Obama Has Cut Taxes for 98.6 Percent of Working* Households**

One thing I don’t quite get has been the White House’s reluctance to highlight the non-infrastructure parts of the stimulus package. Oh sure, people wanted more investment in roads and trains and energy grids and all that good stuff – I did too, and thought the stimulus package spent an inadequate amount of money on them. But you’re left with the impression that the rest of the stimulus was just thrown down a well somewhere. In fact, it was not. The extension in unemployment benefits that the government provided under the stimulus, for instance, is turning out to be highly useful to a lot of people. I don’t necessarily expect the people receiving extended unemployment insurance to turn around and write Obama a thank-you note – but the White House might want to at least occasionally make the point it’s their initiative that is helping them to keep putting food on the table.

Likewise with the tax reductions in the stimulus – which collectively made up $288 billion, or about 37 percent of the package. Most of those tax cuts are targeted at individuals. And while the they aren’t terribly deep, they are impressively broad.

The broadest tax cut in the stimulus package is the “Making Work Pay” tax credit, worth about $116.2 billion (see the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center for this and other figures) and applicable to the vast majority of working Americans. Indeed, all single filers making less than $95,000 and all joint filers making less than $190,000 are eligible for this tax cut. Most of them, in fact, are already receiving it in the form of lower withholding on their paychecks.

The well-to-do are benefiting too – or at least they will once it comes time to file their taxes next April. That’s because, as part of the stimulus, the government extended the alternative minimum tax (AMT) “patch”, which reduces the tax burden for some 24-26 million Americans who would be subject to the AMT. Most people who would be hit by the AMT are doing pretty well. The median income among people who would be subject to the AMT is about $130,000, and the average is about $165,000. This has the convenient property, though, of starting to kick in right where the “Making Work Pay” credit phases out, meaning that a great number of Americans who won't benefit from former program will benefit from the latter one.

Finally, there are a number of smaller tax rebates and credits that are more highly targeted – to buyers of new cars and new homes, to small businesses, to low-income families with children, to the unemployed, and so forth. We’ll focus principally on one of these, which is the credit for new car purchases.

But first – what do I mean by “working households”? By “households”, I mean simply tax filers. There were about 143 million individual or joint income tax returns filed in 2007, according to the IRS (this is the most recent year for which statistics are available). By “working” I mean that the taxpayer had some sort of taxable income, which was true of about 111 million of the 143 million returns.

This is different than saying that 95+ percent of all Americans will receive a tax cut. Barack Obama sometimes confused his language about this on the campaign trail. He was wrong when he did so. Illegal immigrants, some non-working individuals and families, some retirees, etc. will not be assisted by any of the tax cuts. It’s also somewhat ambiguous whether, say, a 7-year-old kid is considered as having had his taxes cut if his daddy is having less withheld from his paycheck.

But more often, Obama used phrases like “working taxpayers” or “working families” when referring to his tax cuts on the campaign trail. This is a promise that Obama has kept.

Let’s take a look at the tax cuts contained in the stimulus package in a little bit more detail. First is the Making Work Pay tax credit. As I mentioned, this applies to single filers making less than $95,000 and joint filers making less than $190,000. Using the IRS tax tables that I linked to earlier, this means that about 102 million taxpayers, or about 92.4 percent of “working” tax filers, will be eligible for the credit.

Then there’s the AMT reduction. The Tax Policy Center has helpfully estimated the percentage of Americans who are subject to the AMT by income bracket. For instance, about 79.2 percent of earners between $100,000 and $200,000 should be subject to the AMT by this time, according to estimates that the Tax Policy Center put together a couple of years ago. All told, this works out to about 24 million tax filers according to the estimates that I linked to above, or 26 million according to newer (but unfortunately much less detailed) estimates. If we perform this calculation for each income bracket based on the 24 million figure, this includes about 6.8 million tax filers who are not eligible for the Making Work Pay tax credit.

That leaves only about 1.6 million working tax filers who will not benefit from either the Making Work Pay credit or the AMT patch. And most of them are out of luck, since while there are a number of other tax cuts in the stimulus package, most of them phase outs at amounts equal to or lower than the threshold for Making Work Pay. One exception, however, is the deduction for the purchase of new vehicles, which doesn’t completely phase out until $135,000 for single filers and $260,000 for couples.

The automobile purchase credit operates by allowing taxpayers who buy new vehicles to deduct state and local sales taxes from the amount they owe to the IRS – something they ordinarily can’t do. The average new car purchased today costs about $25,000 before sales taxes, which at prevailing sales tax rates of about 5 percent, means that it comes with an additional $1,250 sales tax burden. Allowing people to make an “above the line” deduction on these sales taxes should reduce their tax burden by about 30 percent of $1,250, or $375. Since the total amount allocated to this tax credit is $1.7 billion, this implies that about 4.5 million people will benefit from it, or about 4.3 percent of the tax filers who are eligible for it.

