Oh No, Ohio?

A Quinnipiac poll today has Barack Obama's approval rating tanking in Ohio: he's now at 49 percent approve and 44 percent disapprove in the Buckeye State, according to Quinnipiac, whereas back in May, they had him at a healthy 62-31.

Obama's approval ratings have declined nationwide by perhaps 3-5 points since early May. I have little doubt that this has mostly to do with the flagging economy. Each day, a few more voters are going to blame Obama for the economic troubles that we're in. If the economy seems to be showing some "green shoots", as it did in March and April, then Obama will be fine -- voters don't expect the economy to turn around overnight. But if the economy isn't showing any signs of life -- and most of the economic news for the past 45 days or so has been pretty grim -- he'll fail to keep pace with those modest, but ever-increasing, expectations, and his approval ratings will decline.

Ohio, of course, has suffered more than most states from the recession. It's employment rate, at 10.8 percent in May, is the eighth-highest in the nation, and has increased by 3.5 points (and counting) since Election Day:

States with Largest Increases in Unemployment Rate since November


What Ohio hasn't done, though, is suffer uniquely from the recession. It doesn't have it nearly as bad as its neighbor, my native state of Michigan, where unemployment is now at 14.1 percent. And what are Obama's approval ratings like in Michigan?

Not so bad. A Rasmussen poll in mid-June put Obama's approval there at 59-39, including 39 percent strongly approving (and remember, Rasmussen has tended to have very bearish numbers on Obama overall). An EPIC-MRA poll of Michigan in late May, meanwhile, had 61 percent rating his job performance as "excellent" or "pretty good".

The point is not that Obama's approval ratings aren't suffering because of the economy, nor that they might not be suffering more in states where the economy is worse. (Whoa, too many double-negatives there). I just doubt that there any problems Obama has that are so unique to Ohio that you wouldn't also see them manifested in Michigan or Pennsylvania (where Obama's approval numbers have also generally been fine). As such, I think the headlines this poll has generated have been a little overwritten. It's not that, "Oh no, Obama is going to lose Ohio in 2012!". It's more just another indication that voters won't have an infinite amount of patience with Obama on the economy, and if by 2012 the economy still hasn't improved (in which case, we'll be referring to the recession as "GD2"), or has double-dipped, or has improved sluggishly at the cost of a huge run-up in the national debt, Obama is going to be in trouble in Ohio as well as most of the other 49 states.

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Poker Update: I'm #441

As you may know, I'm in Las Vegas right now for the World Series of Poker. It's actually been quite a productive trip: I've met a lot of extremely well-known poker players as well as Congressman Barney Frank, who was very impressive. More on those and other things, including the usual business of politics that we cover around here, later on. In the meantime, for of you who feel like indulging me, there's a bit more on my experience in the poker tournament below the fold.

* My experience yesterday can be broken down into three phases:

- In the first phase, I got poor cards but played pretty well, and made a little bit of money.
- In the second phase, I got poor cards and played poorly, and lost a fair bit of money.
- In the third phase, I got terrific cards and played well enough, and made a lot of money.

The bottom line is that things turned out pretty well. Everyone starts out the tournament with 30,000 chips. I finished the day with slightly over 61,000 chips -- fewer than Los Angeles Lakers point guard Jordan Farmar, who is apparently a very good poker player and was briefly among the chip leaders, but more than Ray Romano, who lost all his chips and busted out of the event. This means I'm currently in 441st place (or thereabouts) out of the 6,500 or so players who entered the tournament. Half the field continues play today; I have the day off and then resume tomorrow.

* Playing ten hours of poker -- with 2+ hours of breaks in between -- as I did yesterday, is absolutely exhausting. I'm not sure if that makes poker a "sport", but it's closer than you'd think. Physical stamina is more of a consideration in an event like the "Main Event" of World Series of Poker than is generally understood, the eventual winner of which will have played something like 90 hours or cards to claim his or her title.

* I know that I'm not the best player in the field of 6,500 or so that entered. I'm certainly not among the 100 best, and maybe not among the 1,000 best. My poker aptitude, mind you, is plenty high. But ability is the sum of aptitude and experience, and I just don't have very much experience at all in these live, big-money tournament settings. Nor is no limit hold 'em, the game played in this tournament, my best one; back when I was playing regularly, I made most of my money from another variant known as limit hold 'em, where all bets are of a fixed size.

But this is true in many aspects of life: the best player/person does not always win. What makes poker somewhat unique is that understanding one's limits can significantly affect (and improve) one's strategy. For instance, I'm willing to gamble chips in certain somewhat marginal situations that mostly boil down to luck, because those chips are less valuable to me than they might be to a world-class player who can find a better spot to deploy them. On the other hand, when I got myself in trouble yesterday, it was usually because I played my hand in such a way that forced me to try to "outplay" a top-level opponent. This doesn't mean that such confrontations can be entirely avoided -- in spite of what it might seem like if you watch the the (highly-edited) version of the tournament on ESPN, you can't win a tournament like this one just by pushing all-in every hand. And there are times when I feel like I definitely have an edge -- even against great players. But I have to be realistic about the fact that, when there is a point when a superior player and I each think we are outplaying one another, I'm going to be the one getting pwned more often than not.

The point is, though, that of the 6,500 people who entered the tournament, I'd guess that as many as half of them really do think deep down that they're the best (or one of the best) poker players in the world. Of course, only one (or a few) of them can be right. But the rest are liable to take the wrong sorts of opportunities against the wrong sorts of opponents.

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Sarah Palin (R, Asterisk)

I really didn't want to spend the Fourth of July weekend thinking about the personal-slash-political saga of Sarah Palin. But the thing about Palin, whether you adore or despise her, is that she forces you to deal with her--which, when you think about it, is a quintessentially American trait.

The reasons for her resignation, whatever they turn out to be, will matter to the present and unfolding story, but not to her larger fate. The fact that Palin resigned now--no less the elliptical and sometimes eerie way she announced her intentions--likely signals the end of her career as a national politician to be taken seriously and the start of her transformation into a political novelty. Yet Palin's personal saga will continue to attract attention and garner headlines. Maybe she'll become a television personality, a career she pursued at one point in her life. So, yes, we may still have to deal with Sarah and all that she represents.

