The Republican Party ID Decline, Revisited

Mark Blumenthal at Pollster.com has taken my idea and done it one better, plotting self-reported partisan identification not just for the six surveys that I identified earlier, but for all national polls since September 1, 2008 that have published such data.



Mark's chart shows less of a decline in Republican party identification than mine did -- perhaps three points since Election Day, and no visible decrease since Inauguration Day.

More data is almost always better, and this is probably no exception. The one modification I might suggest is to limit the analysis to surveys that are published on a regular basis, such that trendlines are easier to derive. The eleven national surveys that have at least five observations in Mark's dataset are: Rasmussen, NBC/WSJ, Diageo/Hotline, CBS/NYT, Democracy Corps, ABC/Post, FOX, Gallup, Pew, AP-GfK and Ipsos. If we limit the analysis to these organizations only, we see what looks like a hybrid between Mark's chart and my original, with a slightly more noticable decline by Republicans since Election Day and a slightly larger increase by independents:



While these numbers aren't good for Republicans, I have somewhat more question now about whether this is a new phenomenon, or this is the continued manifestation of the same phenomenon -- the broad distaste for the Republican Party that we have been observing since at least mid-2006. If the "true" number of Republicans is about 25 percent, then surveys that end up on the low side of the margin of error, or which have Democratic-leaning house effects, are not infrequently going to show "shockingly" low numbers of Republicans, such as 21 percent, 20 percent, or even 18 percent. On the other hand, other regularly-published national surveys show the Republicans' numbers in the high 20's or low 30's.

It's probably also the case that whether Republican party identification is in fact continuing to decline or merely flatlining at a low number is somewhat immaterial from the standpoint of the party's strategy. If only a quarter or so of the country identifies itself as Republican by the time we get to November 2010, the Democrats will probably gain another couple of seats in the Senate (principally because of the numerous retirements from Republican incumbents), while maintaining a large enough majority in the House to essentially give them carte blanche -- they will also have the White House through at least January, 2013, of course. Partisan identification ebbs and flows -- it does so more than many Democrats, who have recently had the better of things, would like to acknowledge. But the ebbs and flows can sometimes be years or even decades long and the GOP probably needs a better strategy than doing the same old thing and merely hoping for a reversal of momentum.

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Is Sestak the Right Choice for the Left?

Progressives are right to want a primary opponent for Arlen Specter -- or at least to keep alive the possibility of one. As Chris Bowers notes, Specter has already cast two important votes against his party in his brief tenure as a Democrat, first on mortgage bankruptcy "cramdown" legislation, and then on the budget conference report, where he was joined only by Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh and Robert Byrd joined. Nor has Specter changed his position on the Employee Free Choice Act -- a measure which he had supported in past years but revealed in March that he would attempt to filibuster.

It's very early in Arlen Specter's career as a Democrat, and we will have to see his positioning evolves on other agenda items. Past party-switchers have tended to change their voting patterns in relatively meaningful ways following their conversions. It seems plausible that Specter would be reluctant to change his positions on issues which were already percolating on the Senate's agenda at the time of his party switch, and on which he had already articulated a position, but that he will become more liberal in the coming months.

For the time being, however, progressive Democrats have ample reason to be wary of Specter. Their problem is that Joe Sestak, the PA-7 Congressman who has refused to rule out a primary challenge, might not be any better from the standpoint of progressive policy.

In fact, it's plausible that he could be a bit worse. ProgressivePunch.org ranks Sestak as the 158th most progressive member out of 221 non-freshman Democrats, and notes that he's an order of magnitude or so more conservative than you'd expect of a Congressman from his Democratic-leaning district. Sestak's DW-NOMINATE score in the 110th Congress was -.287 on a scale that runs from -1 for extremely liberal to 0 for moderate; this is actually slightly more conservative than the score that we'd projected for Specter, which was -.303. The National Journal, moreover, found that Sestak took the liberal position only 63 percent of the time in the votes they tracked in 2007.

Nor would a primary challenge be without its downsides. For one thing, Sestak would have to give up his seat in the House in order to challenge Specter. Although the Democrat would still be favored in an open seat race in PA-7, which is 3 points more Democratic than the nation as a whole, giving up the incumbency advantage might reduce their odds of retaining the seat from, say, 95 percent to 75 percent.

There is also the possibility that Sestak would be more likely than Specter to lose to a Republican in November. I don't think this is a particularly strong worry for Democrats in this instance, since (1) Sestak is a charismatic and talented politician, (2) Sestak is a good fundraiser and (3) the probable Republican nominee -- Pat Toomey -- is much too conservative for Pennsylvania's electorate. Then again, it's precisely the fact that the Republicans seem inclined to nominate Toomey -- who may be borderline unelectable in November 2010 -- that raises the opportunity cost to progressives of nominating a moderate, whether it be Sestak or Specter.

