Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips posted this summary of attitudes on a bunch of gay rights questions:
They did it all using multilevel regression and poststratification. And a ton of effort.
P.S. My only criticisms of the above graph are:
(a) I'd just put labels at 20%, 30%, 40%, etc. I think the labels at 25, 35, etc., are overkill and make the numbers harder to read. And the tick marks should be smaller.
(b) The use of color and the legend on the upper left are well done. But they should place the items in the legend in the same order as the averages in the graphs. Thus, it should be same-sex marriage, then 2nd parent acdoption, then civil unions, then health benefits, and so forth.
6.13.2009
Statistical Report Purporting to Show Rigged Iranian Election Is Flawed
@ 4:13 PM
Like most Americans, there are few things I would like to see more than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's hateful President, to be voted out of office. Elections in thuggish, authoritarian states like Iran need be treated with the utmost skepticism and scrutiny. I can't say I have any real degree of confidence in the official results, which showed Ahmadinejad winning with some 62 percent of the vote.
There is a statistical analysis making the rounds, however, which purports to show overwhelmingly persuasive evidence that the Iranian election was rigged. I do not find this evidence compelling.
Iran's election results were reported by its Interior Ministry in six waves. The first wave covered about one-third of the total vote; there were then two relatively large waves that reported about 20 percent of the vote each, and then three smaller waves that reported the remainder of the vote. What other observers have found is that, over the course of the six waves, there is an extremely strong, linear relationship between the number of votes reported for Ahmadinejad and the number reported for his principal opponent, Mir Hussein Moussavi (who had declared victory before any results were officially announced):
This relationship is superficially very impressive -- an R-squared of .998, which suggests a nearly perfect relationship.
Just how remarkable really is it, however? Rather than deal in abstractions, let's try a more concrete sort of experiment. Suppose that results from last November's election between Barack Obama and John McCain were revealed in this fashion, in six large waves. Suppose moreover that these waves were determined based on the alphabetical ordering of the states:
Wave 1: Results from Alabama-Illinois are reported; this represents about 33% of the total vote.
Wave 2: Results from Indiana-Mississippi (17% of the total vote) are added to the above totals.
Wave 3: Results from Missouri-North Carolina (19%) are added.
Wave 4: Results from North Dakota-Pennsylvania (12%) are added.
Wave 5: Results from Rhode Island-Texas (10%) are added.
Wave 6: Lastly, results from Utah-Wyoming (9%) are added and the counting is complete.
If results were released in this fashion, here is what we would get for the total number of votes for Obama and McCain at each stage:
Now, let's plot these on a graph:
Wow! The correlation is extremely high -- an R-Squared of .9959 -- almost as high as the one we saw for Iran. Does that mean the U.S. election was rigged too?
Of course not. The apparently extremely strong relationship is mostly an artifact of the exceptionally simple fact that as you count more votes, both candidates' totals will tend to increase. In our example, Wave 5 happens to be a very good one for McCain: it contains the results from South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas -- four red states -- plus Rhode Island, which went for Obama but contains a tiny number of votes. And yet, the impact of Wave 5 is barely visible when the results are presented in this fashion.
Likewise, there was more wave-to-wave variation in the Ahmadinejad-Moosavi results than the statistical analysis I cited above seems to imply. Ignoring votes for minor candidates, Ahmadinejad won a high of 70.4 percent of the votes in Wave 1, and a low of 62.3 percent in the votes newly added in Wave 6. By comparison, Obama's share of the newly-added votes in our experiment ranged from 56.4 percent in Wave 3 to 44.7 percent in Wave 4. That's slightly more variance than we saw in the Iranian results but not much.
To be clear, these results certainly do not prove that Iran's election was clean. I have no particular reason to believe the results reported by the Interior Ministry. But I also don't have any particular reason to disbelieve them, at least based on the statistical evidence. If Moosavi truly did have the support of a majority of Iran's citizenry, the best evidence we will have of that is what happens in the streets of Tehran over the next days and weeks.
EDIT: In case this isn't clear, I am not suggesting that any and all statistical analysis purporting to show tampering in Iran's election results will turn out to be fruitless. I am merely suggesting that this particular analysis is dubious; it is not a smoking gun.
To properly analyze Iran's election results is probably something best left to Middle East experts, rather than experts on U.S. electoral politics. Juan Cole, for instance, who certainty does know a thing or two about foreign policy, sees plenty of things that smell fishy to him.
Still, though, would it really be all that hard to rig an election in a way that would be hard for statistical analysis to detect? Suppose that you're Ahmadinejad, and that you become convinced based on the actual vote totals that you're on track to lose by several points. Could you not simply take every tenth vote, or every fifth vote, that came in for Moussavi, and count it for yourself? This would preserve an element of randomness and would make the province-by-province results look reasonably correct relative to one another.
My point, I suppose, is this. Out of all the things you'd need to do to rig an election, coming up with a set of results that managed to avoid easy statistical detection would probably be one of the easier ones. So I'm skeptical that statistical analysis alone is going to turn up evidence of fraud. But I'll be keeping an eye out for other approaches, particularly from those who have a deeper understanding of the Iranian state than I do.
There is a statistical analysis making the rounds, however, which purports to show overwhelmingly persuasive evidence that the Iranian election was rigged. I do not find this evidence compelling.
Iran's election results were reported by its Interior Ministry in six waves. The first wave covered about one-third of the total vote; there were then two relatively large waves that reported about 20 percent of the vote each, and then three smaller waves that reported the remainder of the vote. What other observers have found is that, over the course of the six waves, there is an extremely strong, linear relationship between the number of votes reported for Ahmadinejad and the number reported for his principal opponent, Mir Hussein Moussavi (who had declared victory before any results were officially announced):
This relationship is superficially very impressive -- an R-squared of .998, which suggests a nearly perfect relationship.
Just how remarkable really is it, however? Rather than deal in abstractions, let's try a more concrete sort of experiment. Suppose that results from last November's election between Barack Obama and John McCain were revealed in this fashion, in six large waves. Suppose moreover that these waves were determined based on the alphabetical ordering of the states:
Wave 1: Results from Alabama-Illinois are reported; this represents about 33% of the total vote.
Wave 2: Results from Indiana-Mississippi (17% of the total vote) are added to the above totals.
Wave 3: Results from Missouri-North Carolina (19%) are added.
Wave 4: Results from North Dakota-Pennsylvania (12%) are added.
Wave 5: Results from Rhode Island-Texas (10%) are added.
Wave 6: Lastly, results from Utah-Wyoming (9%) are added and the counting is complete.
If results were released in this fashion, here is what we would get for the total number of votes for Obama and McCain at each stage:
Now, let's plot these on a graph:
Wow! The correlation is extremely high -- an R-Squared of .9959 -- almost as high as the one we saw for Iran. Does that mean the U.S. election was rigged too?
Of course not. The apparently extremely strong relationship is mostly an artifact of the exceptionally simple fact that as you count more votes, both candidates' totals will tend to increase. In our example, Wave 5 happens to be a very good one for McCain: it contains the results from South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas -- four red states -- plus Rhode Island, which went for Obama but contains a tiny number of votes. And yet, the impact of Wave 5 is barely visible when the results are presented in this fashion.
Likewise, there was more wave-to-wave variation in the Ahmadinejad-Moosavi results than the statistical analysis I cited above seems to imply. Ignoring votes for minor candidates, Ahmadinejad won a high of 70.4 percent of the votes in Wave 1, and a low of 62.3 percent in the votes newly added in Wave 6. By comparison, Obama's share of the newly-added votes in our experiment ranged from 56.4 percent in Wave 3 to 44.7 percent in Wave 4. That's slightly more variance than we saw in the Iranian results but not much.
To be clear, these results certainly do not prove that Iran's election was clean. I have no particular reason to believe the results reported by the Interior Ministry. But I also don't have any particular reason to disbelieve them, at least based on the statistical evidence. If Moosavi truly did have the support of a majority of Iran's citizenry, the best evidence we will have of that is what happens in the streets of Tehran over the next days and weeks.
EDIT: In case this isn't clear, I am not suggesting that any and all statistical analysis purporting to show tampering in Iran's election results will turn out to be fruitless. I am merely suggesting that this particular analysis is dubious; it is not a smoking gun.
To properly analyze Iran's election results is probably something best left to Middle East experts, rather than experts on U.S. electoral politics. Juan Cole, for instance, who certainty does know a thing or two about foreign policy, sees plenty of things that smell fishy to him.
Still, though, would it really be all that hard to rig an election in a way that would be hard for statistical analysis to detect? Suppose that you're Ahmadinejad, and that you become convinced based on the actual vote totals that you're on track to lose by several points. Could you not simply take every tenth vote, or every fifth vote, that came in for Moussavi, and count it for yourself? This would preserve an element of randomness and would make the province-by-province results look reasonably correct relative to one another.
My point, I suppose, is this. Out of all the things you'd need to do to rig an election, coming up with a set of results that managed to avoid easy statistical detection would probably be one of the easier ones. So I'm skeptical that statistical analysis alone is going to turn up evidence of fraud. But I'll be keeping an eye out for other approaches, particularly from those who have a deeper understanding of the Iranian state than I do.
Obama Approval Rating Exceeds 50% in States Containing 445 Electoral Votes
@ 2:15 PM
Where would Barack Obama be re-elected if an election were held today?
We can't know for sure, and it would depend on many contingencies, such as the identity of his Republican opponent. One quick-and-dirty way to assess this question, however, is to look at those states where Obama's approval rating is 50 percent or higher. Based on a compilation of public polls since February 15th, that appears to be the case in the following states:
Now, how did we come up with these numbers? We did a lot of work, that's how. First, we compiled a database of all publicly-available Obama approval and favorability numbers since February 15th, since which time Obama's approval ratings have been exceptionally steady. (Obama's disapproval ratings have increased some over this period, but we're only looking at the approval side of the coin for this exercise). A maximum of one poll was used in each state from each survey firm; this totals 88 polls in all, covering 39 of the 50 states.
Secondly, we performed an adjustment for house effects , just like we did during the election. Most of the approval ratings are from Public Policy Polling, SurveyUSA, Quinnipiac, Research 2000/Daily Kos, or Rasmussen; polls from all other survey firms were then lumped into an "Other" category. The PPP, Rasmussen and Research 2000 produces slightly lower numbers than average for Obama, and so were adjusted upward; the Quinnipiac, SurveyUSA and Other polls produced slightly higher numbers for Obama than average, and so were adjusted downward.
A summary of Obama's approval numbers, with our house effects adjustment, follows below.
Obama's approval equals or exceeds 50 percent in all of the states that he won on November 4th, plus Arizona (10 electoral votes), Arkansas (6), Georgia (15), Kentucky (8), Louisiana (9), Missouri (11), South Dakota (3) and Tennessee (11).
Thirdly, in states where no approval polls have been conducted since February 15th, we took Obama's share of the vote on November 4th and added 6.1 points to it, which corresponds the average gain that Obama has made over his election day results in states where approval ratings are available. This flips Montana (3), Nebraska's 1st Congressional District (1) and North Dakota (3) to Obama.
...and that's how we got the map you see above, which contains 445 electoral votes for Obama.
Generally speaking, Obama's approval ratings are extremely strongly correlated with his November 4 results. If you take his election day total and add 6 points to it, you'll have a very good estimate of his approval rating in that state.
There are a couple of places, though, where there is a little bit of a suggestion that Obama is overperforming or underperforming. His approval ratings are somewhat slack in the Southwest relative to his election day totals, although it is hard to reach a definitive conclusion since we only have one poll to look at in Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico. Conversely, there are some signs that Obama is overperforming in the Inner South or what we sometimes call the "Highlands" region -- states like Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas. These are places where Obama appeared to suffer somewhat owing to racial animus. I have theorized before that Obama might gain ground in these states as the manifest familiarity of his Presidency displaced the fear of his otherness. It is too early to confirm or refute that hypothesis, but we perhaps shouldn't completely rule out the possibility that Obama could be competitive in some of these states in 2012.
We can't know for sure, and it would depend on many contingencies, such as the identity of his Republican opponent. One quick-and-dirty way to assess this question, however, is to look at those states where Obama's approval rating is 50 percent or higher. Based on a compilation of public polls since February 15th, that appears to be the case in the following states:
Now, how did we come up with these numbers? We did a lot of work, that's how. First, we compiled a database of all publicly-available Obama approval and favorability numbers since February 15th, since which time Obama's approval ratings have been exceptionally steady. (Obama's disapproval ratings have increased some over this period, but we're only looking at the approval side of the coin for this exercise). A maximum of one poll was used in each state from each survey firm; this totals 88 polls in all, covering 39 of the 50 states.
Secondly, we performed an adjustment for house effects , just like we did during the election. Most of the approval ratings are from Public Policy Polling, SurveyUSA, Quinnipiac, Research 2000/Daily Kos, or Rasmussen; polls from all other survey firms were then lumped into an "Other" category. The PPP, Rasmussen and Research 2000 produces slightly lower numbers than average for Obama, and so were adjusted upward; the Quinnipiac, SurveyUSA and Other polls produced slightly higher numbers for Obama than average, and so were adjusted downward.
A summary of Obama's approval numbers, with our house effects adjustment, follows below.
Obama's approval equals or exceeds 50 percent in all of the states that he won on November 4th, plus Arizona (10 electoral votes), Arkansas (6), Georgia (15), Kentucky (8), Louisiana (9), Missouri (11), South Dakota (3) and Tennessee (11).
Thirdly, in states where no approval polls have been conducted since February 15th, we took Obama's share of the vote on November 4th and added 6.1 points to it, which corresponds the average gain that Obama has made over his election day results in states where approval ratings are available. This flips Montana (3), Nebraska's 1st Congressional District (1) and North Dakota (3) to Obama.
...and that's how we got the map you see above, which contains 445 electoral votes for Obama.
Generally speaking, Obama's approval ratings are extremely strongly correlated with his November 4 results. If you take his election day total and add 6 points to it, you'll have a very good estimate of his approval rating in that state.
There are a couple of places, though, where there is a little bit of a suggestion that Obama is overperforming or underperforming. His approval ratings are somewhat slack in the Southwest relative to his election day totals, although it is hard to reach a definitive conclusion since we only have one poll to look at in Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico. Conversely, there are some signs that Obama is overperforming in the Inner South or what we sometimes call the "Highlands" region -- states like Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas. These are places where Obama appeared to suffer somewhat owing to racial animus. I have theorized before that Obama might gain ground in these states as the manifest familiarity of his Presidency displaced the fear of his otherness. It is too early to confirm or refute that hypothesis, but we perhaps shouldn't completely rule out the possibility that Obama could be competitive in some of these states in 2012.
6.12.2009
Leader Limbaugh: Chalk One Up to Obama, DNC
@ 12:02 PM
A thinly-veiled and loosely concerted campaign by the Democratic National Committee and the Obama Administration to turn radio host Rush Limbaugh into the Republican Party's unofficial leader seems to have worked.
