Angry white men fueled the 1994 Republican Revolution. Will angry white seniors fuel a similar Democratic rebuke next year?
That's the question The Cook Political Report's David Wasserman asks in a detailed analysis published today. (Note to readers: The CPR site requires subscription, but I will quote parts of the analysis and have reproduced the below graphic, kindly shared by Wasserman and CPR for fivethirtyeight readers, for which I express our thanks.)
Let's start with key premise of Wasserman's analysis:
Today's divide, however, is the generation gap--no, make that gulf--that characterized President Obama’s victory in 2008. In 1992 and 2000, Bill Clinton and Al Gore performed just slightly better among voters 60 and older than they did among voters 18 to 29 years of age. But in 2008, Obama won 66 percent of voters 18 to 29 and just 45 percent of voters 65 and older--a staggering 21 point difference.
Much has been made about how this disparity in support poses a big long-term problem for the GOP. That’s true, assuming younger voters maintain their current outlook towards the political parties as they age. But aside from flurries of stories about angry senior citizens packing town halls, precious little attention has been given to why the generation gulf poses a grave short-term threat to Democrats in 2010.
Put simply, older voters dominate midterms and have consistently been Obama's weakest age group. Unlike Bill Clinton’s gender gap, Obama’s generation gap complicates Democrats’ midterm math substantially. There's little discernible variation in gender shares of the electorate from midterm to presidential years. But midterm electorates typically skew older and whiter than those in presidential years.
According to exit poll data, voters over 45 comprised 54 percent of the total electorate in 2004 and just 53 percent of the electorate in 2008, but they were 63 percent of all voters in 2006. And diminished turnout on the part of African-American and Hispanic voters, which was a factor in 1994, looks like a double whammy for Democrats.
It is quite remarkable that, in just eight years, the support of seniors has shifted so dramatically. Not only did Gore win the senior vote in 2000 over Bush, but he did slightlybetter among the those over 65 than he did with those aged 50-64. Of course, a person aged, say, 75 in 2000 (that is, over 65 then) was born in 1925 and was forged by the politics of the 1950s and early 1960s, whereas a person aged 65 in 2008 was born in 1943 and likely forged by the politics of the late 1960s through the early 1980s.
Wasserman continues:
According to a new Pew Survey Research poll, Democrats' edge on the generic congressional ballot test is down to 45 percent to 44 percent, a considerably tighter margin than what Democrats enjoyed in both 2006 and 2008. Unsurprisingly, a large part of this shift has been driven by independents ... [b]ut which group is driving an even larger part of this shift? According to Pew, senior citizens...
If Pew’s latest numbers are even halfway accurate, they should frighten Democrats. Their surveys show voters 65 and over, who gave Democrats a 50 percent to 39 percent edge on the generic ballot in November 2006, giving Republicans a 51 percent to 43 percent edge now. If that reversal holds, Democrats could be ruing the "year of the angry white senior” at the polling place, not just the town hall.
Returning to the figure above, Wasserman games out the type of districts that may flip next year based on what we know about those the Democrats lost in 1994. Looking down the columns of the figure, almost all of the Democratic-held districts that flipped were either carried by George H.W. Bush in 1992 or carried by Clinton with less than 50 percent of the vote. (Remember, there was Ross Perot's third-party votes.)
But looking across the rows, we see that, among Democrat incumbents who ran for re-election, those Democrats who voted for either Bill Clinton's budget or the Brady Bill, or especially those who voted for both, accounted for all but one of the 34 House defeats that year. The other 24 GOP pickups were open-seat races, so there was no incumbent voting record--although note again that the losses were strongly predicted by Clinton's 1992 district-level performance.
Wasserman again:
In 1994, it wasn't easy to be a Bush-district Democrat who voted for both the Clinton budget and the Brady handgun bill. In fact, out of the 12 Democrats who fit this description and ran for reelection, two thirds lost. So far this year, 20 of the 49 McCain-district Democrats have already voted for the "cap and trade" bill. If the House Democratic leadership insists on putting a health care bill with a public option to a vote, how many of these 20 can be relied upon to take on more political risk?