Two other points to bear in mind, one of which makes a primary challenge more attractive for Democrats and the other of which has ambiguous effects. The first point is that the mere prospect of a credible primary challenge (and Sestak is a credible opponent) may have some "bluff" value, whether or not it actually succeeds and in fact whether or not it is actually executed upon. So long as Specter has reason to fear a primary challenge, it will push him toward the median of the Democratic electorate in Pennsylvania, which is probably about at the point occupied by Bob Casey Jr. (DW-NOMINATE score of -.401).

The second point is that Specter is 79 years old. Moreover, however exceptionally admirable his commitment to public service while undergoing chemotherapy for Hodgkin's lymphoma, he is not in the best of health. There is a fairly significant chance that he would not be able to complete his sixth term.

If Specter's term were to end early, then Pennsylvania's governor would pick a replacement, with a special election to follow at the next even-numbered November election. As Democratic incumbent Ed Rendell is term-limited, the governorship will be an open seat race, in which Democrats are probably favored but perhaps not overwhelmingly. Would Democrats prefer the safety of being "locked in" to Sestak for the next decade or two? Or would the they take the gamble a special election would represent as an opportunity to nominate and elect a more liberal candidate -- particularly if they had retained the governor's mansion?

What's clear is that a lot of these questions would be easier to resolve if Democrats were to select a more liberal primary challenger than Sestak. This is perhaps easier said than done, since the Democrats in Pennsylvania's congressional delegation tend to be quite conservative, and since many of the more prominent statewide officeholders are liable to run for governor instead. One intriguing possibility might be Franco Harris, the former Pittsburgh Steelers star who was an Obama delegate at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, and whose name recognition might allow him to be competitive on a relatively limited budget.

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Bunning Retirement Might Not Save GOP in Kentucky

I know that everyone's talking about that other retirement. But this one could potentially be big news too: Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning giving up on his bid for-election in 2010.

It's widely assumed that if the retirement goes through (and so far, the reporting has been a bit speculative), that this will be a boon to the GOP's chances of retaining their seat in Kentucky, with Bunning replaced most likely by Kentucky Secretary of State Tray Grayson. I don't really debate this, particularly after Bunning raised barely more than $250,000 in the first quarter, and had been even with or slightly or behind most Democratic opponents in recent polls.

Grayson, however, hasn't been polling much better. A PPP poll (.pdf) earlier this month but Grayson 6 points behind U.S. Rep. Ben Chandler, and 4 points behind Attorney General Jack Conway, although he was 4 points ahead of another declared entrant, Lieutenant Governor Daniel Mongiardo (who narrowly lost to Bunning in 2004). A Research 2000 poll, meanwhile, had Grayson essentially tied against the three likely Democratic opponents.

These polls may slightly underestimate Grayson's standing because his name recognition is a bit weaker than that of some of his Democratic rivals. What people might not realize, however, is that Kentucky, while being a somewhat conservative state, is also still a rather Democratic state, at least in terms of is voters' declared party preferences. Gallup gives Democrats a 13-point party identification advantage in Kentucky (counting "leaners"), which places it roughly in the middle of the pack nationally. No, Kentucky is not going to vote for certain types of Democrats -- particularly liberal, northern Democrats named "Barack Obama" who gave the state the cold shoulder. But it elects plenty of moderate-to-conservative Democrats to statewide and national offices, like its Governor Steve Beshear, as well as Mongiardo, Conway and Chandler. Democrats also have a 65-35 advantage in the Kentucky State House, although Republicans control the State Senate.

This race, in other words, looks to be a toss-up whether or not Bunning retires, perhaps tilting slightly for or against Grayson based on which Democrat wins that party's nomination.

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Two National Polls, for First Time, Show Plurality Support for Gay Marriage

Good news, evidently, comes in twos for the gay rights movement. A pair of new polls shows for the first time a plurality of Americans in support of gay marriage, although they are contradicted by some other recent evidence.

There are two basic types of polls on gay marriage. The first type of poll simply asks the respondent whether or not they approve or disapprove of gay marriage; the second type gives them a three-way choice between gay marriage, civil unions and no legal recognition.

Up until now, according to the database compiled by PollingReport.com, the closest gay marriage had come to achieving a plurality on the first type of poll was from a Time/SRBI survey in August, 2008, in which likely voters were evenly divided 47-47 on their support for gay marriage rights. However, a new poll from ABC News and the Washington Post gives gay marriage an outright plurality, with 49 percent of adults supporting gay marriage and 46 percent opposed.

In the second type of poll -- the "three-way" poll where the respondent may pick civil unions rather than marriage or nothing -- support for gay marriage is typically slightly lower, as about 5-10 percent of respondents appear to have a preference order of civil unions > gay marriage > nothing, where gay marriage is preferred to nothing, but civil unions are preferred to both alternatives. Gay marriage had yet to poll a plurality in this type of survey either -- until this week, when a CBS/NYT poll put support for full marriage rights at 42 percent, versus 25 percent for civil unions and 28 percent for no legal recognition. This represents a significant increase from an identical CBS/NYT poll in March, where the numbers were 33 percent for marriage, 27 percent for civil unions, and 35 percent for no recognition.