Why? What is it about Palin that we find so compelling, even fascinating? Why is her every move scrutinized? Why can we not look away?

The short answer may be that she is a late-stage warrior in a culture war that, while still ongoing, has diminished into something more of a skirmish. Abortion aside, many of the polarizing issues of the past two generations--Vietnam, race, sexual mores, feminism, popular culture--have lost a lot of their capacity to galvanize and divide us. For those still fighting that war, in 2008 Palin emerged as an icon and a vessel for restoration; for those who had grown tired of that war she was like a political burr, an uncomfortable reminder of a political time thought to be happily put behind us.

The longer answer has to do with the fact that she is young and a woman, which only magnifies sentiments on both sides of the Palin divide. It was easy to dismiss with a polite smile or a roll of the eyeballs the late-stage career grumblings of Jesse Helms or Strom Thurmond; you knew their days were numbered, that they were walking anachronisms slated to join other curiosities in the museum of post-war American politics.

Not so with Sarah. She is younger than Barack Obama, after all. She is attractive. (I stopped counting how many women have mentioned to me, unsolicited and unprompted, Palin's cheekbone structure.) And so we have in her a woman cheerily and cheekily railing against the Great Society even though she was still in diapers the day Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. As colleague Phil Klinkner and I have argued, the 2008 coalition that beat her and John McCain was in many ways LBJ's revenge for the politics that devoured his presidency by 1968 and set into motion the culture war that dominated American politics for the next 40 years. All of which makes Palin the oddest of political hybrids: the spritely scold, the young curmudgeon.

I don't like to talk about politics at social functions with family and friends, especially during holidays. But of course Palin's name was on many lips this weekend. Hearing people speak at length about her for the first time since last autumn, I was reminded just how strongly people feel about her. Other than perhaps Ted Kennedy, I cannot think of another living politician who generates such passionate, unambivalent opinions. (And yes, I include George W. Bush and Barack Obama in that accounting.) It's cliche to say so, but she really is a one-woman American political Rorschach test. And just as I find it painfully difficult to converse with Palinites, I can see them looking back at me like I'm some alien as I explain why she so offends me.

Palin's decision to resign may push her off the presidential election stage, but not out of our collective consciousness. She will soon become an asterisk in presidential politics, even as her grip on the national psyche persists.

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How Can the Climate Bill Get to 60 Votes?

Last week, we commissioned an analysis of voting on the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in the Senate, which was narrowly approved by the House with a relatively high amount of crossing of party lines: 44 Democratic nay votes, and 8 Republican yeas. The model used several variables, including lobbying contributions, per-capita carbon emissions in each state, and a Congressman's ideology, to attempt to explain/predict their vote on the climate bil. Today, we'll take that same analysis and apply it prospectively to the Senate.

But first, a few assumptions:

1. Al Franken has now jointed the Senate but we do not have any votes for him on which to form an ideology score. I am going to give him the numbes of his idol, Paul Wellsone. Does anybody really have a problem with my assuming that Franken, like Wellstone, is going to be very, very liberal? Didn't think so.
2. Lobbying contributions are scaled to reflect the fact that Senators raise more on average than Representatives do.
3. A more controversial assumption is that we're assuming that there won't be nay votes from the left, of which there were almost certainly three (DeFazio, Kucinich, Stark) in the House. In other words, the model as I've run it here treats those three as yea votes. The reason I'm making this assumption is because: (a) it's not so clear that DeFazio, Kucinih and Stark would have voted against the poll if their votes were needed for passage, and (b) this is just not something that seems to be in the gameplan of the progressives in the Senate; Russ Feingold of Wisconsin every once in a blue moon winds up being far enough to the left that he votes with the Republicans, but that's juts about it.

And a few caveats:

1. The Senate will be voting on a different bill than the House's version. The Senate's version might be more or less favorable to, say, farm-state interests than the House's, which could in turn alter the percentages.
2. The overall political tides may have shifted by the time the Senate considers the bill because of changes to the economy, Obama's approval rating, gas prices, and perhaps even the weather, etc.
3. The key vote in the Senate is not really the vote on final passage, which this model would seem to get at, but rather the vote on cloture, or breaking the filibuster, which would require 60 votes. It's not all that uncommon for a senator to vote for cloture and then against the underlying bill, or vice versa, although it seems to happen less often for major issues like climate change legislation.
4. These percentages are based on the relatively limited amount of knowledge embodied in the seven variables in the model; that should not be read to imply that there aren't other factors, both tangible and intangible, that wouldn't have a significant impact.

With all of that said, here are how the 100 senators rank in order of most to least likely to vote for the bill.



The only way any of these senators would vote against the climate bill is if they're opposing it from the left, a possibility which we're specifically ignoring for this analysis for the reasons described above. Diane Feinstein can be weird, I guess, but is unlikely to be so on climate legislation sponsored by her colleague Barbara Boxer -- plus California is a low-carbon state that already has some alternative-energy infrastructure in place and could be a big net beneficiary from this bill.



There are a few bullets for the Democrats to dodge here, but none of them would seem to be fatal:

* Joe Liberman is Joe Lieberman. But he also sponsored a cap-and-trade bill last year, takes no money from the coal industry, and lives in a deeply blue, low-carbon state.
* Tom Carper relies pretty heavily on corporate donations, but the coal industry isn't really one of his suitors and he usually falls into line on major Democratic policy priorities.
* Harry Reid takes a lot of coal money, although he also takes a lot of nuclear and alternative energy money and is, of course, the Majority Leader. And hard as it is to believe considering all the carbon that must be consumed to air-condition the Vegas Strip (it's 2 in the morning here and still 90 degrees outside), Nevada is not a particularly carbon-intensive state. So I don't think Reid's yea vote is in much doubt, but the one way he could be problematic is if he's unwilling to compromise on nuclear energy -- a big chip the Democrats have in their arsenal -- because of concerns over Yucca Mountain.