On the other hand, the lessons of 1994 might serve as a reality check for GOP challengers to Democrats who plan to vote against their party's leadership on both of this year's dominant agenda items, such as Reps. Bobby Bright (AL-02), Parker Griffith (AL-05), and Chet Edwards (TX-17). In districts with challenging numbers, the strategy of voting (and running) against party leadership has persisted for generations, if sometimes for only one reason. It works.
This goes a long way to explaining the reticence of Blue Dog Democrats. They want to keep their seats. One quibble I might have with Wasserman is whether the cap-and-trade or stimulus vote will be the companion danger to the vote on whatever health care bill emerges from Congress.
In any case, to answer the "angry white senior" question, what we will have to watch next November is: (a) how white seniors vote in 2010; (b) what their share of the overall turnout is; and (c) what the fates are of House and Senate Democrats who voted for either or both of President Obama's stimulus [or cap-and-trade] and whatever health care bill ultimately makes it through Congress this year.
Last month, I boldly proclaimed, based on a fairly simple statistical model, that there was only about a 1 in 3 chance that unemployment would hit 10.0 percent. People who took the long side of that bet are looking a bit smarter today after a mediocre employment situation report that showed unemployment rising to 9.7 percent last month. The model had expected an increase to 9.5 percent.
First, the good news. (And no, I don’t feel any need to be politically correct by using scare quotes around the term “good”). The establishment survey – what is usually reported as the “payrolls” number – showed a decline of 216,000 jobs. That was slightly better than consensus expectations, and slightly worse than my model’s expectations, but broadly in line with what everyone was projecting. It’s also the best figure since last August, when the economy lost 175,000 jobs. (There were also some upward revisions to the job loss numbers for June and July, although they were fairly trivial.)
The problem is that the other of the two surveys the government conducts every month – the household survey – showed a decline of 392,000 employed persons. It also showed a small increase in the size of the labor force (which is not unexpected). The unemployment rate is keyed off the household survey – and so it jumped to 9.7 (actually 9.66) percent.
As I wrote last month, when the two surveys conflict with one another, the establishment survey is generally the more reliable one by a fair margin. That's why Wall Street is trying up on today's news -- it trusts the establishment survey a lot more, which is consistent with the story that the economy is recovering. But, both surveys provide some useful information and the household data should not be dismissed out of hand.
Our model still shows unemployment avoiding the 10 percent threshold – but barely – peaking at 9.91 percent in November. Since there’s a definite margin of error in these calculations, and a de facto margin of error in the unemployment rate figures as actually reported by the government, the model probably implies that there’s a 50:50 chance, or a little higher, that unemployment will indeed be reported at 10.0 percent or higher in at least one month.
There are other models out there that are a lot, lot more sophisticated than mine, and most of them show an unemployment peak that is both higher (at least 10 percent) and later (occurring early in 2010 rather than late in 2009) than mine does. On the other hand, the parameters of this particular economic slump are unusual. Recent recessions have been proceeded by "jobless recoveries". But, recent recessions have been fairly shallow whereas this one was (is?) quite deep, and generally speaking the deeper the recession the brisker the recovery in jobs figures. So there's a lot of uncertainty in everyone's estimates. The bottom line: we’re now somewhere in between the rather pessimistic picture implied by June’s employment report, and the more optimistic one implied by July’s.
There's a healthy debate to be about whether Blue Dog Democrats will be helped or hurt by voting for the President's health care package. The answer, in all likelihood, is some of each. The national environment will probably be better for Democrats -- maybe much better -- if some sort of health care bill passes. On the other hand, the local environment, holding other factors constaant, may be worse for those who vote in favor of the package. This Real Clear Politics article from Sean Trende is somewhat overargued, but history (and the academic literature) from 1994 is pretty clear that voting for unpopular initiatives can be perilous to a Congressman's career prospects. How the scale balances in any particular district is hard to say. But generally speaking, for a Blue Dog in a fairly conservative district (not necessarily one like Jim Cooper, who's actually in a fairly liberal district), the optimal outcome is probably that he votes against the health care bill but that the health care bill passes. That's why Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid's vote-whipping skills are going to be so essential: they have to help Democrats out of a prisoner's dilemma in which each member's individual interest harms the party's collective interest. It's also why if a health care bill passes, it's almost certainly going to be by a very narrow margin.
