Some Thoughts on Census Adjustment

Groves rules out use of sampling in 2010 census:

President Barack Obama's pick to lead the Census Bureau on Friday ruled out the use of statistical sampling in the 2010 head count, seeking to allay GOP concerns that he might be swayed to put politics over science. Robert M. Groves, a veteran survey researcher from the University of Michigan, also testified during his confirmation hearing that he remains worried about fixing a persistent undercount of hard-to-reach populations . . . Census officials have already acknowledged that tens of millions of residents in dense urban areas -- about 14 percent of the U.S. population -- are at high risk of being missed because of language problems and an economic crisis that has displaced homeowners.

Adjusting the census would probably help the Democrats, both in the direct sense increasing the number of Democratic-leaning congressional districts, and in the indirect sense of increasing the political influence, and perceived political inference, of inner cities and ethnic minorities.

My comments:

I have a great respect for Bob Groves, and I would trust his decisions on what to do with the Census more than I would trust my own.

Bob's statement that "there is simply no time to prepare for it" seems eminently reasonable to me, especially given the cost constraints under which the census operates. On the statistical merits of the issue, I'm pretty sure that adjusted numbers would be better than unadjusted numbers. The census people know what they're doing, and there are known problems of nonresponse, and, for anything where I care about the damn answer, I'd use their adjusted estimates over the raw numbers.

As a social scientist, I hope the census bureau could release two sets of numbers, one unadjusted for political reasons and one adjusted for those of us who want the most accurate inferences possible.

That said, I'm ignoring a possible indirect effect of adjusting the numbers: If people know that the census will do adjustment, maybe they'll be less likely to participate in the enumeration in the first place. It's hard to measure such an effect and, hey, it might be important. I don't know.

I'm not thinking so much of individuals deciding whether to respond to the census, but rather of the decisions of local jurisdictions, where various spending formulas depend on population. For example, if it's known that the census won't be adjusted, then I'd expect the government of New York City to put a lot of effort into convincing people to participate. If it is known that the census will be adjusted, then there'd be a lot less motivation for localities to do what it takes to boost participation.

Conditional on the data already being collected, you'd definitely want to make statistical adjustments; it's a tougher call to decide on this ahead of time. Also, if you know for sure you won't be adjusting, this will affect the effort you put into collecting the data in different places. So if you're not going to adjust, you might as well make that decision right away.

To expand on this slightly, I think any debates over census adjustments are fundamentally political debates, not statistical disagreements. The scientific consensus on adjustment is pretty easy (although people can argue about the details of implementation, as noted by Lawrence in comments below). It's the political consensus that's difficult, as there are clear winners and losers. With a lack of political consensus, all you need is a little bit of dust and confusion in the air to give a sense of a lack of scientific consensus, which then gets piped back in to justify inaction in the political process.

P.S. Thanks to the commenters below for discussion of the legal aspect of this issue, of which I was unaware.

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More About the Unbearable Lightness of Abortion Polls

When Pew released a poll earlier this week suggesting that there had been a significant shift in public opinion on abortion in recent months, Nate did a fine post exploring the long-term trends on the subject, and expressing considerable doubt that Pew had discovered anything of great moment.

Well, today Gallup released another survey that seems to parallel the Pew findings, such as they are. And since (1) Nate's on vacation, and (2) the two polls together are sure to get tons of play in conjunction with the anti-abortion protests at Notre Dame, not to mention Supreme Court speculation, I'll do a brief post raising a few questions to help tide us over for a while, with particular emphasis on the key questions that pollsters rarely ask on this subject.

First of all, the headline-grabbing finding by Gallup involves its efforts to split Americans into two camps self-identifying as either "pro-choice" or "pro-life." Aside from all the issues with how these two terms are perceived, this methodology also forces asunder and thus distorts the views of the vast "mushy middle" on abortion policy, which Gallup itself measures at 53%, in a secondary question that divides respondents into three camps ("illegal in all circumstances," "legal in any circumstances," and "legal only in some circumstances.")

Second of all, the purported shift that Gallup reports, showing "more Americans 'pro-life' than 'pro-choice' for the first time," is explained in Gallup's analysis as a phenomenon produced almost solely by Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (e.g., roughly those voters willing to actually vote Republican). Given what's been happening to support for Republicans in recent months, this finding raises some questions about the sampling techniques, but could also reflect a shift in the perceived threat to the abortion status quo once George W. Bush left office. After eight years of constant excitement among right-to-lifers about getting that fifth vote on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, that prospect is now pretty distant. And instead, Americans have been exposed to a constant wailing of alarms about Obama being "the most pro-abortion president in history," determined, somehow, to expand abortion rights. That Republicans and Republican-leaning independents might polarize on the subject isn't terribly surprising or necessarily significant.

But more important than any of these reservations about the Pew and Gallup surveys on abortion is a perpetual problem with public opinion research generally on this topic: it rarely deals with the nuances that matter most in setting public policy or assessing the actual political impact of each party's positioning.

The nuance that I've written about recently deals with the simple fact that Americans seem to care quite a bit why a woman seeks an abortion. And once they are aware of a plausible rationale, anti-abortion attitudes appear to relax.

The best example comes from 2003, at the very height of one of the congressional battles over so-called "partial-birth" abortions. The very same ABC poll that showed 62% of Americans favoring a ban on these much-demonized procedures also showed that 61% favored a "health of the mother" exception, even in these cases.

It's an article of faith among right-to-lifers, of course, that a "health exception" makes a mockery of any abortion restrictions. And that's why in a famous moment in one of the presidential debates last year, John McCain sneered and held up "quote marks" when referring to a "health exception." The public reaction was not positive, indicating that abstract hostility towards abortion may well disguise a more sympathetic attitude when it comes to actual women making actual decisions about a pregnancy. To put it another way, who cares if there's a shift towards self-reported "pro-life" sentiments, if consistent majorities basically approve of the constitutional and legal status quo?

In any event, it's maddening that so few polls on abortion get into these sorts of questions. Until they do, we are all entitled to dismiss the big headlines, and rely on hard data like election results to determine which basic direction in abortion policy Americans tend to support. Based on that data, the anti-abortion cause is not doing very well.

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Cash for Clunkers?

Congress is considering legislation to provide vouchers of up to $4,500 to help consumers scrap their gas guzzlers and buy more fuel efficient new cars.  Details of the proposal, from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, are available here.

Proponents argue that in addition to saving oil and curbing greenhouse gas emissions, the measure would provide much needed economic stimulus.  Germany, which recently enacted a similar measure, is the only country in which automobile sales increased last year.

Is this program a good idea?