A much more serious concern for the Democrats is Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who voted against cloture on last year's bill. Brown's public statements have generally indicated lukewarm support for the bill, but also that he and the two senators from Michigan -- Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow -- are going to require some compromises to protect the auto industry. At the end of the day, a lot has already been done to assist the auto industry, and Brown, Levin and Stabenow are mainline liberal Democrats -- their votes can probably be whipped, and their demands for compromise probably revealed to be bluffs. But their votes on the climate bill aren't as certain as the analysis indicates.



Now we get into a set of Democrats who can occasionally be conservative, sometimes in order to protect corporate interests. But the overall combination that befalls each one breaks down in favorable enough ways that the Democrats probably have nothing really to worry about. Mark Warner, for instance, while taking a lot of money from coal, also takes some money from alt/nuclear and lives in a fairly low-carbon state.



These six votes would get the Democrats to 50, which would allow Joe Biden to break the tie -- if not for that whole filibuster thing. You're probably seeing some names here that you're a bit surprised to see. Montana consumes a fair amount of carbon, and Max Baucus is pretty conservative, which seems like a bad combination -- until you see how much money he's getting from alt/nuclear PACs -- the most of any senator on a per-cycle basis. Arlen Specter was generally thought to be sympathetic to cap-and-trade legislation -- and that was before he turned into a Democrat. North Carolina's economy is fairly low-carbon, which should help to prevent Kay Hagan from defecting. The other two senators on this list, however, could be more problematic for the Democrats, as Claire McCaskill has already tweeted her concerns about cap-and-trade, and as Tim Johnson voted against cloture last year -- although South Dakota's economy, for whatever reason, is much less carbon-intensive than North Dakota's.



These are three senators for whom the percentages tended to move quite a bit based on relatively small tweaks to the model. Snowe and Collins are almost certainly going to be necessary parts of any path to 60 votes and are almost certainly going to be easier gets than at least half a dozen Democrats. And I tend to think the model has erred a bit pessimistic on them here. But that doesn't mean their votes are assured.

Mark Begich, in Alaska, might be the more interesting case. Alaska is such an outlier in so many ways in terms of energy production that it's hard to know exactly how all the incentives line up, but Begich claimed on his campaign website that he was a support of cap-and-trade, and Alaska also has its doses of environmentalism. If the Democrats decide to pull some trigger to get Lisa Murkowski's vote -- ANWR drilling, for example, which is highly popular in Alaska -- they'll undoubtedly be safe on Begich by that point.

To this point, even if everything has gone perfectly for the Democrats, that would still only put them up to 53 out of the filibuster-breaking 60. They'd then need to find 7 votes out of this group of 9, none of which are going to be easy:



North Dakota, West Virginia and Louisiana rank 2nd through 4th in per-capita carbon emissions. Five of their six senators also happen to be Democrats. If the Democrats could swap, say, Rockefeller and Byrd for two seats in Arizona, the going would be significantly easier on this issue. Byrd in particular: let's face it -- it's not clear how many more votes Robert Byrd is going to cast in the Senate period, and at the end of the day, I don't see one of his final ones being something that could significantly impair the coal industry in West Virginia. The path of least resistance to 60 votes probably lies elsewhere. Rockefeller, though, voted aye on cloture on last year's bill and is probably attainable.

Mary Landireu and Byron Dorgan, on the other hand, voted 'no' on cloture last year. Dorgan chairs the Democratic Policy Committee and could perhaps be more vulnerable to peer pressure than certain other senators, but I don't know what you do with the more conservative Landireu, unless you can spin some offshore drilling compromise to her liking or persuade her of the linkage between global warming and hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. Then there's Ben Nelson, who's a problem for the Democrats on nearly everything, plus Evan Bayh, Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor, who can probably expect a few late-night phone calls from Rahm Emanuel.



One pattern we've seen this year, but which might be too recent to be picked up by DW-NOMINATE scores, is that the House Republicans seem to be sticking much more to the party line than the Senate Republicans. That could make these votes a bit more gettable than the numbers above indicate. Martinez voted 'yea' on cloture last year and Florida is a low-carbon state which might suffer significantly from a sea-level rise or an increase in Atlantic Hurricanes, but the fact that he's retiring may actually harm the Democrats, since I'd gather that cap-and-trade is reasonably popular down in Florida (which passed a statewide permutation on the policy last year). Speaking of which, I'd love to see some polling on cap-and-trade in New Hampshire, which is both pro-business and pro-environment. John McCain pushed for a cap-and-trade policy on the campaign trail but has since claimed Obama is going about doing it in the wrong way. Perhaps he could be persuaded to vote to break the filibuster even if he votes no on the underlying bill. The one case where the model seems to be pretty clearly out to lunch is that of Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who has already struck a highly skeptical tone about cap-and-trade.



The two names you sometimes hear mentioned from this list are Lindsay Graham and Lisa Murkowski. Graham has not been as "bipartisan" on core issues as he seems to want to make himself out to be, however, and lives in a state with very high unemployment. Perhaps you could get him if you added some offshore drilling provisions, which would probably benefit South Carolina, but I wouldn't expect it to be easy. Murkowski, likewise, sounds basically skeptical but perhaps open to a compromise; again, the permutations of the way the bill might refract onto Alaska's economy are complicated, and so I won't feign complete knowledge here.

* * *

Overall, this is a slightly better assessment than I expected. Although the model considers only 52 Senators to be more likely than not to vote for the bill, there are somewhere between 62-66 votes that are perhaps potentially in play. But Joe Mauer-like precision will be required in targeting the undecided, and further compromises would almost certainly be needed, some of them designed to placate as few as one senator. The question is how many ornaments the Democrats could place on the Christmas Tree before it starts to collapse under its own weight.

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Obama & Palin: Carpe Diem

In many ways, electoral politics is like any other career: you enter as a grunt and "pay your dues" for many years before you eventually have the chance at the big-fish posts. Leaders around the world have made their way in this manner, slowly gaining credibility inside and outside the political establishments within which they reside. Boxes need to be checked and experience accrued, with the issues of security, economy, and social understanding at the top.