The other, more straightforward way out of the prisoner's dilemma is if health care becomes more popular. I wouldn't rule this out -- depending on how the President's big speech goes. But Democrats have to be prepared for the possibility that the numbers won't improve very much.
Against this background we have the added contingency of the public option. If it were the case that the inclusion of a public option made the health care bill less popular, then the solution would be simple: drop it like a hot potato. The health care bill can't afford to become any less popular; it's already at the precipice where any further erosion in public support could render it impossible to pass. (For the time being, the numbers seem to have stabilized, but remain fairly poor).
However, this is not in fact the case. Although there has been some questionable polling on both sides of the public option debate, it seems on balance to be fairly popular. And irrefutably, it is more popular than the health care package is as a whole; one poll, in fact, found that a clear plurality of voters think dropping the public option would make the bill worse rather than better. In addition, the public option appears as though it would be deficit-reducing. Why then, does the public option appear to have become such a sticking point?
There are two fairly obvious answers to this. One is that those Congressmen are arguing against the public option aren't really arguing against the public option per se, but rather against the entire concept of health care reform. If you're not going to vote for any reasonable sort of health care package, your opinion on the public option ought to be regarded as irrelevant. We actually haven't seen very many people say: "I'll vote for the health care bill, but only if it doesn't have a public option". Instead, they merely complain about the public option -- and don't establish any benchmark for a health care bill that they'd actually support.
The second answer, which undoubtedly also plays a part, is that some of these Blue Dogs are not merely looking out for their constituents but also for their corporate donors.
Still, this seems somewhat insufficient to explain the disconnect. And I have another theory too: a potential third leg to the stool. Namely, I wonder if some Blue Dogs aren't opposed to a public option precisely because liberals support it. The way most of us orient ourselves in life is through relative, rather than absolute, means; we'd rather be making $40,000 if our neighbors make $30,000 than be making $50,000 if our neighbors make $100K. Perhaps some Blue Dogs are looking at the public option and thinking: if these liberals think it's that big a deal, there must be something wrong with it. Perhaps there's even some of this coming from conservative elements of the White House, as this Politico article asserts:
On health care, Obama’s willingness to forgo the public option is sure to anger his party’s liberal base. But some administration officials welcome a showdown with liberal lawmakers if they argue they would rather have no health care law than an incremental one. The confrontation would allow Obama to show he is willing to stare down his own party to get things done.
Quinnipiac polling has also shown that, while the public option has become somewhat less popular overall, its support has also become more highly correlated with ideology:
CBS/NYT polling has found the same thing if we look along partisan, rather than ideological, fault lines:
I wonder, in other words, whether the insistence of some liberals on the public option hasn't tended to move the Overton Window in the wrong way, making it seem like more of a partisan issue than it really is, or at least ought to be. That it's come to be seen as the sine qua non of an acceptable liberal health care package may be reason enough for Blue Dogs -- especially some of the more slow-witted ones -- to oppose it.
I don't know that I'd fault progressive activists for this -- conservatives have been making a big deal about the public option from day one too. But I do think their objectives have been a little muddled. Ezra Klein is right about this: it's a legitimately tough decision for a Blue Dog as to whether to support health care or not. About two-thirds of Blue Dog Democrats voted against the health care packages as they were making their way out of the House tri-committee. They are not bluffing. Blue Dogs are not going to be persuaded by threats which imply that progressives would be willing to cause health care reform to fail -- that might have worked two months ago, when the health care bill had better numbers, but it has now become unpopular enough that they are probably largely indifferent to this possibility. Instead, they're going to be persuaded by evidence that the public option will make health care reform more popular in their districts: either directly (as with thesepolls showing that the public option itself is popular) or indirectly (by promoting cost-control). But to take an issue where public opinion is in your favor and to turn it into an ideological litmus test when you're facing an increasingly stiff headwind is almost certainly a mistake.