Although these polls represent cheerful news for supporters of gay marriage, they are contradicted by some other recent evidence. In particular, a Quinnipiac poll, also released today, had just 38 percent in favor of gay marriage against 55 percent opposed. Quinnipiac did show a 57 percent majority in support of civil unions.

Two other polls on gay marriage had been conducted in December, meanwhile, following the passage of Proposition 8 in California: a CNN poll put support for gay marriage at 44 percent against 55 percent opposed, and a Newsweek poll put support at 39 percent against 55 percent opposed.

In addition, both the CBS/NYT and ABC/Post polls contained a very low number of Republicans, although because that trend has been reflected in several other recent surveys, it is hard to tell whether it is a statistical fluke or represnts some sort of emerging trend.

Personally, I think it is somewhat unlikely that gay marriage has in fact achieved plurality support, although I suspect it has come fairly close, and momentum clearly seems to be on its side. A summary of all gay marriage and civil unions polling since the passage of Proposition 8 follows below.

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Party of No(body)?

Republican party identification, which had already been at fairly low levels, in fact appears to have slumped further since Inauguration Day, although the gains are being had not among Democrats but by voters who identify themselves as independent.

Several polls conducted within the last week have attracted attention for their notably low levels of self-reported Republican voters. In particular, ABC/WaPo reported the number of Republicans as 21 percent, CBS/NYT at 20 percent, NBC/WSJ also at 20 percent (not counting "leaners"), and Pew at 22 percent.

FOX, by contrast, which generally reports higher numbers of Republicans and Democrats but fewer independents, put the number of GOPers at 30 percent (although this nevertheless represents a decline from most of their recent polling). Rasmussen put the number of Republicans at 33.2 percent in March, essentially unchanged from recent months; they have yet to report their results from April.

The following chart combines the numbers from these six organizations since August 2008, while adding LOESS regression trendlines.



Per the LOESS curves, the number of Republicans has decreased by about 5 percent since Inauguration Day, from roughly 27 percent to 22 percent. The number of Democrats has also decreased slightly, however, from 38 percent to 35-36 percent. The gains have been made by independents, whose numbers have increased from 30 percent to about 36 percent, such that there are now roughly equal numbers of independents and Democrats.

The shifts in the number of Republicans and independents appears to be a somewhat recent phenomenon, dating not from Inauguration Day itself but rather from the past 50 days or so. My guess is that it is related to increasing -- if possibly unwarranted -- optimism about the economy, perhaps coupled with the GOP's lack of focus in articulating an agenda.

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Diseases and Calcuations of Social Network Size

Nate asks some questions here which can actually be answered by some research that Tian Zheng, Matt Salganik, and I published a couple years ago, in our article, "How Many People Do You Know in Prison?: Using Overdispersion in Count Data to Estimate Social Structure in Networks."

Just a few key bits:

- The average number of people known is more like 750 than 290. We actually estimate the 750 using the same survey that the earlier researchers used to get the 290, but we discuss why 290 is too low an estimate. (In short, it is based on recall of common names such as Michael and Robert, which are under-recalled compared to rarer names and attributes.)

- I doubt that anything close to 3.2% of Americans really know someone who's gotten sick with swine flu. The trouble is that survey estimates of the frequency of rare events are contaminated with misreporting errors. See here for a discussion by David Hemenway of this phenomenon in an unrelated context.

- The pattern of recall in a social network depends a lot on the attribute being asked about. In this example, I may very well know 750 people, but 600 of these are people I don't see very often, and if they have swine flu, I'd have no idea. On the other side, there are all sorts of people I don't really know, but if I heard they got swine flu, I might count it. In our paper, we found that people overreported the number of people they knew who had died in auto accidents in the past year, while underreporting people who had AIDS. (See Figure 5b on page 416 of the linked article.)

In summary, I like the idea of using this kind of indirect network data to learn about prevalence, but I'm afraid that the survey response is so unreliable as to make the estimate close to useless--except as a measure of what people's perceptions are of swine flu prevalence

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Six Degrees of Swine Flu

SurveyUSA has some interesting numbers out on swine flu. According to a poll of 1,200 American adults that they conducted yesterday, 3.2 percent -- 38 of 1,200 -- know someone who has gotten sick with the swine flu.

Three percent does not sound like a whole lot -- but when you back the numbers out, it's really quite something. The U.S. population, at the time I began writing this article, was 306,318,220 people. If we extrapolate out the SurveyUSA data, this implies that 9,700,077 Americans know somebody who has swine flu.