In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel was elected in 1990 to serve as a backbencher for the Christian Democrats, before in 1994 becoming Minister of Environment, and CDU opposition party chair in 2000. She spent five years in this leadership post before finally becoming chancellor following the 2005 federal elections. Similarly, Gordon Brown has spent more than 25 years as a MP from the Scottish council area (county) of Fife, rising from opposition spokesperson on trade issues to Chancellor of the Exchequer, before becoming PM in 2007.

In the U.S., classic examples of the slow-but-steady pol include Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), who both served for many years in their respective state houses and in the U.S. House of Representatives before getting an opening to run for the Senate.

Two politicians in the US in recent years have been able to buck this trend, however, through the time-tried method of aggressive and opportunistic carpe diem. Rather than methodically trudging through the ranks, both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin managed to catapult themselves ahead at a rapid, almost precipitous, pace. The former leapt from the Illinois State to the White House in just four years, after less than one term in U.S. Senate, while the latter transformed from small-town Wasilla, AK mayor in 2002 to vice-presidential hopeful in 2008, with a half-term stopover as Governor of Alaska.

Palin's fascinating, if not bizarre, decision to step down as Governor on Friday after a bruising post-election period, therefore, might indicate that her star has risen to its peak. The decision seemed to be made out of frustration with the overwhelming attention on her family, a thirst for something sexier than the post of top executive Alaskan, mixed with a twist of characteristically impulsive ("you can't blink") day-seizing. While Palin's public towel-throwing has signalled a capitulation, if temporary, to the allegations against her, including unethical behavior and incompetance, perhaps the more interesting question is why her rapid-rising opponent has managed not to stumble in the same fashion.

Since he annouced his intention to run for President in early 2007, Obama was dogged by allegations that his thin national public record, including no executive experience at any level, overly intellectual style of argumentation, and Chicago Democratic machine roots would bring him down. Rather than hamper his administration, however, questions of experience, qualification and fitness for office almost completely dissolved following the election. Today, only wing-nut argumentation has persisted, such as the conspiracy theories about Obama's secret birth in Kenya, rather than Hawaii as his birth certificate verifies.

Perhaps this is in part the winner's spoils, with the benefit of the doubt going with the White House turf. Since Obama managed to win with a resounding 365 electoral votes, and has a amassed a formidable and experienced team, the proof will be in the pudding. Palin, however, has continued to play a starring role in the "what if" game of the 2008 election, with highly divergent tales of her, alternatively as a charismatic ticket boost and as a moronic non-team player.

Nonetheless, the key for Obama has been a combination of shark-like opportunism, combined with a level of brand and image control that puts GM and Microsoft to shame. Palin, while a master of the first component, never has been able to discipline her messaging in a way that clearly defines her in a positive and transformational light, as testified to by Friday's rambling resignation. It is likely that a minor reboot is in store, with Palin reemerging to focus at the national level to rebuild her reputation and financial resources, with an eye towards better branding whether 2012 is the diem she wants to grab.
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Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

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Explainin' Palin: All of The Above?

It's by sheer coincidence that we'd happened to have a Sarah Palin item running earlier this afternoon at the time she announced that she was leaving Alaska's governorship. I've been on a plane for the past six hours (the flight that I was supposed to take last night got cancelled). Fortunately, it was JetBlue, so I was able to watch a lot of TV.

There seem to be three* basic theories to explain why Sarah Palin decided to quit:

1. She's simply burned out;
2. There's some kind of "other shoe dropping";
3. She's so crazy she thinks this could actually help her for 2012, 2016, etc.

The point I'd add is that I don't think these three things are mutually exclusive. In her press conference today, Palin didn't seem sure of much of anything except that she'll no longer be governor. She may have felt like being governor of Alaska had become a waste of her time when she can go about the country being a celebrity instead; she might have concerns for what the national media spotlight has done to her family; she might be worried that she's made too many enemies in the state and that sooner or later one of these mini-scandals will blow up into a bigger one ... AND she may be crazy and narcissistic enough to think this will actually help her chances for 2012.

It won't, of course. Politicians have survived and been re-elected after being stigmatized as liars, hypocrites, and flip-floppers -- but can someone who may forever be branded as a "quitter" become Commander in Chief? There's almost no way. I can't think of someone who has done something comparable to what Palin did today running for national office, let alone winning it. In her critics' imaginations, she's gone from being Dan Quayle to some permutation of Thomas Eagleton.

And today will make her critics more numerous. One gets the sense that the Republican establishment was already starting to have concerns about Palin's electability -- see particularly Charles Krauthammer's recent comments. If Palin really is still in the running for 2012, today's actions may turn those concerns into action items -- like trying to build an "inevitability" narrative around Mitt Romney, or perhaps recruiting another populist conservative into the race to split Palin's vote and ensure that she can't win on some sort of plurality basis. I happen to think that these electability concerns are wise ones, and in the long run Palin may have done the GOP a big favor. In the short run, though, it's going to be a long weekend for them in more ways than one.
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* A fourth theory, I guess, is that she's running for Senate, but that doesn't make any sense at all. Why would she need to leave office to do that? And could she really beat Lisa Murkowski? My guess is that, after today, Palin would not only lose the primary to Murkowski but might do so by an embarrassing margin.

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Why (Some) Liberals Hate Sarah Palin

Hot Air's Allahpundit:

Jim Geraghty [theorizes] why it is that the left despises [Palin] so. He’s certainly got part of the answer — happy, successful pro-life conservative women are a grievous offense to leftist feminism — but I think he misses the element of sheer contempt they have for her intellect. To the left, I think, she embodies a sort of comfort with ignorance that they think characterizes most/all conservatives. Why they’ve come to see her that way is complicated (part of it’s probably educational pedigree, part of it’s her affinity for rural pastimes like hunting, part of it’s the Katie Couric interview and the canned answers she gave at the debate with Biden), but I think it’s a mistake to assume that their antipathy is rooted in nothing but fear and defensiveness. That’s not true of the right vis-a-vis The One, after all. Is it?