Two elections were held on Tuesday in wildly disparate parts of the United States. And while polling data shows Obama’s approval ratings inevitably dipping off their previously lofty heights, Democrats in Iowa and California aren’t yet suffering at the ballot box. As Tom Jensen at Public Policy Polling has blogged, most of the drop in Obama’s approval ratings has come from people who never voted for him to begin with. But let’s look at the one thing in the world that’s sexier to FiveThirtyEight readers than polling data – real live election results. Click on “There’s more” to see what happened on Tuesday in Iowa and California’s special elections. The California election was for California’s 10th Congressional District, represented by Ellen Tauscher until her resignation to serve under Hilary Clinton in the State Department. An ancestor of this district had been represented by a right-wing Republican, Bill Baker, who once pointed at a bunch of junior high school students in a gallery above the California State Legislature’s chamber and referred to them as abortion survivors. But demographic trends in California have not been kind to Republicans and the lines of this district have also been changed by redistricting. It’s in the far suburban reaches of the San Francisco Bay Area and includes Lawrence Livermore National Labs where an awful lot of design and testing work for nuclear weapons has historically been done (along with lots of civilian research that is of unambiguous benefit to the population). The district comes far closer to resembling the rest of the United States than such bastions of the left as San Francisco or Berkeley, albeit it is more affluent and educated than the country as a whole.
The McCain campaign in 2008 wrote off California as a hopeless cause (intelligently in my view) and didn’t spend any money there. Of course neither did the Obama campaign, which vacuumed donations and volunteers out of California and blew them into other parts of the country where they were more needed. Obama won the 10th District over McCain 65% - 33%. In the same 2008 election, the veteran Tauscher – a fairly conservative Dem who was a member of both the Blue Dogs and the New Dems – won over her Republican opponent 65% - 31% with 4% going to a lefty Peace and Freedom party candidate.
In elections where there are only two candidates – one Dem and one Rep -- on the ballot and you’re a Republican and you happen to hate the Republican candidate, then your only options are to stay home or hold your nose and vote for the Democrat. By way of contrast special elections of the type held in California are uniquely well-suited to monitor partisan identification. That’s because anyone who’s a registered voter can vote for any of the candidates, it’s a so called jungle primary. All the Democrats and all the Republicans as well as all minor party candidates run against each other on one open ballot. If one candidate receives 50% + 1 of the total votes cast (i.e. a majority) then that person is elected to Congress. If no one receives a majority, then the top candidate from each party proceeds to the general election. That means – as happened on Tuesday – that someone who got 20% of the vote may not go to the general election while somebody who got 1% (if s/he’s from a minor party) does go on to the general election. It also means that if you’re a Republican and you hate the leading Republican candidate, no big deal, you can just vote for another one without worrying about throwing your vote away. That’s because you know that it’s very likely that there will be a runoff between the top candidate from each party anyway. So you have a license to vote your conscience in the jungle primary knowing you can grit your teeth, do your duty, and vote for the candidate of your party who you don’t like so much when it’s absolutely essential. In this primary there were six Republican candidates on the ballot and five Democrats. The same reasoning of course applies to Democrats, so these open primaries are great indicators of partisan strength. So what happened on Tuesday? Tote up all five Democratic candidates and you get 65%, exactly the same as Obama and the previous incumbent Tauscher received in 2008. Tote up the six Republicans and you get 34%. Most of the remaining 1% went to lefty (i.e. Green & Peace and Freedom party) candidates. In other words the needle essentially didn’t budge at all since the 2008 presidential election.
What about Iowa? Iowa’s 90th State House District is the home of Maharishi University where devotees of meditation go to study, meditate and presumably not eat too much Iowa beef. But it’s also actually a district whose partisan voter registration is within a percentage point of Iowa’s as a whole. The Democratic incumbent had left to take a job in the Governor’s administration as an agricultural czar. He had won his last two elections (in 2006 & 2008) unopposed and had won fairly easily in 2004. But in his first election in 2002 when he was a non-incumbent, his victory margin was by the fat total of 55 votes out of 10,475 cast. Large amounts of money (a few hundred thousand dollars) were spent in this obscure contest as Iowa Republicans strove mightily to break the momentum that Democrats have enjoyed over the last few cycles in Iowa. The recent legalization of gay marriage in Iowa by the state’s Supreme Court has led Iowa Republicans to try to force a debate in the legislature to overturn the ruling. Christian right groups engaged in significant independent expenditures designed to weaken the Democrat. Despite all that, on Tuesday in the first open seat election in the district since 2002, Democrats essentially doubled their winning margin. The Democrat managed to squeak by with a 107 vote margin out of 8,046 votes cast. With the previous incumbent the Democrat’s secret weapon was that he was from the more rural Republican county in the district, so he undercut the Republican base vote. This time around the Democrats got even sneakier. They managed to recruit as their candidate a driver’s ed teacher who had won teaching awards while working for 40+ years and taught almost everyone imaginable how to drive. This is not a mass transit heavy district. The Republican percentage was up in the less populated counties in the district compared to 2002, but the driver’s ed teacher’s old students came through for him and the Democratic percentage was up by ten points from the 2002 percentage in his county, the most populous in the district. Again the dial barely moved.