So if 9,700,077 Americans know someone who has swine flu, how many people actually have the swine flu? This is actually not all that straightforward to calculate. But if we assume that: (a) the average person knows about 290 others, as academic studies have found, and that (b) nobody knows more than one person with swine flu (unlikely in practice, since disease outbreaks are localized phenomena), this would imply that 33,449 people in fact have the swine flu! This would come as a surprise to the CDC, which currently knows or suspects between 400-500 cases of swine flu in the United States.

Except that -- this result is almost certainly illusory (or at least I hope that it is). But it's interesting to contemplate why it's illusory. I see at least six probabilities, which are arranged here from least interesting to most interesting:

1. Some people were lying on the survey;
2. Some people pressed the wrong button when completing the survey (SurveyUSA's polls are conducted via an automated script);
3. People are mistaking all sorts of things which aren't swine flu -- fevers, food poisoning, hangovers, etc. -- for swine flu, and reporting results accordingly.
4. Some people interpret the definition of "know" very liberally, such as someone they've heard about on the news. Do I know Barack Obama? Do I know Susan Boyle? As far as I'm concerned, I don't know them -- I merely know of them. But some people might answer this question differently.
5. The average person, in the Internet era, has ways to remain in contact with a lot more than 290 other people.
6. When something truly extraordinary happens, second and perhaps even third-order social networks come into play. If someone in your network of 290 people won the lottery, you would probably hear about it almost immediately. But not only that -- if anyone in your network of 290 people knew someone who won the lottery, it would be an interesting enough topic of conversation that you would probably hear about this too (and you might still tell a pollster that you "knew" someone who had won the lottery). This might even hold if any of your 290 contacts knew someone who knew someone who had won the lottery.

This same principle would probably hold for the swine flu. If you work in a large company, and the brother of someone in another division in the company (whom you'd never met personally) has come down with swine flu, there's a pretty good chance that you'd hear about it. Would you then tell a pollster that you knew someone who had swine flu? Quite possibly you would, even though under ordinary circumstances you'd have never known anything about this person. If this person got engaged, or got into a bad car wreck, or enlisted in the Armed Forces, you'd probably never hear about it. But if they got the swine flu, you very well might. It's not so much who you know, in other words, but what you know about them, that makes this sort of result plausible.

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But Now He's *Our* No-Good, Dirty Rotten Bastard

One criticism of Arlen Specter I don't quite get, at least coming from liberals, is that his party switch reflects poorly on his character. Glenn Greenwald and Jon Chait, who don't actually agree on all that much, respectively call him "soul-less", and an "unprincipled hack".

Of course this is true, in so far as it goes. Specter has not been shifting to the left gradually over time, as one might expect from someone whose ideology was slowly "maturing". Rather, according to DW-NOMINATE data, he's actually moved slightly to the right in recent years, along with the rest of the Republican Party.

But if you're a Democrat, would you really want Arlen Specter to be anything other than a soulless, unprincipled hack? If Specter were more concerned about self-consistency -- and less about self-preservation -- he'd probably still be a Republican right now. Moreover, Democrats had better hope that Specter is as nakedly power-hungry as possible, because his best move from the standpoint of self-preservation is probably not merely to become a Democrat but to become a reasonably liberal one, along the lines of Bob Casey Jr.

There are, of course, two things you can do with a politician whose views you disagree with. The first thing is to elect him out of office; the second is to apply pressure -- whether moral, intellectual, political, or financial -- to get him to change those positions. In this case, the pressure placed upon Specter seems to have worked! True, we do not yet know exactly which positions he'll be changing along with his party label. He says he won't be changing his position on EFCA, for instance -- ironically, this is probably because he just flip-flopped that very issue last month. But the odds are very high that he'll be changing on at least some, reasonably important issues.

Voters, of course -- and human beings in general -- have a strong revulsion to inconsistency. When I'm trying to decide who to vote for, I factor in not only the articulated positions of the candidate but also an assessment of how likely he is to change them (in ways that I do not like). Past history weights heavily here. I never warmed to John Edwards, for example, because the campaign he was running in 2008 -- although I preferred his positions on issues like health care to the other candidates -- was fairly inconsistent with the one he had run in 2004, and far more inconsistent with the fairly conservative voting record he had accumulated in the Senate.

Then again, there is an odd kind of predictability about someone who is so craven as to constantly be shifting his position with the political winds. Just look up the latest Gallup polling and there you go!

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More on the Contradictory Torture Polling

Nate had a useful discussion of "the apparently contradictory polling result from Gallup which suggests that, while most Americans think 'harsh interrogation techniques' against suspected terrorists are justified, a 51 percent majority also want a federal investigation into the use of these techniques."

This is related to the graph that John Sides posted the other day showing that something like half of Americans thought that "the United States should consider torture against terrorism suspects."

