New York's Gillibrand Has Become Lockstep Liberal

New York voters seeking a progressive alternative to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand may have found one: Gillibrand herself.

According to ratings compiled by ProgressivePunch.org (Progressive Punch founder Joshua Grossman is a contributor to FiveThirtyEight.com), Gillibrand has thus far compiled a progressive score of 98.45% in the 111th Congress, and 94.12% on critical votes. Although there has been little to distinguish the first 30 or so Democratic senators, most of whom have voted in lockstep with the President's agenda, those scores rank Gillibrand 15th among the 59 Democratic Senators; her ratings are essentially identical to those of reliably liberal Senators like Tom Harkin and Pat Leahy, as well as those of her colleague in the Senate, Chuck Schumer. Gillibrand has also been among the most liberal of the 11 freshman Democratic Senators:

Progressive Scores for Freshman Democrats
ProgressivePunch.org
Merkley      OR     98.69%
Burris       IL     98.65%
Kaufman      DE     98.65%
Gillibrand   NY     98.45%
T. Udall     NM     96.73%
Shaheen      NH     95.33%
M. Udall     CO     92.16%
Warner       VA     90.20%
Begich       AK     89.47%
Bennet       CO     88.89%
Hagan        NC     88.08%

It's not as though Gillibrand, who rated as a relatively conservative Democrat while representing New York's 20th Congressional District in the House of Representatives, has done much to conceal her newly more liberal politics; she flipped to become a supporter of gay marriage almost immediately upon taking office, for instance, and she has become a regular contributor on progressive websites like Daily Kos and The Huffington Post.

Still, this might help to explain why the White House has been not-so-subtly trying to dissuade other Democrats -- first Steve Israel and then Carolyn Maloney, both U.S. Representatives with solidly liberal voting records -- from issuing a primary challenge to Gillibrand.

Voting this way, of course, is probably an asset to Gillibrand in New York, where Obama retains a 73 percent approval rating, including getting the thumbs-up from about half of the state's small but hearty base of Republicans. It's a reminder, indeed, that with very few exceptions, electoral considerations bear far more firmly on a Congressperson's voting record than any sort of deep-seated personal convictions.

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Latinos Love Sotomayor--But How Much?

There's finally some polling out on the SCOTUS nomination of Sonia Sotomayor that breaks out Latinos, and unsurprisingly, she's very popular in this demographic. But the degree of this approbation, and thus the potential risk to Republicans of fighting her confirmation, is still in some question.

Yesterday Quinnipiac released a national poll showing a 58/24 approval/disapproval ratio for Sonia Sotomayor's nomination among Hispanics; a solid majority, to be sure, but barely distinguishable from the 55/25 ratio for all voters.

But another poll released today by DailyKos/Research 2000, conducted on 5/31-6/4, with a MoE of 2%, tells a very different story. You can read the full findings over at DKos, but the most important numbers, for Latinos, are very stark: Their approval/disapproval ratio for Sotomayor is 82/5, and for Rush Limbaugh is 3/77. In terms of the big conservative talking points against Sotomayor, Latinos like the idea of empathy in a judge by 79/4; and don't think she's a racist by a margin of 83/2. There are a scattering of undecideds on all these questions, but it's fair to say that Latino support for Sotomayor in this poll is overwhelming and unconditional.

We'll soon see more evidence, and have a better idea which of these two snapshots of Hispanic/Latino opinion is an outlier, since one of them almost certainly is.

If DKos/R2k is right, or conservatives decide to take a different tack with this confirmation, it may well be time for Republicans to ponder Nate's "Operation Gringo" strategy for winning the presidency with little or not Latino support.

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Liberal Blogger Matt Yglesias Wants to Tax Your Beer! I Want to Tax Drunk Drivers.

Matt Yglesias writes:

[E]xcessive alcohol consumption is associated with a lot of health problems, and not only problems for excessive drinkers—drunk driving and the linkage between alcohol and violence impose significant costs on other people. Mark Kleiman estimates that “Doubling the tax on beer (from a dime to twenty cents a can) would reduce the assault rate by at least 5%, and maybe as much as 20%.”

Meanwhile, you could get a healthy chunk of the revenue needed to pay for health care reform. [..] I don’t want my beer to get more expensive. But at the same time, I do want to see comprehensive health care reform. So someone will have to pay something. And this is a pretty good option.

There's pretty good economic evidence to suggest that alcohol consumption is fairly sensitive to price. And there's lots of good economic (and commonsencial) evidence that alcohol consumption is associated with a wide array of undesirable outcomes, from increased highway fatalities, to decreased productivity at work, to increased violence against women, to worsened health outcomes. Increasing alcohol taxes would, therefore, almost certainly save lives.

One problem, however, which is somewhat unique to liquor consumption, is that these behaviors aren't particularly strongly associated with drinking unto itself. They are associated, rather, with drinking to excess and/or engaging in other, particularly stupid sorts of behaviors while doing so. I know the evidence on this is mixed, but many studies have suggested that moderate alcohol consumption is in fact associated with improved health outcomes -- especially if you're drinking red wine and especially if you're a guy. A person who has a couple of drinks a couple of days a week, and who never drives or has the compulsion to engage in violence while doing so, imposes virtually no negative consequences either on himself or on society. Drinking doesn't cause negative externalities in the same way that, say, driving (traffic congestion and pollution) or smoking (second-hand smoke) intrinsically do.

People say it's difficult to tax the undesirable behaviors associated with drinking without taxing drinking itself. But is that necessarily so?

In 2006, there were 1.1 million arrests for drunk driving in the United States (source), not counting Florida which didn't report its statistics. Fine each of those people $8,000, and you'd have almost about $9 billion more to pay for health care every year. Why $8,000? Because that's the figure, according to a 2001 paper (.pdf) by Steve Levitt (the Freakonomics guy) and Jack Porter, that would be required to internalize the negative externalities associated with driving drunk.* By the way, if you're concerned that this tax might be regressive, you could scale it according to a person's income, as they do for traffic fines in Finland.

Of course, if you were actually to fine people $8K every time they got a drunk driving conviction, you wouldn't raise quite as much as $9 billion. Faced with a choice between an $8,000 fine or a $20 taxi fare, a lot more people would have Yellow Cab on speed dial, and you'd have fewer revenue-producing arrests.** But this is a feature of the policy rather than a bug -- you'd be stopping drunk driving. Moreover, it's exactly the same feature/bug problem you'd run into by raising alcohol taxes in general, or any time you were trying to use tax policy to disincentivize an undesirable behavior.

The drunk driver tax would also produce at least as much revenue as the liquor tax. The CBO estimated (.pdf) in December that raising alcohol taxes to $16 per proof-gallon (by about 10 cents a drink over current levels) would raise about $6 billion per year. Even if our $9 billion total were decreased somewhat by deterred drunk driving -- and again, that would be a Good Thing -- we could probably beat that number.

Of course, there are probably some jurisdictional or federalism issues with this. And like Yglesias, I'd be willing to chip in a few extra cents with every beer to help pay for universal health care. (Although as a self-employed person who could probably expect some cost savings from alternatives to employer-based insurance, this is not necessarily a selfless act for me -- though I do drink a lot of beer!).

But a drunk driver tax would be fairer, more efficient, and more Pigovian than a beer tax -- and good luck to the liquor industry in trying to oppose it.



* Levitt and Porter don't account for fines and other sorts of explicit and implicit financial penalties (e.g. raised insurance premiums) that drunk drivers already face; on the other hand, they also don't account for externalities associated with merely maiming, rather than killing, innocent victims. Nor do they blame drunk drivers for the deaths of the other passengers in their cars, figuring that those people had knowingly accepted the risks of driving with someone who had been drinking to excess.

** Then again, there is probably some low-hanging fruit. The number of drunk driving arrests varies a lot from state to state -- from a high of 861 per billion vehicle miles traveled in Alaska to a low of 26 in Delaware. These differentials have virtually no correlation with the amount of drinking in each state -- slightly more Delawareans than Alaskans are binge drinkers, for instance. While I'm enough of a libertarian to be opposed to things like random traffic checks, clearly some states can afford to be more vigorous in their pursuit of drunk drivers.

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Exit Polls and Outrageous Folded Ballots in NL and UK

European Parliament voting is complete in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, with few surprises. Though the European Commission threatened legal action, Dutch exit polling was released last evening, indicating that Geert Wilders' Party of Freedom, and the Liberal Democrats (D66) had picked up four and two seats respectively, while the governing Christian Democrats and coalition partner Labour had lost a combined six seats.