It’s certainly possible that Obama will antagonize the Democratic base by not advocating strongly enough for a public option in his health care proposals. It’s also possible that the drum beat of Republican attacks on everything associated with Obama and the Democrats will continue to drive down Democratic support among Independents. The pendulum tends to swing over time. But for now – looking at actual elections, not polls which can be spun any which way – there’s no hard empirical evidence of significant changes in the electorate’s behavior since November of 2008.
Q: What happens when you're a major party nominee for governor and your graduate thesis from 20 years ago is uncovered, revealing some rather impolitic views about the role of women in the workplace society? A: The other party, which happens to be led by the current governor of the state where you're running, announces it will dump a huge sum of money into the contest to defeat you.
That's the news late today from Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse: The DNC is going to gamble $5 million on the Creigh Deeds campaign against Bob McDonnell, who has been scrambling all week to explain and defend a master's thesis he wrote 20 years ago as a 34-year-old graduate student at Regent University. The DNC is trying to capitalize on the thesis controversy, as Woodhouse's statements make all too clear. "Governor [Tim] Kaine is very, very enthusiastic about this race," Woodhouse said. "He obviously knows Bob McDonnell and Creigh Deeds. He has a good sense that Creigh Deeds is who you see, and Bob McDonnell is who we learned about through his thesis."
DNC investments aside, how damaging are the revelations related to the thesis--which can be read in full here--to McDonnell's candidacy? Put another way, is this his "macaca" moment? My initial reflex is that this story is very damaging. The Washington Post is giving the story significant coverage, leading its Metro section with a page B1 story today about the McDonnell campaign's damage control efforts:
McDonnell has now turned to his prominent female backers to help rebuild his relationship with the key voting bloc, damaged in recent days by the publication of his 1989 master's thesis. He wrote in the thesis that working women and feminists had been "detrimental" to the traditional family and criticized federal tax credits for child care because they made it easier for women to be employed outside the home.
His efforts came as leaders of national organizations focused on the Virginia race, convinced that McDonnell's thesis shows that his election would erase gains for women.
The Post also pubbed a page B2 companion story today reporting that four of McDonnell's former Republican colleagues in the state legislature--all Deeds supporters, and brought forward by the Deeds campaign--confirm that McDonnell's political views as a state legislator were consistent with views he published in that thesis.
The McDonnell thesis scandal unfolding in Virginia already bears a certain resemblance to the state's other recent election-year controversy--George Allen's "macaca" episode. Both involve the backfire resulting caused by the wide circulation of embarrassing words attributed to a Republican statewide candidate and, because they were either videotaped or set down in print, are impossible to retract.
I do not, however, think the damage McDonnell will suffer is as great as that suffered by Allen. Though Allen was an incumbent, with all those advantages, his comments were offensive in a general way, whereas some people, sadly, may be completely untroubled by the notion that women ought to take a subservient role in the family or American society. Allen's remarks were also videotaped--thus heightening their viral impact because television could run video and audio almost ceaselessly--whereas McDonnell's are "merely" in print. Finally, Allen's nasty remark was wholly unrelated to the topic or goal of his picnic speech that day, and thus came across as not only racist but the byproduct of a mean, intemperate person, whereas McDonnell's can at least attempt (however successfully) to explain his comments as one part of a larger policy argument or inquiry.