My first reaction when seeing John's graph was surprise: Even among Democrats, only 65% said the United States should not use torture, with only 45% of independents ruling out the tactic. My impression was that torture was highly unpopular, with techniques such as waterboarding being semi-acceptable to the public only because they were defined as "not really" torture.

So how do I make sense of these polls? I guess I'll have to step back and say that there are few absolutes in people's opinions. In the abstract, torture is to be ruled out, but once you bring in "terrorism" (even "terrorism suspects," which is really pretty vague), people start to change their minds.

I'm reminded of something I read recently--maybe from Mo Fiorina--that a big chunk of Americans support abortion under all circumstances, but when these people are asked whether it should be legal to do an abortion solely for reasons of sex selection, most of these abortion rights absolutists say No, abortion should not be allowed for sex selection. Similarly, people support freedom of speech but then support all sorts of restrictions in particular examples.

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What Kind of Democrat Will Arlen Specter Be?

My first take on Arlen Specter's defection to the Democratic Party was rather skeptical. Although the move is undoubtedly quite psychologically damaging for the GOP, there is room to question how much it will actually change the way that the sausage gets made in the Congress. If, for example, Arlen Specter is a Ben Nelson kind of Democrat, voting against initiatives like EFCA while driving an extremely hard bargain on health care, it is hard to see how Democrats gain, since there is little to distinguish a Ben Nelson type of Democrat from an Arlen Specter type of Republican.

I've now had the chance to examine the data on party-switching in more detail. When Congressmen have changed parties in the past, this has generally been accompanied by relatively material changes in their voting patterns -- thus, Democrats have ample reason to be pleased. Nevertheless, odds are that Specter will line up squarely in the conservative half of the Democratic caucus and will probably leave room to his left for a primary challenge.

Since 1980, according to Wikipedia, 20 Congressmen (16 Representatives and 4 Senators) have switched from one party to the other. The vast majority of these switches -- 17 of 20 -- were from the Democratic Party to the Republicans, mostly among conservative Southern Democrats in the 1980s and early 90s. Only Specter, Long Island Representative Michael Forbes and Jim Jeffords have gone the other way. I classify these Congressmen, by the way, by which party they caucused with regardless of how cute they tried to get about the label attached to their name. Thus Jeffords is treated as going from Republican to Democrat even though he still called himself an independent, whereas Joe Lieberman is not classified as a party-switcher because he never ceased caucusing with the Democrats.

I then looked up DW-NOMINATE data for each of these party switchers. DW-NOMINATE is a liberal-conservative classification which has conveniently assigned scores to each Congressman in each Congress from the 18th Century onward. DW-NOMINATE scores generally run from -1 for an extremely liberal Congressman to +1 for an extremely conservative one (although ratings slightly greater than 1 or less than -1 are possible under exceptional circumstances). The ratings for a select group of Senators in the 110th Congress follow below.



A "typical" Congressman from each party will usually have a scores of about ±.4 or ±.5. Members with scores of ±.55 and higher can usually be thought of as being quite liberal or quite conservative, whereas moderates will usually receive scores of about ±.35 and lower. Democrats, by the way, can receive positive scores and Republicans negative ones, although this didn't occur for any Senators in the 110th. Specter's score was +.091, making him the third least-conservative Republican after Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.

The next step was to look up the DW-NOMINATE scores for the party-switchers, comparing their figures in the Congresses that came both immediately before and immediately after the party change:



All of the party-switchers moved toward the direction of their (new) party caucus after making the change, although with somewhat varying degrees of magnitude. California's Matthew Martinez, for instance, who had not been an exceptionally moderate Democrat, turned all the way into a rather run-of-the-mill Republican. On the other end of the spectrum, you'd have had to look pretty hard to find issues on which Congressman Gene Atkinson of Pennsylvania was voting differently after becoming a Republican in 1981.

The average magnitude of the change was ±.394 points, with about two-thirds of the cases somewhere between ±.3 and ±.5.

What does this mean for Specter? If we take his rating of +.091 from the 110th Congress and subtract .394 points from it, we come up with a -.303. That would make him similar to Tim Johnson (-.282), Blanche Lincoln (-.297), Kent Conrad (.315) or Joe Liberman (-.333). Bob Casey Jr,, by contrast, Specter's colleague from Pennsylvania, rates as a -.401, whereas the average Democratic senator in the 110th Congress was a -.441.

There are both aggravating and mitigating circumstances that may affect Specter's positioning. On the one hand, he seems to have made the switch more or less unabashedly for electoral reasons, even alluding to the polling in his statement today. This suggests that he'll be no more and no less Democratic than he can get away with. On the other hand, the parties are now more polarized than they once were, and so crossing the aisle may mean more than it once did. Prior to this party-switch, Specter's DW-NOMINATE scores had gradually been moving away from the center as it had become harder to stake out a position as a moderate Republican.

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Specter's Switch More Insult Than Injury to GOP

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania has decided to become a Democrat.