What we’re concerned with, though, in evaluating the breadth of the tax cuts, are people who are eligible for the auto purchase credit but who weren’t eligible for Making Work Pay and who didn’t benefit from the AMT patch. This will be the fraction of individual filers making between $95,000 and $135,000 and joint filers making between $190,000 and $260,000 who were not subject to the AMT – a rather small number of people. We can probably assume, however, that participation rates will be higher in this group, since they’re making good money and are more likely to be able to afford a new car. Specifically, we’ll guess that the participation rate among this group will be 8.6 percent, twice the average of 4.3 percent. This works out to another 80,000 tax filers or so who had not been eligible for one of the other tax credits.

Adding everything up, I come up with about 98.6 percent of working tax filers – see upthread for how I caveated that description – who are eligible for one or more of these tax cuts. This is before accounting for any direct or indirect benefit from the various small business tax credits, or from oddball circumstances like when a high-income earner avoids the phase-out for the home purchase tax credit because they book it on their 2008 return.



(See here for a higher resolution version with a bit of additional detail.)

A recent Rasmussen poll found that just 15 percent of likely voters believed that "President Obama cut taxes for 95% of Americans". Technially, they're wrong -- Obama has not cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans. But he has done so for in excess of 98 pecent of "working" tax households. It's time for the White House to start taking a little credit for having done so.

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Mel Martinez to Resign Senate Seat; Charlie Crist to Pull Own Hair Out

Here's the news. So much for a quiet Friday.

There is absolutely no upside here for Charlie Crist. When you're running for Senate, and you're protecting a huge lead, the last thing you need is a wild card like this that can cause people to grow upset with you. Odds are that Crist will take a look at what happened to David Paterson and at least make a decision quickly.

And/but -- Crist just doesn't have a lot of good choices. Since he wants the seat himself beginning in 2011, he can't appoint someone like Jeb Bush who has equally strong credentials, and he can't appoint any sitting Representatives and then come back 18 months later and hope to kill their careers. He also presumably won't want to appoint himself -- a moderate Republican senator is going to have two or three really tough votes over the next year and he would have to navigate carefully so as not to re-energize either the Marco Rubio campaign to his right or the Democrats to his left. If Crist does appoint himself, that would suggest to me that he's really looking more toward 2012 (or 2016) and is sort of going "all-in" on maximizing public exposure and may even try and be a "hero" on health care reform, etc. It would take someone pretty egomaniacal to think that way. Then again, it takes someone pretty egomaniacal to run for President.

In any event, the lack of alternatives is why former governor Bob Martinez (no relation), who has been out of public office for eighteen years, is getting so much buzz right now. He seems like the obvious choice -- then again, he's 74 years old, and was distinctly unpopular by the time he left office, losing his re-election bit to Lawton Chiles by 13 points.

The nearer-term question is whether the Democrats might wind up with someone who could be a potential yes vote on health care -- which Martinez almost certainly wouldn't have been, even though he'd been voting somewhat more moderately since announcing his retirement, including voting to confirm Sonia Sotomayor yesterday. Democrats shouldn't get their hopes up -- Crist is arguably still more threatened by Rubio than by any of the Democratic general election candidates -- but they nevertheless have something of a freeroll here.

If Democrats really wanted to play hardball and squeeze Crist on this decision, then someone like Robert Wexler could take one for the team and announce he had decided to run for Senate. That's probably too much risk for too little reward. But don't be surprised if you see a few bluffs/trial balloons along these lines if Crist takes too long to make his pick.

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Economic Headlines You Won't See on The Drudge Report

-- Job losses slowed to 247,000, their lowest total since a year ago, beating expectations by roughly 100,000.
-- The unemployment rate actually *declined* to 9.4 percent from 9.5
percent.
-- May and June job loss estimates have been revised *downward*.
-- Hourly earnings improved.
-- The average workweek lengthened, particularly in manufacturing.
-- The manufacturing sector added jobs on a seasonally-adjusted basis.
-- The NASDAQ will open today about 33 percent higher than when Obama took office.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

These numbers do not point toward a "good" economy. Some of them, like the decline in the unemployment rate, are even a bit misleading, since some of that has occurred because a lot of dispirited job seekers have given up on looking for work.

But they do speak unambiguously toward an economy which has almost certainly bottomed out and has probably begun to improve. It is more likely to be a slow recovery than a fast one, especially in employment, but this is arguably the best news that Obama has had since taking office.