It depends on what the alternative is.  If it’s to do nothing, the proposal is a clear winner—even if we completely ignore its environmental impact.  But the mere fact that a program is better than doing nothing does not mean that we should adopt it.  Adopting this program means not adopting some other variant of it.  And with a few simple modifications, the existing cash-for-clunkers proposal could deliver much better results. 

Unemployment and idle capacity in the American auto industry are at their highest levels in decades. As the German experience indicates, auto vouchers are likely to produce an immediate surge in auto sales.  This would put people to work who would otherwise be doing nothing.   A $4,500 voucher that leads to production of an additional $25,000 car would generate $25,000 of additional income along the value added chain, which in turn would generate more than enough tax revenue to pay for the voucher. 

For one thing, the program could offer much stronger incentives choose cars with better fuel economy.  As the House proposal stands, a consumer gets a $3500 voucher for abandoning an 18 mpg vehicle for one that gets 22 mpg, but only $1000 more for switching to one that gets 28 mpg or more.  The real fuel savings and emissions reductions come when someone swaps a 10 mpg Ford Excursion for a 41 mpg Ford Fusion hybrid.  New car purchases have long-run consequences.  If we’re going to encourage swaps in the first place, why not provide stronger incentives to make the right ones? 

What happens to the gas guzzlers that voucher recipients unload?  Environmentally, sending them to the scrap heap isn’t necessarily a good idea, since keeping them on the road a little longer would spare the substantial energy use and additional emissions that accompany new vehicle production.   By creating a huge boost in the supply of used gas guzzlers, a voucher program would produce an immediate steep decline in their price, which would make them an economical choice for many drivers who use their vehicles only sparingly.  Although the per-mile cost of operating these vehicles would still be high, owners would be compensated for that by their low purchase price.

But an even more effective way to encourage reduced emissions and fuel use would be to couple the voucher program with a steep new tax on gasoline whose gradual phase-in would begin only after the economy has again reached full employment.  The revenue from such a tax could be used to help pay for a cash-for-clunkers program with even stronger incentives to purchase more efficient new vehicles.

Another problem is that the current cash-for-clunkers bill refers only to fuel economy, not emissions.  Although only 10 percent of cars on the road in Los Angeles are more than 15 years old, these vehicles, which are exempt from emissions control laws, account for a majority of the smog in the area.  Many of them would be ineligible for a voucher under the proposed legislation, even though the environmental case for including them is compelling. 

The real imperative, however, is to act quickly.  Unemployment is like empty seats on a commercial airliner.  In each case the opportunity to produce something of value is lost forever.  If congressional leaders cannot muster the votes necessary to pass the right cash-for-clunkers bill, even the current version would be much better than doing nothing. 

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Obama a Bystander at Notre Dame

As you probably know by now, President Obama is due to deliver the commencement address and pick up an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame on Sunday. And protests over the appearance--and much earlier, over the invitation--have become a big cause celebre for conservative Catholics, including a sizable chunk of the Church hierarchy.

The issue, of course, is whether a Catholic university should be honoring or even listening to a pro-choice president, given the Church's position on abortion, and more to the point, given the conviction of anti-abortion activists that Obama is presiding over a twenty-first century version of the Holocaust.

But the annoying thing about the controversy is the planted axiom in much of the coverage that Catholics are having to decide whether their anti-abortion beliefs should trump every other moral and political issue, or simple respect to a President of the United States.

We are often told that a majority of Catholics voted for Obama, and support the decision to invite him to speak at Notre Dame. The impression often left is that Catholics have forgotten about the primacy of "life" issues, and have let themselves be lured into error by concerns over, say, their jobs or health care needs or global warming, or their opposition to Bush foreign policies.

But it's important to understand that this isn't just a matter of priorities for millions of American Catholics: they are actually no more likely to hold anti-abortion views than the rest of the U.S. population. According to a new Quinnipiac poll, 13 percent of Catholics think abortion should be legal in all cases, while 37 percent think it should be legal in most cases; voters as a whole break down at 15% and 37%. Only 16% of Catholics (as compared with 14% of Americans as a whole) think abortion should be illegal in all cases.

Now it's entirely possible to be in favor of legalized abortion while still deploring the practice. But it seems Catholics are no more likely to be "morally opposed" to abortion than other Americans. According to a recent Gallup survey, 40% of Catholics (as compared to 41% of non-Catholics) consider abortion "morally acceptable." And that's not so strange, since the same survey shows 71% of Catholics finding divorce "morally acceptable" (the number is 66% among non-Catholics), with similarly positive moral acceptance levels for pre-marital sex (67%, compared to 57% of non-Catholics), having a child out of wedlock (61%; 52% among non-Catholics) and homosexual relations (54%; 45% of non-Catholics). None of these positions, of course, are in line with contemporary Church doctrine.

What this should make clear is that the brouhaha over Obama's Notre Dame appearance is less about Obama versus Catholics than Catholics versus Catholics. One of the leading agitators against Obama's appearance, First Things editor Joseph Bottum, has written a long piece arguing that the controversy is part of an epic struggle to force "elitist" Catholic colleges back into line with both the hierarchy and grassroots Catholic anti-abortion sentiment (Damon Linker ripostes that "it is Bottum and his theoconservative allies who stand on the margins of American Catholic life").

Further, the intra-Catholic struggle is an old story in this country, dating back at least to the "Americanist Heresy" furor of the late nineteenth century, which also centered on conservative claims that Catholic academicians were too accomodating to secular American culture. Interestingly enough, as Linker points out, an especially sharp rebuke to Bottum's essay came from Catholic traditionalist Patrick Deneen, who lashes politically conservative Catholics for undermining the faith and encouraging an emphasis on "individual choice" through their enthusiasm for capitalism.

The more you look at it all, Barack Obama is to a large extent a bystander in the battles over his appearance at Notre Dame, no matter how it's spun in the news media or by Republicans. Some Catholic conservatives may indeed think of him as a baby-killing libertine, but that's how they've viewed most Democratic politicians for some time now. What they're really upset about is how many of their co-religionists--whom they constantly mock as "non-observant," lapsed or "cafeteria Catholics"--reject Church doctrine on abortion and other gender and sexuality issues, and won't submit. And for all the explicit and implicit suggestions that "liberal" Catholics aren't "real" Catholics, I doubt the hard-core traditionalists are really quite prepared to invite half the American Church to walk away.

This item is cross-posted from The Democratic Strategist

UPDATE: There have been plenty of interesting comments on this post, but I would particularly like to highlight one by a Notre Dame student named Jack:

I would take the article one further and say that both Obama and Notre Dame students are bystanders in this debate...and this speech is meant to reward and inspire graduates who have earned their diplomas and will hopefully receive them in peace.