Emphasis mine. And I 100 percent agree with the bolded statement. It's much simpler than other versions of this theory, relying less on creepy psychosexual dynamics, and ultimately I think more prescient. And the nice thing about it is that it sort of cuts both ways. If liberals are right that Palin really is ignorant, and moreover, completely comfortable with that ignorance, and moreover still, thought she ought to be Vice President of the United States, they have perhaps ample reason to dislike her. On the other hand, if they dismiss Palin because she looks pretty or talks funny or doesn't read the same newspapers they do, that goes to their being snobs.

But I think there is an even simpler version of this argument: George W. Bush.

Palin is the most Bushlike of all the Republicans who have emerged as contenders for the national ticket: the smirkiness, the smugness, the regional accent (although Palin's, I assume, is not feigned), the malapropisms, the contempt for media (both the people who cover it and their mediums), the express deference to religious faith, the occasionally undeniably likable moments of joviality and regular guy/gal-ness, the tendency toward self-dealing, the bulldog/barracuda mentality, the comfort in one's own skin (Palin was crippled when she lost hers late in the campaign), the (apparent) preference for isolation in [Wasilla, Crawford], and last but not least, the no-holds-barred, no-apologies conservatism.

And sure, some of this is complicated by the fact that Palin is a woman, and a very attractive woman. Would Palin be resented to the same degree by (some) liberals if she looked like Susan Boyle? Well ... maybe not. But would she have been picked for the national ticket? Well ... maybe not. But this has less to do with Palin herself and more to do with the manner in which she was elevated to the national stage. Liberals believe very deeply in the idea that life ought to be meritocratic. Palin didn't seem to have earned it, especially in comparison to John McCain and Barack Obama and even Joe Biden who had such compelling life stories. To a lot of people (not exclusively liberals; Kay Bailey Hutchison's contempt for Palin was obvious), it felt like another case of the pretty girl getting the promotion. If Palin wins the nomination on her own in 2012, this case will fade, and in turn so should some of the resentment.

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This Post Brought to You by Poker

I'll be boarding a plane in the next few minutes headed to Las Vegas, where I'll be for the next several days to conduct some research (yes, really!) for my book and to play in the World Series of Poker.

I haven't played cards for 18 months or so, should you probably be happy if I happen to appear at your table. Nevertheless, for a period of about two and a half years starting in 2004, when the poker craze was at its peak and it was easy to find poor opponents, I was playing quite a bit and relied on poker as a secondary source of income, without which I probably would not have been able to quit my consulting job.

Most of my play was online, which is certainly much duller than playing in person, but has the advantage of allowing you to play many more hands per hour: you don't have to wait for the dealer to physically shuffle the cards, or the players to handle their chips. And if you like, you can play on multiple tables at once -- this is not as impossible as it sounds since you should be folding most of your hands anyway, although there were days when I felt like a meth-addled air traffic controller. Since poker is a volume business -- even winning players earn a very small amount of money on a per-hand basis -- this was essential to many player's ability to earn a living from the game.

All of that changed in September, 2006 when the outgoing Republican Congress passed the conference report to the SAFE Port Act, a perfectly admirable port security bill to which the Congress added a rider called the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 or UIGEA. The UIGEA did not make online gambling illegal (although its legality was and remains somewhat ambiguous), but instead sought to prohibit people from depositing money into online casinos, all of which are based offshore. Without money, of course, there can't be any game, and -- further frightened by some aggressive enforcement actions by the Department of Justice -- many leading poker sites such as PartyPoker shuttered their doors to Americans.

Other sites, discovering that the UIGEA was a sloppily-written piece of law, developed workarounds and remain open to Americans to this day. But the games weren't the same. The competitive ecology of poker is very fragile: winning players usually earn almost all of their profits from the presence of one or two suckers at the table. Once those suckers ran out of money (as suckers are wont to do), and found it was simply too cumbersome to get any additional funds in, a lot of the winners became the suckers -- including me. So I got most of my profits out while it was still safe to do so, and lost most of the rest.

In the long run, this turned out to be a good thing: poker, as they say, is a hard way to make an easy living, and trying to moonlight as a poker player while running a sports business was physically and mentally exhausting. I'm having much more fun now than I was back then, and get go to bed feeling like maybe, just maybe, I've contributed something insightful to the world that will make people's lives better.

But following the debate over the UIGEA was one of the primary motivators that got me into politics. It took a "dirty trick" -- attaching it to an unrelated conference report that couldn't possibly be voted down -- to get the UIGEA to become law, although then again, this was undertaken partly in response to another "dirty trick", which was the process of anonymous holds that was preventing the bill from coming to a floor vote in the Senate (where it would probably have passed on its own merits). I found the whole process of watching the sausage getting made alarming -- but also utterly fascinating. Without poker -- and without that bill -- there probably wouldn't have been any FiveThirtyEight.

The UIGEA, intended as a way to bolster their family values credentials, didn't turn out so well for the Republicans. The bill's principal sponsor in the House, a very moderate Iowa Republican named Jim Leach, lost his seat after 30 years to an unknown political science professor, a Democrat named Dave Loebsack. I was one of thousands of poker players who gave money to Loebsack -- he was the first political candidate I'd ever donated to -- and considering that he won by only 6,000 votes in a race that wasn't even on many observer's radar screens, it may have been those extra funds that put him into the Congress. Meanwhile, the primary driver of the bill in the Senate, the then-majority leader Bill Frist, retired and has barely been heard from since, his Presidential aspirations dashed by the landslide losses that Republicans took all over the country that year.

There are now efforts being led mostly by Barney Frank and Ron Paul -- politics makes for strange bedfellows -- to either overturn the UIGEA or to explicitly legalize online poker, which would allow American casinos to take money from American taxpayers, with Uncle Sam getting a share of their earnings. I am not terribly optimistic about the prospects for passage of any of these bills -- gambling is opposed by many paternalist Democrats as well as most Republicans -- but as the government is forced to rely on increasingly "creative" mechanisms to collect revenues and pay down the debt, they may gain some traction.

In the meantime, you'll have to wish me luck, and I'll try to spare you guys the bad beat stories.