In the UK, local election results so far indicate a strong showing from the Liberal Dems and the Tories, who each earned four additional councilor's chairs, at the expense of Labour. For the UK Independence Party, a bizarre "scandal" has emerged with regard to the folding style of the EP ballot. Apparently, requiring the reading of ballot instructions and/or unfolding more than one crease represents an "outrage" that undermines the fundamentals of democracy. The EP results from both countries will be officially released on Sunday, once the rest of the EU has voted.

UPDATE:As Gordon Brown remains under fire, local election results continue to trickle in from the counties. Overall, Conservatives are at +29 on councilors, +4 on councils, while Labour is -25/-1 and Liberal Dems -8/-1.
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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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McAuliffe : Virginia :: Dean : Iowa?

We haven't been paying quite as much attention to next Tuesday's Virginia Democratic Primary as we probably should. But these charts from Pollster.com tell you pretty much all you need to know:



The purple line is Creigh Deeds, whom I'd been hoping might lose mainly because I don't want to be misspelling his first name for the next six months. But there's been some fairly robust polling of this race, and Deeds has all sorts of momentum. The green line is Terry McAuliffe, the outspoken former DNC chair and longtime Democratic consultant. McAuliffe does not have the momentum. In fact, his stock is dropping like a rock. Meanwhile, the third candidate, Brian Moran, is gaining ground on McAuliffe too but having trouble keeping up with Deeds. Does this pattern look familiar to anyone?



This was the polling situation in the run-up to the 2004 Iowa Democratic Caucus, with the last data point representing the actual results. As you can see, while it was clear from the polling that Howard Dean was losing momentum and John Kerry and John Edwards were gaining it, the polling far underestimated the magnitude of the momentum, and Dean wound up losing to Kerry by 19 points.

These kind of dramatic late swings happen more often in primaries than in general elections, and more often in multi-candidate fields than in two-candidate ones. I don't want to say they're always dispositive, because I haven't studied the issue systematically enough. Of note is that at least one hot-off-the-presses poll (from SurveyUSA) still has McAuliffe ahead by 6 points. But overall, and particularly in consideration of the fact that is Terry McAluiffe, who started out with the biggest warchest and the most name recognition, it's hard to see what he's going to do to halt his slide.

McAuliffe does, however, have one asset that Howard Dean didn't: Bill Clinton, whom he already pulled out of his hat in mid-May and who will return to Virginia over the weekend. McAuliffe, because of his access to the Democratic establishment, presumably also has things like superior voter lists, which could help his turnout on Election Day.

There is one last problem for McAuliffe, though: what happens to those Moran voters? Will they stick with their guy? He does, after all, seem to have some momentum of his own, and is polling within the margin of error in several surveys. Or, rather than playing the role of John Edwards, will Moran be more like Dick Gephardt, who also lost momentum in the days before the Iowa Caucus and saw most of his vote go to candidates like Kerry and Edwards? If some Moran voters do defect, presumably they would be more likely to go to Deeds, who has substantially better favorables than McAuliffe according to PPP (although Research 2000 disagrees).

My armchair assessment is that the probabilities here are something like Deeds 60-70%, McAuliffe 20-30%, and Moran 10-20%. Like Dean, McAuliffe wears his emotions on his sleeve, and if he were to lose, the concession speech should be something to watch.

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As Go These Four So Go the Dems?

As a final look for the moment at re-election prospects of the House Democratic rookies, I'm going to focus on four white, Rust Belt freshmen, two each from Michigan and Ohio: Steve Driehaus, OH1; Mary Jo Kilroy, OH15; Mark Schauer, MI7; and Gary Peters, MI9.

Here are some basics on the four:



This quartet provides a nice mix, with variation in their own victory margin, Barack Obama's performance in their district, and the racial makeup and levels of college education in their districts. None of the four were among the 11 Democrats who voted against Obama's stimulus or the 20 who voted against his budget.

Based on this limited, preliminary sketch of the four, if I had to list them from least to most vulnerable, it would be Kilroy, Peters, Schauer and then Dreihaus.

Kilroy won the open seat vacated by Deborah Pryce's 2007 retirement, though she nearly beat Pryce in 2006. So Kilroy has run strong twice, and almost certainly will not have to face a challenge in 2010 from a politically-revived Pryce. Thanks to Ohio State University, her district, which includes significant chunks of Columbus and Franklin County, has a high rate of college education--in the heart of the so-called "diploma belt." Though Kilroy benefited from Obama's solid showing, her win was not dependent on a minority voter surge, as her close defeat in 2006 and the relatively low minority voter district percentage shows.

Gary Peters posted only 52 percent in his 2008 elected, but won by 9 points thanks to third party votes. Still, 52 means 48 percent voted against you, and so it will be important to see what sort of challenger the Republicans recruit here. Peters' is an even better-educated district than Kilroy's and he got an even bigger push from a more diverse district than Kilroy's. Again, given that all of this put him at just 52 percent, quality of opponent here is crucial. Fortunately for Peters, he's raising cash at a clip that would make Rahm Emanuel proud--fourth best among rookie Democrats in pickup districts.

I'd rank Mark Schauer next, second most vulnerable among the quartet. On the upside, he didn't get much of a pull from Obama in this district with relatively low levels of college degrees and a small non-white population. Schauer's victory was partially set-up by the victory of the man he beat: Conservative Republican Tim Walberg, who successfully primaried moderate GOPer Tim Schwarz in 2006, making Walberg a poster boy for what goes wrong when the far right dominates a primary and making the seat a prime target for Democrats in 2006. Though Walberg hinted soon after his loss that he may be back for a rematch in 2010, the tougher challenge might actually come from Schwarz, were he to decide to run.

That brings us to Driehaus. Not only did Driehaus win by a small margin, but he benefitted from arguably the largest Obama coattails, courtesy of the large share of minority voters in the district. Steve Chabot is clearly convinced that Driehaus was a coattail winner: He already announced, on February 9, that he will run to take back the seat, and identified a large minority turnout as "a key factor in our loss, probably the most substantial factor. With the turnout model you saw this past election cycle in a district like mine, it was just impossible to overcome."

CORRECTION: Sorry, I initially and accidentally had the OH16 (Boccieri) results in the column for Kilroy's OH15 district. She won by 1, not 10 points, and that said, she surely has a far more tenuous hold on that seat. I'd re-order it from least to most vulnerable as Peters, Schauer, Kilroy and then Driehaus--putting Kilroy slightly ahead of Driehaus despite the closer victory margin because she's run twice and, so far at least, is not facing the recently-deposed Republican, as Driehaus will with Chabot.

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Get Ready for Hockey Dad!

Yesterday, we noted that Tim Pawlenty's approval ratings, even if we give him a bit of extra credit for being a Republican in a blue state, have been nothing remarkable. He's no Charlie Crist or Jon Huntsman Jr., someone whose popularity at home clearly points toward some kind of special political acumen. True, almost any "opposite-color" governor of a reasonably large state is someone who is going to get at least a passing thought from his party. But there's no particularly good reason why, say, Tim Pawlenty is considered a serious presidential candidate and someone like Jodi Rell isn't.

Since Pawlenty has announced, however, that he won't seek a third term as Minnesota's governor, and he seems poised to tip his toes into the Presidential waters instead, let's take another look at what his strengths might be. Below is a comparison, from exit polls, of Pawlenty's performance in 2006, when he defeated DFL candidate Mike Hatch by a single percentage point to win re-election, against that of a generic House Republican candidate. That 2006 year was, of course, not a very good one for Republicans: they lost all sorts of key demographics, including independents by a 3:2 margin, en route to losing most of the key races that they were competing in. Palwenty's narrow re-election was one of the few bright spots for them. Where and with whom did he overperform a generic Republican?



There are a lot of numbers there but, although be perfectly frank, I'm not sure this was quite as enlightening as I was hoping for it to be. But a few interesting things stand out.

Firstly, Pawlenty performed relatively well with young voters. Although he lost the 18-29s, he didn't lose them badly, and he won Gen X'ers by a solid margin. This may have more to do, however, with the peculiar politics of Minnesota rather than anything in particular that Palwenty was doing. While Minnesota is blue now, it was very blue before, once sometimes thought of as the most reliably Democratic state in the nation. What this implies is that the old folks in Minnesota might be at least as liberal as their younger counterparts.