In March, following Limbaugh's CPAC speech in Washington, it was hard to turn on the television without seeing top Republican leaders squirm in response to questions about Rush's influence on the party. And now comes a new Gallup poll showing that Limbaugh tops the list--not only among Democrats, but Republicans and all national adults surveyed--as the figure identified as "the main person speaking for the Republican Party today."
The share citing Limbaugh is not that high: 18 percent among Democrats, 10 percent among Republicans (tied with Newt Gingrich), and 13 percent overall. But the question was open-ended, which means respondents volunteered Limbaugh's name. Former vice president Dick Cheney and former Speaker Newt Gingrich also received a significant share of responses.
A less charitable reading of these results is that the leadership vacuum for the GOP is so profound right now that Limbaugh was going to make some minimal showing no matter what and, of course, Democrats have a self-interested reason to cite Limbaugh; a more charitable view is that at least no self-identified Republicans/Republican leaners cited George W. Bush as their party's leader, and a solid 17 percent of them responded "no one."
Discussing the results, Gallup's Frank Newport writes:
After the midterm elections, when the battle for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination and arguments about the future of the GOP thus get more fully underway, this will change. But for now, the DNC and Obama administration have succeeded in elevating Limbaugh's status.
In March, following Limbaugh's CPAC speech in Washington, it was hard to turn on the television without seeing top Republican leaders squirm in response to questions about Rush's influence on the party. And now comes a new Gallup poll showing that Limbaugh tops the list--not only among Democrats, but Republicans and all national adults surveyed--as the figure identified as "the main person speaking for the Republican Party today."
The share citing Limbaugh is not that high: 18 percent among Democrats, 10 percent among Republicans (tied with Newt Gingrich), and 13 percent overall. But the question was open-ended, which means respondents volunteered Limbaugh's name. Former vice president Dick Cheney and former Speaker Newt Gingrich also received a significant share of responses.
A less charitable reading of these results is that the leadership vacuum for the GOP is so profound right now that Limbaugh was going to make some minimal showing no matter what and, of course, Democrats have a self-interested reason to cite Limbaugh; a more charitable view is that at least no self-identified Republicans/Republican leaners cited George W. Bush as their party's leader, and a solid 17 percent of them responded "no one."
Discussing the results, Gallup's Frank Newport writes:
Almost half of those who identify with or lean toward the GOP cannot think of a single political or other figure when asked to name the main person who speaks for their party. And none of the three individuals whom Republicans name -- Limbaugh, Cheney, and Gingrich -- would likely be characterized as new visionaries or individuals bringing a fresh or new face to the Republican political scene. None of the three hold elective office at this time, all are older white males (the youngest of the three is Limbaugh, who is 58), and only one has a realistic chance of running for the presidency in the future (Gingrich).
Perhaps most importantly, none of these is mentioned by more than 10% of Republicans, a telling indication that rank-and-file Republicans today simply have no single consensus leader around whom they can gather their forces.
After the midterm elections, when the battle for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination and arguments about the future of the GOP thus get more fully underway, this will change. But for now, the DNC and Obama administration have succeeded in elevating Limbaugh's status.
Polling and Voting in Iran's Friday Election
@ 2:39 AM
This morning, voting began in Iran’s tenth Presidential election, which pits incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against three Guardian Council approved challengers. The main contest is between the more conservative President Ahmadinejad, and former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who has billed himself as a moderate reformist. The two dark horse candidates, former Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Razaei and former Majlis (parliament) speaker Mehdi Karroubi, have each campaigned since the approval process ended on 20 May, but without making enough progress for us to expect an upset.
Over time, Iran’s Presidential elections have gotten progressively more competitive and pluralistic, as more candidates have been approved to participate, more competitive vote totals have encouraged challengers, and universal voting rights have persisted.
The above chart begins in 1985, when the first incumbent Presidential reelection was held after the 1979 revolution. The 1980 and 1981 (first and second) elections were largely impacted by extreme events: an assassination, a removal from office by the Supreme Leader, etc.
Over time, turnout has increased, while the winning share of the vote has dropped significantly, as the elections have become more competitive. In 2005, for the first time, a run-off between former President Rafsanjani and now-incumbent Pres. Ahmadinejad was forced by the first round vote percentages, where the first round winner Rafsanjani earned just 21.1%, and Ahmadinejad 19.4%.
In the 2009 election, even though Ahmadinejad has gotten a bump from his incumbency, the momentum for his challengers has been growing. Many observers are predicting another run-off for the Presidency after today's voting to be required, in the case that no candidate reaches 50% plus one.
Fortunately, opinion polling has been quite extensive in the run-up to today's election. Unfortunately, much of it has been focused on Tehran, has included dubious, push-polling language, or includes candidates for office that are not running or neglects some that are. Luckily, however, we can have a look at overall trends since earlier this year, and get a sense of what the momentum, if not the exact figures, might look like for today's voting, and the possible run-off.
While the numbers have been extremely variable between polls, and making a decision about what polls to include or exclude from aggregating in a case like Iran is nearly impossible, we can see a basic cycle that can be corroborated by anecdotal news evidence over the last two months. The incumbent has been largely held below a majority, which in the Iranian system is significant for two reasons. First, an absolute majority is needed, without which a runoff is certain. In addition, if Ahmadinejad fails to earn a majority, he will be the first incumbent President running for reelection to do this.
In summary, the Iranian system is slowly maturing, with more a more competitive and multi-candidate system. The candidates are still restricted to the mainstream approved by the Guardian Council, but this is certainly no one-party system. In fact, the Guardian Council is quite reminiscent of the party nominating conventions that have long been the deciding factor for the "mainstream" candidates in the United States.
It is clear that the reformist Mousavi has a real chance for victory, though likely not in a first-round scenario. Given their history of reelecting presidents, this would be a new direction for post-revolutionary Iran. That said, the wide unpopularity of Ahmadinejad's handling of the economy in Iran, and the suggested weakening of nuclear ambitions rhetoric as a tool for political distraction away from bread and butter issues for the 46 million Iranian voting-age citizens indicates that a chance may be on the way.
For the Obama administration, this is an important day - a chance to see if a more congenial approach to Iran might provoke a more reform-minded Presidency in Iran by making anti-Americanism a less powerful mobilization tool. We will see in time how successful this is.
---
Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com
Over time, Iran’s Presidential elections have gotten progressively more competitive and pluralistic, as more candidates have been approved to participate, more competitive vote totals have encouraged challengers, and universal voting rights have persisted.
The above chart begins in 1985, when the first incumbent Presidential reelection was held after the 1979 revolution. The 1980 and 1981 (first and second) elections were largely impacted by extreme events: an assassination, a removal from office by the Supreme Leader, etc.
Over time, turnout has increased, while the winning share of the vote has dropped significantly, as the elections have become more competitive. In 2005, for the first time, a run-off between former President Rafsanjani and now-incumbent Pres. Ahmadinejad was forced by the first round vote percentages, where the first round winner Rafsanjani earned just 21.1%, and Ahmadinejad 19.4%.
In the 2009 election, even though Ahmadinejad has gotten a bump from his incumbency, the momentum for his challengers has been growing. Many observers are predicting another run-off for the Presidency after today's voting to be required, in the case that no candidate reaches 50% plus one.
Fortunately, opinion polling has been quite extensive in the run-up to today's election. Unfortunately, much of it has been focused on Tehran, has included dubious, push-polling language, or includes candidates for office that are not running or neglects some that are. Luckily, however, we can have a look at overall trends since earlier this year, and get a sense of what the momentum, if not the exact figures, might look like for today's voting, and the possible run-off.
While the numbers have been extremely variable between polls, and making a decision about what polls to include or exclude from aggregating in a case like Iran is nearly impossible, we can see a basic cycle that can be corroborated by anecdotal news evidence over the last two months. The incumbent has been largely held below a majority, which in the Iranian system is significant for two reasons. First, an absolute majority is needed, without which a runoff is certain. In addition, if Ahmadinejad fails to earn a majority, he will be the first incumbent President running for reelection to do this.
In summary, the Iranian system is slowly maturing, with more a more competitive and multi-candidate system. The candidates are still restricted to the mainstream approved by the Guardian Council, but this is certainly no one-party system. In fact, the Guardian Council is quite reminiscent of the party nominating conventions that have long been the deciding factor for the "mainstream" candidates in the United States.
It is clear that the reformist Mousavi has a real chance for victory, though likely not in a first-round scenario. Given their history of reelecting presidents, this would be a new direction for post-revolutionary Iran. That said, the wide unpopularity of Ahmadinejad's handling of the economy in Iran, and the suggested weakening of nuclear ambitions rhetoric as a tool for political distraction away from bread and butter issues for the 46 million Iranian voting-age citizens indicates that a chance may be on the way.
For the Obama administration, this is an important day - a chance to see if a more congenial approach to Iran might provoke a more reform-minded Presidency in Iran by making anti-Americanism a less powerful mobilization tool. We will see in time how successful this is.
---
Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com
6.11.2009
Gay Marriage, State by State: A Tipping Point?
@ 10:56 PM
Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips put together a dataset using national opinion polls from 1994 through 2009 and analyzed several different opinion questions on gay rights. Here I'm going to talk about their estimates of state-by-state trends in support for gay marriage.
In the past fifteen years, gay marriage has increased in popularity in all fifty states. No news there, but what was a surprise to me is where the largest changes have occurred. The popularity of gay marriage has increased fastest in the states where gay rights were already relatively popular in the 1990s.
In 1995, support for gay marriage exceeded 30% in only six states: New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, and Vermont. In these states, support for gay marriage has increased by an average of almost 20 percentage points. In contrast, support has increased by less than 10 percentage points in the six states that in 1995 were most anti-gay-marriage--Utah, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Idaho.
Here's the picture showing all 50 states:
I was stunned when I saw this picture. I generally expect to see uniform swing, or maybe even some "regression to the mean," with the lowest values increasing the most and the highest values declining, relative to the average. But that's not what's happening at all. What's going on?
Some possible explanations:
- A "tipping point": As gay rights become more accepted in a state, more gay people come out of the closet. And once straight people realize how many of their friends and relatives are gay, they're more likely to be supportive of gay rights. Recall that the average American knows something like 700 people. So if 5% of your friends and acquaintances are gay, that's 35 people you know--if they come out and let you know they're gay. Even accounting for variation in social networks--some people know 100 gay people, others may only know 10--there's the real potential for increased awareness leading to increased acceptance.
Conversely, in states where gay rights are highly unpopular, gay people will be slower to reveal themselves, and thus the knowing-and-accepting process will go slower.
- The role of politics: As gay rights become more popular in "blue states" such as New York, Massachusetts, California, etc., it becomes more in the interest of liberal politicians to push the issue (consider Governor David Paterson's recent efforts in New York). Conversely, in states where gay marriage is highly unpopular, it's in the interest of social conservatives to bring the issue to the forefront of public discussion. So the general public is likely to get the liberal spin on gay rights in liberal states and the conservative spin in conservative states. Perhaps this could help explain the divergence.
Where do we go next in studying this?
- We can look at other issues, not just on gay rights, to see where this sort of divergence occurs, and where we see the more expected uniform swing or regression-to-the-mean patterns.
- For the gay rights questions, we can break up the analysis by demographic factors--in particular, religion and age--to see where opinions are changing the fastest.
- To study the "tipping point" model, we could look at survey data on "Do you know any gay people?" and "How many gay people do you know?" over time and by state.
- To study the role of politics, we could gather data on the involvement of state politicians and political groups on gay issues.
I'm sure there are lots of other good ideas we haven't thought of.
Further discussion (and another pretty graph) here.
In the past fifteen years, gay marriage has increased in popularity in all fifty states. No news there, but what was a surprise to me is where the largest changes have occurred. The popularity of gay marriage has increased fastest in the states where gay rights were already relatively popular in the 1990s.
In 1995, support for gay marriage exceeded 30% in only six states: New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, and Vermont. In these states, support for gay marriage has increased by an average of almost 20 percentage points. In contrast, support has increased by less than 10 percentage points in the six states that in 1995 were most anti-gay-marriage--Utah, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Idaho.
Here's the picture showing all 50 states:
I was stunned when I saw this picture. I generally expect to see uniform swing, or maybe even some "regression to the mean," with the lowest values increasing the most and the highest values declining, relative to the average. But that's not what's happening at all. What's going on?
Some possible explanations:
- A "tipping point": As gay rights become more accepted in a state, more gay people come out of the closet. And once straight people realize how many of their friends and relatives are gay, they're more likely to be supportive of gay rights. Recall that the average American knows something like 700 people. So if 5% of your friends and acquaintances are gay, that's 35 people you know--if they come out and let you know they're gay. Even accounting for variation in social networks--some people know 100 gay people, others may only know 10--there's the real potential for increased awareness leading to increased acceptance.
Conversely, in states where gay rights are highly unpopular, gay people will be slower to reveal themselves, and thus the knowing-and-accepting process will go slower.
- The role of politics: As gay rights become more popular in "blue states" such as New York, Massachusetts, California, etc., it becomes more in the interest of liberal politicians to push the issue (consider Governor David Paterson's recent efforts in New York). Conversely, in states where gay marriage is highly unpopular, it's in the interest of social conservatives to bring the issue to the forefront of public discussion. So the general public is likely to get the liberal spin on gay rights in liberal states and the conservative spin in conservative states. Perhaps this could help explain the divergence.
Where do we go next in studying this?
- We can look at other issues, not just on gay rights, to see where this sort of divergence occurs, and where we see the more expected uniform swing or regression-to-the-mean patterns.
- For the gay rights questions, we can break up the analysis by demographic factors--in particular, religion and age--to see where opinions are changing the fastest.
- To study the "tipping point" model, we could look at survey data on "Do you know any gay people?" and "How many gay people do you know?" over time and by state.
- To study the role of politics, we could gather data on the involvement of state politicians and political groups on gay issues.
I'm sure there are lots of other good ideas we haven't thought of.
Further discussion (and another pretty graph) here.
American Medical Association Has Long Donated to Opponents of Health Care Reform
@ 4:10 PM
You might think that the American Medical Association, which today came out in opposition to a "public option" on comprehensive health care reform, is just a bunch of doctors trying to do what's best for their patients, and that their opposition to the public option is a mere disagreement over details.
And you'd be wrong. The AMA is not just a bunch of doctors, but among other things an extremely lucrative lobbying organization that has given more than $12 million in campaign contributions to federal candidates since 1998. And since 1998, according to the nonpartisan OpenSecrets.org, some 64 percent of the AMA's donations to federal candidates have been to Republicans -- although 2008, in which the AMA gave 56 percent of its contributions to Democrats, was a notable exception.
The disparity is especially noteworthy on the Senate side, which arguably has a greater role in passing health care reform. Since 1998, almost four-fifths of the AMA's donation to Senate candidates have been to Republicans (including 64 percent in 2008). They have been a bit more equitable on the House side.