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Destroying the Planet, Part II

Over the weekend, we provided a graphic illustration of how much of the planet you could eliminate for a "budget" of 5 percent of global GDP. But what if, instead of having 5 percent to work with, you instead had 23.4 percent, or about 14.3 trillion dollars, which was the United States' share of world GDP in 2008 as according to the International Monetary Fund?

It turns out that you could wipe out 5.3 billion people for this amount: all of Africa except Libya, all of South America except Venezuela, Mexico and the Rest of Central America, China, Southeast Asia (except Taiwan and Hong Kong), the Indian Subcontinent, all of Central Asia, most of Eastern Europe, and quite a few tiny Pacific Islands.



Note that a few countries, like Cuba and Somalia, survive here merely because the IMF does not publish data on them, but they're generally impoverished and it probably would not be too much trouble to rid yourself of those ones too.

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Cup O' Jolt, Or, How Americans are Tightening Those Belts

Many Americans are in dire economic straits: they lost their jobs, their homes have been foreclosed, their health care bills are skyrocketing, and creditors are hassling them. But even many of those Americans for whom none of the above apply are tightening their belts, as I discussed in a post earlier this week based on a recent Harris poll on how Americans are managing their assets.

Starbucks Store Closures, 2008

















Now comes Harris with the release of other results from this survey, pertaining to consumption patterns. Not surprisingly, people are cutting back on, if not foregoing altogether, many non-essential items. What sorts of non-essentials?

In their write-up, Harris reports that Americans say they cut back or altered their consumer behaviors during the past six months in the following ways:

*Three in five adults (62%) say they are purchasing more generic brands while another 14% are considering it. Just under half (47%) of Americans are brownbagging lunch instead of purchasing it with 8% considering it;

*Slightly over one-third (36%) are going to the hairdresser or barber less often, while one-third (33%) are switching to refillable water bottles instead of purchasing bottles of water;

*People are also cancelling one or more magazine subscriptions (29% done, 7% considered) and cancelling a newspaper subscription (15% done, 9% considered); and,

*One in five Americans have cut down on dry cleaning (20%) and stopped purchasing coffee in the morning (19%) while 14% have begun carpooling or taking mass transit.

These findings conform with news that, beginning last year and depicted geographically above, Starbucks has been forced to close hundreds of stores; generic brand sales have jumped dramatically; and drycleaning sales have dropped off, as depicted in terms of regional sales declines, below. (Courtesy of AmericanDrycleaner.com.)


Obviously, these changes in consumer behavior ramify across the economy, costing jobs in these sectors, worsening the recession and exacerbating the financial woes of, say, Americans who worked as baristas or wholesalers of drycleaning plastic wrap. But the downturn seems to be providing a different and arguably long overdue jolt for Americans, as they begin to reassess how and on what they spend their disposable income now that they have less of it to dispose.

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Is Mike Huckabee the New Jesse Jackson?

Michael Barone has a fascinating insight that, dare I say, I'd never really contemplated before.

Huckabee or a candidate with a similar profile can corner the votes of evangelical and born-again Christians and, starting with Iowa, can round up a significant number of delegates. It is conceivable that such a candidate, with the help of Republicans’ winner-take-all delegate allocation rules and if he continues to face multiple opponents, could accumulate enough delegates to win the nomination. But otherwise he is in the position of Jesse Jackson in the 1984 and 1988 Democratic contests, able to run a significant second or third thanks to strong support from one of the party’s core constituencies but unable to run first.

Does this analogy hold water? I've always tended to think of Huckabee, who has more populist views on economics than most other Republicans, as a candidate who had a fair amount of crossover appeal. But Huckabee may be crossing over too far -- appealing to independents and some conservative Democrats, but not necessarily the non-evangelical part of the Republican primary electorate.

Here is how the major Republican candidates split the vote last year before Mitt Romney dropped out of the race after Super Tuesday:



Evangelicals make up a larger share of the Republican primary electorate -- about 40 percent, than black voters do of the Democratic primary electorate -- about 20 percent. But Huckabee was nowhere near as dominant among evangelicals as candidates like Jackson and Barack Obama have been among blacks He won the evangelical vote in about half the states that voted through Super Tuesday; almost all of those wins were in the South. But John McCain and Mitt Romney won the evangelical vote in other states, and Huckabee wound up with only about 37 percent of the evangelical vote overall (weighting for the approximate number of evangelicals in each state). As Barone suggests, a Republican candidate could potentially win the nomination if he absolutely ran the table among evangelicals, even if he had little support elsewhere. But Huckabee didn't do that in 2008, and with Sarah Palin a probable entrant in the primary next time around, the going isn't likely to be much easier in 2012.

Meanwhile, Huckabee won only 8 percent of non-evangelical voters, which is getting into Ron Paul territory. Could Huckabee make inroads with this group instead? He'll probably have a larger media profile in 2012 than he did last year, which could help to make up for what might be chronic deficiencies in fundraising and establishment support. But this is likely to be a tricky road to navigate: the Republicans, so far, seem more inclined to play up their fiscal conservatism than their social conservatism, and Huckabee is swimming in somewhat the opposite direction.

Some months ago, I had a smart Republican strategist tell me that he thought that Huckabee might skip 2012 to focus on 2016 instead. Since that time, 2012 has started to look a bit more winnable for the Republicans. But it nevertheless might be tough for Huckabee to squeeze out enough votes with Palin competing on his right and Romney and some Charlie Crist alternative on his left (if he's smart, Romney will run somewhat to the left, especially if Palin enters, endeavoring to pick up big delegate prizes in some winner-take-all states like California).

Huckabee is not like Jackson in this way: there are circumstances where one can at least imagine him being his party's nominee, which was probably never the case for Jackson. But I'm not sure if those circumstances are shaping up all that well for him in 2012. Moreover, I suspect any Republican candidate who runs and loses for the second time in 2012 (this would include Palin, since she was on John McCain's ticket, as well as Romney and Huckabee) will be severely damaged going forward and will risk being tarred with perennial candidate label so often applied to folks like John Edwards (as well as to Jackson himself). So it might be indeed be smart for Huckabee to go into political hibernation in 2012 and hope that Romney and Palin have managed to eliminate themselves, or one another, once's he's woken up.