Likewise, Pawlenty split the independent vote with Hatch -- not a bad outcome in a year in which the Republicans lost it by 18 points nationally. But part of that may have been because of the presence of Peter Hutchinson, an independent who won 6.4 percent of the vote. Hutchinson's vote share, naturally, was large among independents, but exit polls also revealed that about twice as many of his votes came from Kerry voters as Bush voters; he probably cost Mike Hatch the election. (Of course, any Minnesota politician who is hoping to win a race without a third-party candidate mucking things up somehow is making a mistake).

The number I find most interesting here, actually, is Pawlenty's strong performance among people with children under the age of 18 -- he won them by 15 points in a year where Republicans lost them by 4 points nationally. Although some of this may have to do with the age-based demographics in Minnesota that we described above -- it's that 30-44 age range where most people are raising kids -- it was nevertheless an impressive performance. And Pawlenty's performance was particularly good with dads: he won them by 25 points, when Republicans won them by just 2 points nationally.

Perhaps this can be Pawlenty's elevator pitch: the 30-second (or less) soundbyte that distinguishes him from some of the other, relatively strongly-branded Republican hopefuls like Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin. He's Soccer Dad! Or since this is Minnesota, he's Hockey Dad! Or, since Palin has sort of deflated the Hockey Parent bubble, he's Curling Dad!

All right, you might be interpreting this as sarcasm. But doing well with middle-aged men is a pretty good attribute for a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination to have. Some 56 percent of the Republican turnout in the Iowa caucuses was male, as was 57 percent in New Hampshire, and 56 percent in both Michigan and Florida. Just as it's an advantage to have your demographics skew female in a Democratic primary, it's nice to have them skew male in a Republican one.

Pawlenty is not the only Republican hopefuls with some appeal to the working class -- Palin and Huckabee, notably, are big problems for him. So the Hockey Dad schtik alone won't be enough for him. The Republican presidential field is crowded, but, as I noted in February, it's least crowded in the dimension of a moderate populist:



Pawlenty's small opening might come among voters who conclude that Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee are a little scary (although Pawlenty is an evangelical Christian, he'll lose if he tries to out-conservative them), but that Charlie Crist and Mitt Romney are a little creepy. If I were him, I might talk a lot about guns -- but not so much about God. On an issue like gay marriage, I might take the tack that a lot of the Republican moderates are taking in the New York Senate: don't necessarily come out forcefully against it, but blame the other side for creating a "distraction". Don't be a jingoist, but talk a lot about American jobs and the need to protect them.

It's going to take a lot of ingenuity for Pawlenty to win the Republican nomination -- he starts out with much lower name recognition, and a much weaker brand, than most of his rivals. But that is, I suppose, why he's decided to take two years off to get ready for the race.

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Control of Virginia Redistricting Hinges on Races Far Under the Radar

Many millions of dollars are being spent in Virginia this year in order to affect the primary election being held there five days from now as well as the general election being held in November. The battle royal that’s attracting the vast majority of attention right now is the red-hot, three-way Democratic gubernatorial primary between Terry McAuliffe, Creigh (pronounced "Cree") Deeds and Brian Moran. Deeds had been trailing but now has caught up to the other two (see the most recent three way horse race primary poll from PPP). We’ll have more on the general election race against Republican Bob McDonnell after the primary.

But underneath all the thunder and lightning and money being hurled around in the gubernatorial primary, there is pitched battle for control of the State House, and with it a significant stake in the coming redistricting. How it shakes out below the break.

Operating far below the public awareness levels of the three statewide elections (Governor, Lt. Governor and Attorney General) are the one hundred races for the Virginia House of Delegates, which is what the lower chamber of the state legislature is called in Virginia. Why should anyone outside of Virginia care whether the Democrats or the Republicans control the Virginia House of Delegates? Collectively, the House of Delegates comprises one leg of the three-legged stool (the other two are the governor and the state senate) that will determine the lines that demarcate all the new 2010 census-based congressional districts and state legislative districts in the state of Virginia for the next decade. (Because Virginia is one of the rare states that holds elections in odd numbered years, the new post-2010 census lines actually go into effect in Virginia in 2011, before everywhere else in the country implements new lines in 2012.) The 2009 elections are the last for the House of Delegates before redistricting.

As things currently stand, control of Virginia redistricting is wide open, which would have been a surprise to anyone after the 2001 elections. Republicans seized full control of Virginia government leading up to the 2001 redistricting, and drew aggressive new lines. Despite Mark Warner winning the Governor’s race and collecting broad support throughout the Commonwealth, Virginia Democrats dropped from a 49 seats out of 100 all the way down to 34.

But Virginia Democrats are on a very strong victorious streak. They’ve won two governors' races in a row and picked up Jim Webb’s U.S. Senate seat in 2006. In 2008 came an across-the-board triumph with Mark Warner easily picking up the other U.S. Senate seat for the Dems and the defeat of two incumbent U.S. House Republicans -- not to mention the first Democratic triumph in the presidential race in Virginia since 1964. Today, the House of Delegates sits at 55 Republicans (including two independents who regularly caucus with the Republicans) and 45 Democrats.

Bob McDonnell, the Republican nominee for governor, leads all three possible Democratic candidates in trial heat polling, although not by enough to enable a prediction with much confidence. So that leg is up for grabs.

Virginia state senators are elected to four-year terms, with all 40 senators being elected at once. The next election for them will not be held until November of 2011. In theory, Democrats control the Virginia state senate over Republicans 21-19. But the Democrats’ margin is even more tenuous than it appears. That’s because the Virginia State Senate Republican Caucus had successfully lured Democratic State Senator Ralph Northam to join them, which would have created a 20-20 tie and terminated Democratic control over the State Senate. But Virginia Democrats had been blessed with inept opponents: Jeff Frederick, then the Virginia state Republican chairman, sent a premature tweet boasting to all and sundry that the Democratic hegemony in the Virginia State Senate was about to be overthrown. The tweet allegedly gave members of the Virginia State Senate Democratic Caucus sufficient time to whisper their own counter lures in Northam’s ear and so the announced defection never actually transpired. But if Republicans can seize control of the governorship and the state House of Delegates, Northam and other individual conservative Democrats in the state Senate would have tremendous leverage to extract concessions from either side in order to either consolidate or foil Republican control or redistricting. So control of the senate leg of the redistricting stool is also in serious question.

The House of Delegates is the leg of the stool whose control appears most likely to be held by Republicans. The key questions in determining the outcome of the Delegate elections are:

1. Is Obama's victory last November a harbingers of a changing Virginia -- or a unique result unlikely to be replicated in a 2009 election with no federal offices on the ballot?
2. How good are the Democratic candidates in these “Obama seats” currently held by Republicans?
3. Can the Democrats overcome not having candidates in some of the most closely-fought districts from 2008?

As he did nationally, Obama ran ahead of typical Democratic performance in the vast majority of Virginia -- essentially the entire state outside of Appalachia.

There are 22 House of Delegates districts in Virginia where Obama won more than 63.5% of the vote (NOT shown below on the chart), all of which are all currently held by Democrats. There are also 38 districts of the 100 where Obama received less than 47.0% percent. That leaves 40 districts in which you might expect a competitive contest:



But in some of these districts, one or the other party hasn't managed to field a nominee. Rather, there are 26 districts out of these 40 with both a Democratic and Republican candidate. Throw in the three additional off-chart districts with competitive races in places Obama underperformed and you’re left with 29 competitive races -- 16 seats defended by Republicans, 13 seats by Democrats. Democrats would need to win essentially two-thirds of these seats to take the chamber, a very challenging but not insurmountable task. Recent projections as well as “deep background” briefings I've received indicate a mid-range scenario where the Democrats would pick up two or three seats in the November 2009 general election, leaving them just two or three short of capturing a majority in the body. Just one or two more candidates in (the right) currently uncontested districts could provide some cushion to their efforts this fall.

Many of the districts where Obama won or came very close and that are currently uncontested by the Democrats in 2009 are in key swing areas in Virginia where the Democratic tide washed farthest in 2008. These districts are in Virginia Beach and the far exurban reaches of the Washington D.C. Metro (Fauquier, Loudoun, the farthest reaches of Prince William Counties).

Virginia Democrats (I know, because I’ve spoken to them) come up with cogent reasons as to why this or that Republican incumbent is too tough to be taken down. But the fact of the matter is you can’t win the fight if you’re not in the fight. If a scandal involving a Republican incumbent should arise in one of these districts between now and the November election, the Democrats won’t even have an alternative on the ballot whom people can turn to. (And of course it’s also bad for the democratic process to have unchallenged elections.)