These aren't particularly moderate Republicans the AMA is donating to either. The leading Senate-side recipient of its campaign contributions since 1998 has been John Ensign of Nevada, to whom the AMA has given $30,000. Ensign is the chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee. And Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, with $20,000 in donations, is in a tie with six other Republicans for second place. By contrast, the AMA has given just $3,000 to Ted Kennedy over this period, $4,000 to former Senator Hillary Clinton, and nothing to Majority Leader Harry Reid. Nor did President Obama or Vice President Biden receive any contributions from the AMA before departing for the White House. The AMA has, however, has given more generously to some other Democrats who are key players in health care reform, like Ron Wyden of Oregon ($12,800) and Max Baucus of Montana ($15,000; Baucus is the leading Senate Democratic recipient of AMA funds).
The AMA has given, since 1998, a total of $280,485 to the 66 Senators who voted in January to pass the Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). That is $4,250 per vote. By contrast, it has given $374,745, or $11,711 per vote, to the 32 Senators who opposed SCHIP. All but one Senator who voted in opposition to SCHIP, the newly-elected Jim Risch of Idaho, has received at least some contributions from the AMA over this period. By contrast, 30 of the 66 yea votes on SCHIP have not received a donation from the AMA since at least 1998, although we should note that a relatively high number of Democrats have joined the Senate chamber since 2006 and have not had as much opportunity to receive contributions.
And you'd be wrong. The AMA is not just a bunch of doctors, but among other things an extremely lucrative lobbying organization that has given more than $12 million in campaign contributions to federal candidates since 1998. And since 1998, according to the nonpartisan OpenSecrets.org, some 64 percent of the AMA's donations to federal candidates have been to Republicans -- although 2008, in which the AMA gave 56 percent of its contributions to Democrats, was a notable exception.
The disparity is especially noteworthy on the Senate side, which arguably has a greater role in passing health care reform. Since 1998, almost four-fifths of the AMA's donation to Senate candidates have been to Republicans (including 64 percent in 2008). They have been a bit more equitable on the House side.
These aren't particularly moderate Republicans the AMA is donating to either. The leading Senate-side recipient of its campaign contributions since 1998 has been John Ensign of Nevada, to whom the AMA has given $30,000. Ensign is the chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee. And Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, with $20,000 in donations, is in a tie with six other Republicans for second place. By contrast, the AMA has given just $3,000 to Ted Kennedy over this period, $4,000 to former Senator Hillary Clinton, and nothing to Majority Leader Harry Reid. Nor did President Obama or Vice President Biden receive any contributions from the AMA before departing for the White House. The AMA has, however, has given more generously to some other Democrats who are key players in health care reform, like Ron Wyden of Oregon ($12,800) and Max Baucus of Montana ($15,000; Baucus is the leading Senate Democratic recipient of AMA funds).
The AMA has given, since 1998, a total of $280,485 to the 66 Senators who voted in January to pass the Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). That is $4,250 per vote. By contrast, it has given $374,745, or $11,711 per vote, to the 32 Senators who opposed SCHIP. All but one Senator who voted in opposition to SCHIP, the newly-elected Jim Risch of Idaho, has received at least some contributions from the AMA over this period. By contrast, 30 of the 66 yea votes on SCHIP have not received a donation from the AMA since at least 1998, although we should note that a relatively high number of Democrats have joined the Senate chamber since 2006 and have not had as much opportunity to receive contributions.
Deeds Leads
@ 11:23 AM
The first post-Democratic primary poll shows Virginia Sen. R. Creigh Deeds leading former VA attorney general Robert McDonnell in the state's gubernatorial race, 47 percent to 41 percent, with 10 percent undecided.
Surely Deeds--who handily defeated bigger-name opponents Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran in Tuesday's Democratic primary--is reaping the political windfall from his win Tuesday and his crucial, May 22 endorsement by the Washington Post. Of course, his lead may shrink or even disappear as voters begin to think more specifically about the head-to-head matchup with McDonnell, in what should be a very intense and competitive race through the summer and fall. But it's clear Deeds has made steady progress, trailing McDonnell in a potential head-to-head matchup by 6 points in late May and by a whopping 15 points back in mid-April.
Deeds's lead in the latest Rasmussen is a byproduct of better intraparty support--89 percent of VA Democrats support him, compared to only 78 percent of VA Republicans who support McDonnell--and stronger favorability ratings. (Deeds's 59 percent "somewhat favorable" rating among respondents edged McDonnell's 52 percent.) McDonnell is, however, trusted more on issues of taxes and cutting spending, Rasmussen reports.
As almost everybody knows by now, this contest will be a rematch of the 2005 attorney general's race which McDonnell won by a mere 323 votes. Given that voters already had to make a pairwise comparison of the two men four years ago, the mere 10 percent who remain undecided with five months to go is hardly surprising.
Surely Deeds--who handily defeated bigger-name opponents Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran in Tuesday's Democratic primary--is reaping the political windfall from his win Tuesday and his crucial, May 22 endorsement by the Washington Post. Of course, his lead may shrink or even disappear as voters begin to think more specifically about the head-to-head matchup with McDonnell, in what should be a very intense and competitive race through the summer and fall. But it's clear Deeds has made steady progress, trailing McDonnell in a potential head-to-head matchup by 6 points in late May and by a whopping 15 points back in mid-April.
Deeds's lead in the latest Rasmussen is a byproduct of better intraparty support--89 percent of VA Democrats support him, compared to only 78 percent of VA Republicans who support McDonnell--and stronger favorability ratings. (Deeds's 59 percent "somewhat favorable" rating among respondents edged McDonnell's 52 percent.) McDonnell is, however, trusted more on issues of taxes and cutting spending, Rasmussen reports.
As almost everybody knows by now, this contest will be a rematch of the 2005 attorney general's race which McDonnell won by a mere 323 votes. Given that voters already had to make a pairwise comparison of the two men four years ago, the mere 10 percent who remain undecided with five months to go is hardly surprising.
How To Get 63% of Americans to Support Gay Marriage. (Maybe.)
@ 9:38 AM
Back when I used to do high school debate, there were all sorts of esoteric arguments related to the notion of positive and negative rights. The distinction, to simplify the matter greatly, is that a positive right is something that permits you to act a certain way -- something granted to you -- whereas a negative right is a claim to noninterference -- something that precludes action from being taken against you, either by government or by other people. You'll most commonly hear the distinction in association with libertarianism, as libertarians tend to regard positive rights as impure manifestations of government fiat power, whereas negative rights exist intrinsically outside of government, which in turn has a duty to protect them.
I never found this framing terribly satisfying as a matter of moral philosophy -- there are too many things which fall somewhere in between the two poles. But as a political matter, the distinction is potentially quite interesting.
Take for example the issue of gay marriage. When gay marriage is polled, it is almost always framed as a positive right, as in: "should the government permit Adam and Steve to get married?". I wouldn't necessarily say I find this framing biased -- since gay marriage is only permitted in six out of the 50 states and only came about in those states very recently, it is probably the more natural, plain-English way to ask the question.
But there is a different way to frame the question that is no less fair, and flips the issue on its head. Namely: "should the government be allowed to prohibit Adam and Steve from getting married?". This is closer to the logic embodied by the court decisions in Iowa, California, Massachusetts, and other states. Those courts didn't create gay marriage; they argued, rather, that it was already protected by their respective state constitutions.
And it turns out that if you frame a polling question in this particular way, as Gallup and USA Today did recently, you get a very different set of responses. Take a look at what happens:
When USA Today asks whether gay marriage is a private decision, or rather whether government has the right to pass laws which regulate it, 63 percent say it's a private decision. This contrasts significantly with all other polling on gay marriage. The highest level of support gay marriage has received in the more traditional, positive-rights framing is 49 percent, from a ABC/Washington Post poll in late April. The average support is closer to about 41-42 percent. And indeed, this same survey organization, Gallup, last month released a poll that put the number of Americans approving of gay marriage at 40 percent.
So this USA Today poll is really something quite different -- nearly two-thirds of Americans say that gay marriage is "strictly a private decision". Now, it can and will be objected that USA Today's wording is a little tricky: they don't ask whether the government has the right to prohibit gay marriage, but rather, whether government has the right to prohibit or allow
gay marriage.
But take a look at the other items that USA Today asked about. Some 97 percent of respondents say that marriage between two people of different religions is strictly a private decision. Perhaps some small fraction of that 97 percent think that the government should have nothing to do with marriage at all -- there should be no state-sanctioned marriage, period. It's fairly safe to assume, however, that the overwhelming majority of those 97 percent were interpreting the question to mean that the government ought not pass a law prohibiting marriage between two people of different religions. Marriage between two people of the same gender isn't at 97 percent support -- but it's at 63 percent, and that's a hell of a lot better than its done in other polls.
The better argument against my interpretation of this poll is that it's contradicted by other evidence. Namely, last November in California, a state whose highest court had indeed ruled that gay marriage was protected by the state's constitution, some 52 percent of the electorate decided that they knew better, and that Adam and Steve would have to catch the next available flight to Burlington, Vermont.
But even though gay marriage had already become -- however briefly -- the law of the land in California, that wasn't how the debate unfolded on Proposition 8. Instead, look at what Equality California said on its website at the time:
What if Equality California had instead said this:
Would changing these few little words have made a difference last November? Probably not. But advocates for same-sex marriage can do a better job of framing their argument. Generally speaking, appeals to government noninterference are fairly popular; people don't like government telling them what they do and they don't have the right to do. Posit equal treatment under the law as the default -- how dare the government make a law that abridges this right on the basis of something as trivial as sexual orientation.
I never found this framing terribly satisfying as a matter of moral philosophy -- there are too many things which fall somewhere in between the two poles. But as a political matter, the distinction is potentially quite interesting.
Take for example the issue of gay marriage. When gay marriage is polled, it is almost always framed as a positive right, as in: "should the government permit Adam and Steve to get married?". I wouldn't necessarily say I find this framing biased -- since gay marriage is only permitted in six out of the 50 states and only came about in those states very recently, it is probably the more natural, plain-English way to ask the question.
But there is a different way to frame the question that is no less fair, and flips the issue on its head. Namely: "should the government be allowed to prohibit Adam and Steve from getting married?". This is closer to the logic embodied by the court decisions in Iowa, California, Massachusetts, and other states. Those courts didn't create gay marriage; they argued, rather, that it was already protected by their respective state constitutions.
And it turns out that if you frame a polling question in this particular way, as Gallup and USA Today did recently, you get a very different set of responses. Take a look at what happens:
When USA Today asks whether gay marriage is a private decision, or rather whether government has the right to pass laws which regulate it, 63 percent say it's a private decision. This contrasts significantly with all other polling on gay marriage. The highest level of support gay marriage has received in the more traditional, positive-rights framing is 49 percent, from a ABC/Washington Post poll in late April. The average support is closer to about 41-42 percent. And indeed, this same survey organization, Gallup, last month released a poll that put the number of Americans approving of gay marriage at 40 percent.
So this USA Today poll is really something quite different -- nearly two-thirds of Americans say that gay marriage is "strictly a private decision". Now, it can and will be objected that USA Today's wording is a little tricky: they don't ask whether the government has the right to prohibit gay marriage, but rather, whether government has the right to prohibit or allow
gay marriage.
But take a look at the other items that USA Today asked about. Some 97 percent of respondents say that marriage between two people of different religions is strictly a private decision. Perhaps some small fraction of that 97 percent think that the government should have nothing to do with marriage at all -- there should be no state-sanctioned marriage, period. It's fairly safe to assume, however, that the overwhelming majority of those 97 percent were interpreting the question to mean that the government ought not pass a law prohibiting marriage between two people of different religions. Marriage between two people of the same gender isn't at 97 percent support -- but it's at 63 percent, and that's a hell of a lot better than its done in other polls.
The better argument against my interpretation of this poll is that it's contradicted by other evidence. Namely, last November in California, a state whose highest court had indeed ruled that gay marriage was protected by the state's constitution, some 52 percent of the electorate decided that they knew better, and that Adam and Steve would have to catch the next available flight to Burlington, Vermont.
But even though gay marriage had already become -- however briefly -- the law of the land in California, that wasn't how the debate unfolded on Proposition 8. Instead, look at what Equality California said on its website at the time:
Every Californian should have the choice to marry the person they love. It’s a personal and fundamental freedom guaranteed by the California Constitution.Emphasis mine. True, Equality California mentioned that gay marriage had already been established under the state's constitution. The problem is that Proposition 8 wasn't an argument over how to interpret the state constitution -- it was an argument about whether or not to amend the constitution to render interpretation unnecessary.
What if Equality California had instead said this:
California's government should not have the right to interfere with the decision of two loving adults to get married. It’s a personal and fundamental freedom protected by the California Constitution.You see the distinction? Equality California was still stuck in the positive rights paradigm. Gay marriage was something given to California by the state Supreme Court in its benevolent wisdom, not an intrinsic (negative) right for which the government had a duty of noninterference.
Would changing these few little words have made a difference last November? Probably not. But advocates for same-sex marriage can do a better job of framing their argument. Generally speaking, appeals to government noninterference are fairly popular; people don't like government telling them what they do and they don't have the right to do. Posit equal treatment under the law as the default -- how dare the government make a law that abridges this right on the basis of something as trivial as sexual orientation.
6.10.2009
Do Americans Trust Obama on Terrorism or Just Dismiss the Terrorist Threat?
@ 2:15 PM
Barack Obama has strong overall approval, and even strong approval on the subject of terrorism. But a result from the latest AP/GfK poll--one understandably drowned out by the poll's questions about Sonia Sotomayor--that really struck me was that from three consecutive questions (TER1, TER2, TER3 on pp. 5 & 6) about how Americans perceive the threat of another terrorist attack and Obama's ability to handle terrorism.
Two back-to-back questions, TER1 and TER2, asked respondents, first, if they are worried about "becoming a victim of terrorism," and second, if they are concerned that they or their family "might be a victim of a terrorist attack." The questions are so similar, in fact, they elicited virtually identical results: 35 percent combined responded either "frequently" or "occasionally" to the first one, and "great deal" or "somewhat" to the second; a combined 65 percent responded "rarely" or "never" to the first and either "not too much" or "not at all" to the second. Given the similarity of the questions, I'll go out on a limb here and assume it's the same 35/65 groups in both cases. (Two emails and two phone calls to AP/GfK to request crosstabs were not returned.)
And then there is Question TER3:
Again, without the crosstabs, I can't know for sure how strongly that 65% and that 70% overlap, but let's consider the situation in the two limits:
Case 1:
Case 2:
In the first table, above, I presume that all of those 65% respondents who aren't much worried about an attack are also confident in Obama's abilities on the issue of terrorism. That means that, at minimum, the difference, just 5%--one in 1 in 20 Americans--and a mere one in every 14 Americans who are confident in Obama's ability, are confident in his terrorism abilities despite having serious worries about a forthcoming attack.
At the other extreme -- which I suspect is the far, far less likely actual crosstabulated case -- I presume that the share of those confident in Obama's ability includes all of the 35% worried about a pending attack. Yet that would still mean that, at the very most, only 35% of Americans are both confident in Obama's ability and truly worried about a pending attack, and that only half (35% of 70%) of those confident in him are really worried that there will be an attack anyway.
Put simply, and presuming that my assumptions about the crosstabs are right, those who are confident in Obama aren't much worried about an attack anyway, somewhat mooting their support, while those who worried about an attack are also doubtful that Obama would be up to the task.