Those who have chosen the Notre Dame commencement as the latest battleground in the culture wars should remember that most of the graduates and their friends are celebrating their own accomplishments, and are pleased to be honored with the presence of the President of the United States at this event (I can understand, as someone whose college graduation was graced with an address by a local architect/real estate developer). Jack's right. The ostensible subjects of this event are complete bystanders, whose views are being solicited only to the extent that they are willing to turn their own big day into a political circus.

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Travel Advisory

So, I'm going on vacation. It's my first "real" vacation -- not an, oh, I've got to take a meeting in Los Angeles, so let me work my ass off for three nights and then go out with a college friend for beers on the fourth night and call it a "vacation" -- since 15 months ago, when I had the brainstorm for this website during a weather delay at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. While I wouldn't rule out a tweet here and perhaps even a post or two, I'm going to be doing my darnedest to resist that temptation and stick to the far more important tasks of eating and sleeping a lot.

Here's the good news: in addition to our other, regular contributors, I've also got a couple of "special guest" columnists lined up, whose stuff you will very much like (and have probably already encountered) and who have generously agreed to contribute to the blog in my absence. In fact, the blog is probably going to be better next week then it is ordinarily. If there's an over/under on the number of steak dinners Nate is going to be buying at Peter Luger's, you should take the over.

There isn't any bad news; there's only good news. The blog will be left in very good hands, and I'll see you all again on Memorial Day.

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Arlen Specter Now 67% Democrat

I can't say we didn't see this coming, because we did. But Arlen Specter is starting to make good use of that 'D' beside his name and behave like an actual Democrat, indicating that he's open to a compromise on the Employee Free Choice Act and a public option on the Democratic health care plan.

Specter's record in the Senate since changing parties on April 28th has been somewhat more mixed, however. The Senate has held 22 roll call votes since Specter's party switch; Specter has taken the position of the majority of the Democratic caucus on 17 of these (77%). However, some of these votes were procedural with both the Democratic and Republican caucuses in broad agreement. Of the 15 votes on which the Democratic and Republican caucuses have split, Specter has sided with the Democrats on 10 occasions and the Republicans on 5; that makes him 67% Democrat and 33% Republican. A table of these votes and some further analysis follows below the fold.



For comparison's sake, Specter's colleague in the Senate, Bob Casey Jr., has sided with the Democrats on 14 of the 15 contentious votes (93%) over this period. Blue Dog Democrat Evan Bayh has voted Democratic on 8 of 14 bills, or 57% (Bayh skipped one vote), and Ben Nelson, probably the Senate's most conservative Democrat, has voted with them on 7 of 15 occasions (47%). Olympia Snowe, the most liberal Republican, has voted Democratic 5 out of 15 times (33%).

Democratic Loyalty Scores since 4/28, Selected Senators

Casey, D-PA      93%
Specter, D-PA    67%
Bayh, D-IN       57%
Nelson, D-NE     47%
Snowe, R-ME      33%

Based on this admittedly small sample, then, Specter does appear to be voting more liberally than the most famously conservative Democrats, as well as any and all Republicans. But, he still has a ways to go before voting as a "normal" Democrat from his state might.

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Is Public Opinion Changing on Abortion?

A new survey from Pew Research which suggests that a declining number of Americans support the option of abortion in all or most cases is receiving a fair amount of attention. But is there actually any evidence that public sentiments on abortion are changing?

In my opinion, probably not -- and if there is change in public opinion, it is occurring very slowly. The chart below is populated with data from PollingReport.com and incorporates data from eight organizations -- ABC/Washington Post, Quinnipiac, Pew, LA Times/Bloomberg, AP/Ipsos, CBS, NBC/WSJ and CNN -- that ask respondents a four-option question about abortion, where they are given a choice between saying abortion should be legal in all cases, legal in most cases, illegal in all cases, or illegal in most cases. We then draw a linear trendline through the individual datapoints.



Although two recent surveys -- the Pew poll conducted last month and an NBC/WSJ poll conducted in September -- indicated smaller-than-usual margins for the legal option, this is countered by a large amount of data from earlier in 2008 which indicated support for legal abortion at about its typical levels in the mid-50's. While it's possible that public opinion has shifted more dramatically on this issue since sometime late last year, it seems highly unlikely. Polls don't move without reasons, and abortion hasn't been particularly in the news of late. Who knows -- maybe Baby Trig won over a few hearts and minds -- but odds are the Pew result is a mild outlier. Since the abortion choice question is surveyed quite frequently, we will know soon enough.

As far as a longer-term trend goes, you can arguably perceive a slight one in favor of those saying abortion should be illegal. On the other hand, if we look at a different type of survey question -- those asking the respondent to identify as pro-choice or pro-life -- we do not perceive any such pattern:



Or, if you like, we can combine the two types of surveys onto one graph:



There's just no trend at all there, except maybe toward slightly more people having an opinion, one way or the other, about the abortion choice question.

In fact, the remarkable thing about abortion is precisely how steady public opinion has been on it for many, many years. Perhaps this in and of itself is interesting -- as Ross Douthat pointed out, there is some decent evidence that Gen Y'ers are less inclined to take the pro-choice position than Gen X'ers or Baby Boomers -- although they are still more pro-choice than the voters they are gradually replacing in the voting pool, which are members of the Silent Generation. This is in spite of the fact that young Americans are considerably more liberal than their peers on issues like gay marriage and marijuana legalization, issues on which there is more tangible evidence of "momentum" in favor of the liberal position. There are evidently an increasing number of pro-life, pro-gay marriage Americans, particularly among Generation Yers, a position it would have been very unusual to encounter just a few years ago.

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Whip Count: Gay Marriage Faces Uphill Odds in New York Senate

Although New York's State Assembly today approved a bill to legalize gay marriage by a 89-52 margin, the measure faces longer odds in the State Senate, where Democrats hold a slim 32-30 majority and where several prominent Democrats are likely to oppose the measure.

Governor David Paterson's bill requires 32 votes to pass -- a 31-31 tie would ordinarily be broken by New York's Lieutenant Governor, but New York does not currently have a Lieutenant Governor because Paterson ascended from that position to replace Elliot Spitzer.

The bill, S.4401, has 19 sponsors, all Democrats. A 20th Democrat, Majority Leader Malcolm Smith, is also committed to supporting the measure.

Beyond that, however, things get a bit dicey for the Democrats. Based on recent public statements and press accounts, we count 5 Democrats -- Shirley Huntley of Queens and George Onorato of Queens, Ruben Diaz of the Bronx, Darrel Aubertine of Cape Vincent, and William Stachowski of Buffalo -- as definitively being opposed to the measure. We also count 7 Democrats as undecided, one of whom -- David Valesky of Oneida -- we characterize as leaning toward a no vote.