There are a few days left for both Democrats and Republicans to at least get a warm body on the ballot in the House of Delegates districts that aren’t currently being contested, in case a sudden scandal blows up in a member’s face or some act of God removes the unopposed incumbent.

Of course, it’s not all on the shoulders of the Virginia Democratic Party that there are a dearth of Democratic candidates in these districts. These are geographic areas lacking in a recent rich tradition of Democratic Party activism. The hundreds and hundreds of people who volunteered for Barack Obama in these areas are still catching their breaths or have otherwise moved on with their lives. The lack of ongoing participation by Obama supporters in local Democratic Party electoral politics -- not just in Virginia, but elsewhere in the country too -- is something worthy of a whole post unto itself.

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Brits and Dutch Vote Today; Skeptics Leading

British and Dutch voters head to the polls today, the first two EU nations to cast ballots in the 2009 cycle of the European Parliament elections. In both countries, parties that normally fall far outside the mainstream are now receiving significant attention, and will likely earn addition MEPs.

At the same time, the new European Conservatives coalition in the EP should receive a boost from today's voting.

UK top four current parties:

UK Party	Current MEPs	Last 3 polls ave.
Conservatives	27 (26.7 %)	26.6 %
Labour	19 (22.6 %)	20.3 %
Liberal Dems	12 (14.9 %)	18.3 %
UK Indep.	9 (16.1 %)*	17.6%

While the two "major" parties in the UK look to be performing quite poorly, particularly the Labour government, this performance is not significantly worse than the last round of elections. In the 2004 EP elections, the very unpopular Blair government was taken to task by the British public, and lost 6 EP members. At the same time, the Conservative opposition fared even worse, losing 8 MEPs. In return, the Liberal Dems and UK Independence Party won a combined 12 new MEPs. After today's voting, the UK delegation will likely remain center-right, with a slightly more euro-skeptic bent.

That said, if an especially poor Labour showing were to take down the Brown government - still quite unlikely at this point - it would be another example of the political warping of the EU/EP and it's role in member state politics.

In the Netherlands, turnout is expected to remain equal to or slightly higher than the 39.1 % of eligible voters that participated in 2004. Dropping from 27 MEPs because of the expansion of the EU to include Bulgaria and Romania since in the 2004 round, the Dutch will today elect 25 members. Most interesting will be the outcome for Geert Wilders' PVV (Party of Freedom), a far right wing operation that is best known for Wilders' "I don't hate Muslims, I hate Islam," comment. Some have suggested, supported by the last few polling results, that the PVV could possibly garner the highest vote total.

Netherlands top five current parties:

NED Party	Current MEPs	Last 2 polls ave.
Christian Dems	7 (24.4 %)	18.0%
Labour Party	7 (23 .6 %)	15.5%
Freedom and Democ.	4 (13.2 %)	13.2%
Socialists	2 (7.0 %)	11.1 %
Party for Freedom	0	17.0 %

The Socialists and Freedom Party look to make the largest gains in the Dutch delegation, which for the Socialists would represent three consecutive elections with a gain in MEPs. This began in 1999, when they earned their first member with just 5.0% of the vote. Geert Wilders and his far-right, anti-immigrant, anti-Islam party will also make news based on the EP coalition his projected 3-5 MEPs will join; or if they instead remain unaligned. Indicators of the Dutch voting may be available as early as tomorrow, as the release of exit polling data has been promised, over the protests of the EU.


* UKIP initially won 12 seats in the 2004 elections, before two members were expelled due to allegations of voter fraud, and an additional member resigned later.
Note: Commentor noted a typo in the conservatives figure, which has been fixed. Cheers!

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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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Gubernatorial Power Rankings: Crist, Freudenthal Top List

Who's the most popular governor in the land? A fairly well-informed observer might guess Jon Hunstman, Jr. of Utah (who won't be a governor for much longer), Charlie Crist of Florida or Sarah Palin of Alaska. Those would all be pretty good guesses, except for Palin, who was once extremely popular in Alaska, but no longer is. The answer, however, appears to be governor Dave Freudenthal of Wyoming, who when his approval was last tested back in August, was viewed favorably by some 81 percent of voters.

What makes this more remarkable is that Freudenthal is a Democrat -- something which a only 26 percent of Wyoming voters are (52 percent are Republicans). On the other hand, Freudenthal has one big advantage: Wyoming is a small state, and as our own Andrew Gelman has noted, it seems to be much easier to maintain higher approval scores when you have fewer constituents to please.

What I've set out to do then, is to develop an index of gubernatorial power rankings that takes a governor's approval scores and adjusts it for these two things: the size of a state and its partisan makeup. Let me explain in a bit more detail.

Approval Ratings. Approval ratings are taken from all available public polling data collected in the last three months (since March 1st). We take a governor's positive rating less his negative rating (for example, 52 percent approve and 44 percent disapprove is a +8) and then simply average the numbers across all the polls. A maximum of one poll -- the most recent -- is used from each survey firm. In other words, this is basically the Real Clear Politics approach. Where no polls have been conducted on a governor within the past three months, we take the most recent available one; such instances are denoted in the chart below.

Obviously this is not a perfect metric. Approval ratings tend to be associated with fairly large house effects at different polling firms; a more sophisticated version of this analysis would correct for that. But, this is what we're going to go with for now.

Adjustments for Size of State and Party ID. The next step is to create an expected approval rating based on two factors: the size of a state and its partisan leanings. The adjustment for the size of the state is based on a regression analysis of the unadjusted approval scores against the square root of a state's population. Small-state governors are expected to have above-average approval ratings, and large-state governors below average ones.

The other adjustment is for party ID. Party affiliation isn't quite as important for governors as it is for other types of office-holders, as they aren't necessarily beholden to the whims of their national party and have somewhat more flexibility to define themselves. That's why Freudenthal is the Governor of Wyoming, and Republican Jim Douglas is the chief in Vermont. Nevertheless , party has some influence. Based on previous (unpublished) work I've done on the 2006 election, each additional point of advantage a gubernatorial candidate has in terms of his partisan ID advantage translates into about half a point at the ballot box on Election Day. That is, all else being equal, we'd expect the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Michigan, where Democrats had a 12-point party ID edge on the 2008 exit poll, to win by about 6 points.

We take this rule of thumb and apply it to a governor's expected approval rating. For every point's worth of advantage a governor's party has in his state (as according to 2008 exit polls), we add half a point to his expected approval rating. Obviously, in cases where the governor's party is at a disadvantage, this lowers his expected approval rating.

The Results. The final step is to compare a governor's actual approval average against his expected one; this is what we refer to as our power rating. For example, Hunstman's approval rating in a recent Dan Jones poll was a remarkable +61 in Utah, but because he hails from a state which is both very red and relatively small, we'd expect him to score a +18. His power rating, then is, 61 less 18, or +43 -- still very good.

Power ratings for all 50 governors are listed below. (And yes, I know that Kathleen Sebelius is no longer the governor of Kansas, but nobody has tested Mark Parkinson yet).



Freudenthal tops our list with a net score of +65; the bonus he gets for being a Democrat in a very red state roughly cancels out with the penalty he gets for being in a very small state. Following him are Charlie Crist of Florida (+61), Jodi Rell of Connecticut (+58), Huntsman (+43), and Mike Beebe of Arkansas (+42). At the bottom of the list is David Paterson of New York, whose power rating is an execrable -44. Jim Gibbons of Nevada (-35) and Deval Patrick of Massachusetts (-24) follow him on the worst list.

Let's take a slightly more detailed look at the power ratings for the governors who are considered serious contenders for the 2012 presidential nomination:



As we mentioned, Crist, who gets a lot of extra credit for governing a large state, ranks second overall, whereas Hunstman ranks fourth of 50. Bobby Jindal, meanwhile, even if his national coming out was somewhat awkward, is still very popular in Louisiana, and rates as a +24 overall. I didn't include everyone's favorite darkhorse contender, Mitch Daniels of Indiana; he has excellent ratings but declared today that he has no interest in 2012

The ratings for the other contenders, however, are fairly average. Tim Pawlenty gets a little extra credit for governing in a blue state, but it's not enough to make up for somewhat marginal approval numbers -- there's no particular sign that Palwenty has any special political acumen. I've also never understood why Mark Sanford of South Carolina or Haley Barbour of Mississippi are regarded as national contenders. Neither is especially popular at home, and indeed, Barbour is somewhat unpopular relative to what you'd expect for a Republican in Mississippi. Then there's Palin, who remains more popular than not in Alaska, but has seen her ratings drop very sharply, and has a high expected score because she's the governor of a small, red state. Her power rating of -7 ranks 36th of 50. Think she'll pull a Pawlenty and decide she has better things to do than hang out in Juneau?