Now, there's (at least) two ways to look at this, and in some ways they ratify the polarities in post-9/11 conceptions about terror. As we hear repeatedly from conservatives, liberals are soft on security, underestimate the global threat of Islamic fundamentalists, etc. Yet it's also hard not to conclude from these poll results on questions TER1 and TER2 that the rest of the country, which presumably includes most liberals and moderates, have come to the conclusion that September 11 may have been a one-time situation where the terrorists caught us off-guard and disorganized, but that their abilities to do so again are limited.
And that raises the question of whether that two-thirds is confident in Obama's ability per se, or just confident because they are not much worried his abilities will be tested in the first place.
The reason I raise this question is simple: If, today, you were forced to describe one, event-based scenario that would put Obama in serious jeopardy for 2012 re-election, it would be a terrorist attack that either (a) he should have been able to anticipate and prevent; (b) he couldn't have anticipated, but to which he responded poorly or too slowly; or, worse (c) both of the above. That said, the third of the country that seems both worried about another attack and, depending on the likely overlap, shows little faith in Obama's ability to respond to such an attack is going to be remembered as either (1) a really, really paranoid group that's basically dubious about any liberal's/Democrat's ability to handle national security issues anyway, or (2) a group clucking loudly if an attack occurs on Obama's watch, and certainly if Obama bungles the response.
#TER3, unfortunately, only asks about Obama's handling of terrorism as an issue, not of his potential response to an actual attack, which are not the same thing. It would be nice if AP/GfK followed this survey next time with a more specific question about the response to an actual attack. I should also note that whether a person believes he/she or his/her family will specifically be attacked is not the same as believing there will be an attack somewhere on Americans. But then again, given the share of the population that was actually, directly hit by the 9/11 attacks, even 35% would be absurdly high: even if we take the upper limits of deaths and casualties and those hit collaterally, the share of Americans literally and directly "attacked" on 9/11 is a fraction of one percent.
Two back-to-back questions, TER1 and TER2, asked respondents, first, if they are worried about "becoming a victim of terrorism," and second, if they are concerned that they or their family "might be a victim of a terrorist attack." The questions are so similar, in fact, they elicited virtually identical results: 35 percent combined responded either "frequently" or "occasionally" to the first one, and "great deal" or "somewhat" to the second; a combined 65 percent responded "rarely" or "never" to the first and either "not too much" or "not at all" to the second. Given the similarity of the questions, I'll go out on a limb here and assume it's the same 35/65 groups in both cases. (Two emails and two phone calls to AP/GfK to request crosstabs were not returned.)
And then there is Question TER3:
And when it comes to terrorism, how confident are you that President Barack Obama will be able to handle this issue effectively? Very confident, somewhat confident, not too confident, or not at all confident?On this question, 70 percent of people responded either "very" or "somewhat" with 29 percent (allow me to round to 30%, to keep the numbers simple) responding "not too" or "not at all." Notice how close the split is to the split in the previous two questions; that is, about two-thirds of the country isn't much worried about themselves or their family being attacked by terrorists, and an almost identical share (a wee bit higher) are confident about Obama's ability to handle terrorism.
Again, without the crosstabs, I can't know for sure how strongly that 65% and that 70% overlap, but let's consider the situation in the two limits:
Case 1:
Case 2:
In the first table, above, I presume that all of those 65% respondents who aren't much worried about an attack are also confident in Obama's abilities on the issue of terrorism. That means that, at minimum, the difference, just 5%--one in 1 in 20 Americans--and a mere one in every 14 Americans who are confident in Obama's ability, are confident in his terrorism abilities despite having serious worries about a forthcoming attack.
At the other extreme -- which I suspect is the far, far less likely actual crosstabulated case -- I presume that the share of those confident in Obama's ability includes all of the 35% worried about a pending attack. Yet that would still mean that, at the very most, only 35% of Americans are both confident in Obama's ability and truly worried about a pending attack, and that only half (35% of 70%) of those confident in him are really worried that there will be an attack anyway.
Put simply, and presuming that my assumptions about the crosstabs are right, those who are confident in Obama aren't much worried about an attack anyway, somewhat mooting their support, while those who worried about an attack are also doubtful that Obama would be up to the task.
Now, there's (at least) two ways to look at this, and in some ways they ratify the polarities in post-9/11 conceptions about terror. As we hear repeatedly from conservatives, liberals are soft on security, underestimate the global threat of Islamic fundamentalists, etc. Yet it's also hard not to conclude from these poll results on questions TER1 and TER2 that the rest of the country, which presumably includes most liberals and moderates, have come to the conclusion that September 11 may have been a one-time situation where the terrorists caught us off-guard and disorganized, but that their abilities to do so again are limited.
And that raises the question of whether that two-thirds is confident in Obama's ability per se, or just confident because they are not much worried his abilities will be tested in the first place.
The reason I raise this question is simple: If, today, you were forced to describe one, event-based scenario that would put Obama in serious jeopardy for 2012 re-election, it would be a terrorist attack that either (a) he should have been able to anticipate and prevent; (b) he couldn't have anticipated, but to which he responded poorly or too slowly; or, worse (c) both of the above. That said, the third of the country that seems both worried about another attack and, depending on the likely overlap, shows little faith in Obama's ability to respond to such an attack is going to be remembered as either (1) a really, really paranoid group that's basically dubious about any liberal's/Democrat's ability to handle national security issues anyway, or (2) a group clucking loudly if an attack occurs on Obama's watch, and certainly if Obama bungles the response.
#TER3, unfortunately, only asks about Obama's handling of terrorism as an issue, not of his potential response to an actual attack, which are not the same thing. It would be nice if AP/GfK followed this survey next time with a more specific question about the response to an actual attack. I should also note that whether a person believes he/she or his/her family will specifically be attacked is not the same as believing there will be an attack somewhere on Americans. But then again, given the share of the population that was actually, directly hit by the 9/11 attacks, even 35% would be absurdly high: even if we take the upper limits of deaths and casualties and those hit collaterally, the share of Americans literally and directly "attacked" on 9/11 is a fraction of one percent.
Size and Distribution of the VA Primary Vote
@ 1:42 PM
In trying to understand Creigh Deeds' smashing win in yesterday's VA gubernatorial primary, turnout patterns are one obvious thing to focus on. But the more you stare at the numbers, the more Deeds' win looks like a triumph of persuasion for him rather than any failure in mobilization efforts by his rivals.
The total vote topped 320,000 or 6.4 percent of registered voters. That was well above the 250,000 that state officials expected, and over double the turnout in the 2006 Senate primary that was the most cited parallel. To be sure, one defeated candidate, Brian Moran, clearly seemed to be banking on a low turnout (at least outside NoVa), but the size of Deeds' win probably made that irrelevant.
But how about the geographical distribution of the vote? Did that favor Deeds or disadvantage Moran or McAuliffe? Doesn't look like it.
Given the apocalyptic storms that hit NoVa just as polls opened, one might wonder if turnout there was lower than it should have been. To check that, I looked at the percentage of the primary vote cast in NoVa's 8th, 10th and 11th congressional districts in 2006 and yesterday. In the 2006 Senate primary, NoVa famously dominated the results, and sure enough, an amazing 42.9% of the statewide vote was cast in those three CDs. Yesterday, the percentage was down to 37.3%. It's hard, however, to suggest that this represented a turnout failure, since the percentage of the statewide Democratic vote produced by the 8th, 10th and 11th in the 2008 presidential general election was only 33%.
Moreover, the parts of the state that produced a significantly higher percentage of yesterday's primary vote than in 2006 were not by and large "Deeds Country" in central or SW VA, but in Hampton Roads and the Richmond area. The (majority black) 3d CD's share of the vote jumped from 8.9% in 2006 to 11.8% yesterday; that was the one district won by someone other than Deeds (Terry McAuliffe).
So there's nothing funky about turnout patterns that had much to do with the ultimate results. And BTW, since there's some talk about McAuliffe's defeat representing the "end of Clintonism," you can look at maps of the counties HRC won in the 2008 primaries and compare them to yesterday's results and see that Deeds was especially strong exactly where she was.
The total vote topped 320,000 or 6.4 percent of registered voters. That was well above the 250,000 that state officials expected, and over double the turnout in the 2006 Senate primary that was the most cited parallel. To be sure, one defeated candidate, Brian Moran, clearly seemed to be banking on a low turnout (at least outside NoVa), but the size of Deeds' win probably made that irrelevant.
But how about the geographical distribution of the vote? Did that favor Deeds or disadvantage Moran or McAuliffe? Doesn't look like it.
Given the apocalyptic storms that hit NoVa just as polls opened, one might wonder if turnout there was lower than it should have been. To check that, I looked at the percentage of the primary vote cast in NoVa's 8th, 10th and 11th congressional districts in 2006 and yesterday. In the 2006 Senate primary, NoVa famously dominated the results, and sure enough, an amazing 42.9% of the statewide vote was cast in those three CDs. Yesterday, the percentage was down to 37.3%. It's hard, however, to suggest that this represented a turnout failure, since the percentage of the statewide Democratic vote produced by the 8th, 10th and 11th in the 2008 presidential general election was only 33%.
Moreover, the parts of the state that produced a significantly higher percentage of yesterday's primary vote than in 2006 were not by and large "Deeds Country" in central or SW VA, but in Hampton Roads and the Richmond area. The (majority black) 3d CD's share of the vote jumped from 8.9% in 2006 to 11.8% yesterday; that was the one district won by someone other than Deeds (Terry McAuliffe).
So there's nothing funky about turnout patterns that had much to do with the ultimate results. And BTW, since there's some talk about McAuliffe's defeat representing the "end of Clintonism," you can look at maps of the counties HRC won in the 2008 primaries and compare them to yesterday's results and see that Deeds was especially strong exactly where she was.
Paterson Now Less Popular Than Spitzer
@ 12:01 AM
We knew things were getting pretty bad for Governor David Paterson of New York, but this probably takes the cake: former Governor Eliot Spitzer, who resigned last March after allegations that he patronized a high-price prostitution service, is now more popular than Paterson, according to a new poll (.pdf) by Cornell University and the New York Times. Just 21 percent of registered voters in New York State have a favorable view of Paterson, the poll finds, while 50 percent have an unfavorable view. Sptizer's numbers are marginally better, at 26 percent and 44 percent respectively.
The poll also sheds some light on why Paterson is so unpopular. When asked to name the worst thing that Paterson has done since becoming governor, 23 percent of New Yorkers mentioned taxes or the concomitant issue of the state budget. This compares to just 6 percent who mentioned the handling of the appointment of Kirsten Gillibrand to the U.S. Senate, and 5 percent who cited the governor's push for gay marriage -- indeed, more voters mentioned gay marriage as a positive trait for Paterson than a negative one.
One wonders, however, what Paterson might reasonably have done differently. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, New York, which was hit especially hard by the attrition to its tax base due to the financial meltdown, faces a 2010 budget shortfall equal to 29.0 percent of its 2009 general fund. This ranks it fourth in the country behind California, Arizona and Nevada, and well ahead of the (unweighted) national average, which is 13.7 percent.
New York chose something of an all-of-the-above approach to address its budget deficit. A net of about $7 billion will be raised from tax hikes: $4 billion from increased income taxes on upper-income taxpayers, $1.5 billion from the rollback of property tax rebates, $0.6 billion from taxes on utilities, and roughly another $1.0 billion from miscelaneous taxes and fees. Although New York will nominally cut its spending by $6.5 billion, the deficit is more than made up for by an infusion of $7.2 billion in federal stimulus funds.
Nevertheless, as compared with budget solutions passed by other states, New York's is probably relatively more redistributive: most of the tax hikes fall on high-income earners, while key services were protected more than they otherwise might have been. New York enjoys a somewhat complicated relationship with its wealthiest residents. While, on the one hand, it is undeniably one of the most progressive states in the country, full of union workers, recent immigrants, and Manhattan liberals, on the other hand it is somewhat less likely than other progressive states to demonize the rich: New Yorkers tolerate and even applaud the accumulation of vast sums of wealth, and take pride in the state's financial sector.
New York is neither a good state for a libertarian nor a good state for a populist; if there's any leadership style that seems constituently to work in New York, it's the Bloombergian, almost 19th Century one of the benevolent plutocrat. This may have made Paterson's task especially difficult; while concentrating the tax hike on the rich may have been no worse for him than the alternatives, there weren't many people willing to give him bonus points for leveling the playing field.
The poll also sheds some light on why Paterson is so unpopular. When asked to name the worst thing that Paterson has done since becoming governor, 23 percent of New Yorkers mentioned taxes or the concomitant issue of the state budget. This compares to just 6 percent who mentioned the handling of the appointment of Kirsten Gillibrand to the U.S. Senate, and 5 percent who cited the governor's push for gay marriage -- indeed, more voters mentioned gay marriage as a positive trait for Paterson than a negative one.
One wonders, however, what Paterson might reasonably have done differently. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, New York, which was hit especially hard by the attrition to its tax base due to the financial meltdown, faces a 2010 budget shortfall equal to 29.0 percent of its 2009 general fund. This ranks it fourth in the country behind California, Arizona and Nevada, and well ahead of the (unweighted) national average, which is 13.7 percent.
New York chose something of an all-of-the-above approach to address its budget deficit. A net of about $7 billion will be raised from tax hikes: $4 billion from increased income taxes on upper-income taxpayers, $1.5 billion from the rollback of property tax rebates, $0.6 billion from taxes on utilities, and roughly another $1.0 billion from miscelaneous taxes and fees. Although New York will nominally cut its spending by $6.5 billion, the deficit is more than made up for by an infusion of $7.2 billion in federal stimulus funds.
Nevertheless, as compared with budget solutions passed by other states, New York's is probably relatively more redistributive: most of the tax hikes fall on high-income earners, while key services were protected more than they otherwise might have been. New York enjoys a somewhat complicated relationship with its wealthiest residents. While, on the one hand, it is undeniably one of the most progressive states in the country, full of union workers, recent immigrants, and Manhattan liberals, on the other hand it is somewhat less likely than other progressive states to demonize the rich: New Yorkers tolerate and even applaud the accumulation of vast sums of wealth, and take pride in the state's financial sector.
New York is neither a good state for a libertarian nor a good state for a populist; if there's any leadership style that seems constituently to work in New York, it's the Bloombergian, almost 19th Century one of the benevolent plutocrat. This may have made Paterson's task especially difficult; while concentrating the tax hike on the rich may have been no worse for him than the alternatives, there weren't many people willing to give him bonus points for leveling the playing field.
6.09.2009
Virginia Gubernatorial Primary Live Blog
@ 6:58 PM
8:54 EDT [Ed]: A few other random notes are in order before we turn off the liveblog and spend a little time mulling over deeper thoughts for posting tomorrow. With 88% of the precincts reporting, and a lot of those still out in high-population areas like Fairfax and Richmond, 266,000 votes have been cast in this primary, over the 250k most often predicted. Looks like PPP's "high" estimate of 300,000 votes could be close to right.