I said two weeks ago that if the job loss number declined to 250,000 or so, it would be a game-changer. I was not making a prediction about what the employment numbers would look like. I was merely saying that if this occurred, it would probably be enough to change the tenor of the debate in Washington. Republicans have to be very careful now about not overplaying their hand on health care.

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The NRA's Pyrrhic "Victory" on Sotomayor

As a follow-up to my post from earlier this afternoon, I was able to track down NRA ratings for each of the 40 Republican Senators as of their most recent election (this is much harder to do than you might think). The ratings suggest that the NRA’s pledge to rate a ‘yea’ vote on Sonia Sotomayor as blemish on a Senator’s record may indeed have swayed a few votes.

Consider that six Republican senators – Jim Bunning, Saxby Chambliss, Orrin Hatch, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Jim Inhofe, and Jeff Sessions -- have an NRA rating of A+. All six voted against Sotomayor.

Meanwhile, 28 Republican senators have an NRA grade of a straight ‘A’. Just four of the 28 – Lamar Alexander, Kit Bond (who is retiring), Mel Martinez (ditto) and Lindsay Graham -- voted for Sotomayor.

Lastly, the remaining six Republican senators have NRA grades of C+ or lower. Five of the six voted for Sotomayor, the lone exception being John McCain, whom the NRA (somewhat hesitantly) endorsed for President last year and who had received higher ratings from the group in the past.



Granted, the senators who receive high grades from the NRA tend to be conservative on other issues as well. But the NRA grades are a much stronger predictor of voting than overall ideological ratings, when we plop both into a regression model. Some senators who have a reputation for being moderates on judicial appointments, like Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley, but who have excellent NRA ratings, chose to vote against Sotomayor. So did Lisa Murkowski, who is one of the 3-5 most moderate Republican senators according to most rating systems but comes from a big gun-ownership state. Kay Bailey Hutchison, likewise, who has voted fairly moderately on some issues this year and comes from a state with a huge Hispanic population, was not about to jeopardize her A+ rating when going up against Rick Perry, who also has an A+.

The question is whether the NRA was really doing the Republicans any favors – particularly given that the outcome of the vote was not really in doubt. I don't hink that this vote will turn out to be a particularly big deal – but it’s going to turn off a few Hispanic voters for seemingly little upside, as there are rather few Americans who are strongly opposed to Sotomayor and as individual Supreme Court justices rarely make news once they join the bench. Overall, it speaks to a Republican Party that remains convinced that catering to its narrowing base – rather than hoping to expand it – is the way to win elections. That might not actually be a horrible strategy in 2010, when I expect the Republican base to be more enthusiastic than the Democratic one and for their higher turnout to swing a few -- or maybe more than a few -- elections. But I think it’s a mistake, in all likelihood, for 2012 and beyond.

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Hispanic Votes Not Swaying GOP on Sotomayor

According to the website DemConWatch, which has been compiling public statements on the Supreme Court nomination pending before the Senate, nine Republican senators will vote to confirm Sonia Sotomayor, with the rest planning to vote against her. Eight of the nine anticipated yea votes come from states with tiny Hispanic populations: Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine (which is 0.7 percent Hispanic), Judd Gregg of New Hampshire (1.7 percent), George Voinovich of Ohio (1.9), Kit Bond of Missouri (2.1), Lamar Alexander of Tennessee (2.2), Linsday Graham of South Carolina (2.4), and Dick Lugar of Indiana (3.5) percent. The other yea vote is expected to come from Mel Martinez of Florida, which is 16.8 percent Hispanic.

By contrast, the five Republican senators in states where roughly 20 percent or more of population is Hispanic -- these are John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, Jon Kyl and John McCain of Arizona, and John Ensign of Nevada -- have all said they will vote against Sotomayor.



More sophisticated modelling techniques, like logisitic regression, do not reveal any connection between the Hispanic status of a state and the expected vote on Sotomayor. In some formulations, in fact -- for example, if a state's PVI is accounted for but not the ideology of the Senator -- a higher Hispanic population actually turns up as a statistically predicdtor of a vote against Sotomayor.

I suspect that is probably a fluke; among the five Republicans in the states with 20%+ Hispanic populations planning to vote against Sotomayor, Kyl and Ensign are very conservative, Cornyn is in a leadership position in his caucus, and Hutchison may have to bolster her conservative credentials in anticipation of her primary against Rick Perry. John McCain's nay vote is more surprising, and he seems to being a thorn in Obama's side.

Pressure from the NRA, which will "score" a yea vote on Sotomayor as being a vote against gun control, may also be a factor. With the exception of Florida, the states with large Hispanic populations are Western ones that tend to have large numbers of gun owners and where gun rights are certainly an issue with the GOP base. That seems to outweigh any concerns the Republicans might have about alienating Hispanics.