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Does History Dictate That New Jersey and Virginia Will Elect Republican Governors in November?

Yesterday New Jersey Republicans, in a light turnout, chose former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie to take on incumbent Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine in November. As expected, Christie, a favorite of national Republicans, defeated Bogota mayor Steven Lonegan, a self-styled conservative activist, by a comfortable 55%-42% margin. Corzine won the Democratic nomination with 77% of the vote against three minor opponents.

Next Tuesday, Virginia Democrats will hold a gubernatorial primary featuring state senator Creigh Deeds, former DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe, and former state rep. Brian Moran. The winner will take on Attorney General Bob McDonnell, who is unopposed for the GOP nomination.

Since these are the only two major statewide political contests in this off-year, national political observers will naturally seek to divine national political trends in NJ and VA, and some will go right over the brink and treat them as referenda on President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress. And in that connection, we will be told repeatedly that the party controlling the White House hasn't won a gubernatorial election in either state since 1989.

Is that bit of selective data really a legitimate predictor of this November's results? I don't think so.

This simplest way to test the "party holding the White House loses NJ and VA" axiom is to look beyond the five cycles from 1989 through 2005 at the previous five cycles. And there the hypothesis quickly breaks down.

For one thing, VA and NJ went in different partisan directions in four of the five off-year elections (NJ elected a Republican Governor and VA a Democrat in 1985 and 1981, while NJ went Democratic in 1977 and 1973, and VA went Republican in those years) between 1969 and 1985. The only time they moved in concert, in 1969, the party controlling the White House won both states.

So the question must be asked: did the citizens of these two very different states suddenly decide in 1989 to start holding national political referenda in choosing their governors, and moreover, to award their top state political prize to the party out of power in Washington? There's no particular reason to think so.

Now there's a sub-argument sometimes made that Virginia is the real contrarian bellwether, perhaps because of its proximity to Washington. That's more credible since the party controlling the White House has now lost eight consecutive gubernatorial elections there. Moreover, Virginia's susceptibility to big partisan trends is theoretically strengthened by its now-unique law against successive gubernatorial terms, which wipes out much of the power of incumbency to influence election results.

But if you look more closely at those three pre-1989 VA gubernatorial elections where the party controlling the White House lost, the idea that the results reflected an anti-White-House-incumbent backlash begins to weaken. (NOTE: all references to the results of these VA gubernatorial elections are from unofficial compilations by Polidata, since the State Board of Elections does not publish returns prior to 1995.)

In fact, distinctive Virginia intra-party dynamics were a big factor in the 1977, 1981 and 1985 gubernatorial races. In 1977, Virginia Democrats were enduring the final phase of the ancient rivalry between the old Byrd machine and party "insurgents." The best-known insurgent, Henry Howell, won the gubernatorial nomination in a close race against establishment candidate Andrew Miller, and then went on to get vastly outspent and then trounced by Republican John Dalton. None of this had much to do with what was happening in Washington, and the idea that Virginia was trying to "send a message" to Jimmy Carter is also undercut by the fact that the Commonwealth was the only state in the former Confederacy that didn't go for Jimmy the year before. The "message," if any, had already been sent.

Then in 1981, after much soul-searching among Virginia Democrats, the party united behind popular moderate-to-conservative Lt. Gov. Chuck Robb, who won comfortably, as did his hand-picked successor, Gerald Baliles, in 1985.

I could go on, but you get the idea: applying Occam's Razor (i.e., the most simple theory that explains a phenomenon should be given precedence), which in this case would suggest that state elections are most obviously controlled by state political dynamics, there's plenty of evidence explaining why one party or the other has won Virginia gubernatorial elections without resorting to the "White House backlash" explanation.

That's true of more recent elections in both New Jersey and Virginia. New Jersey is a relatively competitive state leaning Democratic in most state and presidential contests in recent years. It underwent a tax revolt in the early 1990s that helped an exceptionally talented moderate Republican politician, Christine Todd Whitman, win the governorship in 1993; she had little trouble getting re-elected in 1997. It's largely a coincidence that a Democrat was in the White House both those years. Since Whitman left office, New Jersey has reverted to its fundamentally Democratic leanings; it's largely a coincidence that a Republican was in the White House in 2001 and 2005.

Virginia, meanwhile, has been a Republican-leaning state trending Democratic; Republican gubernatorial wins in 1993 and 1997 were unremarkable given the state's basic political complexion, though in 1997, a close race was blown open by the brilliant if irresponsible ploy by Jim Gilmore to campaign almost exclusively on a pledge to repeal an unpopular "car tax" (a tactic so powerful in VA that it was replicated in Republican gubernatorial campaigns in other states for several years). Mark Warner's 2001 campaign will be studied for years by political scientists as a textbook case of successful strategic audacity and effective use of a financial advantage. If Virginians were trying to send a "message" to George W. Bush by electing Warner, it's odd that they voted three years later to re-elect Bush by a goodly margin. More importantly, the 2001 election occurred at the very peak of Bush's post-9/11 popularity. By 2005, the demographic changes in VA that eventually led to the first Democratic victory in the Commonwealth since 1964 made Tim Kaine's win pretty unsurprising, and in any event, Republicans generally conceded that Kaine ran a far better campaign than GOP nominee Jerry Kilgore.

I am not ruling out the strong possibility that attitudes towards the party controlling the White House have had some effect, at the margins at least, in state elections in both New Jersey and Virginia. Voters do not completely compartmentalize national and state politics, and the White-House-backlash phenomenon is evidenced by the general rule that the presidential party loses congressional seats in midterm elections (though it's worth remembering that two exceptions to this "rule" have occurred in the last three midterms, in 1998 and 2002).

There's little question, for example, that Tim Kaine in 2005 benefitted from anti-Bush sentiments in those rapidly growing Northern Virginia counties that are within the Washington media market. But it's also likely that Kaine benefitted in those same counties even more from a backlash against Jerry Kilgore's over-the-top negative campaign (and his oafish handling of the death penalty issue), and from his own messaging, which was tailor-made to appeal to suburban voters.

All in all, there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical about predictions that New Jersey and Virginia are somehow destined to vote Republican this November. And even if that happens, in-state dynamics, such as Jon Corzine's low approval ratings or a "backlash" against two consecutive Democratic administrations in Richmond, will probably matter most.

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Is Gay Marriage Coming or Going in NY State?

The news channel NY1 today conducted a poll of New York's 62 state senators on pending legislation to legalize gay marriage in the Empire State, which was approved by the State Assembly but faces longer odds in the more conservative Senate.

Six senators who we had previously classified as undecided told NY1 they were planning to vote no. They are:

Kenneth LaValle, R-Long Island (Port Jefferson)
John J. Flanagan, R-Long Island (East Northport)
Charles Fuschillo, R-Long Island (Merrick)
Carl Kruger, D-NYC (Brooklyn)
Betty Little, R-Upstate (Queensbury)
Catharine Young, R-Upstate (Olean)

The loss of the three Long Island Republicans -- LaValle, Flanagan and Fuschillo -- is a pretty big blow to gay marriage's chances, as is that of Carl Kruger, a Brooklyn Democrat. Little and Young were thought to be longshots for yea votes and it is less surprising that they have now come out against gay marriage explicitly.

But, there is some good news for advocates of gay marriage too. Three Republicans who we had previously classified as no votes now tell NY1 they're undecided:

Thomas Morahan, R-Westchester (Clarkstown)
John Bonacic, R-Westchester (Mount Hope)
Roy McDonald, R-Upstate (Wilton)

That makes the count 20 yea votes and 28 nay votes, with 14 senators undecided. Gay marriage will require 12 of the 14 undecided votes to pass.