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Obama Has a Health Care Plan?

CNN asked a stupid question and got a stupid result:

From everything you have heard or read so far, do you favor or oppose Barack Obama's plan to reform health care?

51% Favor, 45% Oppose

OK, so in fact there's nothing stupid about the question at all. The public's response, likewise, is perfectly reasonable given the information they were provided.

But a better question might be: what exactly is Barack Obama's health care plan? Does he have one?

And if so, what's included in it? Is it the plan Obama advanced on the campaign trail, which had a public option but lacked an individual mandate? Is it the one making its way through the Senate Finance Committee, which has an individual mandate but lacks a public option? Is it the House's version, which has both?

And how is the plan going to be paid for -- something the campaign version of Obama's plan was largely silent on? Is there going to be a tax on health care benefits -- an economically sound but undoubtedly unpopular idea that Obama explicitly campaigned against? Booze and cigarette taxes? A rollback of the Bush tax cuts? A value-added tax?

CNN's article makes a big deal of the "public option" component of Obama's "plan". The article seems to imply that it's the public option that accounts for its tepid numbers, when in fact, the public option is the one component that seems to be somewhat unambiguously popular.

The more pressing issue, though, may be that the lack of detail and public-facing leadership from the Administration on health care. You'd think that if you took two fairly popular things -- health care reform and Obama -- and combined them together, you'd wind up with a more popular thing. Instead, we have a situation where the Obama "plan" is less popular than the idea of health care reform in general and less popular than Obama in general. Obama's approval ratings on health care, indeed, lag about 10 points behind his overall numbers, according to an average of three recent polls:



The conservative spin on this is Obama's personality is preferred to his liberal politics. That might be true, but it's not clear that conservatives are the only problem Obama has on health care. Quinnipiac actually tracks presidential approval by political philosophy (liberal, moderate, conservative). Although Obama is underperforming on health care among all groups, the differences are larger among moderates and liberals than they are among conservatives:



That's not to suggest that Obama should throw caution to the wind and push for single payer. But he needs to begin pushing for something, and something fairly specific.

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Welcome to the Club, Al

Yesterday, Al Franken joined the most exclusive club in America. No, not the Senate, nor even the 60-member-strong and theoretically filibuster-proof Democratic majority caucus within the Senate, but the even smaller club celebrities who have won major public office. (The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza has a pretty good roundup of celebrity politicians here.)

In 1990, political scientist David Canon published a book entitled Actors, Athletes and Astronauts, in which he examined--and, with the benefit now of almost two decades of hindsight, apparently presaged--the era of the celebrity politician. Actually, the book is more broadly about political amateurs, defined as those who win high office despite a lack of appointed or elected experience prior to their election. Canon talks about how most political amateurs in the general sense end up becoming lamb-to-the-slaughter losers in no-win races, but how, thanks to their special celebrity status actors, athletes and astronauts are more competitive and can thus more easily break out from the pack of amateurs and win.

Although Franken was always very involved in politics as an activist and donor, he surely qualifies as an amateur under this definition. And his comedic style certainly qualifies as amateurish; I mean, c'mon, the man once did a bit wearing bunny ears and a diaper!** Franken has appeared in some feature films, including the leading role in his Saturday Night Live-created character Stuart Smalley; but he's mostly a television actor and comedian. (My favorite Franken role was as the other half of a baggage-handling duo, along his early-career but long since forgotten comedic partner Tom Davis, in Trading Places.)

What I have long found ironic is that Republicans tend to bemoan the influence of Hollywood in politics when, in fact, they have had more than their share of actors-turned-politicians, including former Iowa Congressman Fred Grandy (pictured above, middle, in case you had forgotten about the Love Boat's "Gopher"), former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson and, most notably, President Ronald Reagan, who you may recognize as the other politician pictured above.

Frankly, I'm wary of celebrity-politicians, whatever their occupational background or ideological leanings. Reagan's aura covered up for a lack of substance and, late in his presidential tenure, even a declining coherence. Grandy worked hard, but was otherwise not particularly distinguished House member. John Glenn was a solid senator from Ohio and JC Watts was a key fixture in the Republican House and on the national scene, though it's hard to disentangle how much of Watts' wattage stemmed from the fact that he was both a celebrity former football player and almost equally rare elected species, namely a black Republican. Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning has--how to put this?--slowed down a bit late in his career. And Thompson never could make up his careerist mind, jumping from the political world to acting to senator, and then back to acting and then back again into politics for his ill-fated 2008 presidential bid; supposedly Thompson is lazy, but maybe he's just torn between the two versions of celebrity. Meanwhile, I really don't think it serves the people of California to have Arnold Schwarzenegger as their governor, nor would Warren Beatty or Rob Reiner be much better successors to the Terminator. For my money, the best example of the celebrity-turned-politician is the late Jack Kemp. Whatever you think of his ideas, he studied the issues closely and took governing seriously.

I realize that in the era of reality TV, where non-professionals can become television celebrities, maybe celebrities who are political amateurs are just as entitled as anyone to serve in elected office. But I'd much rather have a person who worked her way up through the state legislature and the House run and win a Senate seat, than Al Franken. Oh, and the use of the feminine pronoun in that last sentence was not random: You'll note that when we talk about celebrity politicians we are almost invariably talking about men.

**CORRECTION: At the time of the posting, I simply did not know that this photo was a doctored fake created by the Ohio Republican Party. Given many of the outrageous characters Franken has played over the years, it's not unreasonable to conclude he had. (We're not talking Thurgood Marshall here, folks.) In any event, apologies to readers and to Sen. Franken.

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Who Voted for the Climate Bill? (And Why?)

In many ways, the debate over curbing carbon emissions is more interesting than the debate over health care. The latter is more or less a straightforward discussion about economics -- how much to subsidize health care for lower-income taxpayers at the direct or indirect expense of an increased tax burden on higher-income taxpayers, and to what extent private-sector insurers, warts and all, can be expected to deliver more efficient solutions than public-sector ones.