To be clear, I don't think anybody should vote for (or against) Sotomayor because she's Hispanic, nor do I think they should vote for her because their constitutents are. But given that Sotomayor is reasonably popular with the public -- most polls show about 50 percent wanting a vote in favor of confirmation, 30 percent against, and 20 percent indifferent -- I was expecting a few more 'yeas'.

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How Conservative are Michelle Malkin and Michael Moore?

Following Paul Krugman, John Sides considers how one might measure the ideological position of conservative political commentator Michelle Malkin. I'd heard the name but I don't have any TV reception and didn't really know what she stood for. Going to her webpage, I see she's written three books: "Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores," "In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror," and "Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild." From her blog, she also appears to have conservative economic views, although it's hard to separate this from partisanship without going back to posts from previous years.

Krugman wants a "scale of positions on political matters ... we might find that only 19 percent of Americans are to the right of Michelle Malkin, while 23 percent are to the left of Michael Moore." I don't have enough of a sense about Malkin, but I'm pretty sure that much less than 23% of Americans are to the left of Michael Moore. In chapter 8 of Red State, Blue State is this graph from Joe Bafumi and Michael Herron estimating the ideological positions of congressmembers and voters:



From this graph, it appears that fewer than 20% of Americans are more liberal than the average Democratic congressmember (as of 2006). Accepting the indisputable claim that Michael Moore is quite a bit to the left of the average Democrat in Congress, we can conclude that only a tiny fraction of Americans is to the left of Moore. Maybe 1%.

Bafumi and Herron's analysis can be disputed on methodological grounds and put into context in different ways (here are graphs showing the breakdown in Republican, Democratic, and battleground states), but I think it's a good starting point.

Placing Malkin on the ideological scale could be trickier: she's certainly a partisan Republican and strongly identifies as a conservative, but her book topics on immigration and racial profiling only capture a small subset of the issues usually used to measure ideology. Being "left" or "right" on immigration doesn't necessarily correlate with positions on economic issues. In any case, if you believe that Malkin is well to the right of the average Republican congressmember, you'll find from Bafumi and Herron's graph that far fewer than 19% of Americans would be to her right.

A statistical measurement issue

Sides does a quick try at placing Malkin's ideology by adding the responses to three survey questions from the National Election Study, each on a 1-7 scale (from 1=most liberal to 7=most conservative), graphing where Americans stand on these issues (on this combined 3-21 scale), and the seeing how Malkin would compare to this distribution, if her responses were a 6 on each question. I have some problems with John's graph (the data are discrete and run from 3 to 21, yet his curve seems to have more than 19 different points on it; the y-axis doesn't go down all the way to zero, making the curve look like the distribution drops down to zero at the extremes when it doesn't really do so), but I think it's great that he brings data and specific issues into the picture. In support of his idea, I have a couple of comments. First, the particular method he uses--taking some questions and seeing how someone with an average response of 6 out of 7 would look in the distribution--will be highly sensitive to the number of questions used in the analysis. The more responses you add, the more the person-with-average-score-of-6 will be an extreme in the distribution. If you added the responses to 20 questions on a 1-7 scale, I expect you'd get almost nobody with an average score of 6 out of 7. People's responses to these different questions are not so highly correlated as we political junkies might expect.

One final point

Moore and Malkin may each be more ideologically extreme than 1% of Americans (or maybe 5% of watchers of the Stephanopolous show). But a lot more than 1% of Americans think Michael Moore has something important to say (and, I assume this is true of Malkin as well).

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If Republicans Were Serious About Deficits...

Over at Esquire, I contemplate the uncontemplatable. What if the Republicans ran on a platform of, if not actually raising taxes, at least curbing their resistance to them, thereby hoping to claim the moral highground on the issue of deficits? Granted, it will never happen -- especially when Republicans might be able to get Barack Obama to raise taxes for them. But the historical precedents are not as bad as you might think:

Although raising taxes — or at least not trying to cut them — has been anathema to Republicans since the Reagan era, it hasn't always been so. Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower both largely resisted calls to cut taxes (Eisenhower slashed the top tax bracket all the way from 92 percent to 91), choosing to focus on deficit reduction instead. Both were elected to second terms.

In Britain, meanwhile, David Cameron, the Tory leader, recently told fellow Conservatives that tax cuts would have to take a backseat to deficit reduction, even pledging to stop high-income earners from receiving some tax credits. Perhaps partly in response, Cameron's Conservatives increased their margin by six seats over the Labor party in the recent European Parliament elections, and betting markets consider them 4 to 1 favorites to take over the British Parliament in the next elections.