If this were an exercise in flipping coins -- and you had to come up with heads at least 12 times in 14 tosses to pass gay marriage, its odds of passing would be extremely long: about 150-to-1 against. However, that is of course not the way that politics works. People's votes are not independent from one another -- instead, legislators they may look to leadership or their colleagues to determine their own vote. Moreover, it may not be safe to assume that those who claim to be undecided on gay marriage are 50:50 shots to vote for it. A senator like Bonacic, who cp-sponsored a 2006 bill to ban gay marriage, might be reluctant to come out publicly in favor of the bill until the last possible moment. On the other hand, one wonders what some of the Democrats who claim to be on the fence, particularly those who hail from areas where most of their constituents approve of gay marriage, are waiting for.

Nevertheless, Democratic senator Thomas Duane on Monday told the Daily News that Democrats have the 32 votes they need; Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith was more reserved in his assessment.

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Home Stretch of European Parliament Elections; Egg-Pelting Continues

As the home stretch of the EP election campaign rapidly approaches, the major media outlets in Europe have begun to finally cover campaign developments on a regular basis, even as it commands fairly low interest from many voters. In the U.S., the big news outlets have generally ignored the election, with even Reuters and the AP providing little to no coverage.

Not surprisingly, the stories that have emerged in the headlines have largely been event-driven rather than issue-driven, such as Czech Social Democrats leader Jiří Paroubek's campaign rally troubles:

"When the head of the Social Democrats, Jiří Paroubek, was pelted with eggs at a political rally in Kolín two weeks ago, the reaction in the press was one of amusement and shock. But then it happened again in Plzeň, and again in Kladno, and again in Příbram and Beroun. Mr Paroubek has quipped that the perpetrators would be better off baking a cake than haranguing him on the campaign trail, but the Czech daily Právo reported on Saturday that the mood behind the scenes in the Social Democrat camp was one of agitation in light of these developments." [Český rozhlas - Radio Prague, 25 May 09]

In general, EU citizens seem to be taking the opportunity to punish incumbent national parties - to the glee of most member state oppositions. This is most apparent to the Anglophone world through the nose-diving poll numbers for Labour in the UK, more MP and cabinet official resignations, and even tougher rhetoric from the Tories and UK Independence Party (UKIP). "The government is collapsing before our eyes," David Cameron declared earlier today, while the UKIP leader Nigel Farage insisted yesterday that the EP voting that takes place tomorrow "will bring down Gordon Brown."

All politics is local, after all. Though the election is for Europe, and the issues ostensibly linked to issues of pan-European concern, the campaign has again focused on national politics, national identity, and the political troubles of many governing coalitions.

FiveThirtyEight's coverage of the election will continue tomorrow, beginning in the UTC morning.
---
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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Targeting House Democratic Freshmen, Part 2

Following yesterday's post about the 26 House Democratic freshmen from seats held by Republicans prior to 2008, here are their first quarter 2009 fundraising totals:*



Although there's some disparity between the high end (NJ3's John Adler's, $464K) and the low (FL8's Alan Grayson's, $144K), the totals are relatively tightly clustered; more than half the 25 frosh for which there are data are bounded between $221K and $301K. If fundraising continues at this pace, most of these freshmen should have somewhere between $1.5 to $2 million for their initial re-elects. Not bad.

Given the wealth of his district, it's not surprising to see CT4's James Himes, who unseated Chris Shays, near the top of the list. Of greater concern to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee are those at the bottom: OH16's John Boccieri and NC8's Larry Kissel both won with 55 percent in 2008, but FL8's Alan Grayson and OH1's Steve Dreihaus squeaked by with tighter, 52-48 victories. They may need to start ringing the register a bit more in the year ahead.

(*These are total quarterly receipts as of March 31, 2008, not total cash-on-hand. For some reason, the Federal Election Commission did not have a figure for Nye.)

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Targeting House Democratic Freshmen, Part 1

Continuing a theme I began a week or so ago, I'm going to look more closely at key House races for 2010. To get started, let's look at all 26 seats featuring Democratic freshmen/women in pickup seats--that is, Dems who beat a Republican incumbent in the general or captured a GOP-held seat by replacing a retired or primary-defeated Republican.

Tomorrow I will look at the first quarter 2009 fundraising totals of these 26 House frosh, but for starters let's plot them all based on their 2008 vote share and the margin by which Barack Obama carried/lost their district last November. (Data again courtesy of POLIDATA dataset compiled on behalf of the National Journal and the Cook Political Report.)



The correlation between vote share and Obama margin is weakly but positively correlated (r = .317), and if we use 54 percent vote share as one cut point and whether Obama or McCain carried the district as the other, the four quadrants sort out as follows:

Group 1. Though circumstances change and all freshmen face some degree of uncertainty, to limit the discussion, let's set aside the six members in districts in the top right quadrant (NV3, IL11, NM1, NC8, VA11, and NY25) as somewhat safer, though never totally safe of course, than the rest.

Group 2. Likewise, in the bottom left are six Democratic frosh the National Republican Campaign Committee undoubtedly has identified as prime targets: ID1's Walt Minnick, MD1's Frank Kratovil, AL2's Bobby Bright, VA5's Tom Perriello, NY29's Eric Massa, and PA3's Kathleen Dahlkemper.

Of greater interest are the off-diagonal quadrants in the top left and bottom right.

Group 3. The quintet who won with 55 percent or more despite Obama losing their district--AZ1's Ann Kirkpatrick, CO4's Besty Markey, FL24's Suzanne Kosmas, NY13's Michael McMahon, and OH16's John Boccieri--have demonstrated that their support exceeds the external force of possible Obama coattails. At 55 percent or higher their own winning margins were thus at least 10 percent, and in some cases a bit higher because of third-party and write-in votes. I suspect the RNCC will have to make judicious, case-by-case decisions here based on several interrelated factors including the freshmen incumbents' voting patterns and fundraising totals, the quality of the Republican challengers recruited, and a variety of intangibles like personal gaffes and the effects of local issues.

Group 4. Finally, there is the cluster of 8 Democrats who won narrowly despite a strong Obama tailwind that may or not be available to them in 2010, and these could be the real wildcards--and, not coincidentally, the places Obama needs to visit in the next two years to flex his downballot electoral muscle. Of these eight--which also include CT4's James Himes, FL8's Alan Grayson, NJ3's John Adler, and VA2's Glenn Nye--those two seats each in Ohio and Michigan could be the bellwethers for the Democrats' 2008 House frosh class: Steve Dreihaus (OH1), Mary Jo Kilroy (OH15), Mark Schauer (MI7) and Gary Peters (MI9).

Why? To cite just one reason, all four are white Democrats who benefit from having at least 9 percent combined black/Hispanic population shares in their districts. Given that non-white voting turnout between 2004 and 2008 increased 19 percent while white turnout increased just 1 percent, if there is any significant drop-off in minority turnout their path to re-election could be tough. But I'll have more to say about the "bellwether-ness" of these four districts in a separate, forthcoming post.

UPDATE: I corrected two small typos (had AZ-1 pasted into two groups by accident, and misspelled Mark Schauer's name--apologies on both counts). But, just for future reference, and since I have never blogged here or anywhere else (DKos, American Prospect, Salon) under a pseudonym and my columns for The Baltimore Sun already include my email address, 538 readers should never hesitate to email me directly at schaller67@gmail.com--so long as comments, corrections and suggestions are polite and not personal. And thanks to those readers for pointing out my typos.

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Pro-Life States Have Lower Abortion Rates

States with higher numbers of adults who identify themselves as "pro-life" have lower rates of abortion among both teenage and adult women.

The chart below compares the percentage of pregnancies in each state that ended in abortion in 2005 to a SurveyUSA poll conducted in that same year that asked residents of all 50 states to identify themselves as pro-choice or pro-life. A couple of caveats about the abortion data: although it comes from the CDC (.pdf), it relies on voluntary reporting from each state health agency. Some states, like Florida and Louisiana, do not report their abortion statistics, and in other cases -- Kentucky's figures are suspiciously low when compared to Tennessee's, for instance -- it may be subject to various sorts of imperfections, as the reporting of abortion statistics can have some political implications. Also, there is some ambiguity about the number of abortions in a particular state versus the number by residents of that state; for instance, a lot of women in Idaho travel to Washington to get abortions, which has more liberal abortion laws (there appear to be similar flows from Mississippi into Alabama, South Dakota into North Dakota, and Missouri into Kansas, among others). We report the latter total, with a correction for those women whose state of residence was not identified. Nevertheless, those caveats aside, the relationship is pretty strong:



The modest outlier you see in the top left-hand corner is New York, which was one of four states (the others are Alaska, Hawaii and Washington) in which abortion was completely legal prior to the Roe v Wade decision and has particularly liberal abortion laws. It seems, however, that people do practice what they preach. For each increase of about 10 percent in the number of residents who identify themselves as pro-life, the percentage of pregnancies ending in abortion is reduced by about 5 percent.