On the other hand, while no Republican has publicly come out in favor of the bill, we have 9 Republicans who we characterize as undecided (although several are thought to be leaning no). A majority of these Republicans are from Long Island, a swing region in New York state politics.



The most plausible path to 32 votes involves picking up the 20 definite yes votes, plus the 5 Democrats and 7 Republicans that we characterize as truly undecided or leaning yes. Although a clean sweep of these votes would seem unlikely, there are some backup options in the form of 1 Democrat and 4 Republicans who we describe as leaning -- but not definitively -- against the bill. (Note: we characterize Republicans who sponsored S.2056, a 2006 bill that sought to ban gay marriage in New York state, as definite 'no' votes unless there is more recent information to suggest they have moderated their position).

Democrats may take some solace in the fact that, when gay marriage bills were approved by legislatures in states like Maine and Vermont, they tended to pass with slightly more votes than anticipated. Still, based on the most recently available information, I would guess that their odds of securing 32 votes are not better than about one in three.

Our 'whip count' of the 62 State Senators follows below.

YES (20)
7. Craig Johnson, D-Long Island (Port Washington) S.4401 sponsor
14. Malcolm Smith, D-NYC (St. Albans) link
16. Toby Ann Stavisky, D-NYC (Flushing) S.4401 sponsor
17. Martin Malave Dilan, D-NYC (Bushwick) S.4401 sponsor
18. Velmanette Montgomery, D-NYC (Brooklyn) S.4401 sponsor
20. Eric Adams, D-NYC (Brooklyn) S.4401 sponsor
21. Kevin Parker, D-NYC (Brooklyn) S.4401 sponsor
23. Diane Savino, D-NYC (Staten Island) S.4401 sponsor
25. Dan Squadron, D-NYC (Brooklyn) S.4401 sponsor
26. Liz Krueger, D-NYC (New York) S.4401 sponsor
28. Jose M. Serrano, D-NYC (Spanish Harlem) S.4401 sponsor
29. Thomas Duane, D-NYC (New York) S.4401 sponsor
30. Bill Perkins, D-NYC (Harlem) S.4401 sponsor
31. Eric Schneiderman, D-NYC (Washington Heights) S.4401 sponsor
33. Pedro Espada, D-NYC (Bedford Park) S.4401 sponsor
34. Jeffrey Klein, D-NYC (Throgs Neck) S.4401 sponsor
35. Andrea Stewart-Cousins, D-Westchester (Yonkers) S.4401 sponsor
37. Suzi Oppenheimer, D-Westchester (Mamaroneck) S.4401 sponsor
46. Neil Breslin, D-Upstate (Albany) S.4401 sponsor
60. Antoine Thompson, D-Upstate (Buffalo) S.4401 sponsor

UNDECIDED, LEANING YES (1)
55. James Alesi, R-Upstate (East Rochester) link

UNDECIDED OR UNKNOWN (11)
1. Kenneth LaValle, R-Long Island (Port Jefferson) link
2. John J. Flanagan, R-Long Island (East Northport) link
3. Brian X. Foley, D-Long Island (Blue Point) link
4. Owen H. Johnson, R-Long Island (West Babylon) link
8. Charles Fuschillo, R-Long Island (Merrick) link
13. Hiram Monserrate, D-NYC (Jackson Heights) link
15. Joseph Addabbo, Jr., D-NYC (Ozone Park) link
19. John Sampson, D-NYC (Brooklyn) link
27. Carl Kruger, D-NYC (Brooklyn) link
36. Ruth Hassell-Thompson, D-Westchester (Williamsbridge) link
40. Vincent Leibell, R-Westchester (Patterson) link

UNDECIDED, LEANING NO (5)
6. Kemp Hannon, R-Long Island (Garden City) link
24. Andrew Lanza, R-NYC (Staten Island) link
45. Betty Little, R-Upstate (Queensbury) (conflicting reports suggest opposition and that she's 'within reach')
49. David Valesky, D-Upstate (Oneida) (officially undecided; constituent e-mail hints at opposition)
57. Catharine Young, R-Upstate (Olean) link

NO (25)
5. Carl Marcellino, R-Long Island (Syosset) link
9. Dean Skelos, R-Long Island (Rockville Centre) link
10. Shirley Huntley, D-NYC (Jamaica) link
11. Frank Padavan, R-NYC (Bellerose) S.2056 sponsor
12. George Onorato, D-NYC (Astoria) link
22. Martin Golden, R-NYC (Bay Ridge) S.2056 sponsor
32. Rubén Díaz, D-NYC (Soundview) link
38. Thomas Morahan, R-Westchester (Clarkstown) link
39. Bill Larkin, R-Westchester (New Windsor) S.2056 sponsor
41. Stephen Saland, R-Westchester (Poughkeepsie) link
42. John Bonacic, R-Westchester (Mount Hope) S.2056 sponsor
43. Roy McDonald, R-Upstate (Wilton) link
44. Hugh Farley, R-Upstate (Schenectady) S.2056 sponsor
47. Joseph Griffo, R-Upstate (Rome) link
48. Darrel Aubertine, D-Upstate (Cape Vincent) link
50. John DeFrancisco, R-Upstate (Syracuse) S.2056 sponsor
51. James Seward, R-Upstate (Milford) S.2056 sponsor
52. Thomas W. Libous, R-Upstate (Binghamton) S.2056 sponsor
53. George H. Winner, Jr., R-Upstate (Elmira) link
54. Michael Nozzolio, R-Upstate (Fayette) S.2056 sponsor
56. Joseph Robach, R-Upstate (Greece) link
58. William Stachowski, D-Upstate (Hamburg) link
59. Dale Volker, R-Upstate (Depew) S.2056 sponsor
61. Michael Ranzenhofer, R-Upstate (Clarence) link
62. George Maziarz, R-Upstate (Newfane) S.2056 sponsor

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Will Crist Get Toomeyed?

It's rare that you see Markos Moulitsas and Erick Erickson agree on something, but they seem to be on the same page on at least this one issue: both would like conservative former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, and not soon-to-be-ex-governor Charlie Crist, become the Republican nominee for Florida's Class III Senate seat in 2010. Nor is it clear that either Kos or Erickson's strategies are incompatible. As I argued on Monday, while Crist would be much more likely than Rubio to win the general election, he is far enough to Rubio's left that it might well be worth it for Republicans to gamble on Rubio rather than being stuck with Crist, who might vote with the Democrats on issues like cap-and-trade and illegal immigration.

The analytical trap we should probably avoid, however, is to assume that Florida's primary electorate will resemble Pennsylvania's, whose tendency toward extreme conservatism drove Arlen Specter from the Republican Party and has paved the way for a nomination for Former Congressman Pat Toomey. In contrast to Pennsylvania, Florida's Republican primary electorate is relatively diverse ideologically and otherwise, although it contains its share of idiosyncrasies.