And maybe it doesn't matter that much except for the pride of the participants, but it's still not clear who will finish second behind Deeds. At the moment, McAuliffe's running just under 7,000 votes ahead of Moran. Of the precincts still out, the biggest blocs are in Fairfax, where Moran's been running about eight points ahead of McAuliffe; in the City of Richmond, where their positions are reversed; and in Roanoke, in a region where Moran has been running very poorly. Unless the Fairfax numbers are very big, looks like McAuliffe will probably hold onto the consolation prize, such as it is.
8:37 EDT [Nate]: Well, I think both parties are going to go into November with a candidate they're feeling pretty happy about. And the stakes are fairly high: given Virginia's newfound status as a swing state, whomever wins is a decent bet to make a VP short list in 2012 or 2016.
8:24 EDT [Ed]: So in addressing the three analytical factors I posed last night in anticipation of this primary, you'd have to say that: (1) yes, the Persuasion camp in the Persuasion-versus-Mobilization debate on how to win low-turnout primaries got a nice talking point for the future, since there was no Deeds Machine in sight today, while the highly-organized Moran and McAuliffe GOTV efforts missed most of their marks; (2) no, you can't chalk it all up to the Washington Post endorsement, given the margin of Deeds' win and its breadth, far beyond the DC media market (though the endorsement was a good momentum generator); and (3) no, the race wasn't at all close enough for Virginia's relatively restrictive early voting rules to matter.
8:15 EDT [Ed]: If I were Bob McDonnell, I wouldn't be real happy about tonight's results. Deeds showed no real regional weaknesses, and with all due consideration of the problems that Moran and McAuliffe caused themselves and each other, it does look like the Bath County senator knows how to run a campaign. The win was decisive enough that there shouldn't be too many hard feelings among Democrats, and Deeds will get some nice media buzz. And let's don't forget that Deeds basically tied McDonnell in the AG race four years ago, despite being outspent. The first couple of head-to-head polls between Deeds and McDonnell should be very interesting.
8:00 EDT [Nate]: This really is looking like a collapse of Howard Dean in Iowa proportions for McAuliffe; he had the lead just two weeks ago and now he's about to lose by 20+ points. Just for fun, here's another version of the Iowa polling in 2004, this one generously provided to 538 by Ann Selzer of top-ranked polling firm Selzer & Co.
7:50 EDT [Ed]: With the votes now pouring in, Creigh Deeds is winning in nine of Virginia's eleven congressional districts (Moran narrowly leads in the 8th on the strength of his Alexandria performance, but the lead probably won't hold, and McAuliffe leads narrowly in the 3d, with Richmond still out). This is quite a statewide victory for Deeds.
7:45 EDT [Nate]: OK, the 538 decision desk is calling this one for R. Creigh Deeds. Almost half the vote is in, and although we're a little bit light on turnout from areas like Richmond, neither Moran nor McAuliffe is doing anywhere near as well as they'd need to to make up for Deeds' large advantage. It's really a battle for second place at this point.
7:38 EDT [Ed]: Very bad signs for Brian Moran. He's winning Alexandria handily, but Deeds is beating him in Arlington, Fairfax, Loudon and Fauquier by big margins. And McAuliffe isn't doing well at all in NoVa so far.
7:29 EDT [Nate]: Below is a map of Virginia's Congressional Districts; you can see the results as they come in by CD here.
7:20 EDT [Nate]: Deeds' strength in the rural part of the state is overwhelming -- we don't have many results in from NoVa yet but I don't know I see how McAuliffe gets enough votes there to make up for Deeds' huge margins elsewhere in the state, particularly with Moran eating into some of the NoVa vote.
7:18 EDT [Ed]: Took a quick look at the official returns page, and the early precincts are mostly in Deeds' base area: Staunton and vicinity. His statewide lead was significantly diminished by a single precinct from Henrico coming in for T-Mac.
7:15 EDT [Nate]:Wow -- just 20 precincts in, but Deeds has a very early lead of 67% to T-Mack's 18%. See for yourself here.
7:00 EDT [Ed]. The polls are about to close throughout Virginia, so we'll be having some commentary and analysis from the 538 crew as the results come in.
And maybe it doesn't matter that much except for the pride of the participants, but it's still not clear who will finish second behind Deeds. At the moment, McAuliffe's running just under 7,000 votes ahead of Moran. Of the precincts still out, the biggest blocs are in Fairfax, where Moran's been running about eight points ahead of McAuliffe; in the City of Richmond, where their positions are reversed; and in Roanoke, in a region where Moran has been running very poorly. Unless the Fairfax numbers are very big, looks like McAuliffe will probably hold onto the consolation prize, such as it is.
8:37 EDT [Nate]: Well, I think both parties are going to go into November with a candidate they're feeling pretty happy about. And the stakes are fairly high: given Virginia's newfound status as a swing state, whomever wins is a decent bet to make a VP short list in 2012 or 2016.
8:24 EDT [Ed]: So in addressing the three analytical factors I posed last night in anticipation of this primary, you'd have to say that: (1) yes, the Persuasion camp in the Persuasion-versus-Mobilization debate on how to win low-turnout primaries got a nice talking point for the future, since there was no Deeds Machine in sight today, while the highly-organized Moran and McAuliffe GOTV efforts missed most of their marks; (2) no, you can't chalk it all up to the Washington Post endorsement, given the margin of Deeds' win and its breadth, far beyond the DC media market (though the endorsement was a good momentum generator); and (3) no, the race wasn't at all close enough for Virginia's relatively restrictive early voting rules to matter.
8:15 EDT [Ed]: If I were Bob McDonnell, I wouldn't be real happy about tonight's results. Deeds showed no real regional weaknesses, and with all due consideration of the problems that Moran and McAuliffe caused themselves and each other, it does look like the Bath County senator knows how to run a campaign. The win was decisive enough that there shouldn't be too many hard feelings among Democrats, and Deeds will get some nice media buzz. And let's don't forget that Deeds basically tied McDonnell in the AG race four years ago, despite being outspent. The first couple of head-to-head polls between Deeds and McDonnell should be very interesting.
8:00 EDT [Nate]: This really is looking like a collapse of Howard Dean in Iowa proportions for McAuliffe; he had the lead just two weeks ago and now he's about to lose by 20+ points. Just for fun, here's another version of the Iowa polling in 2004, this one generously provided to 538 by Ann Selzer of top-ranked polling firm Selzer & Co.
7:50 EDT [Ed]: With the votes now pouring in, Creigh Deeds is winning in nine of Virginia's eleven congressional districts (Moran narrowly leads in the 8th on the strength of his Alexandria performance, but the lead probably won't hold, and McAuliffe leads narrowly in the 3d, with Richmond still out). This is quite a statewide victory for Deeds.
7:45 EDT [Nate]: OK, the 538 decision desk is calling this one for R. Creigh Deeds. Almost half the vote is in, and although we're a little bit light on turnout from areas like Richmond, neither Moran nor McAuliffe is doing anywhere near as well as they'd need to to make up for Deeds' large advantage. It's really a battle for second place at this point.
7:38 EDT [Ed]: Very bad signs for Brian Moran. He's winning Alexandria handily, but Deeds is beating him in Arlington, Fairfax, Loudon and Fauquier by big margins. And McAuliffe isn't doing well at all in NoVa so far.
7:29 EDT [Nate]: Below is a map of Virginia's Congressional Districts; you can see the results as they come in by CD here.
7:20 EDT [Nate]: Deeds' strength in the rural part of the state is overwhelming -- we don't have many results in from NoVa yet but I don't know I see how McAuliffe gets enough votes there to make up for Deeds' huge margins elsewhere in the state, particularly with Moran eating into some of the NoVa vote.
7:18 EDT [Ed]: Took a quick look at the official returns page, and the early precincts are mostly in Deeds' base area: Staunton and vicinity. His statewide lead was significantly diminished by a single precinct from Henrico coming in for T-Mac.
7:15 EDT [Nate]:Wow -- just 20 precincts in, but Deeds has a very early lead of 67% to T-Mack's 18%. See for yourself here.
7:00 EDT [Ed]. The polls are about to close throughout Virginia, so we'll be having some commentary and analysis from the 538 crew as the results come in.
A Note About Those VA Turnout Numbers
@ 5:53 PM
As we get ready for a fun night, or at least a fun couple of hours, of following Virginia primary results, there's a simple but important point to remember about the "turnout percentages" for the state and particular locations that you will be hearing about (as, indeed, we have been hearing about sporadically all day).
Virginia does not have party registration. So "turnout" is measured against total voter registration. That's why Virginia's primary turnout percentages always look so incredibly low (e.g., today's anticipated turnout of 5% or less) as compared to party registration states. Moreover, this factor makes comparison of "turnout" in various jurisdictions perilous. Heavily Democratic jurisdictions (e.g., Arlington County and most of the state's independent cities) will naturally tend to show much higher turnout percentages than more competitive areas. But that does not mean Democrats are turning out there at higher rates.
This is obvious if you think about it for a minute, but some of the "reports" kicking around today contrasting "high" turnout in parts of NoVa to abysmal turnout in SW VA garble this key point. The percentage of the statewide primary vote cast in different parts of the state is indeed a very big deal, and we'll be looking at that when the votes start coming in.
Virginia does not have party registration. So "turnout" is measured against total voter registration. That's why Virginia's primary turnout percentages always look so incredibly low (e.g., today's anticipated turnout of 5% or less) as compared to party registration states. Moreover, this factor makes comparison of "turnout" in various jurisdictions perilous. Heavily Democratic jurisdictions (e.g., Arlington County and most of the state's independent cities) will naturally tend to show much higher turnout percentages than more competitive areas. But that does not mean Democrats are turning out there at higher rates.
This is obvious if you think about it for a minute, but some of the "reports" kicking around today contrasting "high" turnout in parts of NoVa to abysmal turnout in SW VA garble this key point. The percentage of the statewide primary vote cast in different parts of the state is indeed a very big deal, and we'll be looking at that when the votes start coming in.
N.R.A. Muscle Saves 538, Blocks D.C. Voting Rights
@ 3:29 PM
The Hill reports that a bill to give the District of Columbia a vote in the House of Represenatives, which would increase the number of Electoral Votes from 538 to 539, has stalled out in the House after and is unlikely to become law:
The complication is that the version of the bill the Senate approved was passed with an unrelated amendment, introduced by Senator Ensign of Nevada and accepted by a 62-36 majority, that would limit the District's ability to set its own policy on gun control. The amendment is opposed by some Democrats in the House and has created more of a stir there, as it has a proportionately somewhat larger and more empowered contingent of progressive and minority Democrats.
So why can't they simply remove the gun control provision and start over? The Hill explains:
In any event, Steny Hoyer seems to have concluded that he doesn't have the votes for either version of the bill.
As a piece of political maneuvering, this is pretty darn brilliant by the NRA. And more power to the NRA if they want to lobby to pass the Second Amendment provisions on their own accord; based on the votes on the Ensign Amendment, they'd probably have the votes if they could get it to the floor. But as a window to how the sausage gets made in Washington, it's fairly revealing -- and it's a pretty disgusting sausage.
Hopes have evaporated for passing a bill giving the District of Columbia voting rights in the House, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said Tuesday.What's a bit unusual is that this bill has already passed the Senate, which is presumably the more difficult chamber to get legislation through. In fact, it did so with a little bit of room to spare, getting 65 votes for cloture and 62 votes for the underlying bill, with several moderate Republicans defecting to vote with the Democrats. (Democrats Max Baucus and Robert Byrd, on the other hand, voted against both cloture and the bill text).
The district's leaders can't reach consensus on what to do about an amendment that would gut D.C.'s gun laws, according to Hoyer (D-Md.), the bill's patron in leadership.
“There is not a consensus among leaders in D.C.,” Hoyer said. “I don't think we're going to be able to move the bill at this time.”
The bill has been stalled for months, but today represented Hoyer's most dismal assessment since the Senate passed the bill with the gun amendment attached. Previously, Hoyer had said he was confident the bill could pass this year.
The complication is that the version of the bill the Senate approved was passed with an unrelated amendment, introduced by Senator Ensign of Nevada and accepted by a 62-36 majority, that would limit the District's ability to set its own policy on gun control. The amendment is opposed by some Democrats in the House and has created more of a stir there, as it has a proportionately somewhat larger and more empowered contingent of progressive and minority Democrats.
So why can't they simply remove the gun control provision and start over? The Hill explains:
The gun amendment is backed by the National Rifle Association and supported by conservative Democrats, particularly Blue Dogs from the South and the West. Together with Republicans, they form a strong majority in support of gun rights.Emphasis mine. Even if the gun control provision is completely removed, the NRA appears poised to treat a vote on the revised bill -- a bill on whether the District of Columbia should have a vote in the U.S. House -- as a gun control bill, and would score a yea vote on the bill as ruining the "perfect" voting record for the roughly 50 House Democrats who had NRA ratings of A or A+ as of the 110th Congress. Absent those 50 votes -- and maybe another half-dozen or so from conservative freshman Democrats who have not yet been rated by the NRA -- the Democrats would be stuck on about 200 votes out of the 218 needed for passage. Although the Democrats could expect a few Republican defections, particularly from among the six Republicans who represent Virginia or Maryland, the House Republicans are more organized than the Senate ones and presumably have other reasons to vote against the bill since it would essentially lock in an additional House seat for the Democrats. Although the bill would balance the situation out in the 112th Congress by giving Utah an additional seat as well (Utah came up just short of adding a 4th House seat based on the 2000 Census), there is no guarantee that Utah would keep the seat once the lottery balls were reshuffled again after 2010.
[...]
Democratic leaders have been flummoxed by the drive by the NRA and Republicans to add the gun provisions to the D.C. vote bill.
Lawmakers believe that the NRA would “score” any procedural motion that brought up a D.C. vote without the gun amendment. That means any member who voted for it couldn’t have a perfect voting record with the NRA.
But it has long been expected that if the D.C. vote came to the floor with the gun amendment, Republicans and liberal Democrats would both vote to defeat it. That's because Republicans oppose giving the District a vote in the House, and liberals oppose NRA efforts to loosen gun restrictions.
In any event, Steny Hoyer seems to have concluded that he doesn't have the votes for either version of the bill.
As a piece of political maneuvering, this is pretty darn brilliant by the NRA. And more power to the NRA if they want to lobby to pass the Second Amendment provisions on their own accord; based on the votes on the Ensign Amendment, they'd probably have the votes if they could get it to the floor. But as a window to how the sausage gets made in Washington, it's fairly revealing -- and it's a pretty disgusting sausage.
Starbucks Beats Peet's?
@ 7:58 AM
Zagat has its annual survey out on fast foot restaurants and there are some surprising results, at least to my tastes. Perhaps the most surprising is that Starbucks beat Berkeley, CA based chain Peet's Coffee for the title of best cup'o'joe.
Mind you, I'm not a Starbucks hater. It's fine. The stores are usually comfortable and well run, and it's often a convenient spot to sit down between meetings (or even to take a meeting).