A successful Republican message might mirror Cameron's: not wholesale tax increases, but selective and perhaps temporary ones for the wealthiest Americans — lifting the cap on Social Security taxes, say, for Americans making $250,000 or more, until such time as Social Security is projected to be revenue-neutral.

Like I said: It. Will. Never. Happen. And right now, the Republicans are looking pretty good for 2010 (a bit better, frankly, than when I wrote this piece -- we're dealing with longish lead times in print). The deficit is quite an albatross that Obama is wearing around his neck.

At the same time, pieces like this one -- The Washington Examiner's Byron York gleefully anticipating that Obama will have to raise taxes on the middle class -- seem a bit myopic. Obama certainly won't have to raise middle-class taxes. He'll only do so if he's concluded that doing so would be a lesser political burden than letting the deficit grow. But if the public is at a point where they see tax hikes as preferable to ballooning deficits, then Obama will have plenty of room to insist on "bipartisanship" -- that some prominent Republicans must get on board before he enables Congress to vote on a tax increase. The public is not going to forget that Obama inherited much of the national debt from Bush, and rhetoric about shared responsibility is liable to be fairly effective. Anyway, go read the rest of the article.

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Nothing Sucks Worse Than The Post Office -- Except for Kinko's

Paul Krguman compares his experience at the Post Office to that at FedEx and UPS:

Art Laffer (why is he, of all people, on my TV?) asks what it will be like when the government runs Medicare and Medicaid.

But I’d raise a further question: he warns that when the government takes over these, um, government programs, they’ll be like the Post Office and the DMV. Why, exactly, are these public functions unquestioned bywords for “something bad”?

Maybe I’m living a sheltered life here in central New Jersey, but I don’t find the Post Office a terrible experience — no worse than Fedex or UPS. (Full disclosure: I worked as a temp mailman when in college.) And nobody likes going to the DMV, but the one on Rt. 1 I go to always seems fairly well managed.

Maybe things are different in New Jersey, but my couple of experiences at the Post Office since moving to Brooklyn a few months ago have been really awful. The first time I went, to mail out my tax forms on April 15th, I had to stand in line for the better part of 20 minutes to buy a couple of stamps. The second time, when I had to mail out some forms for a passport renewal, the clerk "serving" me decided literally without warning or apology half-way through processing my forms that it was time for her break; it took a good 15 minutes, with most of my personal documents slid conspicuously under her window, before someone came to relieve her. The third time, when I had to send some corporate documents to Albany for my consulting business, things were going smoothly enough -- until I actually had to fill out the shipping receipt, and discovered that there were literally no working pens available in the entire building. I had to go across the street and buy one.

There's probably only one customer service experience that is routinely as bad as the Post Office: FedEx Kinko's.

The last time I went to FedEx Kinko's, the black & white printer was broken, the fax machine was broken, and the "high-speed" Internet connection -- which I was being charged for by the minute -- was about as fast as a dial-up line in Ulan Bator. And then I had to stand in line for 15 minutes to pay an arm and a leg for the privilege of having my time wasted. The clerks at the Court Street Kinko's are actually quite sweet -- but the location is chronically understaffed and undermaintained on one of the busier commercial thoroughfares in the Five Boroughs. There are also the simple things that FedEx Kinko's doesn't get right: why do I have to fill out shipping forms by hand -- invariably transposing the ZIP+4 or something and having to start over again -- instead of by computer, when the clerk has to key in everything I've written down anyway? This is the nineties 21st Century, damnit. FedEx does an admirable job of delivering packages -- but the retail experience is a real black eye for the company.

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And apparently, I'm not alone in these experiences. Yelp.com has compiled 237 ratings for a total of 67 distinct USPS locations throughout the New York City area. The average rating, on a scale of 1 to 5, is a 2.29. As Yelp raters tend to be fairly generous with most things, this is really bad. But the ratings for FedEx Kinko's are even worse: an average rating of 2.07 (n=78). The UPS Store, at least, gets somewhat more decent marks (an avergae rating of 2.70), which matches my experiences, although UPS has a somewhat hipper brand and Yelp is notorious for having a pro-hipster bias.

All kidding aside, I do think the Post Office creates some small, residual level of disdain for the idea of government-run services. The level of funding seems manifestly suboptimal and probably ought to be increased. But if every private-sector business were run as badly as FedEx Kinko's, we'd all be frickin' Communists in no time.

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Corzine Hearts Obama ... Does Deeds?

How valuable will the political capital of President Obama--and relatedly, if to a lesser degree, Vice President Joe Biden--be for fellow Democrats campaigning for office? We'll get a preliminary answer to this question this fall in the New Jersey and Virginia governor's races, and a fuller answer next autumn in the congressional and gubernatorial races of the midterm cycle.