As the Pollster composite poll figure above shows, McDonnell enters September with a 10-point lead. We'll see how his numbers respond as this story develops and that $5 million takes effect.
* With asterisk as necessary to account for future contingencies. If our country gets attacked again, or if there's some other sort of major unanticipated crisis, foreign or domestic, that moment and the President's response to it may outshine everything else. But in the ordinary course of business, it doesn't get much bigger than this:
President Barack Obama will address a joint session of Congress on health care reform in prime time on Wednesday, Sept. 9, a senior official tells POLITICO.
Obama will receive House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at the White House the day before for a previously scheduled sit-down.
The last time a president addressed a joint session of Congress that wasn’t a State of the Union, or the traditional first address by a new president, was Sept. 20, 2001, when President George W. Bush spoke on the war on terrorism following the 9/11 attacks.
Back in July, I urged President Obama to do exactly this:
If and when the Democrats are at the stage where they have a plan to frame the discussion, then President Obama needs to give a speech. Not a town-hall forum, and not a press conference. And not multiple speeches. A speech. A "big" speech, and probably a somewhat long speech. A make-or-break speech in prime time on a busy television night. Preferably one from the Oval Office, or perhaps in front of a joint session of Congress -- not some bullsh*t at a steel mill in Toledo. This is not as risky as it sounds, since the President is very good at delivering big speeches. But he's probably only going to get one shot.
The odds of any health care bill at all passing are at this point are pretty tenuous: still probably more likely than not, but it may not be a very good bill, and it may not make the Democrats any more popular once it gets signed (although failing to pass health care reform would almost certainly be even worse). To stretch this into a baseball analogy, this is not really a moment where Obama is being the "closer" and protecting a lead. It's more like the Democrats are down 5-4 in the bottom of the ninth, but with ample opportunity to turn the game around because they have the bases loaded and their cleanup hitter, Obama, at the plate. If he strikes out, he strikes out -- and it's probably finito for substantive health care reform. But at long last he'll be swinging for the fences, and this is a moment that should play to nearly all of Obama's strengths.
The White House may as well go ahead and raise expectations as much as possible: they'll want ratings points, and they'll want buzz: they'll want for this to be the defining moment of the health care debate, and not the dog days of July and August where Obama's approval rating was chipped away at one lost news cycle at a time.
The conservative critique, exemplified by Mary Katherine Ham at the Weekly Standard, seems to be that Obama has already said too much about health care and that another speech can't possibly help him:
His appearances read like a list of unfortunate "Friends" episodes: "The One Where Obama Started an Ill-Advised Week-Long P.R. War With Cambridge Cops," "The One Where Obama Showed Up 45 Minutes Late, Made No News, and Answered No Questions," "The One Where Obama Promised to Go Through the Legislation He's Never Read Line-by-Line With Congress," "The One Where Obama Was Asked About 'Mean Signs' by the 11-Year-Old Daughter of an Obama Volunteer," "The One Where Obama Claimed His Plan Had AARP's Endorsement, When It Didn't," and "The One Where Obama Said He'd Never Supported Single-Payer."
Does he really think another episode is going to help?
This argument has it pretty much backward. People like Mary Katherine Ham have heard Obama talk alot about health care -- but that's because it's Mary Katherine Ham's job to pay attention to everything the White House does. It's not the job of an ordinary voter in Ohio or Florida. And whether design or by poor execution, Obama hasn't really had a moment that would resonate with those folks. Two thirds people like these are confused about what the Democrats' health care package actually entails, and are presumably quite willing to get some clarity from Obama.
I do think, indeed, that the White House has sometimes played it too cutely with the President's public appearances. A "natural" setting like a town-hall usually comes across as being more contrived than simply speaking directly to the public from the Oval Office; the "transparency" of a press conference usually comes across as being more pre-spun than simply addressing the Congress from the floor of the Capitol. (This is something that Ronald Reagan, among others, understood.) Arguably, there should have been fewer of those sorts of moments. But that doesn't mean that this speech is superfluous; if anything, the steady but only marginally effective trickle of background radiation from the White House makes a moment like this all the more necessary.