The table below compares two things: the composition of Florida's electorate in the 2008 Republican presidential primary (where John McCain, with Crist's endorsement, narrowly defeated Mitt Romney), and the composition of the pool of McCain voters in last year's general election:



Sixty-one percent of Florida Republican primary voters, as compared to 58 percent of McCain voters nationwide, identified themselves as conservative. However, what these voters are not, by and large, are religious conservatives. There were significantly fewer white evangelicals in Florida's primary electorate than you might expect -- just 31 percent -- and there was a smaller share of regular churchgoers than voted for John McCain in November. Only 52 percent of the January primary electorate described itself as pro-life, versus 43 percent pro-choice.

What Florida's primary voters appear to be instead are security conservatives. A significant percentage of them -- some 27 percent -- were veterans. Thirty-five percent of them identified a national security issue -- terrorism or Iraq -- as being the most important to their vote, versus 26 percent of McCain voters in November (although, this may have been because the economy was in much worse shape by November than it had been in January). And, perhaps owing to the popularity of Jeb Bush, a significantly higher share of Flordia's primary electorate still had warm feelings toward George W. Bush's time in office.

As you might expect, Florida's primary voters are also extremely old -- nearly one-third were senior citizens -- and significantly more Hispanic (mostly Cuban) than most Republican electorates. While the latter trait works in favor of Rubio, who is Cuban-American, Rubio is also just 37, and it might be asking a lot of seniors to vote for a candidate half their age given the presence of a "trusted" alternative like Crist.

If I were advising Rubio, I might tell him to make immigration his signature issue: just 29 percent of Florida primary votes wanted a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, versus 40 percent who wanted them deported and 29 percent who favored a guest worker program. Since neither Crist or Rubio have any tangible foreign policy experience, immigration might be the closest Rubio can come to framing a security issue to his benefit.

The elephant in the room is whether the Rubio campaign -- and obviously they'd need to do this very discretely -- might try and make an issue of Crist's sexual orientation, something which might receive renewed attention in light of a new film which alleges that Crist is a closeted gay man. Although, as we mentioned, Florida's primary electorate does not contain a particularly high number of religious conservatives, it is quite old, and seniors are generally quite uncomfortable with the idea of homosexuality.

For Rubio to win, I think he'll need at least two of the following three things, and possibly all three, to work to his advantage:

1) The ability to differentiate himself on a security issue -- probably illegal immigration;
2) An endorsement from Jeb Bush;
3) The wild card of Crist's sexuality to work against him, particularly among seniors, without backfiring on Rubio as it did to Tom Gallagher, Crist's opponent in 2006 gubernatorial primary, who ran none-too-subtle homophobic ads against him and wound up losing by 30 points.

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Introduction to the European Parliament Elections

Elections to the European Parliament (EP) are rapidly approaching, with EU citizens taking to the polls from 4-7 June, the date dependant on the typical voting day in each country. The vast majority of the parliamentarians (MEPs) will be elected on 7 June, when about 80% of the members will be elected.

The EP is a unique institution, more powerful than many legislatures in its ability to set transnational policy, but weak because it cannot set its own agenda. Proposed policy changes are submitted to the EP for debate and approval or refusal, rather than the parliament being able to introduce legislation on its own.

Along with the European Commission (executive branch-type activities) and the European Council (oversight activities by top authorities from each member state), over 700 MEPs of the EP represent the interests of more than 200 political parties in the 27 EU states. Every five years since direct election began in 1979, voters in each member state have elected MEPs from national parties through the local electoral system, most often the “Party List” method. National parties then associate with pan-European parties that create voting blocs in the EP.

Power in the EP, as with most parliamentary systems, is concentrated through coalition-building between various parties in order to generate a bloc large enough to control the passage of legislation. Currently the marriage between the European People’s Party and the European Democrats (EPP-ED) controls the largest bloc of MEPs, with 288 of the 785 members. A center-right group, EPP-ED is made up of mainline conservatives, such as France’s UMP, led by President Sarkozy, Germany’s Christian Democrats, the party of Chancellor Merkel, and the UK’s Conservatives, led by David Cameron. Second largest, the Party of European Socialists (PES) currently holds 217 seats, and represents the center-left wing. The Socialist and Labour parties of most EU states fall into this coalition, such as Labour in the UK or the French Parti Socialiste. Six other coalition parties follow the top two parties, but none with more than 12.7% of the parliamentary votes (a good summary here).

EP elections fall into a different point in the electoral cycle for each of the 27 EU states. National elections take place in Luxembourg at the same time, while national parliamentary balloting in Portugal will be just a few months later, in September. In this time of economic upheaval, most ruling parties will take hits in the EP polling. However, depending on the electoral dynamics since 2004, actual shifts in party numbers may be minimal. For example, while the UMP in France and Labour in the UK are doing poorly in the polls, they will both likely improve on their 2004 results, as their position was even worse at that time.

Another dynamic that shapes the EP elections is the dramatic lack of interest from most Europeans in the election. One British friend of mine, when I asked if he would be voting in the elections, insisted the UK did not have any MEPs, as they had not changed to the Euro from the British Pound. Recent Eurobarometer polling indicates that only 29% of EU citizens could identify the correct year for the next wave of EP elections, ranging from just 14% in the UK to 56% in Luxembourg. Even though more than 70% of respondents felt that “the EU is indispensible in meeting global challenges” and “what brings citizens together is more important than what separates,” just 34% of citizens planned to vote in this round of EP electionsⁱ.

Regardless of the interest from citizens, the election should see an interesting reshuffle of power in the Parliament. In contrast to the US system, however, this reshuffling will not likely be due to a clear voter mandate towards one party or coalition, but instead a number of changes in the way national parties ally with the coalition parties. In Italy, the rapidly changing dynamics in Belusconi’s ruling PdL party will be an important factor in how many MEPs end up in the EPP-ED delegation, and how many instead are part of the more conservative European Nationalist coalition (UEN) or the newly emerging European Conservatives faction. As well, there has been talk of the EPP and ED splitting apart to become separate coalitions. As for smaller national parties, there is sometimes an advantage to being part of a smaller coalition, even if ideological conflicts occur, since it allows your leadership to gain a higher profile in the Parliament than would be possible as part of the EPP-ED or PES. Fianna Fail from Ireland face this dilemma as they consider leaving the smaller UEN (44 seats) for the larger liberal coalition ALDE (100 seats).