On behalf of Jon Corzine, the Democratic National Committee has produced a new ad featuring the president, above. Corzine, who by dint of his poll numbers looks to be in serious trouble, appears on stage at a rally with Obama, whose comments touting Corzine's performance on the economy and education are sampled at some length. (We see but do not hear from Corzine.) Two Obama visuals and accompanying quotes also now scroll across the Corzine campaign homepage.

Turning southward to the Commonwealth, Obama will be in Virginia Thursday to stump for Creigh Deeds, something Biden has already done. Tellingly, however, the Obama event is planned for Northern Virginia, which makes me wonder about something that the Hotline's Jennifer Skalka is also pondering: Will Deeds want to be seen as closely allied with Obama, particularly in the non-NoVa sections of the state?



If the rest of the Deeds campaign's media approach is any indication, I'm guessing Obama is not going to venture too far from NoVa. The campaign has produced a fantastic, semi-biographical, two-minute ad called "Welcome to Deeds Country." The video works hard to establish Deeds' native cred, showing him and his attractive family in a variety of rural backdrops--all of this set to violin-heavy, bluegrassy music. The "Deeds Country" logo, depicted on the pin to the right, is visually appealing and affirms Deeds' homespun, pastoral themes. The branding here is highly localized.

Of course, in almost any governor's races the campaign wants make the case about its candidate, and how well s/he fits the needs and goals of the state, rather than turning the contest into some referendum on national politics or a fellow partisan president. But, so far as I can tell from perusing the Deeds' website, what's amazing is the complete avoidance of all things Obama. It's possible I missed some mention somewhere, but the "issues" page on the Deeds campaign website, including various links to the topical subpages, includes not even one reference to Obama. There may no mention of the Democratic president anywhere on the site. Meanwhile, at the equivalent issues mainpage on the Corzine site, we find this unapologetically partisan identification: "Governor Corzine’s partnership with President Obama, his cabinet, Democrats in the US Congress and here in New Jersey is well-known. As the country moves in a new, more progressive, direction that attempts to undo to the damage of the Bush years, it’s critical that New Jersey has a leader who is in sync with that vision and will not let New Jersey get left behind."

According to Pollster.com, both Democrats are trailing--though Corzine appears to be in greater danger of losing than Deeds. Aside from needing to pull out any and all stops, there are other reasons why Corzine would be inclined to appear closer and cozier with Obama than Deeds: Corzine is an incumbent a time of high voter frustration, and he represents a bluer state that Obama carried more comfortably last fall than his 6-point margin in Virginia, with its sea of mostly red counties beyond the Washington suburbs.

Perhaps the Deeds campaign is simply waiting for Thursday's Obama appearance to begin building some linked messaging and visuals. And you can be damn sure that Obama-themed literature and robo-calls will be going into African American neighborhoods in the final days of the campaign. Still, for now at least it looks like Deeds understands that the value of a president's political capital depends on the local currency--and is thus less interested in tapping Obama's reserves as is Corzine.

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The Enthusiasm Gap, Revisited

It seems strange to talk about this just months after Barack Obama could seem to turn out 50,000 for a rally at the drop of a hat. But there are some worrying signs for Democrats that may be impacting the debate on health care and other issues. Take what Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling found in Virginia, for example:

Last week I was skeptical of SurveyUSA's poll showing an electorate that voted for John McCain 52-43...but we actually found it at a 52-41 McCain advantage.

What does that mean? Let's say that 2 million people vote this fall, a slight uptick from 2005. Using the data from the poll that would mean 1,040,000 McCain voters and 820,000 Obama voters.

Now let's compare that to last fall. McCain received 1,725,005 votes. If 1,040,000 of those turn out this year that's equal to 60% of his voters. Obama received 1,959,532 votes. If 820,000 of those turn out this fall that's equal to 42% of his voters.

Suppose that we take some liberties with Jensen's data and apply them not just to Virginia but to the rest of the country. Right now, the partisan ID split among adults in the country is about 34 percent Democrat, 24 percent Republican, and 36 percent independent (plus an additional 6 percent "other"). But suppose that, in accordance with PPP's Virginia poll, 42 percent of Democrats are highly engaged at the moment -- 42 percent of 34 percent is 14 percent. Now suppose that 60 percent of Republicans are highly engaged -- 60 percent of 24 percent is also 14 percent, the same total that we got for the Democrats.