This strikes me as being bad news for the Republican Party more than it is good news for the Democrats. Back in January, I described a process which I labeled the Republican Death Spiral:

Thus the Republicans [...] are in something of a death spiral. The more conservative [...] their message becomes, the more they alienate non-base Republicans. But the more they alienate non-base Republicans, the fewer of them are left to worry about appeasing. Thus, their message becomes continually more appealing to the base -- but more conservative, partisan, and strident to the rest of us. And the process loops back upon itself.

This defection, coming at a time when historically low numbers of Americans are identifying themselves as Republican, would seem to be a manifestation of said Death Spiral. These problems, indeed, were particularly acute in Pennsylvania, where many of the state's more moderate Republicans had re-registered as Democrats to vote in the state's extremely contentious primary between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Thus, given an extremely conservative Republican electorate, Specter appeared to be an underdog against his extremely conservative primary challenger, Pat Toomey, and switched parties in order to increase his odds of survival.

But this is not necessarily an unmitigated win for the Democrats. Unlike Jim Jeffords' switch in 2001, this does not affect who controls the Senate Chamber. Rather, it merely nudges the filibuster math, which has always been somewhat fuzzy. While the Democrats will have a nominal total of 60 votes once Al Franken is seated, the Senate's fortunes will still be determined by a group of about a dozen moderate senators from both parties (including Specter), just as it was before.

The real question is -- how often will Specter's vote change as a result of this? Specter was already voting with the Democrats on some issues, like the stimulus, and he said in his statement today that he will continue to vote against the Democrats on at least one other high-profile issue, the Employee Free Choice Act. If he goes from voting with the Democrats 40 percent of the time to 60 percent of the time, that is not so terrific for them, particularly if the 60th seat raises expectations and lends credence to Republican claims about the need for divided government.

But of course, Specter can't be too cute about this, or he might have primary problems on the left. The Republican nominee is probably going to be Toomey, who will be an underdog against any sentient Democrat. Why should the Democrats settle for a Liberdem when they can probably get Pennsylvanians to elect a mainline Democrat along the lines of Bob Casey? Specter's cooperation on key issues like health care and cap-and-trade would now seem all but assured -- but then again, Democrats could perhaps already have expected such cooperation to begin with. Unless Specter becomes a fairly liberal Democrat (perhaps with one or two exceptions like EFCA) his party switch today is something which might have more symbolic than actual impact.

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Explaining the Contradictory Torture Polling

Apologies for the light posting today; it's just been one of those days that isn't very conducive to blogging. But I wanted to comment briefly on the apparently contradictory polling result from Gallup which suggests that, while most Americans think "harsh interrogation techniques" against suspected terrorists are justified, a 51 percent majority also want a federal investigation into the use of these techniques.

Gallup's interpretation is that this isn't really about torture -- rather, it's about investigations. We Americans like to investigate!

While a slim majority favors an investigation, on a relative basis the percentage is quite low because Americans are generally quite supportive of government probes into potential misconduct by public officials. In recent years, for example, Americans were far more likely to favor investigations into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys (72%), government databases of telephone numbers dialed by Americans (62%), oil company profits (82%), and the government's response to Hurricane Katrina (70%).

I don't necessarily debate this interpretation, but I think it's somewhat incomplete. Although many people regard torture as a moral absolute, for others (perhaps most others) it is more of a sliding scale: certain types of torture may be permissible against certain types of persons in certain -- presumably fairly extraordinary -- circumstances. A Pew poll released last week, for example, has 15 percent of Americans saying torture is "often justified" against terrorism suspects and 25 percent saying it is "never justified". The majority of 56 percent are somewhere in the middle, saying torture is "sometimes justified" (34 percent) or "rarely justified" (22 percent).

Thus, people may want an investigation into the torture so that they can see whether or not this was the "right" type of torture. They want the details, because they think the details matter.

This is perhaps compounded by the fact that Gallup used the deliberately ambiguous phrase "harsh interrogation techniques" rather than "torture". An ABC-Washington Post poll, which did use the phrase "torture", did not show as significant a number of people who were inclined to think the interrogations were OK but nevertheless wanted an investigation into them.

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Recession, Succession, and Secession

Rick Perry’s media-friendly turn of phrase regarding Texan sovereignty has set off a sensational level of interest in the business of retrospective nation building – the art of justifying annexations, treaties, royal deposition, and marginally-legal occupation – hundreds of years after the fact. While the US media has treated the statement about possible Texas separatism with mostly amused curiosity, the truth is that secession is one of the most commonly employed political strategies around the world, including the United States.

With the world organized into sovereign Westphalian states (since 1648 and still ticking), and power centered in the national governments of these states, attaining recognized statehood is the ultimate goal for many groups. Without the mantle of statehood, many argue, you are subject to the whims of an unresponsive and oppressive government.