As a result, quantitative evaluation and projection of the outcome of the elections is quite a challenge. Rather than only developing a projection model, such as FiveThirtyEight was able to do with the 2008 election cycle in the US, inter-party and intra-party dynamics in 27 countries must be analyzed. With around 250 parties running for seats in the EP, and 8 coalition parties vying for power in the Parliament, complications are many.

Burston-Marsteller (Mark Penn, CEO) was hired by the European Commission to do such a study, however, which is quite interesting in its mix of quantitative and qualitative analysis. The pollsters developed a model by taking vote distributions in previous EP elections (1979 and on) and exploring how well they were related to a number of variables. Similar to Nate’s use of demographic data, the B-M statisticians argue that how well a party fares in the vote distribution can be predicted by taking timely national polling data on each party and adjust them with the following variables:

1. Vote percentages in the previous election
2. Which party is in government
3. Is the party a strong Euroskeptic?
4. Is the EP election being held during a national election year?

The expressed goal of the analysis is make an improvement on the predictive capacity of national EP election polling data that are released in the run-up to the election, which historically has been quite poor. High non-response or “don’t know” rates have plagued this opinion polling, which is typical for elections with low public interest. As well, polling is done in 27 countries, each by a different pollster, with great variability in the methodologies used and house effects included. As a result, while a slight improvement on the polling results may be indicative of trends, the error associated with such an analysis is still very high, illustrating the importance of doing election projections using the FiveThirtyEight method of using opinion polling as just one of several variables, like demographic and regional characteristics.

We will continue to explore this over the next month as the voting approaches. In the meantime, have a look at the B-M study and a few other good resources on the EP elections.

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^i. In addition, Eurobarometer polling before EP elections has tended to overestimate turnout by 10 or more points, which indicates that turnout could be extremely poor. Data from EB 303, special EP election edition.
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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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Why Obama Wants the Olympics

Politico's Kenneth Vogel reports that the Obama administration is making a rather explicit lobbying effort for the 2016 Summer Olympics, which will either be held in Tokyo, Madrid, Rio De Janeiro or Obama's home city of Chicago. Since the four cities appear to be very close on the technical merits, this lobbying could make a significant amount of difference to Chicago's chances.

On the three of the four previous occasions when the Summer Olympics were held in the United States, the incumbent President won re-election by a landslide margin. On the other hand, Herbert Hoover got crushed in his re-election bid in 1932 against Franklin D. Roosevelt, when the Olympics were held in Los Angeles.



Making the major assumption that Obama will win re-election in 2012, it's easy to see how a domestic Olympic Games could create nightmares for the GOP in their efforts to win back the White House in 2016. The Olympics are intrinsically a feel-good, patriotic event. The symbolism of Obama, in an Olympic Stadium built just blocks away from his home (see map below), bringing the world to together and passing the literal and figurative torch to Hillary Clinton or whomever the Democratic nominee might be in 2016 would be extremely powerful, worth tens of millions of dollars in free advertising impressions at a critical phase in the campaign.


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Note: The original version of this article contained a stupid mistake.

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The Decline of The Conservative Intellectual

Richard Posner has a fascinating read:

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.

Now, take a look at this chart; this is the share of the vote of those with post-graduate educations won by Democrats:



The 1980 figure is extrapolated based on Jimmy Carter's performance among all college graduates. Carter won only 35 percent of college graduates in 1980, but Democrats have generally performed better among those with postgraduate educations than those with "just" a college degree; we estimate Carter's share of the postgraduate vote was 40 percent. Other figures are taken from New York Times exit polling.

Obviously, this data is far from perfect: Having attended the University of Chicago, where there are plenty of booksmart people that you wouldn't consider particularly bright, I can tell you that the correlation between intelligence and educational attainment is considerably less than one-to-one. Still, Republicans have gradually been losing the egghead vote. I wonder how that translates into their ability to recruit strategists and "thought-leaders" who can work on the campaign, policy and media sides and help to lead them out of their current slump.

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Update from Sierra Leone

Apologies for the long silence - I have been on mission in Sierra Leone since the 3rd, and have not had any access to the web until today.

My team is doing a two week assessment on environment, natural resources, conflict and peacebuilding as an input to a key UN planning document called the “Joint UN Vision,” where all the UN agencies come together to lay out priorities for cooperative work over next 3-4 years. Sierra Leone, famous for its diamonds and other minerals, is one of the poorest countries in the world – in fact on the 2008 UN Human Development Report, Sierra Leone ranked last.

The ten year civil conflict that raged from 1992 to 2001 killed tens of thousands displaced over 2 million of the country’s 5 million people, and wrecked infrastructure and human capacity. The continued campaign by the brutal RUF rebel group was largely funded by diamond and gold sales to Liberia in exchange for arms and ammunition. The natural environment was a serious casualty, with productive land, cash crops and valuable forest and bush areas damaged in the fighting and coping strategies that followed.

In fact, over 40% of civil conflicts in the 20th century had a link to natural resources, often as a contributing cause, by financing arms, or acting as a flashpoint for small-scale conflict that becomes embroiled in larger ethnic, political or economic conflict, which can spiral out of control. In the post-conflict period, extraction of natural resources (mining, timber, firewood forestry, fishing) is often the only livelihood option for returning displaced populations. All too often, unsustainable practices become embedded as the new norm, setting up the conditions for severe resource stress in the future.

Unfortunately, natural resources and environment are often given less attention in the immediate post-conflict period than they deserve, given their importance ⁱ. Hopefully this will change in the future as more emphasis is given to the issue.

i. UNEP has published a very good summary report on the issue: http://www.unep.org/pdf/pcdmb_policy_01.pdf
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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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Should Democrats Be Rooting for Charlie Crist?

Florida Governor Charlie Crist will reportedly announce tomorrow that he is running for the United States Senate. At first glance this move -- which would have surprised until we began to hear credible chatter about it from Republican insiders earlier this month -- would seem like a real recruiting coup for the GOP. In contrast to most governors, Crist retains strong approval ratings; he is well ahead, moreover, of prospective Democratic opponents in early horse race polling. Democrats may hold out hope that they can skewer Crist for leaving Florida's problems behind him in Tallahassee (the DSCC is already running ads to this effect), or that he'll be defeated by Marco Rubio, a conservative young Cuban who has top-notch advisers and will be competing against him in the Republican primary. But this is likely to be very much an uphill battle for them, particularly given the absence of a top-tier opponent like state CFO Alex Sink. Florida will drop significantly on next month's senate race report card.

As Arlen Specter has proven, however, party distinctions are often relatively meaningless: when control of the chamber is not at stake, it's votes, not chairs, that count. And when it comes to key votes in the Senate, it's an open question as to which would the Democrats rather have:

-- a virtually 100 percent chance of Crist, an extremely moderate Republican, in the Senate chamber, or,
-- a roughly 50 percent chance of Rubio, a fairly conservative Republican, and a 50 percent chance of Kendrick Meek, a not-particularly-progressive South Florida congressman who is the leading contender to represent the Democrats next November.