All right, so that's a little imprecise by the standards of what we usually do around here. But for all sorts of tangible and intangible reasons -- probably none more profound than that Republicans have been losing every election for the past few years and nothing warms the spirit like revenge -- I suspect that something like this approximates the state of play in the country right now: the depth of Republican support is starting to rival the breadth of Democratic support. Sometimes, American politics resembles a screaming contest, and Republicans -- though fewer in number -- are screaming a little louder right now.

I certainly do think, by the way, that the semi-organized efforts to disrupt things like health-care town halls have some chance of backfiring. Americans are actually a relatively civil people, and all it might take is one idiot taking things too far for the "movement" to lose a news cycle or six. The whole point of these efforts, moreover, is to make a molehill of opposition look like a mounain.

Fake mountains (mass movemnts) don't generally beat real ones. But the Democrats don't have a mass movement right now. They have an electorate that's maybe 60 percent unaware of the threat that things like health care are under in Washington, 20 percent aware but burned out or ambivalent, and 10 percent both aware and engaged but busy fighting with one another. That doesn't leave very many Democrats left to stand up and shout back.

The Democratic Party's fundamentals, to paraprase John McCain, remain strong -- whereas these ebbs and flows of enthusiasm can be rather transient. But sometimes the short run matters, and on health care reform at least, this is one of those times. Unfortunately for Democrats, I don't think there are any easy answers. It's almost certainly not as simple as flipping a switch, or mobilizing OFA, and re-activating the enthusiasm we witnessed during the campaign. Which is not to say that Democrats shouldn't try. But their leadership ought to be prepared for the eventuality that they will lose the shouting match -- and will still need to find a way to win the war.

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The Difference Between Birthers and Truthers

Over at Real Clear Politics, David Paul Kuhn has a pretty good take on the recent Research 2000 / Daily Kos survey revealing that 58 percent of Repulicans either don't believe or aren't certain that Barack Obama was born in the United States. Kuhn points out that in a Rasmussen Reports poll in 2007, 61 percent of Democrats either believed that George W. Bush had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, or weren't certain that he didn't.

I agree with Kuhn that there are lowlifes and imbeceles of every political persuasion, and that they ought to be treated with equal scorn. I also agree that the Birther "movement" has gotten far more media attention than it deserves. That's one reason that I've shied away from talking about it. People like Orly Taitz, the Russian-born dentist/real-estate-agent/attorney who has become the birthers' unofficial spokeswoman, ought to be institutionalized somewhere rather than being given a platform on cable news.

However, I don't buy that the two phenomena are entirely equivalent. For one, there are some quantitative differences. In the Research 2000 poll, only 7 percent of Democrats have doubts about Barack Obama's origins. That compares, in the Rasmussen poll, to 26 percent of Republicans who had doubts about George Bush's role in 9/11, and 43 percent who had doubts about whether the CIA had advanced knowledge of the attacks. Trutherism is pathetically widespread -- somewhat more so than birtherism -- and is also somewhat more "bipartisan" than its counterpart. By the way, I'd expect that you'd find a pretty wide overlap between the two groups -- that controlling for party ID and other factors, truthers are much more likely to be birthers and vice versa.

The other difference is qualitative. I can't recall any sitting Congressmen raising doubts about 9/11 (if I've forgotten one or two instances, I'm sure someone will remind me in the comments). On the other hand, quite a few Republican Congressmen have mimicked the birthers' doubts about Obama's place of origin. So, indeed, let's not give Taitz any more facetime. Instead, let's give Senators Jim Inhofe and Richard Shelby, and Represenatives John Campbell, Marsha Blackburn, Bill Posey, Roy Blunt and Dan Burton the ridicule they deserve for enabling these unpatriotic and malicious conspiracy theories.

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Obama States and Unemployment: Confusing Cause and Effect

I like Ross Douthat, the New York Times's newest regular columnist, but the case he presents today on economic conditions in blue states and red states is misleading. Typical of the piece are claims like these:

Meanwhile, California, long a paradise for regulators and public-sector unions, has become a fiscal disaster area. And it isn’t the only dark blue basket case. Eight states had unemployment over 11 percent in June; seven went for Barack Obama last November.

This is true -- states which voted for Barack Obama have higher unemployment rates than those that don't. In fact, the difference is statistically significant: Obama states have an average of 9.3 percent of their population unemployed at the moment, versus 7.9 percent for McCain states.

The problem is that Douthat is confusing cause and effect. Those states may very well have voted for Barack Obama because they had higher unemployment. Obama blew out McCain in high-unemployment states like Michigan, Oregon and Nevada -- states which are normally much more competitive. He won, to much surprise, Indiana and North Carolina, two states with unemployment rates well above the national norms. Indeed, although the Obama states have higher unemployment now, they also did so by a statistically significant margin in November, when Obama was elected.



