigger a re-vote, there was a net swing of 12 votes between the first and second recounts.

On the other hand, the assumptions that I made above are probably optimistic. Machine counts, for example, are clearly not unbiased, because different types of voters are more likely to complete ballots that are misread by machines, and different types of voters are also more likely to have voted for particular candidates. Inexperienced voters, for example, are more likely to have filled out their ballots imperfectly in ways that might confuse a machine; in Minnesota inexperienced voters were also more likely to have voted for Al Franken.

Manual recounts may produce results that are closer to unbiased, but they probably aren't perfectly so. Different people will be responsible for conducting the recount in different precincts and counties throughout the state, and they may also have different levels of competence at doing so. If the candidates have differing areas of strength and weakness across the different precincts, which of course they will, this could introduce bias.

Moreover, the risk of tabulation errors is probably not independent from one ballot to the next. Rather, the errors would tend to be clustered. A whole stack of ballots, for instance, might go missing (as happened in at least one instance in Minnesota), or might be counted twice.

Thus, the risk is miscalling the election would be higher than indicated under the idealized conditions presented above. One could presumably convene a panel of statistical experts to come up with some more robust estimates of the probability for a miscalled election, by stress-testing the ballot counts for these and other types of contingencies. My guess is that they would find that a 312-vote lead following a manual recount was nevertheless very, very safe, but I do not know for sure.

The Journal, however, is not calling for a re-vote in response to the risk of tabulation errors; rather, they are calling for one in response to what they presume to be legal errors. This strikes me as a much more dangerous precedent. Clearly, courts are not infallible, especially under the pressure of an extremely close election. But, to build in a fudge factor for errors in judgement by hte courts is another thing entirely, and would seem to undermine the rule of law. If a court finds a defendant guilty of a serious offense, it does not then say "you know what, we're not really certain about this, so we're only going to sentence the defendant to probation rather than life in prison".

Moreover, attempting to apply this principle would be problematic. You would need to deal with a world full of counterfactuals -- alternate rulings that the courts could presumably have made. You would then need some way to differentiate "reasonable" counterfactuals from unreasonable ones -- for example, if the courts had determined that no ballots should be counted from Minneapolis, this would dramatically alter the outcome of the election, but no court would issue such a ruling. Finally, you would need to demonstrate that from among the set of reasonable counterfactuals, some subset of them would have altered the outcome of the election. This is far from apparent in Minnesota. The Coleman legal team never really attempted to argue for a particular standard of ballot-counting. Instead, their approach was ad-hoc -- they presented a series of ballots to the elections panel and said "here, count these ones!". Although there are various reasons why this might have been their approach -- incompetence, for instance -- another interpretation is that the Coleman team knew it was likely to lose under any and all reasonable and consistent standards for ballot counting.

The Coleman campaign needs more than a winning legal argument, in other words; it also needs a legal argument that would win it the election. Unless it can be demonstrated that such an argument exists, the Journal's case for a re-vote is moot.

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National Elections Getting Closer; Individual Congressional Elections Getting Less Close

Presidential elections have been closer in the past few decades than they were for most of American history. Here's a list of all the U.S. presidential elections that were decided by less than 1% of the vote:

1880
1884
1888
1960
1968
2000

Funny, huh? Other close ones were 1844 (decided by 1.5% of the vote), 1876 (3%), 1916 (3%), 1976 (2%), 2004 (2.5%).

Four straight close elections in the 1870s-80s, five close elections since 1960, and almost none at any other time.

At the congressional level, however, NY-20 notwithstanding, close elections are less and less likely to be close. Here's a graph showing, for each decade of the past century, the proportion of elections each to the House and Senate that were closer than 51.0%-49.9% of the two-party vote:

Close elections (in percentage terms) have always been more common in the Senate than the House. (We can't take the comparison back before the 1910s, because it was during that decade that direct election for senators was implemented.) In addition, the rate of close elections in the House has declined steadily over the century. If you count closeness in terms of absolute votes rather than percentages, then close elections become even rarer, due to the increasing population. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, there were typically over thirty House seats each election year that were decided by less than 1000 votes; in recent decades it's only been about five in each election year.

The decline of House elections each year is no surprise; as Nate and I discuss, the increasing incumbency advantage has reduced the number of close elections; beyond this, localities are more politically homogeneous than they used to be, and with the nationalization of political parties, it is harder for candidates to tack to the center in individual district races. For the Senate, these factors are present, but to a lesser extent. Gerrymandering sounds like a potential explanation--after all, House districts get redrawn and Senate districts don't--but there's actually no evidence that redistricting reduces competitiveness of legislative districts on the average. (I'll refer you to Ansolabehere and Snyder's 2002 paper for more discussion of these issues.)

P.S. We got our data from various sources, including some old data files that I can't remember who prepared, also from CQ, see for example here.

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