The truth is, in fact, that this is a speech the conservatives at the Weekly Standard and elsewhere out to be pretty nervous about. When Bill Clinton delivered his big speech to the Congress on health care 16 years ago, his approval rating shot up by 10 points almost instantenously.
Now, Clinton wound up squandering that and then some (and be prepared -- if Obama does get some sort of bounce out of the speech, some of it will probably evaporate almost immediately). But Obama's timing is better than Clinton's, coming toward the end rather than the beginning of the process, and at a moment where the press corps is exceedingly skeptical and where expectations may be unrealistically low. And even a temporary bounce might prove sufficient, since the health care bill has already passed out of 4 out of 5 Congressional committees and doesn't have that many more hurdles to clear. The more successful Obama's speech is, the more eager Democrats will be to engage in a 4-6 week sprint to get a health care bill to the President's desk while they have momentum on their side.
The hiring of Jenna Bush Hager by NBC's "Today" show to be an education correspondent smacks of non-meritocratic promotion, and has Salon's Glenn Greenwald suitably fired up. Tongue planted firmly in cheek, Greenwald imagines this scenario:
They should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it. They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it's really unfair for anything other than merit to determine position and employment. They can interview Lisa Murkowski, Evan Bayh, Jeb Bush, Bob Casey, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, Dan Lipinksi, and Harold Ford, Jr. about personal responsibility and the virtues of self-sufficiency. Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson and John Podhoretz can provide moving commentary on how America is so special because all that matters is merit, not who you know or where you come from. There's a virtually endless list of politically well-placed guests equally qualified to talk on such matters.
I can't speak to the state of nepotism in the media; so far as I know, beyond anecdotal evidence, no statistics have ever been compiled to track this phenomenon. But when Greenwald cites U.S. senators--and as he wrote in a related, earlier post that, "Family succession is hardly unheard of in U.S. political history, but what was once quite rare has now become pervasive"--he's simply not right, or at least as concerns the U.S. Senate. The fact is that nepotism in the Senate is today at historical lows in American history. The figure printed above was part of an unpublished paper fellow political scientist Geoffrey Vaughan and I wrote earlier this decade about whether a "natural aristocracy" has emerged in the Senate along the lines envisioned by Thomas Jefferson or John Adams. Vaughan is a political theorist, and carried that part of the argument, so please don't ask me to explain colonial-era American political thought. My contribution to the paper was to analyze the biographies of senators, using this IPSCR dataset to determine how much lower-office experience senators brought with them to the Senate.
One of the preliminary analyses we decided to conduct for the paper was to simply compute the share of U.S. senators in each Congress (through the 104th) with a relative who had served in Congress (House or Senate). As the figure above shows, the share of Senators with relatives who were serving or had served in Congress has been steadily shrinking. The passage of the 17th Amendment certainly accelerated this trend, but the downward trend predates even that significant event. As a point of reference when looking at the figure, the 64th Congress was the first in which senators--or at least the third from seats elected that year--were elected rather than appointed; by the 66th, the entire Senate had thus stood for election. (Our paper was about the Senate; we didn't conduct a similar analysis for the House and so I can't speak to that.)
Personally, and despite if not because of nepotism-beneficiary Adam Bellow's justifications, I find nepotism for the most part galling. The insult added to the injury is provided by those people, many but not all of whom are white, who oppose affirmative action yet are themselves beneficiaries of a family- and/or legacy-style affirmative action that at some or several points along their career path helped them gain admissions to college, internships, jobs and promotions. Most annoying, in my experience, is how so many people associate the term "affirmative action" solely and exclusively with race-based preferences when, to take just one prominent example, college admission practices typically involve preferences granted not only to racial minorities but people of special talent (be they oboists or cornerbacks); the sons & daughters of alumni; and even to people based on region. (On this last, one can easily and rightly understand why state legislators would hesitate to approve funding for state universities if their constituents' children could not gain a reasonable number of admissions; but, given the disparities in SAT by region or county within states, this reality implies and in practice compels regional quotas, a form of affirmative action that often admits rural whites with otherwise non-competitive SAT scores into college. One can only hope that such whites arrive on campus as strong advocates of affirmative action.)