The other, probably more obvious flaw with Douthat's logic is that Barack Obama has no more authority to govern Vermont than he does Wyoming. Instead, the voters in each state elect governors and legislatures to represent them. And sometimes, these decisions do not match their Presidential preferences: Vermont has a Republican governor, for instance, while Wyoming has a Democratic one.

If we look at who was in charge of each state as of Demcember, 2007, when the recession began, we see no difference in unemployment rates between states with Republican governors and states with Democratic ones.



We can also look at the composition of each state's legislature. States that had Democrats in charge of both chambers of their legislature as of December 2007 have somewhat higher unemployment rates than those with Republicans in charge. However, the difference is not statistically significant. States with mixed legislatures -- where the higher and lower chambers are split between the parties, or where one or both chambers is subject to a tie or coalation government -- have higher unemployment rates than either Democratic or Republican states, perhaps suggesting that the real enemy in tackling the unemployment crisis is not partisanship but gridlock.



Nor do states with Democratic governors have larger budget gaps, although states with Democratic legislatures do:



We're going to have something of a natural experiment taking place over next 12-18 months; the states have adopted a variety of strategies in response to the economic crisis, and we'll get to see which ones recover more quickly than others. But so far the evidence, contra Douthat, is rather mixed.

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The Real Problem with The Senate's Small-State Bias

As you all surely know, the Senate is not a terribly democratic institution. A voter in Wyoming -- population 533,000 -- has about 70 times more ability to influence the Senate's direction than one in California -- population 36.8 million. And the lack of representativeness can be particularly acute when the Senate is conducting business at the committee level. Max Baucus's Table for Six, for instance, which may very well determine the fate of efforts to reform health care, is made up of members who collectively represent about 6.5 million people, or around one-fiftieth of the country's population.

This in and of itself is problematic for Democrats, since there is a correlation between the size of a state and how Democratic it tends to vote in elections for national office, although the relationship is not as strong as you might posit (Rhode Island, Delaware and Hawaii are small states too). The bigger and more structural problem, however, may have to do with the ways that small-state senators raise funds, and in turn, whose interests they are beholden to.

The chart below details the 20 current senators who have received the highest percentage of their campaign contributions since 2003 from corporate PACs, based on data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. This data focuses on corporate PAC contributions and individual contributions only; other, usually minor sources of income (self-financing, transfers from other campaign committees, contributions from ideological and labor PACs) are treated as ambiguous and are ignored. Data should be current through roughly May of this year.



What do these senators have in common? All 20 come from states with below-median populations. In fact, you have to go to #26 (John McCain) to find a senator from a state with an above-median population, and #30 (Saxby Chambliss) to find one from a state with an above-average population.

The reason this occurs is because individual contributions are easier to obtain in states with larger populations. Although some people make campaign contributions to candidates from outside their states, most do not, and so a senator from Texas ought to have an easier time eliciting funds than one from Idaho. On the other hand, there is no relationship between the amount of PAC contributions and the population of a senator's state; PACs know that one senator's vote is just as good as another.

What this means is that senators from small states tend to be relatively more dependant on special-interest money -- it makes up a larger share of their overall take. Senators from the ten smallest states have received, on average, 28.4 percent of their campaign funds from corporate PACs, versus 13.7 for those in the ten largest. There is a tendency to think of senators from small states as being populists, and there are a few instances in which this is accurate -- Jon Tester of Montana and John Thune of South Dakota, for instance, are relatively non-dependant on PAC money. But for the most part, something the opposite is true, and senators from small states in fact have more incentive to placate special interests.

It is worth noting, by the way, that the six senators on Baucus's mini-committee are especially egregious in this regard. They rank #1 (Mike Enzi), #6 (Chuck Grassley), #11 (Kent Conrad), #13 (Baucus), #14 (Jeff Bingaman) and #20 (Olympia Snowe) in the share of contributions received from corporate PACs (an average of 47.5 percent of their funds overall).

One can think of several plausible reforms to redress this imbalance. For instance, corporations might be restricted from donating PAC money to a senator unless they do a material amount of business in her state. In addition, the proliferation of the Internet as a fundraising tool has probably leveled the playing field some, making it easier for populist-ish candidates like Tester or Jim Webb to receive contributions from activists all over the country.

This goes a long way toward explaining, however, why the Senate tends to be more protective than the House of corporate interests -- be they in the form of bank bailouts, tax breaks, or whatever else (consider, for instance, that H.R. 1424 -- the second take on the bank bailout -- was approved with the votes of 74 percent of the Senate but just 60 percent of the House). We don't need vague notions about the "cultural" differences between the two chambers to explain this -- they have mostly to do with where the money is flowing in from.

A complete list of the source of campaign funds for all 100 senators follows below.

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