Let's consider Crist's stances on the issues:

The Stimulus. Crist was in favor was in favor of Obama's economic stimulus package, and in fact campaiged with the President for its passage.

Cap-and-Trade. Crist supports cap-and-trade and signed a bill to create a statewide cap-and-trade system in Florida. This isn't necessarily that radical a stance for a Florida politician, a state which has relatively few jobs in carbon-intensive industries and conversely might suffer disproportionately from rising sea levels and stronger Atlantic hurricanes (Mel Martinez, Florida's outgoing Senator, was one of seven Republicans to vote in favor of cloture on last year's climate change bill). Crist also somewhat notoriously reversed his former opposition to offshore drilling during John McCain's 2008 election campaign. Nevertheless, he is likely to be a reasonably reliable Democratic vote on environmental issues.

National Health Insurance. Unclear. Last May, Crist signed a bill to provide for low-cost, no-frills health insurance for the roughly 20 percent of Floridians who are uninsured. The bill does not contain an individual mandate, but does prohibit insurance companies from discriminating on the basis of age or pre-existing conditions. The smart money is that Crist would be a gettable vote on health care but would balk at a public option.

Taxes. Crist has generally positioned himself as a fiscal conservative and it seems highly unlikely that Democrats would have his vote on an effort to roll back the Bush tax cuts or to make the tax code more progressive. Furthermore, Florida has no income tax, and Crist had previously suggested replacing the federal income tax with a flat tax or national sales tax. He is, however, currently considering a bill to raise tobacco taxes and certain other fees.

Abortion. Proving that the resemblance to fellow Ken Doll Mitt Romney is more than superficial, Crist has, at different points in his career, described himself as both "pro-choice" and (more recently) "pro-life". Crist has made four appointments to the Florida Supreme Court: two conservatives and two moderates.

Gay Rights. Crist supports civil unions but not gay marriage, and was a somewhat lukewarm supporter of Florida's Amendment 2, which passed in November and amended Florida's constitution to ban gay marriage. Crist has also stated that he opposes any change to Florida's longstanding ban on gay adoptions.

Immigration. Crist has been somewhat coy about his stance on immigration issues, but has generally been sympathetic toward immigration reform proposals including an amnesty provision for illegals.

Labor. Florida is a right-to-work state with low unionization rates, something which Crist has been loathe to change, although labor claims some moderate successes in strengthening layoff and workplace safety provisions for state employees. It seems unlikely that Crist would become the one Republican to defect on the "card check" provisions of EFCA, although his support for a compromise bill might be plausible.

Other Issues. On other "values" issues, Crist has generally taken an orthodox Republican stance. Although having adopted a somewhat casual tone about his own past usage of marijuana, Crist signed a bill last June to toughen Florida's laws on marijuana growers and has stated his opposition to legalization provisions. He has received high ratings from the NRA and signed a bill to strengthen Flordia's concealed-carry provisions. Crist is pro-death penalty and has overseen three executions. He has been a somewhat vocal supporter of education vouchers. On the other hand, Crist pushed to restore voting rights for some 750,000 non-violent ex-felons, a move which might have harmed John McCain in November.

All in all, this would appear to be an authentically moderate set of positions, one that very much resembles those of Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins. Not coincidentally, Crist's approval ratings show no partisan split whatsoever; in the latest Quinnipiac polling, Crist received favorable ratings from 67 percent of Republicans, 64 percent of Democrats, and 65 percent of independents. Crist, moreover, is not exactly a loyal GOP soldier, having essentially abandoned the McCain campaign in October and irking conservatives again in February by campaigning for the President's stimulus package.

The particular answer to our question probably depends on the particular issues that the Senate would be taking up during Crist's tenure, especially during the 112th Congress that will convene in January, 2011. Reading the divining rods, my guess is that the key policy debates during this interval will involve environmental policy (since cap-and-trade may lack the momentum to pass in a down economy), the tax code (since there will be increasing pressure on the Administration to pare down the deficit), and perhaps immigration reform (where Democrats may dare Republicans to further alienate Hispanic voters in advance of the 2012 elections). Democrats are likely to have Crist's support on two of these three issues; that might be a bit better for them than flipping a coin between zero and three.

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How Did White People Vote? How Did Rich and Poor People Vote?

Awhile ago I posted some maps based on the Pew pre-election polls to estimate how Obama and McCain did among different income groups, for all voters and for non-Hispanic whites alone. The next day the blogger and political activist Kos posted some criticisms. I disagree with one of Kos's suggestions--he wanted me to rely on exit polls, but I don't actually see them as more reliable than the Pew pre-election polls--but he pointed out some serious problems with my maps. I realized that some fixes were in order. Most importantly:

- My maps would be improved by replacing solid red and blue with continuous shading to distinguish between landslides and narrow margins.

- I needed a more flexible model that would allow the nonlinear pattern of voting and income to vary by state. (In the previous model, I fit a nonlinear pattern (by including a separate logistic regression coefficient for each of the five income categories) but allowed the states to vary only with intercepts and slopes. In the new model, we're letting all five coefficients vary by state.)

During the past couple of months, I've been working on this when I've had a spare hour or two, and now I think we have something reasonable to share. Here it is:

States colored deep red and deep blue indicate clear McCain and Obama wins; pink and light blue represent wins by narrower margins, with a continuous range of shades going to pure white for states estimated at exactly 50/50.

I know that the 538 audience is more interested in results than in technical details, so I've put the detailed state-by-state discussion at my statistical modeling blog (along with a graph showing data and fitted model for each state).

All this work is joint with Yair Ghitza.

P.S. We did not include Alaska and Hawaii on the maps because they were not included in the Pew Research surveys that we analyzed.

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Forecast: On Climate Change, Cooler Temperatures Bring Hotter Air

You may remember this photograph -- or one very much like it -- from websites such as the Drudge Report:



It turns out that a lot of other Americans may remember this sort of photo too, and it may affect their perceptions of global warming.

A new study by Patrick J. Egan of New York University and Megan Mullin of Temple University, in fact, finds a statistically significant relationship between recent weather conditions and beliefs about global warming. They write:

By matching geocoded survey data to local weather records, we find a significant relationship between local weather and beliefs about global warming. For each three degrees [Fahrenheit] that local temperature rises above normal, Americans become one percentage point more likely to agree that there is "solid evidence" that the earth is getting warmer.