In the US, Hawaiian sovereignty activists are likely the most legitimate voices for an independent nation, with even the US government recognizing wrongdoing. In November 1993, then-President Clinton signed the famous “Apology Resolution,” passed by both houses of Congress, which admitted that, “the indigenous Hawaiian people never directly relinquished their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people or over their national lands to the United States.” In short, US military forces supported an illegal overthrow of the constitutional monarchy in 1887, and a similarly extra-legal 1898 annexation.

Other movements, such as the Alaskan Independence Party, Second Vermont Republic, and Texan efforts are not strictly linked to historical wrongs, but instead a new frustration with the US. Indeed, anytime communities become alienated from the national system, often along identity and economic lines, the talk of separation tends to become louder. Particularly in a time of economic upheaval and recession, historical cleavages in society become more likely to promote separatist feelings.

Across the globe today, sub-national groups continue to clamor for recognition, some more fervently than others. Ranging from the examples of Belgium, Spain, Somalia, Canada, Morocco, Russia, Iraq/Turkey, China, Israel/OPT and so on, to the less aggressive cases like Italy, France, and Puerto Rico, nearly every nation on the planet has some level of separatist tendency, which stretches the fabric of national unity.

Some countries, such as Spain, with its complex levels of decentralization of language, culture, finance and political power, maintain national composition by providing strong autonomy to communities that might otherwise attempt to break away. Others decide that national unity is no longer possible to maintain, evidenced by the 1947 partition of the Indian sub-continent, or the 1990s break-up of the Balkans. In many places, numerous political parties represent the various regional interests in the national government, allowing for many voices to smooth over societal divides.

The US, with its incredible geographic size, diverse population, socio-cultural and identity rifts, and pre-partitioned state boundaries, would seem to be a prime candidate for regular crises of territorial and political integrity. As well, with the 1860s in mind, there is clearly a history of conflict based on these ideas.

The modern US political system, however, has found ways to mitigate the risks, inspired by the long and troubled history of state versus national sovereignty and the rights of individuals over the state, which bolsters the numerous cultural efforts to maintain national unity.

By having two ubiquitous political parties, the US as a nation retains continuity and conformity throughout the system. Two poles in political society create a commonly defined space for dialogue. But while there is continuity, there is great variability. As anyone can tell you, a Republican in New Jersey is a far cry from a Republican in Utah, and a Democrat in Mississippi shares little with her partisans in Rhode Island. Regional, and even local, variation provides enough flexibility to exercise state and individual rights and ideas, without challenging the legitimacy of the US as a nation.

In addition multiple centers of power in the parties themselves prevent one voice from dominating completely. While President Obama is by most measures the “leader” of the Democratic party, several other key power centers exist to check the party’s ideological drift, left or right. The DNC, the Senate and House leadership, and the Democratic Governors, provide far ranging ideas about what the party stands for, along with state party chairs, leadership and candidates. The exact same is true of the Republicans, where unlike the British Conservative Party led by David Cameron (in the Westminster System), many power centers provide dozens of messages about the ideas of the opposition, from diverse geographic and ideological sources.

Each of these, along with common cultural touch points and the “American” narrative that pervades all political rhetoric, serve to make national issues local, and link local issues with the national dialogue. As a result, national identity is quite strong, even in more “separatist” regions. The widely cited Rasmussen study from this month puts Texan support for independence at just 18%, and Native Hawaiians are currently seeking redress through the “Akaka Bill,” which seeks to provide recognition similar to that of continental Native American tribes, rather than territorial secession. At least for now, the mix of regional and national political identities seems to support the nation-state in the US, rather than challenge it, such that calls for secession are newsworthy only because they are far-fetched.
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Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

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Were the Tea Parties Really a Libertarian Thing?

Last week, I suggested that the April 15th "tea parties" were an indication of the potentially increasing influence of libertarianism within the Republican Party, and noted that attendance at the tea parties had been higher in states (such as New Hampshire and the Mountain West) that are traditionally associated with having libertarian leanings. But I didn't present any evidence in support of that claim -- and so, here it is.

The best benchmark I've been able to come up with for libertarianism is the amount of contributions to Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign. Fundraising data has the advantage of being extremely clean and comprehensive -- all contributions of at least $200 are reported to the FEC and itemized by their location. Here, then, were Ron Paul's best fundraising states, as measured by contributions per adult aged 18+.

Top Ron Paul Fundraising States,
Donations Per Adult 18+
New Hampshire  $0.22
Wyoming        $0.18
Alaska         $0.18
Nevada         $0.17
Montana        $0.15
Idaho          $0.14
Washington     $0.14
Texas          $0.13
Arizona        $0.11
Colorado       $0.11

What do we have here? We have New Hampshire, we have Texas (where Paul is from) and we have a whole bunch of states in the Mountain West. Per capita, Paul raised about twice as much money in the West as he did in other parts of the country. In New Hampshire, he raised about three times above the national average (although we should disclaim that New Hampshire has an early primary and is generally a good fundraising state for all Presidential candidates).