What Starbucks isn't, however, is Peet's, a chain that elicits a ridiculous amount of loyalty from those in California and the few other locations where they have a store. Poll any ten San Franciscans, and I'd assure you with a high degree of confidence that at least seven of them would tell you that Peet's has the better coffee.
Perhaps this Zagat survey proves that San Francisco values are, true to the conservative refrain, are out of touch with those in the rest of the country. Except that, this isn't necessarily the apples-to-apples comparison that you might think. There are something like 200 Peet's Cofeee stores around the country; by comparison, there are something like 11,000 Starbuckses. Most of the people that Zagat surveyed have probably never even heard of Peet's Coffee, let alone tasted it.
Zagat's methodology is a little opaque, but from what I gather it's in fact quite simple and works like this. Periodically, Zagat sends surveys to a number of diners in a given area; these reviewers rate each restaurant they've sampled from 0 to 3. The ratings are then averaged together and multiplied by 10, so if I give a restaurant a 1 and my two best friends give it a rating of 2, it will get a composite score of 17, which is 1 plus 2 plus 2 divided by three, multiplied by 10, and rounded to the nearest whole number.
The problem is that different restaurants are rated by different numbers of people -- in a national survey of 6,000 adults, for instance, like the one that Zagat just conducted, Starbucks will get thousands of ratings and Peet's will probably only get a few dozen. When something like that happens, you could potentially encounter a problem such as this:
In this (entirely hypothetical) example, Starbucks finishes with a slightly higher rating on average than Peet's, even though from among the five people (Alice, Chloe, Felix, Gwyneth and Harry) that rated both Peet's and Starbucks, Peet's was rated as the superior option on three of the five ballots and was tied with Starbucks on the other two.
Perhaps this seems like a contrived example, but just for fun, I looked up the ratings on Yelp.com, another user-driven restaurant review service, for busy Starbucks and Peet's stores located about a block away from another on California Street in the Laurel Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. Overall, the ratings were barely distinguishable; the Starbucks store finished with 3.6 stars on average (out of 5 possible) and the Peet's finished with an average of 3.8. However, from among the 11 reviewers that rated both the Peet's and the Starbucks, six rated Peet's higher and just one preferred Starbucks, with the other four rating the two stores equally. What seems like a too-close-to-call verdict is actually a relatively clear one for Peet's.
Maybe Zagat's methodology is more sophisticated than I'm giving it credit for, but it seems to me that you have the appearance of a comparison when there really isn't one; very few of the people that rated Starbucks also rated Peet's, and probably some of the people that did rate Peet's failed to rate Starbucks. There might be demographic differences between the Starbucks' customers and the Peet's ones and there are certainly geographic ones. Perhaps it's also the case that Peet's customers are a bunch of San Francisco snobs and harsher critics in general and give lower ratings to all restaurants; that would tend to bias downward the results. I'm working on a consulting project for a (non-political) client right now and we're encountering a problem very much like this one.
People are generally much better at making comparisons between two things than they are taking any one thing as an abstraction. This is something to keep in mind when evaluating political polls. You can find lots and lots of surveys to suggest that people want to cut taxes, balance budgets, and have the government spend more on many key initiatives. Well, terrific: I'm sure they want to cure cancer, win the lottery, and increase the size of that certain part of the male anatomy too. But these economic goals are rather mutually exclusive; the question is what happens when people are asked to pick between them. Surveys generally reveal, for instance, that people prefer lower taxes to balanced budgets, and that they're willing to accept a higher tax burden for universal health care. It's those sorts of results that drive political calculations in Washington -- who's to say about their coffee preferences.
Mind you, I'm not a Starbucks hater. It's fine. The stores are usually comfortable and well run, and it's often a convenient spot to sit down between meetings (or even to take a meeting).
What Starbucks isn't, however, is Peet's, a chain that elicits a ridiculous amount of loyalty from those in California and the few other locations where they have a store. Poll any ten San Franciscans, and I'd assure you with a high degree of confidence that at least seven of them would tell you that Peet's has the better coffee.
Perhaps this Zagat survey proves that San Francisco values are, true to the conservative refrain, are out of touch with those in the rest of the country. Except that, this isn't necessarily the apples-to-apples comparison that you might think. There are something like 200 Peet's Cofeee stores around the country; by comparison, there are something like 11,000 Starbuckses. Most of the people that Zagat surveyed have probably never even heard of Peet's Coffee, let alone tasted it.
Zagat's methodology is a little opaque, but from what I gather it's in fact quite simple and works like this. Periodically, Zagat sends surveys to a number of diners in a given area; these reviewers rate each restaurant they've sampled from 0 to 3. The ratings are then averaged together and multiplied by 10, so if I give a restaurant a 1 and my two best friends give it a rating of 2, it will get a composite score of 17, which is 1 plus 2 plus 2 divided by three, multiplied by 10, and rounded to the nearest whole number.
The problem is that different restaurants are rated by different numbers of people -- in a national survey of 6,000 adults, for instance, like the one that Zagat just conducted, Starbucks will get thousands of ratings and Peet's will probably only get a few dozen. When something like that happens, you could potentially encounter a problem such as this:
In this (entirely hypothetical) example, Starbucks finishes with a slightly higher rating on average than Peet's, even though from among the five people (Alice, Chloe, Felix, Gwyneth and Harry) that rated both Peet's and Starbucks, Peet's was rated as the superior option on three of the five ballots and was tied with Starbucks on the other two.
Perhaps this seems like a contrived example, but just for fun, I looked up the ratings on Yelp.com, another user-driven restaurant review service, for busy Starbucks and Peet's stores located about a block away from another on California Street in the Laurel Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. Overall, the ratings were barely distinguishable; the Starbucks store finished with 3.6 stars on average (out of 5 possible) and the Peet's finished with an average of 3.8. However, from among the 11 reviewers that rated both the Peet's and the Starbucks, six rated Peet's higher and just one preferred Starbucks, with the other four rating the two stores equally. What seems like a too-close-to-call verdict is actually a relatively clear one for Peet's.
Maybe Zagat's methodology is more sophisticated than I'm giving it credit for, but it seems to me that you have the appearance of a comparison when there really isn't one; very few of the people that rated Starbucks also rated Peet's, and probably some of the people that did rate Peet's failed to rate Starbucks. There might be demographic differences between the Starbucks' customers and the Peet's ones and there are certainly geographic ones. Perhaps it's also the case that Peet's customers are a bunch of San Francisco snobs and harsher critics in general and give lower ratings to all restaurants; that would tend to bias downward the results. I'm working on a consulting project for a (non-political) client right now and we're encountering a problem very much like this one.
People are generally much better at making comparisons between two things than they are taking any one thing as an abstraction. This is something to keep in mind when evaluating political polls. You can find lots and lots of surveys to suggest that people want to cut taxes, balance budgets, and have the government spend more on many key initiatives. Well, terrific: I'm sure they want to cure cancer, win the lottery, and increase the size of that certain part of the male anatomy too. But these economic goals are rather mutually exclusive; the question is what happens when people are asked to pick between them. Surveys generally reveal, for instance, that people prefer lower taxes to balanced budgets, and that they're willing to accept a higher tax burden for universal health care. It's those sorts of results that drive political calculations in Washington -- who's to say about their coffee preferences.
6.08.2009
Primary Eve in VA: Anticipating the Analysis
@ 8:36 PM
As political junkies everywhere await their next fix in tomorrow's Democratic gubernatorial primary in Virginia, there are a number of variables that will bear watching when the returns are in, aside from the possible "Martin Effect" that Tom identified today, and the mutual-destruction/Iowa 2004 hypothesis offered last week by Nate.
The most obvious question involves an anomaly: in what will almost certainly be a low-turnout primary, the candidate universally considered to have a weak "ground game," Creigh Deeds, is also the candidate surging in the polls in the last week, when pollster screening for likelihood to vote generally becomes more accurate. (A new SUSA poll of likely voters came out today showing Deeds moving from 29% to 42% in the last five days, with McAuliffe falling from 35% to 30%, and Moran from 26% to 21%). That makes four late polls in a row, all claiming to screen for likelihood to vote, placing Deeds in the lead, two by double digits. That's a bit unexpected for a candidate whom many observers left for dead a month ago when he was running a poor third in most polls and was laying off part of his small field staff.
If Deeds hangs on to win, then we'll have another, and somewhat heretical by recent standards, data point in the ancient debate between mobilization and persuasion strategies, and air versus ground spending.
A second and possibly related issue is the impact, if any, of Deeds' endorsement by the Washington Post, which the Deeds campaign has tried to amplify with direct mail in Northern Virginia.
It is true that the Post endorsement immediately preceded Deeds' rise in the polls, and it's also true that the Deeds Surge seems to have been especially powerful in the Washington media market: the final PPP poll suggests that the rural senator's support in NoVa more than tripled in the last two-and-a-half weeks.
But it's also true that it's engraved on stone tablets in most political science departments that newspaper endorsements don't amount to a hill of beans in contemporary politics--particularly now that nobody outside the chattering classes reads op-ed pages, and newspapers appear to be in the last phase of a decades-long decline in media market share.
Thinking back to Nate's Iowa 2004 analogy, it's worth remembering that the startling end-game in that contest involved not only a surge for the ultimate winner, John Kerry, but another surge by near-winner John Edwards, from even further back in the pack, that seemed to be fed by an endorsement of the North Carolinian by the Des Moines Register. With all due respect for the Register's atavistic dominance of Iowa media, its endorsement of Hillary Clinton in 2008 didn't, to use a familiar phrase, seem to amount to a hill of beans.
But just to toss a theory out, perhaps newspaper endorsements do matter, or at least reinforce trends, when late-deciding voters are casting about for another candidate in reaction to unsavory front-runner rasslin': Dean and Gephardt in Iowa 2004, and McAuliffe and Moran in Virginia 2009. If that's the case, then obviously Creigh Deeds could be benefitting from the dynamics that helped both Kerry and Edwards in Iowa in 2004, punctuated by a major media endorsement.
A third and smaller factor should draw attention if the results tomorrow night are very close: Virginia has a relatively restrictive early voting system. Voters can go to their precincts before election day and apply for and then cast absentee ballots, but only if they certify in the presence of a witness (if only a poll worker) that they qualify under specific grounds for absentee voting. So while the level of early voting in VA has risen rapidly in recent years, it hasn't matched the massive percentages of many other states.
This is relevant because Gov. Tim Kaine's bill to allow "no excuse" absentee voting in Virginia was killed by the legislature in February. And in a contest where the two campaigns with the "ground game" resources for an intensive early voting effort are also the campaigns that would have benefitted from "banking" votes before a third candidate's late surge, it could be a what-might-have-been factor if tomorrow night's results are very close.
Now we'll just have to wait for voters to vote, and see if any of these factors ultimately matter to anyone other than serious geeks.
The most obvious question involves an anomaly: in what will almost certainly be a low-turnout primary, the candidate universally considered to have a weak "ground game," Creigh Deeds, is also the candidate surging in the polls in the last week, when pollster screening for likelihood to vote generally becomes more accurate. (A new SUSA poll of likely voters came out today showing Deeds moving from 29% to 42% in the last five days, with McAuliffe falling from 35% to 30%, and Moran from 26% to 21%). That makes four late polls in a row, all claiming to screen for likelihood to vote, placing Deeds in the lead, two by double digits. That's a bit unexpected for a candidate whom many observers left for dead a month ago when he was running a poor third in most polls and was laying off part of his small field staff.
If Deeds hangs on to win, then we'll have another, and somewhat heretical by recent standards, data point in the ancient debate between mobilization and persuasion strategies, and air versus ground spending.
A second and possibly related issue is the impact, if any, of Deeds' endorsement by the Washington Post, which the Deeds campaign has tried to amplify with direct mail in Northern Virginia.
It is true that the Post endorsement immediately preceded Deeds' rise in the polls, and it's also true that the Deeds Surge seems to have been especially powerful in the Washington media market: the final PPP poll suggests that the rural senator's support in NoVa more than tripled in the last two-and-a-half weeks.
But it's also true that it's engraved on stone tablets in most political science departments that newspaper endorsements don't amount to a hill of beans in contemporary politics--particularly now that nobody outside the chattering classes reads op-ed pages, and newspapers appear to be in the last phase of a decades-long decline in media market share.
Thinking back to Nate's Iowa 2004 analogy, it's worth remembering that the startling end-game in that contest involved not only a surge for the ultimate winner, John Kerry, but another surge by near-winner John Edwards, from even further back in the pack, that seemed to be fed by an endorsement of the North Carolinian by the Des Moines Register. With all due respect for the Register's atavistic dominance of Iowa media, its endorsement of Hillary Clinton in 2008 didn't, to use a familiar phrase, seem to amount to a hill of beans.
But just to toss a theory out, perhaps newspaper endorsements do matter, or at least reinforce trends, when late-deciding voters are casting about for another candidate in reaction to unsavory front-runner rasslin': Dean and Gephardt in Iowa 2004, and McAuliffe and Moran in Virginia 2009. If that's the case, then obviously Creigh Deeds could be benefitting from the dynamics that helped both Kerry and Edwards in Iowa in 2004, punctuated by a major media endorsement.
A third and smaller factor should draw attention if the results tomorrow night are very close: Virginia has a relatively restrictive early voting system. Voters can go to their precincts before election day and apply for and then cast absentee ballots, but only if they certify in the presence of a witness (if only a poll worker) that they qualify under specific grounds for absentee voting. So while the level of early voting in VA has risen rapidly in recent years, it hasn't matched the massive percentages of many other states.
This is relevant because Gov. Tim Kaine's bill to allow "no excuse" absentee voting in Virginia was killed by the legislature in February. And in a contest where the two campaigns with the "ground game" resources for an intensive early voting effort are also the campaigns that would have benefitted from "banking" votes before a third candidate's late surge, it could be a what-might-have-been factor if tomorrow night's results are very close.
Now we'll just have to wait for voters to vote, and see if any of these factors ultimately matter to anyone other than serious geeks.
Following Leadership Coup, Gay Marriage Probably DOA in New York State [UPDATED: Or Is It?]
@ 6:22 PM
Who knew there could be such excitement in Albany?
It would be dubious, however, to suggest that gay marriage itself was the cause of the leadership change. Among the two disloyal Democrats involved in the kerfuffle, Espada was a supporter of gay marriage and Monserrate was on the fence.
And indeed, we ought to be careful of coming to too much of any conclusion, period. These things can sometimes unravel themselves with as little as a stray tweet here and there, and one of the defectors, Monserratte, is facing an indictment for felony assault and would automatically be ejected from the senate if convicted. Even if Smith and the rest of the Democrats win back control of the chamber, however, one expects they'd be reluctant to rock the boat by pushing forward on the gay marriage issue. The fact of the matter is that there are three NYC-based Democrats who are no votes on gay marriage and another three NYC-based Democrats who are undecided. If Democrats had most or all of those votes, gay marriage would be (or would have been) a heavy favorite to pass, but they don't.
New York's 62 senators are elected to concurrent, two-year terms; all will be up for re-election in 2010.
EDIT: If you absolutely need a ray of hope, the new rules the Senate seems prepared to operate under appears to give more power to individual members in pushing legislation to the floor.