Although Egan and Mullin are principally concerned with short-term, local fluctuations in temperature, one also wonders if longer-term, national trends play a role in perceptions about global warming. Gallup, for instance, recetly identified an increase in the number of Americans who think global warming concerns are exaggerated, and a decrease in the number who think that global warming has already begun or will take effect at some point within their lifetimes (from 75 percent in 2008 to 68 percent in 2009). Could cooler weather (or the perception thereof) be playing a part here too?

It seems that it very well could. From March 2008 through February 2009 (Gallup's survey was conducted in March), the average temperature in the United States was 53.2 degrees, a fairly typical figure by historical standards, but the lowest one recorded over a comparable 12-month period since March 1997-February 1998. By comparison, U.S. temperatures from March 2007 through February 2008 had averaged 54.5 degrees Fahrenheit, one of the higher figures on record.

Gallup, in fact, has asked this question for a number of years, first in November 1997 and then in March of each year from 2001 through 2009. The chart below presents a comparison of the percentage of Americans expecting to see the effects of global warming within their lifetimes (or who claim to have already seen it) against average United States temperatures in the 12 months prior** to each survey being conducted.


**Previous 12 months indicates March-February temperature averages for each survey year from 2001-2009, and December 1996-November 1997 averages for the 11/97 survey. In March 2007, Gallup asked this question on two separate occasions; responses from those two surveys are averaged.

These results actually suggest a somewhat more profound relationship than Egan and Mullin identified from local data; each increase in average US temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit is associated with a 2.8 point increase in the percentage of Americans who expect to see the effects of global warming by the end of their lifetimes. Although we should caution against overinterpreting this data since we have only ten observations to work with, the relationship is nevertheless statistically significant at the 95 percent level. (A further caution: the effect decreases to 2.0 points if the discontinuous 1997 data point is dropped and the statistical significance drops to 85 percent).

It may seem implausible that Americans can remember discrepancies in average temperatures of as little as a degree or two, and even more so that it will affect their perceptions about global warming to a material degree. Something of a cottage industry has emerged on the right, however, to treat any period of below-average temperatures, even of a few days, as a point of evidence that global warming concerns are exaggerated. Meanwhile, normally fair-minded and intelligent conservatives like Michael Barone use weasel-worded phrases like "temperatures actually haven't been rising over the past decade" while skirting over the fact that temperatures throughout the last decade have been significantly higher than in the past (each of the last 11 years has each been associated with above-average temperatures in the United States, although 2008 was only barely so). Nor are conservatives like Barone likely to mention that temperatures were above average in 2008 almost everywhere BUT the United States and Canada:



Barone further suggests that a belief in global warming "has taken on the character of religious faith" for "liberal elites". If he is arguing that liberals take science as seriously as conservatives take God, then I suppose we should take that as a compliment. At the same time, the fact that Barone, or Matt Drudge, or Fred Barnes, or (more notoriously) George F. Will treat climate change as yet another bit of truthiness to be passed through the spin cycle is something which should both appall and alarm liberals: the former because nothing is a surer sign of the conservative elite's capacity for intellectual dishonesty, and the latter because perceptions about climate change are literally as fickle as the weather, and liberals are losing ground in the spin war at the very time they have the opportunity to advance serious policy reforms to mitigate it.

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Mike Huckabee's Flawed Logic on the GOP's Future

Take a look at this comment from Mike Huckabee's interview yesterday with the Visalia (CA) Times-Delta:

Here's what I find: People that are social conservatives are also economic conservatives. But a lot of the economic conservatives are not social conservatives. Throw the social conservatives the pro-life, pro-family people overboard and the Republican party will be as irrelevant as the Whigs.

If you accept Huckabee's assertion -- that social conservatives are always economic conservatives, but economic conservatives are not always social conservatives -- it follows that social conservatives are necessarily a subset of economic conservatives:



If this is the case, however, is does not follow, as Huckabee states, that "[t]hrow the social conservatives, the pro-life, pro-family people overboard and the Republican party will be as irrelevant as the Whigs." After all, the social conservatives are also economic conservatives. If you adopt a message of economic conservatism, it will also appeal to the social conservatives. On the other hand, if you adopt a socially conservative message, a lot of the economic conservatives might be turned off by it and could leave the party.

So the equilibrium strategy under Huckabee's model is probably to adopt an economically conservative, but socially moderate message. Sure, the social conservatives might not be particularly happy about this state of affairs -- but unless they wanted to form a third party, they wouldn't have anywhere else to go. (For reasons that we will leave as an exercise to the reader, it wouldn't make sense for the Democrats to adopt a socially conservative, economically liberal platform under this scenario.)

The GOP's real problem, of course, is that there is far from perfect overlap between social conservatives and economic conservatives. You probably have something like this:


The base voters are the ones that are both economically and socially conservative; these are ~25 percent of voters the that still identify as Republican. However, whereas during 1994-2004, the Republicans seemed to be winning many or most swing voters who were either economically conservative or socially but not both, they now seem to be losing much of both groups.

In November, for instance, Obama won 43 percent of voters who attended church on an at-least-weekly basis. Considering that many of the 57 percent of such voters he didn't win were probably also economic conservatives, that suggests that Obama won a majority of voters who are socially conservative but economically liberal -- particularly African-American and Latino voters, who often fit this description.

Obama also, however, won a majority of voters making $200,000 or more, who as a group can be presumed to be fiscally conservative but socially liberal.

We should also mention the importance of the War on Terror to the GOP's successes in the 2002 midterms and the 2004 Presidential election. In 2004, 19 percent of voters described terrorism as their most important issue, and 86 percent of such voters picked George W. Bush (this was more than enough to outweigh the gains that John Kerry made on Iraq). By comparison, only 9 percent of voters described terrorism as the most important issue in 2008 (86 percent of them voted for John McCain). That change alone accounts for a drop of about 7 percent in the GOP's margins.

Security issues, indeed, may have been the glue that was helping to hold the fiscal and social conservatives together into a winning electoral coalition. There were a lot of security conservatives after 9/11 -- and my guess is that the Republicans were winning the vast majority of them provided they were either social conservatives or economic conservatives. With homeland security issues having faded into the background, however, and foreign policy issues starting to work against the Republicans, the strange-bedfellowness of the relationship between social and fiscal conservatives is now becoming more apparent.




The irony of all of this is that Huckabee's greatest appeal is probably to economically moderate (or even liberal), but socially conservative voters, precisely the sorts of voters that he says don't exist. But these voters do exist, and the GOP's medium-term choice is probably in picking between them (which, FWIW, probably requires their making significant into the Hispanic and perhaps even African-American communities) and their alter egos, which are fiscally conservative but socially moderate, libertarianish voters. Right now, however, the GOP's messaging is so haphazard that they are probably losing majorities of both groups.

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