The debate over cap-and-trade, on the other hand, is a genuine moral dilemma, pitting the interests of present-day Americans against those of future generations both here and abroad. I have absolutely no sympathy for those who voted against the climate bill because they don't believe in global warming; I do have some sympathy for those who weren't willing to sacrifice jobs in carbon-intensive industries in their districts now to possibly save a village of Bangladeshi children who will be born 40 years hence. That is not meant to sound sarcastic; it is naive to pretend that there wouldn't be losers from a bill that sought to increase the cost of carbon and it is naive to assume that a member of a legislative body who is subject to re-election every two years might not err on the side of his present-day constituents. Although the bill barely got through the House, in some ways it is amazing that it did in the midst of the worst recession in 70 years.

In any event, it would be useful to see how the 434 sitting members of the House (one seat in California remains vacant) tried to navigate the waters. As I did for health care, I built a logistic regression model that attempted to predict the likelihood of a particular congressman voting for the cap-and-trade bill as the result of a variety of factors. After much trial and error, the factors that look to be most significant are as follows -- factors are listed roughly in declining order of significance:

Ideology. The overall liberal-conservative bent of a Representative, as determined by DW-NOMINATE scores, which run from -1 for very liberal to +1 for very conservative. In this instance, I use the "common space" version of DW-NOMINATE scores, which are slightly less robust overall but place Representatives and Senators on a level playing field, which will come in handy later when we try and predict (as we will in a subsequent post) how the Senate will vote on the bill. Scores are as of the 110th Congress; for freshman Congressmen, they are extrapolated from Progressive Punch scores.

District Partisan Lean. The PVI (Partisan Voting Index) in a district was a highly significant variable; Congressman in Democratic-leaning districts were more likely to vote for Waxman-Market and those in Republican ones more likely to vote against it, all else being equal.

Lobbying Money. As in the case of health care, funds raised from certain types of PACs are a significant predictor of a representative's vote, although the money in this case cuts both ways. Whereas receiving contributions from coal industry PACs decreased the likelihood of a vote for Waxman-Markey, contributions from nuclear and alternative energy providers significantly increased it. I also looked at contributions from oil and gas industry PACs, public utility PACs, and agribusiness PACs, but these had no statistically significant effects. All data is taken from the Center for Responsive Politics and covers the 2004 cycle forward; contributions are divided by the number of cycles a Representative has participated in as a Congressman or as a candidate.

Carbon Emissions. I use county-by-county data on the amount of carbon emissions per capita in a particular area, as determined by Project Vulcan. This requires us to map the county data onto congressional districts by dividing the population of a county evenly among all congressional districts that occupy a part of its geography. Estimates are in metric tons of carbon consumed annually per capita. The carbony-ist district is the At-Large one in Wyoming, which produces 36.3 metric tons of carbon per capita; the least carbon-intensive are the 10th and 11th Congressional Districts of New York, which are both located in Brooklyn and are responsible for 1.1 metric tons of carbon per capita.

Poverty Rate. Although the Waxman-Markey bill contains provisions to refund a portion of increased energy costs to lower-income consumers, it was nevertheless more likely to receive support in districts where the poverty rate is low. Alternate measures of economic welfare like per-capita income work almost as well in the model and could serve as reasonable substitutes for the poverty rate.

Employment in Carbon-Intensive Industries. Lastly, the fraction of a district's jobs that are in manufacturing, mining or agriculture was a good predictor of voting on Waxman-Markey (although this variable was significant only at the 90 percent level and not at the 95 percent level).

*-*

Overall, this set of variables is pretty useful and explains about three-quarters (R-squared = .74) of a particular Congressman's vote on the climate bill. The model predicted 401 of 431 votes correctly.

The congressmen deemed most likely to vote in favor of cap-and-trade are as follows:



These are liberal Democrats in liberal areas with relatively low carbon output. All on this list did indeed vote for Waxman-Markey. Waxman and Markey themselves, incidentally, ranked as the 11th and 15th most likely Congressman to vote for the bill, respectively. All on this list did indeed vote for the bill.

The congressmen deemed least likely to vote for Waxman-Markey are these:



There's Ron Paul! Few surprises here either; these are some very economically conservative Republicans in districts that tend to consume a lot of carbon. Cynthia Lummis was given only about a 1-in-4.5 million chance of voting for the bill -- she didn't. Neither did any of the other Congressmen on this list, although Jeff Flake of Arizona missed the vote.

Where were the surprises then? These are the Congressmen the model thinks were most likely to vote for Waxman-Markey but in fact didn't:



The first three names on this list -- Pete Stark, Dennis Kucinch, and Peter DeFazio, apparently all cast nay votes on the bill because they they thought it was too conservative. One imagines that they might have voted for the bill nevertheless if their votes were necessary to secure passage -- but as it actually went down, they didn't. Not listed here is Alcee Hastings of Florida, who was given a 99.8%+ likelihood of voting for the bill but did not cast a vote either way.

Next, here are the least likely yes votes.



Note of these yea votes were truly all that unlikely, the closest thing to an exception being John McHugh from upstate New York, who is generally fairly conservative and represents a somewhat poor district.

So what are the general takeaways here?

-- People on the whole were pretty rational in trying to balance "selfish" traits (their own ideology; lobbying influences) against "unselfish" ones (the economic and political characteristics of their districts).
-- Nevertheless, the playing field is fairly broad, as there are quite a few representatives for whom these traits balance out in ambiguous ways. Some 95 representatives -- about 20 percent of the House -- were deemed to have between a 10 percent and a 90 percent chance of voting for the bill and can reasonably be described as swing votes.
-- Cap-and-trade differs from health care in that there are particular private sector groups that would appear to benefit from its passage: nuclear power and renewable energy providers. Although the nuclear energy lobby is small, and the alternative energy industry lobby is very small, they nevertheless appear to have had some influence; nuclear is a big, untold part of this story. On the other hand, the effects of the agricultural lobby appear to have been mostly neutralized, perhaps because of concessions made in the bill to farm-state Democrats.
-- This bill faces long, but not impossible, odds in the Senate -- we will cover that in more detail tomorrow.

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