The pattern is slightly more profound when we look at teenage (girls aged 15-19) pregnancies, among whom a higher fraction of pregnancies (at least a quarter) end in abortion and where there is larger state-to-state variance: more than half of teenage pregnancies in New York end in abortion, for instance, versus less than 15 percent in some states like West Virginia, Arizona and South Dakota (and purportedly only 5 percent in Kentucky, but as we mentioned before we find that figure dubious). For teenagers, the CDC reports data based only on the number of abortions in a particular state and not by state of residence; we apply a correction for this to attempt to identify the latter figure.



The correlation there is quite strong -- about .77.

It might be objected that those states that have more pro-life residents may have more restrictive abortion laws; I ran a regression analysis to test for the impact of things like parental notification requirements and waiting periods and generally did not find any significant relationships, although it does appear that the four states in which abortion was legal before Roe maintain somewhat higher abortion rates today. I also tested for the impact of a few types of demographic variables and some were statistically significant in some formulations of the model (higher rates of teenage pregnancy, for instance, were correlated with higher abortion rates after controlling for other variables). None of these, however, invalidated the pro-life variable, which was highly statistically significant in all versions of the analysis.

One complication, however, is that of access. According to the Guttmacher Institute, approximately one-third of American women live in a county where there is no abortion provider. There is a very strong (inverse) relationship, additionally, between having access to an abortion provider in one's county, and the pro-life leanings of that state.



Do pro-life states have fewer abortion providers because there is less demand for abortions in those states? Or, alternatively, is there social stigma attached in these states to running an abortion clinic, meaning that less of the demand is met?

Undoubtedly the answer is some of both. The regression analysis hints that access is not a strong causal factor -- from what it can gather, the pro-life tendencies of a state drives both the lower number of abortions among its residence and the relative absence of abortion clinics, rather than access directly impacting the abortion figures. On the other hand, because all of these variables are so strongly correlated, it is hard for the model to disentangle them.

The Guttmacher institute data, however, suggests that abortion providers in pro-life states carry a larger caseload. Abortion clinics in the 15 most pro-life states performed an average of 949 abortions in 2005; those in pro-choice states performed an average of 576. (In this case, we are reverting back to using data based on the state in which the abortion was actually performed -- not the woman's state of residence). This may imply that there are either too few providers in pro-life states to meet the demand for abortion (or too many in pro-choice states) -- although clearly many women who want an abortion are willing to travel for one.

State Clinics Abort. Ratio
15 Most Pro-Life States   
UT 6 3,630 605
LA 9 11,400 1,267
AR 3 4,710 1,570
ID 7 1,810 259
AL 13 11,340 872
MS 2 3,090 1,545
WV 4 2,360 590
KY 3 3,870 1,290
TN 13 18,140 1,395
IN 15 11,150 743
SD 2 790 395
MO 7 8,400 1,200
OK 6 6,950 1,158
NE 6 3,220 537
ND 1 1,230 1,230
TOTAL 97 92,090 949
   
State Clinics Abort. Ratio
15 Most Pro-Choice States   
VT 12 1,490 124
CT 52 16,780 323
NY 261 155,960 598
MA 45 27,270 606
CA 424 208,430 492
NH 13 3,170 244
MD 41 37,590 917
NJ 85 61,150 719
DE 9 5,150 572
WA 49 23,260 475
RI 4 5,290 1,323
NV 8 13,530 1,691
OR 32 13,200 413
ME 13 2,770 213
IL 38 50,970 1,341
TOTAL 1086 626,010 576

What would be interesting for both pro-lifers and pro-choicers to know, however, is the relationship between access and abortion rates. If it's a three-hour drive to the nearest clinic, how many women will ultimately wind up forsaking an abortion (and how many will have an illegal abortion instead)? I'm not going to try and sum this up with a nice, sugary conclusion. This is a complicated issue and, appropriately enough, it has complicated answers, even when it comes to its statistics.

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Would Mike Dukakis Have Won the 2008 Election?

Chris Bowers writes:

The nation still moving away from Republicans demographically, too. It can't be emphasized enough that Michael Dukakis would have won the 2008 election. His exit polls of 40% among whites, 89% among African-Americans, and 70% among Latinos is enough to reach 50%+1 now, even in the event that African-American turnout was only 12% of the vote instead of 13%.

From our analysis of the Current Population Survey post-election supplement, here are our estimates for voter turnout in 2008: 76.4% white, 11.9% black, 7.4% hispanic, 4.3% other, with the categories defined as mutually exclusive (for example, if you're white and hispanic, you count as "hispanic"). The exit polls say 74% white, 13% black, 9% hispanic, and 5% other (not adding to 100% because of rounding error), but I think CPS is more trustworthy.

Now we can take the Dukakis numbers and plug them into the 2008 turnout numbers, as long as we make some estimate for the votes of "other." I'll assume 55%, halfway between his performance among whites and among hispanics. (By comparison, we estimate from the Pew pre-election polls that Obama got 45% of the two-party vote among whites, 96% among blacks, 68% among hispanics, and 59% among others.)

Plugging in Dukakis's percentages by ethnic group and using the turnout numbers of 2008, we get a national adjusted Dukakis vote of .40*76.4% + .89*11.9% + .70*7.4% + .55*4.3% = 48.7%, which is better than the 46.1% he actually received but not quite enough to win.

This doesn't really shoot down Bowers's main argument--demographic shifts are important. I think he was overstating his case just slightly.

And, yes, I know that if Dukakis had really been running in 2008, things would've been different. I'm just following Bowers in using the Dukakis vote as a handy way to summarize the trends, keeping voting by ethnic group constant. Voting by ethnic group is not constant (as we can see by comparing Obama's breakdowns to his predecessors), but doing this sort of calculation is a good way to visualize the demographic changes that are occurring.

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GOP Has Always Been Dominated by White Voters

Gallup has data out suggesting that 89 percent of self-identified Republicans are white; the comparable figure among Democrats is 65 percent. These numbers closely match those from last November's Presidential election, when 89 percent of John McCain's voters were white as were 60 percent of Barack Obama's, according to exit polls.

This, however, is not exactly anything new. 88 percent of George W. Bush's voters in 2004, and 91 percent of them in 2000, were white. And nearly 98 percent of Ronald Reagan's voters in 1980 were white as were 96 percent of Gerald Ford's in 1976. The GOP is, in fact, slightly less white than it once was, as they do relatively better among Hispanics and Asians than among blacks (if still not particularly well), and Hispanics and Asians are starting to make up a larger fraction of the nonwhite (and overall) voting pool.



The Democrats, however, are becoming less white at a much faster rate than the Republicans. Whereas 85 percent of their votes were from white voters in 1976, the number was just 60 percent last November. This is, of course, a helpful characteristic, since the nonwhite share of the electorate, just 11 percent in 1976 and 1980, represented more than a quarter of the turnout in November.

Consider this remarkable statistic. In 1980, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Democrats (or at least white Carter voters) -- likewise, in 2008, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Obama voters. But whereas, in 1980, just 9 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Carter voters, 21 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Obama voters last year. Thus, Carter went down to a landslide defeat, whereas Obama defeated John McCain by a healthy margin.

In certain ways, I wonder if the GOP isn't paying a price for a strategy adopted years ago -- namely, the Southern Strategy. The Southern Strategy undoubtedly won the GOP many elections over the years, but it was adopted at a time when probably less than 10 percent of the electorate was nonwhite (if minorities were allowed to vote at all), whereas now about a quarter of the electorate is. The steady drumbeat of demographic change, coupled with an inability or unwillingness to adapt to it, has steadily made the Republicans' job harder and harder.

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Senate Rankings, June 2009 Edition

Races are ranked in order of their likelihood of changing parties (by November 2010, accounting for all factors such as potential retirements, primary challenges, and so forth).

Likelihood of party switch has increased since last month's rankings.
Likelihood of party switch has decreased since last month.

1. Missouri (R-Open)
I'd promised a couple of weeks ago that we'd have a new #1, and it's Missouri, which displaces the spot that New Hampshire had held for the previous two months. Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, a Democrat, has maintained a pretty consistent polling lead. She also has had an easier time with fundraising than Republicans like Roy Blunt and has a cute picture of a pony on her website. What's not to like? Missouri, as always, will be competitive, but Democrats may simply have the more appealing candidate here.