But, who knows. Marriage equity advocates should probably be focusing their attention for the time being on collecting votes (or signatures) for a so-called motion (or petition) of consideration, and calling out senators who are trying to have it both ways -- pun somewhat intended.
Republicans seized control of the New York State Senate on Monday, in a stunning and sudden reversal of fortunes for the Democratic Party, which controlled the chamber for barely five months.The prospects for gay marriage in New York State, which were already fairly tenuous, would now seem to be very bleak for the current senatorial term. The deposed majority leader, Malcolm Smith, had already been reluctant to bring a vote to the floor unless he had the votes. The new "bipartisan" leadership, with control of the chamber's agenda, presumably will prefer to vote on other issues rather than focus one where New Yorkers are almost evenly divided and it will be very hard to extract advantage from their tenuous, and possibly temporary (see below), hold on power. Indeed, quite a few senate Republicans had explained their no (or undecided) votes by saying that they viewed gay marriage as a "distraction".
A raucous leadership fight erupted on the floor of the Senate around 3 p.m., with two Democrats, Pedro Espada Jr. of the Bronx and Hiram Monserrate of Queens, joining the 30 Senate Republicans in a motion that would displace Democrats as the party in control.
It was a noisy and acrimonious scene on the floor of the Senate as Senator Thomas W. Libous, a Republican from Binghamton and the party’s deputy leader, shouted for a roll-call vote, while Democrats attempted to stall the vote by asking to adjourn the session.
All 30 Republicans stood with their hands raised, signaling a vote for a change in leadership. Mr. Espada and Mr. Monserrate joined them, each raising his hand. Republicans won the vote by a 32-to-30 margin. The Senate will now be governed under a new joint leadership structure, with Mr. Espada serving as the president pro tempore, and Senator Dean G. Skelos, of Long Island, as the new majority leader.
It would be dubious, however, to suggest that gay marriage itself was the cause of the leadership change. Among the two disloyal Democrats involved in the kerfuffle, Espada was a supporter of gay marriage and Monserrate was on the fence.
And indeed, we ought to be careful of coming to too much of any conclusion, period. These things can sometimes unravel themselves with as little as a stray tweet here and there, and one of the defectors, Monserratte, is facing an indictment for felony assault and would automatically be ejected from the senate if convicted. Even if Smith and the rest of the Democrats win back control of the chamber, however, one expects they'd be reluctant to rock the boat by pushing forward on the gay marriage issue. The fact of the matter is that there are three NYC-based Democrats who are no votes on gay marriage and another three NYC-based Democrats who are undecided. If Democrats had most or all of those votes, gay marriage would be (or would have been) a heavy favorite to pass, but they don't.
New York's 62 senators are elected to concurrent, two-year terms; all will be up for re-election in 2010.
EDIT: If you absolutely need a ray of hope, the new rules the Senate seems prepared to operate under appears to give more power to individual members in pushing legislation to the floor.
# A new motion for consideration is created. A sponsor may move to have his or her bill included on the next active list if a majority of members present and voting agree to the motion.So in theory, if gay marriage had the 32 votes it needed to begin with, it would also have the votes for a "motion for consideration" to bring it to the floor. The problem is that gay marriage only had about 20 or so enthusiastic supporters, and under the current conditions my guess is that most the other 12 are going to be careful about making any false moves, even if you might find a couple of sympathetic Republicans who were planning to vote no on gay marriage but were nevertheless willing to bring it to a floor vote.
# A petition for consideration is also created, which allows a majority of the members elected to request a bill be put to the floor. If successful, the bill shall be placed on the active list for the next session day. If within the last four days of session, it shall be immediately considered by the body if successful.
But, who knows. Marriage equity advocates should probably be focusing their attention for the time being on collecting votes (or signatures) for a so-called motion (or petition) of consideration, and calling out senators who are trying to have it both ways -- pun somewhat intended.
Has The Geithner Plan Succeeded?
@ 3:06 PM
Ezra Klein has noticed something that the rest of the world seems to have ignored: Tim Geithner's Public-Private Investment Partnership Plan, announced to great fanfare and much controversy in March, has gone kaput. The banks aren't interested, and the FDIC has (temporarily, it says) pulled the plug.
Ezra takes this as an ambiguous sign: "The economy certainly "feels" better," he writes, "and that's been enough to drain the urgency from some of these questions. But have the questions really gone away?".
I'll stick my neck out there and say that it's more unambiguously a positive sign. For one thing, among the reasons that the banks aren't interested in getting loans subsidized by the Fed is because they're raising unexpectedly large amounts of private capital: some $50 billion in May. For another, the economy is doing more than just feeling better; it's showing some fairly robust signs of turning the corner and actually getting better. The Leading Economic Index improved significantly in April (the most recent data available; it is quite likely to improve further in May), with seven of ten key indicators improving -- these are things like consumer sentiment, supplier deliveries, the S&P 500 (which is up about 20 percent since the Geithner plan was announced) and initial unemployment claims.
Mind you, we aren't out of the woods just yet. For one thing, the most direct way in which most of us feel the impact of the economy -- unemployment -- is unfortunately a lagging rather than a leading indicator, and has particularly been so in recent recessions. That fewer people are losing their jobs doesn't mean that the economy is creating jobs -- it isn't doing so yet. For another, the history of recovery from recessions is littered with false starts and double-dips.
But a lot of the debate about the Geithner plan was about the very "feeling" that Ezra describes. Were the toxic assets that the banks were unable to dispose of "probably fundamentally undervalued", as Brad DeLong put it at the time, implying some fear and loathing and "irrational" sentiment? If that were the case -- and this seemed to be the Geithner Plan's bet -- it would serve as a sort of artificial boost of confidence for the economy: an ecstasy pill for the banks. Conversely, if the toxic assets were correctly and appropriately assigned a (very) low value by the markets, the Geithner Plan would amount to a big giveaway -- TARP III under another name.
The "spontaneous" recovery in equities markets, capital flows and bank balance sheets hints at the former scenario: there was a bit of fear and loathing that the markets have now shaken off. Current market valuations are now very much in line with long-term indicators like 10-year P/E ratios (although some smart observers now think they're modestly overvalued); moreover, market volatility has decreased by about 40 percent since the Geithner plan was announced and is barely more than a third of what it was at the peak of the financial crisis over the winter.
There was always a bit of hocus-pocus to the Geithner Plan and, particularly, the stress tests. The markets needed to see some sort of coherent plan plan coming out of Treasury; they tanked in February when the initial rollout of the Geithner plan was woefully short on details. Treasury couldn't just sit around and do nothing, even if -- and perhaps specifically if -- they thought the crisis was indeed being perpetuated by a certain amount of irrational despair.
But the goal of the Geitherner plan was never about the toxic assets themselves, and always to get capital flowing again in a sustainable way. If that is what's happening, and it seems to be, the plan may be a victim of its own success.
Ezra takes this as an ambiguous sign: "The economy certainly "feels" better," he writes, "and that's been enough to drain the urgency from some of these questions. But have the questions really gone away?".
I'll stick my neck out there and say that it's more unambiguously a positive sign. For one thing, among the reasons that the banks aren't interested in getting loans subsidized by the Fed is because they're raising unexpectedly large amounts of private capital: some $50 billion in May. For another, the economy is doing more than just feeling better; it's showing some fairly robust signs of turning the corner and actually getting better. The Leading Economic Index improved significantly in April (the most recent data available; it is quite likely to improve further in May), with seven of ten key indicators improving -- these are things like consumer sentiment, supplier deliveries, the S&P 500 (which is up about 20 percent since the Geithner plan was announced) and initial unemployment claims.
Mind you, we aren't out of the woods just yet. For one thing, the most direct way in which most of us feel the impact of the economy -- unemployment -- is unfortunately a lagging rather than a leading indicator, and has particularly been so in recent recessions. That fewer people are losing their jobs doesn't mean that the economy is creating jobs -- it isn't doing so yet. For another, the history of recovery from recessions is littered with false starts and double-dips.
But a lot of the debate about the Geithner plan was about the very "feeling" that Ezra describes. Were the toxic assets that the banks were unable to dispose of "probably fundamentally undervalued", as Brad DeLong put it at the time, implying some fear and loathing and "irrational" sentiment? If that were the case -- and this seemed to be the Geithner Plan's bet -- it would serve as a sort of artificial boost of confidence for the economy: an ecstasy pill for the banks. Conversely, if the toxic assets were correctly and appropriately assigned a (very) low value by the markets, the Geithner Plan would amount to a big giveaway -- TARP III under another name.
The "spontaneous" recovery in equities markets, capital flows and bank balance sheets hints at the former scenario: there was a bit of fear and loathing that the markets have now shaken off. Current market valuations are now very much in line with long-term indicators like 10-year P/E ratios (although some smart observers now think they're modestly overvalued); moreover, market volatility has decreased by about 40 percent since the Geithner plan was announced and is barely more than a third of what it was at the peak of the financial crisis over the winter.
There was always a bit of hocus-pocus to the Geithner Plan and, particularly, the stress tests. The markets needed to see some sort of coherent plan plan coming out of Treasury; they tanked in February when the initial rollout of the Geithner plan was woefully short on details. Treasury couldn't just sit around and do nothing, even if -- and perhaps specifically if -- they thought the crisis was indeed being perpetuated by a certain amount of irrational despair.
But the goal of the Geitherner plan was never about the toxic assets themselves, and always to get capital flowing again in a sustainable way. If that is what's happening, and it seems to be, the plan may be a victim of its own success.
VA Gov a Test Case for the "Martin Effect"?
@ 1:36 PM
Last December, with Republicans still licking fresh wounds, Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss won a runoff election against Democrat Jim Martin. Chambliss' 15-point victory margin in the runoff was far greater than his 3-point margin in the initial contest a month earlier, in which Martin, despite finishing second, was able to keep Chambliss under the state-mandated 50 percent threshold, triggering the runoff.
What accounted for Martin's disparate performances? Race was certainly a key factor, as African American turnout dropped even more precipitously than the statewide voter dropoff, which fell by almost half. Though the lack of exit polling data makes it impossible to know for sure how much the black voter turnout rates at both moments affected Martin's performance in each election, as Nate pointed out in December, there's almost no doubt that Barack Obama's presence on the ballot helped Martin in November and, thus, his absence pretty much doomed Martin in December.
From the New York Times story the day after the runoff:
Tomorrow's Virginia Democratic primary provides another opportunity to test the racial turnout implications of Obama's candidacy. It is not a perfect analog to the Georgia senate race, for the obvious reason that Georgia was a two-way general election runoff between a Democrat and Republican, not a party primary fought among three Democrats. But as the Washington Post reports today, what's uncertain for all three of those Democratic contenders--Craigh Deeds, Terry McAuliffe, Brian Moran--is not only whom African Americans will support, but what the overall turnout among black voters will be.
If Barack Obama has changed black politics--and even if he has done so only in symbolic ways, is there any doubt he has?--the interesting post-2008 electoral questions are whether and to what degree African Americans will turn out in non-presidential contests, particularly those without a black candidate in (presumably, though not necessarily) Democratic primaries and/or general election contests. Tomorrow's result should provide one of the first pieces to this racial turnout puzzle.
Black voter share of the VA Democratic primary electorate should be higher than it was four years ago, if for no other reason than the greater level of attention paid and amount of resources invested by the three contenders in African American parts of the state. (Besides, Tim Kaine's nomination was never in doubt in 2005.) What will be harder to tease out is whether an increase is a byproduct of African American voters newly-engaged by the Obama effect, or simply a result of all that attention and resources. But if black share of the primary electorate is only slightly higher than four years ago, or the same or lower, Jim Martin may be chuckling--and wincing--tomorrow night.
What accounted for Martin's disparate performances? Race was certainly a key factor, as African American turnout dropped even more precipitously than the statewide voter dropoff, which fell by almost half. Though the lack of exit polling data makes it impossible to know for sure how much the black voter turnout rates at both moments affected Martin's performance in each election, as Nate pointed out in December, there's almost no doubt that Barack Obama's presence on the ballot helped Martin in November and, thus, his absence pretty much doomed Martin in December.
From the New York Times story the day after the runoff:
“For a lot of African-American voters, the real election was last month,” said Merle Black, an expert in Southern politics at Emory University. “The importance of electing the first African-American president in history generated enormous enthusiasm. Everything else was anticlimactic.”
A little more than two million people voted in the runoff, compared with 3.7 million on Nov. 4. In heavily black Clayton County, just south of Atlanta, Mr. Martin’s vote was less than half what it was in the earlier election. Only 9.2 percent of registered Georgians cast early votes in the runoff, compared with 36 percent in the general election.
Tomorrow's Virginia Democratic primary provides another opportunity to test the racial turnout implications of Obama's candidacy. It is not a perfect analog to the Georgia senate race, for the obvious reason that Georgia was a two-way general election runoff between a Democrat and Republican, not a party primary fought among three Democrats. But as the Washington Post reports today, what's uncertain for all three of those Democratic contenders--Craigh Deeds, Terry McAuliffe, Brian Moran--is not only whom African Americans will support, but what the overall turnout among black voters will be.
Enthusiasm among black voters for Barack Obama last fall helped him become the first Democrat since the 1960s to carry Virginia in a presidential election, but it is unclear whether any of the Democrats who hope to succeed Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) has succeeded in tapping that energy.
In a race without a clear front-runner, state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds (Bath), former Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe and former state delegate Brian Moran (Alexandria) have touted endorsements from civil rights leaders and black newspapers, mailed thousands of fliers and competed on radio for support in areas that are not a natural base for any of the three.
They have crafted messages targeting black voters -- who accounted for an estimated 30 percent of the Democratic primary vote in 2008 -- with promises to reduce childhood obesity, spur economic renewal in the urban areas of Richmond and Norfolk and restore voting rights to nonviolent felons. All three have pledged to crack down on predatory payday lenders, an issue McAuliffe elevated by promising to drive such businesses out of the state.
If Barack Obama has changed black politics--and even if he has done so only in symbolic ways, is there any doubt he has?--the interesting post-2008 electoral questions are whether and to what degree African Americans will turn out in non-presidential contests, particularly those without a black candidate in (presumably, though not necessarily) Democratic primaries and/or general election contests. Tomorrow's result should provide one of the first pieces to this racial turnout puzzle.
Black voter share of the VA Democratic primary electorate should be higher than it was four years ago, if for no other reason than the greater level of attention paid and amount of resources invested by the three contenders in African American parts of the state. (Besides, Tim Kaine's nomination was never in doubt in 2005.) What will be harder to tease out is whether an increase is a byproduct of African American voters newly-engaged by the Obama effect, or simply a result of all that attention and resources. But if black share of the primary electorate is only slightly higher than four years ago, or the same or lower, Jim Martin may be chuckling--and wincing--tomorrow night.
Obama's Top Targeter Bullish on Montana and Worried About Gingrich; Predicts Deeds Win Tomorrow
@ 11:18 AM
Ken Strasma, recognizable to many 538 readers as Barack Obama's national targeting director in 2008, is the first participant in a new series of interviews we will be conducting with consultants and experts from the field of campaigns and elections.