Now then, which states had the most tea party attendance? Aggregating the figures from the 347 locations where I was able to find some sort of objective estimate of tea party attendance and dividing by the number of adults in that state, I come up with the following list:

Top States for Tea Party Protests,
Percentage of Adults Attending
South Dakota    0.66%
Alaska          0.47%
Wyoming         0.38%
Colorado        0.30%
Oklahoma        0.30%
Idaho           0.29%
Arizona         0.27%
Iowa            0.26%
West Virginia   0.26%
Georgia         0.25%

As measured on a per capita basis, eight of the top ten states for Tea Party attendance were West of the Mississippi. Five of the top ten -- Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming -- overlap with the best Ron Paul fundraising states. New Hampshire, incidentally, had 0.21 percent of adults attending, placing it 14th out of the 50 states.

Acknowledging that some of the tea party attendance estimates are rough and that my list was not comprehensive, it might be best to aggregate the data across the 11 political regions of the country as I define them:


The eleven regions are ranked by Ron Paul fundraising as follows:

Ron Paul Donations Per Adult 18+, by Region
1. Big Sky        $0.13
2. Southwest      $0.12
3. Pacific        $0.11
4. Gulf Coast     $0.10
5. New England    $0.08
6. South Coast    $0.07
7. North Central  $0.06
8. Acela          $0.06
9. Highlands      $0.06
10. Rust Belt     $0.06
11. Prairie       $0.05

Note that the three Western regions -- Big Sky, Southwest, Pacific -- occupy the top three slots, followed generally by the South, the Northeast and the Midwest.

Here, by comparison, are the regions as ranked by tea party attendance:

Percentage of Adults Attending Tea Parties, By Region
Southwest       0.24%
Big Sky         0.22%
South Coast     0.18%
Gulf Coast      0.17%
Highlands       0.17%
Prairie         0.14%
New England     0.12%
Pacific         0.12%
Rust Belt       0.11%
North Central   0.10%
Acela           0.05%

The correlation (.65) is not perfect but is nevertheless fairly strong. The major exception is in the South, where there was proportionately attendance at the tea parties than there was enthusiasm for Ron Paul.



What we seem to have is an audience that was about two parts Ron Paul/libertarian conservative (with its strength out West and in New Hampshire) and one part Sarah Palin/red-meat conservative (with its strength in rural areas, particularly in the South). This is perhaps not an accident, since Paul and Palin are just about the only Republicans to have generated some real grassroots enthusiasm over the past few years.

And yes, before anyone asks, I do think the tea parties were a relatively "authentic" display of conservative grassroots activism. Certainly, it helps the cause when you have FOX News advertising on your behalf. But FOX News can't get you up off your couch, nor -- when a protest is being conducted simultaneously in several hundred different locations -- can they tell you exactly where to go. For that, you'd have had to talk to your neighbors or log onto the Internet, which is what the tea-partiers did.

Now, I also think the tea parties got more attention than they deserved, especially in comparison to things like anti-war protests of 2003 or the immigration rights protests of 2006, which had much larger aggregate attendances. Nor were they particularly representative of where the country is at as a whole. On the contrary, record numbers of Americans think they're paying a fair share of taxes.

But I do think this was one of the right's more effective moments of late, particularly if regarded as a sort of "fire drill" for 2010 and 2012. If the right somehow could fuse the enthusiasm of the Palinites with that of the Paulites -- and that isn't necessarily going to be a happy marriage -- they'd have the makings of something that could help to rebuild their damaged coalition.

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The Environmental Inverted Pyramid

This chart, adopted from a very interesting new survey (.pdf) of 2,164 American adults on climate policy, reveals part of the problem that advocates of more aggressive measures to curb climate change may be encountering as they seek to push forward initiatives like cap-and-trade.

The survey, conducted by George Mason University's Center for Climate Change Communication, reveals that Americans are concerned about global warming in the abstract -- but perhaps only in the abstract. Just 32 percent of Americans think global warming will harm them "a great deal" or a "a moderate amount" personally. The further we get out from the individual, however, the more impactful people think climate change will tend to be: more impactful on their families than themselves; more impactful on their communities than their families; more impactful on their country than their communities; more impactful than other counties than on the United States; more impactful on future generations than the present one, and finally, more impactful on plants and animals than on humans.

These beliefs are not necessarily irrational. Climate change probably will have more impact on the developing world than the developed one, and it almost certainly will have more impact on our children than it does on ourselves.

Nevertheless, the fact that fewer than a third of Americans are worried about the effects that climate change will have on them personally strikes me as significant. Although more aggressive policy responses on climate change generally poll fairly well, they are also often the first things to be sacrificed in Americans' minds when something else intervenes, such as a recession or higher energy prices. Advocates of cap-and-trade may need to find ways to personalize the terms of the debate.

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