2. New Hampshire (R-Open)
In New Hampshire, we now have a poll from the University of New Hampshire that puts Paul Hodes slightly behind prospective Republican opponent (and former senator) John E. Sununu. If you want to nitpick, UNH polls have a reputation for being a bit erratic, and this was a poll of all adults rather than registered voters (though generally speaking polling adults rather than registered voters tends to help Democrats). Nevertheless, when coupled with somewhat tepid 1Q fundraising numbers for Hodes, this argues for treating this race as more of a toss-up and less of a Lean Democrat. On the other hand, there are not yet any declared Republican candidates, and there is a chance that the Republicans won't nominate a candidate even as strong as Sununu or former U.S. Rep Charlie Bass, whom Hodes defeated in the Democratic wave election of 2006.

3. Kentucky (R-Bunning)
Rumors of Jim Bunning's retirement, it seems, were greatly exaggerated, as he now has his re-election website up and running. Like Carnahan's, it features pictures of horses, as well as the slogan "Keep Bunning":



Don't send poor old grandpa to the retirement home! Keep 'im around! He's good folk, and he just so happens to be on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee! If you keep 'im, he'll bring us some nice earmarks for Christmas, just like the ones that grandma used to make!

4. Connecticut (D-Dodd)
Somewhat better polling numbers for Dodd, although Quinnipiac still has him behind Republican challenger Rob Simmons. This is one case, however, where the filter of a primary challenge might be useful to Democrats. If the anybody-but-Dodd sentiment is still strong come next year, there's a decent chance he'll lose to Merrick Alpert, who would probably wind up being the favorite in the general election by virtue of the Democrats' partisan ID advantage in the state. If Dodd is strong enough to fend off Alpert, on the other hand, that suggests that his standing with the public will have improved at least a little bit, and that he's likely to make further gains on Simmons.

5. Ohio (R-Open)
The latest set of Quinnipiac polling has Democrats Jennifer Brunner and Lee Fisher each maintaining leads on Rob Portman, but with Portman having weaker name recognition than his rivals (and plenty enough money to make sure that changes), I'm not yet ready to read too much into those numbers.

6. Delaware (D-Open)
No official word yet from Mike Castle, Delaware's at-large Representative, whose entry would radically alter the dynamics of this race, but a Republican source tells David Weigel that Castle is leaning toward running.

7. Nevada (D-Reid)
Some conflicting evidence here, but on balance it points toward improved prospects for the Republicans. There's more polling to suggest that Reid is deeply unpopular at home, and while it's not clear that Republicans will identify a top-tier candidate, a second-tier candidate like State Senator Mark Amodei may have a decent chance if the Anybody-but-Harry sentiment is sufficiently strong.

8. Colorado (D-Bennet)
The nominal incumbent, Democrat Michael Bennet, is an appointed Senator with fairly low name recognition who has never held elected office; this race is therefore in some ways better thought of as an open seat. Still, the Republican candidates to have thrown their hat in the ring so far are fairly obscure, and this race is at risk of being demoted if we don't start to see some proof within the next month or two that Republicans will field a decent opponent.

9. North Carolina (R-Burr)
Republicans have caught a major break here as Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper now says he won't challenge incumbent Richard Burr. Still, polling has several other Democrats holding Burr below 50 percent with high numbers of undecided voters. The Democrats are somewhat lacking in second-tier races after Missouri, New Hampshire, Kentucky and Ohio, and whomever emerges as their nominee in North Carolina stands to get a decent amount of support from the party.

10. Texas (R-Open?)
The Dallas Morning News speculates that Arlen Specter's departure from the Republican conference may hasten Hutchison's, as she no longer needs to worry about giving the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority and, according to both partisan and nonpartisan polling, may be losing her favored position against incumbent governor Rick Perry, who she is expected to challenge.

11. Illinois (D-Burris)
Why are Republican blogs spending so much time on unfounded conspiracy theories and so little on Roland Burris, when evidence is mounting that Burris crossed many significant ethical boundaries en route to being hand-picked by the Blagojevich Bros. to the U.S. Senate? Nevertheless, this race gets a down arrow: Mark Kirk, the strongest potential Republican challenger, has been very very quiet, Peter Roskam probably won't run, and meanwhile Lisa Madigan, rather than trying to knock off relatively popular governor Pat Quinn, may run for Senate instead. If Madigan enters, expect Kirk to keep his seat in the Congress and for this race to fall off the radar screen.

12. Pennsylvania (D-Specter)
Tom Ridge isn't running; does Pat Toomey actually have a chance at defeating Specter or likely Democratic primary challenger Joe Sestak? Quinnipiac has Toomey within 9 points of Specter and 2 of Sestak, although the latter is impacted by very low statewide name recognition. Still, both Sestak and Specter qualify as moderate Democrats and it is hard to imagine that Toomey, who compiled an extremely conservative voting record in the Congress, would be able to hold the political center against them once things have settled down a bit.

13. Louisiana (R-Vitter)
Charlie Melancon, the only remaining Democratic Congressman from Louisiana, is now said to be re-considering a challenge to Vitter; a March poll put Melancon seven points behind him. While I still think there's more smoke than fire here -- Vitter isn't as unpopular in Louisiana as you'd think -- he is sure to make a few entertaining gaffes on route to trying to win re-election and Melancon would have a decent chance with a well-executed campaign.

14. Florida (R-Open)
Marco Rubio, who has shown no inclination to exit stage right for Charlie Crist, has started to rack up some endorsements like those of Mike Huckabee and Jeb Bush Jr. Even if Rubio were to upset Crist in the Republican primary, however, he'd still stand a decent-enough chance in the general election, as the field of Democratic candidates started out fairly weak and is getting weaker. Democrats might do better to concentrate their resources on the gubernatorial race instead, where popular state CFO Alex Sink is running and could help deliver Florida to them in 2012.

15. New York (Jr.) (D-Gillibrand)
Depending on which numbers you look at, Kirsten Gillibrand's favorables either are or aren't improving. What we can say for sure is that the White House isn't playing games, having begun muscling potential primary challengers out of the race, evidently reluctant to betray any sign of weakness that might encourage former Governor George Pataki, who polls competitively against Gillibrand, to enter the contest.

16. Arkansas (D-Lincoln)
Potential GOP opponents are inventing all sorts of ways to avoid challenging Lincoln, although John Cornyn is still talking up the opportunity.

17. Iowa (R-Grassley)
I somewhat overzealously bumped this race last month on retirement speculation, not realizing that Grassley had brokered a deal with Jeff Sessions to ensure him a premium committee seat in the 112th Congress -- which, of course, Grassley can't be a member of unless he runs for re-election. Grassley is 75 years old and so retirement cannot be completely ruled out, but it's looking less and less likely.

18. California (D-Boxer)
I'm giving this race a very slight bump upward on the theory that, given the depth of its budget crisis, California is going to hell in a handbasket, and chaos usually helps the underdog.

19. Georgia (R-Isakson)

20. Oklahoma (R-Coburn)
Coburn is dropping hints that he'll in fact run for re-election. Although some of the stronger Democratic prospects are within Macaca range against Coburn, odds are that Brad Henry or Dan Boren won't run unless Coburn vacates the seat. Coburn's announcement is expected today; if he pulls a fast one on us, we'll revise accordingly.

21. Wisconsin (D-Feingold)

22. Arizona (R-McCain)

23. Hawaii (D-Inoyue)

24. Kansas (R-Open)
Democratic Governor Mark Parkinson, who took over when Kathleen Sebelius became HHS secretary, says he won't run for the seat, further diminishing the Democrats' already-slim chances.

25. Alaska (R-Murkowski)

26. North Dakota (D-Dorgan)

27. Maryland (D-Mikulski)

28. South Carolina (R-DeMint)

29. Washington (D-Murray)

30. South Dakota (R-Thune)

31. Alabama (R-Shelby)

32. Indiana (D-Bayh)

33. Vermont (D-Leahy)

34. Oregon (D-Wyden)

35. Utah (R-Bennett)
Bennett might actually be somewhat vulnerable in the Republican primaries, as Utah has a very weird nomination system involving a state convention that caters heavily to conservative activists. But our rankings measure the likelihood of a seat changing parties -- not merely changing candidates -- and, um, it's Utah.

36. New York (Sr.) (D-Schumer)

37. Idaho (R-Crapo)

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