In this interview, Strasma describes the voter targeting approaches of the 2008 Obama campaign, explains why he thinks Montana is the top target for Obama to flip in 2012, calls Newt Gingrich an unconventional and thus potentially tough 2012 Republican nominee, and predicts that Virginia Sen. Craigh Deeds will win his state's Democratic gubernatorial primary tomorrow.
First, give our readers a little bit of background on you and Strategic Telemetry.
Strategic Telemetry specializes in providing microtargeting and other strategic consulting services for progressive candidates and organizations. I founded Strategic Telemetry in 2003 in order to help make sure that Democratic candidates didn't fall behind in the targeting arms race against the Republicans, who under the leadership of Karl Rove were making big investments in voterfiles and data analysis.
My own background is in campaign management. I was using microtargeting as a manager long before there was a buzzword to describe the process. One of my favorite early successes with microtargeting was when I was able to combine polling data from more than 20 individual legislative races in Minnesota in order to find likely swing voters. The morning after a mailing using that model hit, I was listening to a right-wing talk show host in the Twin Cities who was attacking our strategy in sending out the mailing. He felt that because it was attacking the legislative Republican's votes on education, it should have been targeted to hard-core Republicans who always vote, and he didn't understand why he hadn't gotten the mailing. He went on to say that his girlfriend who voted for some Democrats and some Republicans had received the mailing. So that made my day, having the right-wing talk show host confirm for us that our targeting had succeeded in finding his swing-voter girlfriend.
What was your role as a consultant for the Obama campaign?
I served as Obama's national Targeting Director, and my firm provided the Obama campaign's microtargeting in both the primaries and the general election. We started planning for the IA Caucuses in late 2006. The primary process lasted longer than anyone expected, so we shifted right into targeting for the general election even before the last primaries had been held.
Without giving away any trade secrets, can you explain to us how you developed the targeting models for the Obama campaign?
At the most basic level, any campaign is about persuading undecided voters, and turning out supporters. Using telephone IDs, we were able to ask hundreds of thousands of voters who they were supporting, and how they felt about certain issues.Those IDs by themselves were very valuable, but there were still millions of voters who we were not able to reach. Using the ID information we did have, combined with demographic and commercial marketing data, we built statistical models that predicted how voters we weren't able to reach would have answered the ID questions if we'd been able to reach them. Some of the statistical modeling techniques are well known from the academic and commercial marketing worlds. Other proprietary techniques fall under the category of trade secrets that we'll have to keep to ourselves for the moment. The Obama campaign was in some ways a wonderful 2-year research and development project, with the most aggressive testing of microtargeting models that I have ever seen. We'll be continuing intense R&D to make sure that we maintain the technical lead we established in 2008.
The Obama campaign used Catalist, supplemented with some other voter databases. Can you give us a status update on the quality of voter lists today?
While I can't get into the details of exactly what voterfiles the Obama campaign used in the primaries and the general election, I can say that the voterfiles were the best I have ever worked with. There are always problems with voterfiles, but a lot of progress was made this cycle. Because my work is highly dependent on having accurate voterfile data, I was especially pleased with the advances in the quality of voterfiles in 2008. Another major achievement was the quick turn-around on voterfile updates. The Obama campaign focused heavily on voter registration and on early vote. Getting new registrants on the voterfile and flagging who had voted early was extremely valuable. Because we knew who had voted early, and because we had support scores for those voters telling us how likely it was that they were Obama supporters, we were able to estimate our margin from early vote going into election day, and calculate the percentage of the at-the-polls vote that we needed to get to 50 percent +1.
Obama flipped nine states: three each in the Southwest, Midwest and South. How did the demographic challenges differ in each region?
One of the key demographic challenges was to avoid treating groups as if they were all the same. There are significant differences between Protestant and Catholic Hispanics in the Southwest, between Cuban and non-Cuban Hispanics in Florida, and between Hispanics living in majority Hispanic neighborhoods and those who live in more diverse areas.
Once you start looking at voters on the individual level, rather than as monolithic blocks, there are a lot of similarities between these states. There are pockets of similar voters in all of these states, but the share of the electorate made up by the various groups differed dramatically.
OK, I lost a bet to you about Obama winning North Carolina. In my defense, that bet was made in July, before the September economic collapse and McCain's "fundamentals are strong" blunder. But, to your credit, you were bullish on NC five or six months out. What made you so optimistic?
The North Carolina primary gave us a lot of insight into how the state was changing, and what was doable in the general election. Winning North Carolina wasn’t just about mobilizing African-American turnout, although that was very important. North Carolina’s electorate is changing, with a significant increase in younger, well educated voters who made up another key part of Obama’s winning coalition. Even when things looked bad for a little while when McCain briefly took the lead following the Republican convention, we knew that we were on track to hit or vote goal in North Carolina. That gave me confidence, even when the polling looked bad.
Indiana might be the biggest puzzle of 2008. Aside from the neighboring state advantage, how the heck did Obama swing Indiana so far in one cycle?
Indiana is one of those states whose dark-red status in presidential elections has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Indiana is Republican-leaning, but still competitive at the state level. We made Indiana competitive by choosing to compete there. It is important to understand that this wasn’t any kind of head-fake. We invested serious resources in building an unprecedented field operation in Indiana.
It's also worth noting that our primary organization paid huge dividends in the general election. People are still debating whether the long primary process helped or hurt, and I don’t claim to know the answer to that question. One thing I am sure of is that winning Indiana would have been much more difficult if we hadn’t been forced to compete there late in the primary process.
We're a long way from 2012, but if you had to project forward, what will it take for Obama to flip states like Montana and the Dakotas?
I'm very bullish on Montana. It is currently my number one pick to flip in 2012. Energy, land-management and environmental issues are key in Montana and the Dakotas. If, after four years, voters there see that Obama’s policies aren’t the caricatures that Republicans have claimed, we should do quite well.
Which Republican of the potential field of names presently under discussion-Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Haley Barbour-do you think would present the biggest obstacle to Obama in 2012?
I would love to see Sarah Palin as the Republican nominee if only for the entertainment value. In terms of who I think would be the strongest opponent, that depends on what type of environment we’re facing. If the economy is still in dire straits, and voters blame Obama, than I would worry about facing Romney. He is an inoffensive, reasonable-appearing candidate, especially compared to some of the other candidates competing for the support of the right-wing of the Republican Party.
However, I expect that the economy will begin to recover, and that Obama will continue to be a popular and successful president. In that case, the Republicans will not win by nominating an inoffensive candidate like Romney. In those circumstances, Newt Gingrich is the candidate who worries me the most. Gingrich has new and unusual ideas. While those ideas are usually dead wrong, and often quite scary, he is something different. You don’t defeat a popular incumbent with a conventional politician, so an unusual choice like Gingrich would be what would worry me the most.
You got to know Virginia demography pretty well in 2008. Any predictions on what will happen Tuesday in the Virginia primary?
The key in Virginia as that we don’t yet know the demographics of the primary electorate. The Democratic primary electorate in VA has been changing over the last several cycles. The share of the Democratic primary vote coming from Northern Virginal more than doubled between 2001 and the 2008 presidential primary. We’ll see on Tuesday who does the best job of turning out their vote.
Most public polling is showing Deeds and Moran gaining and McAuliffe dropping, but the numbers are close enough that a good GOTV operation could make the difference for any one of the three candidates. I see the most likely outcome as a Deeds win, but McAuliffe could still win if Deeds and Moran continue to split the “non-McAuliffe” vote. If Moran’s supporters begin to defect to Deeds then there is probably no way for McAuliffe to win what would then be functionally a 2-person race against Deeds.
In this interview, Strasma describes the voter targeting approaches of the 2008 Obama campaign, explains why he thinks Montana is the top target for Obama to flip in 2012, calls Newt Gingrich an unconventional and thus potentially tough 2012 Republican nominee, and predicts that Virginia Sen. Craigh Deeds will win his state's Democratic gubernatorial primary tomorrow.
First, give our readers a little bit of background on you and Strategic Telemetry.
Strategic Telemetry specializes in providing microtargeting and other strategic consulting services for progressive candidates and organizations. I founded Strategic Telemetry in 2003 in order to help make sure that Democratic candidates didn't fall behind in the targeting arms race against the Republicans, who under the leadership of Karl Rove were making big investments in voterfiles and data analysis.
My own background is in campaign management. I was using microtargeting as a manager long before there was a buzzword to describe the process. One of my favorite early successes with microtargeting was when I was able to combine polling data from more than 20 individual legislative races in Minnesota in order to find likely swing voters. The morning after a mailing using that model hit, I was listening to a right-wing talk show host in the Twin Cities who was attacking our strategy in sending out the mailing. He felt that because it was attacking the legislative Republican's votes on education, it should have been targeted to hard-core Republicans who always vote, and he didn't understand why he hadn't gotten the mailing. He went on to say that his girlfriend who voted for some Democrats and some Republicans had received the mailing. So that made my day, having the right-wing talk show host confirm for us that our targeting had succeeded in finding his swing-voter girlfriend.
What was your role as a consultant for the Obama campaign?
I served as Obama's national Targeting Director, and my firm provided the Obama campaign's microtargeting in both the primaries and the general election. We started planning for the IA Caucuses in late 2006. The primary process lasted longer than anyone expected, so we shifted right into targeting for the general election even before the last primaries had been held.
Without giving away any trade secrets, can you explain to us how you developed the targeting models for the Obama campaign?
At the most basic level, any campaign is about persuading undecided voters, and turning out supporters. Using telephone IDs, we were able to ask hundreds of thousands of voters who they were supporting, and how they felt about certain issues.Those IDs by themselves were very valuable, but there were still millions of voters who we were not able to reach. Using the ID information we did have, combined with demographic and commercial marketing data, we built statistical models that predicted how voters we weren't able to reach would have answered the ID questions if we'd been able to reach them. Some of the statistical modeling techniques are well known from the academic and commercial marketing worlds. Other proprietary techniques fall under the category of trade secrets that we'll have to keep to ourselves for the moment. The Obama campaign was in some ways a wonderful 2-year research and development project, with the most aggressive testing of microtargeting models that I have ever seen. We'll be continuing intense R&D to make sure that we maintain the technical lead we established in 2008.
The Obama campaign used Catalist, supplemented with some other voter databases. Can you give us a status update on the quality of voter lists today?
While I can't get into the details of exactly what voterfiles the Obama campaign used in the primaries and the general election, I can say that the voterfiles were the best I have ever worked with. There are always problems with voterfiles, but a lot of progress was made this cycle. Because my work is highly dependent on having accurate voterfile data, I was especially pleased with the advances in the quality of voterfiles in 2008. Another major achievement was the quick turn-around on voterfile updates. The Obama campaign focused heavily on voter registration and on early vote. Getting new registrants on the voterfile and flagging who had voted early was extremely valuable. Because we knew who had voted early, and because we had support scores for those voters telling us how likely it was that they were Obama supporters, we were able to estimate our margin from early vote going into election day, and calculate the percentage of the at-the-polls vote that we needed to get to 50 percent +1.
Obama flipped nine states: three each in the Southwest, Midwest and South. How did the demographic challenges differ in each region?
One of the key demographic challenges was to avoid treating groups as if they were all the same. There are significant differences between Protestant and Catholic Hispanics in the Southwest, between Cuban and non-Cuban Hispanics in Florida, and between Hispanics living in majority Hispanic neighborhoods and those who live in more diverse areas.
Once you start looking at voters on the individual level, rather than as monolithic blocks, there are a lot of similarities between these states. There are pockets of similar voters in all of these states, but the share of the electorate made up by the various groups differed dramatically.
OK, I lost a bet to you about Obama winning North Carolina. In my defense, that bet was made in July, before the September economic collapse and McCain's "fundamentals are strong" blunder. But, to your credit, you were bullish on NC five or six months out. What made you so optimistic?
The North Carolina primary gave us a lot of insight into how the state was changing, and what was doable in the general election. Winning North Carolina wasn’t just about mobilizing African-American turnout, although that was very important. North Carolina’s electorate is changing, with a significant increase in younger, well educated voters who made up another key part of Obama’s winning coalition. Even when things looked bad for a little while when McCain briefly took the lead following the Republican convention, we knew that we were on track to hit or vote goal in North Carolina. That gave me confidence, even when the polling looked bad.
Indiana might be the biggest puzzle of 2008. Aside from the neighboring state advantage, how the heck did Obama swing Indiana so far in one cycle?
Indiana is one of those states whose dark-red status in presidential elections has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Indiana is Republican-leaning, but still competitive at the state level. We made Indiana competitive by choosing to compete there. It is important to understand that this wasn’t any kind of head-fake. We invested serious resources in building an unprecedented field operation in Indiana.
It's also worth noting that our primary organization paid huge dividends in the general election. People are still debating whether the long primary process helped or hurt, and I don’t claim to know the answer to that question. One thing I am sure of is that winning Indiana would have been much more difficult if we hadn’t been forced to compete there late in the primary process.
We're a long way from 2012, but if you had to project forward, what will it take for Obama to flip states like Montana and the Dakotas?
I'm very bullish on Montana. It is currently my number one pick to flip in 2012. Energy, land-management and environmental issues are key in Montana and the Dakotas. If, after four years, voters there see that Obama’s policies aren’t the caricatures that Republicans have claimed, we should do quite well.
Which Republican of the potential field of names presently under discussion-Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Haley Barbour-do you think would present the biggest obstacle to Obama in 2012?
I would love to see Sarah Palin as the Republican nominee if only for the entertainment value. In terms of who I think would be the strongest opponent, that depends on what type of environment we’re facing. If the economy is still in dire straits, and voters blame Obama, than I would worry about facing Romney. He is an inoffensive, reasonable-appearing candidate, especially compared to some of the other candidates competing for the support of the right-wing of the Republican Party.
However, I expect that the economy will begin to recover, and that Obama will continue to be a popular and successful president. In that case, the Republicans will not win by nominating an inoffensive candidate like Romney. In those circumstances, Newt Gingrich is the candidate who worries me the most. Gingrich has new and unusual ideas. While those ideas are usually dead wrong, and often quite scary, he is something different. You don’t defeat a popular incumbent with a conventional politician, so an unusual choice like Gingrich would be what would worry me the most.
You got to know Virginia demography pretty well in 2008. Any predictions on what will happen Tuesday in the Virginia primary?
The key in Virginia as that we don’t yet know the demographics of the primary electorate. The Democratic primary electorate in VA has been changing over the last several cycles. The share of the Democratic primary vote coming from Northern Virginal more than doubled between 2001 and the 2008 presidential primary. We’ll see on Tuesday who does the best job of turning out their vote.
Most public polling is showing Deeds and Moran gaining and McAuliffe dropping, but the numbers are close enough that a good GOTV operation could make the difference for any one of the three candidates. I see the most likely outcome as a Deeds win, but McAuliffe could still win if Deeds and Moran continue to split the “non-McAuliffe” vote. If Moran’s supporters begin to defect to Deeds then there is probably no way for McAuliffe to win what would then be functionally a 2-person race against Deeds.
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