Of course, family names are still powerful, as the recent passing of Ted Kennedy testifies. Greenwald is certainly right to sniff familial advantage in the election of, say, Mark Pryor or Lisa Murkowski. But the fact is that familial hookups in the Senate just ain't what they used to be.
There remain about 16 senators who have yet to articulate a clear position on the public option. What are these folks thinking? I can't say; nobody has ever accused the members of the United States Senate of being overly decisive. But I'd imagine that a decent number of them are taking the same position as Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia:
Last night, at John Bell's fundraiser, Senator Warner said to a group of people that, in the end, he would not vote against health care reform containing the public option.
Read the above statement carefully. What Warner promised to his constituents is that "he would not vote against health care reform containing the public option." That's not nothing. But what could Warner do -- while still being true to his word?
-- He could vote for an amendment that stripped the public option from the health care bill. -- He could vote against, or even filibuster, an amendment that sought to add a public option. -- He could lobby the Senate leadership not to put a bill with a public option on the floor. -- He could try to become part of the conference committee reconciling the House and Senate bills, and negotiate against a bill containing a public option. -- Technically speaking, he could filibuster a health care bill containing a public option -- provided that he didn't vote against it if it overcame the filibuster and came to a floor vote. -- If the health care bill were cleaved into two pieces, he could arguably vote against whichever half of the bill contained the public option -- and then claim later that he'd indeed voted for health care reform (before he'd voted against it).
Although the latter two possibility are somewhat fanciful and would require a pretty deceitful statement on Warner's behalf, the first couple are real problems. There would seem to be a very strong possibility that, whatever health care bill is ultimately reported to the Senate floor, it will be subject to some kind of vote on an amendment regarding the public option.
Suppose, for example, that the bill reported to the Senate does contain a public option. Anyone could then introduce an amendment which sought to eliminate it. This amendment would almost certainly get the approval of 39 of the 40 Republicans. If they were joined by some combination of 11 Democrats plus Olympia Snowe, the amendment would prevail. Someone like Warner would be free to vote for this amendment -- he could kill the public option without having to vote against the health care bill itself.
Such an amendment could be filibustered, if 40 enthusiastic Democrats banded together to block it from coming to a floor vote. Undoubtedly, if and when such a situation arose, there would be a very active campaign from the blogopshere urging them to do exactly that. But this could be a perilous strategy: filibustering an up-and-down vote on the public option could embolden conservative Democrats filibuster an upand-down vote on the overall health care reform package. For all the talk about the use of reconciliation, the most straightforward path toward a healthcare reform bill passing remains for the Senate leadership to encourage Blue Dog democrats like Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh to vote for cloture (to break a filibuster), even if they wind up voting against the underlying bill: go ahead and let them have their cake and eat it too. This strategy is much less likely to be effective, however, if Democrats were to filibuster an amendment on the public option from getting and up-or-down vote.
Alternatively, the bill reported to the Senate floor might not include a public option. In that case, someone like Jay Rockefeller could introduce an amendment to include one. This amendment too could be filibustered -- and it almost certainly would be. Probably between 37 and 39 Republicans would vote to sustain the filibuster, and they'd be joined by a number of Blue Dog Democrats who could vote for the filibuster without having to vote against health care itself; indeed, some of them would probably complain loudly about how liberals were trying to muck up thier hard-earned "compromise".
Ultimately, I don't think advocates of the public option are doing themselves a favor by being generous in how they interpret ambiguous replies from Senators. If anything, some number of the ostensible "yes" votes -- like Diane Feinstein and Majority Leader Read -- seem to be from people who support a Public Option In Name Only (POINO), something which they call a "public option" but which is really just another private plan or some kind of co-op proposal. If the people who exerted the most influence on the health care debate -- like Harry Reid, Max Baucus, Kent Conrad -- were more forceful advocates of a public option, then perhaps there would be more argument to treat the ambiguous votes as "leaning yes". But since they aren't, you might wind up with some whippable votes with nobody there to whip them.
The big (long-expected) news from East Asia from this weekend was the landslide victory of Japan's opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). Ousting the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), who have dominated the country since the end of US occupation in 1952, the DPJ and its coalition partners now control 318 of the 480 seats of the Diet's lower house. The DPJ has controlled the upper chamber since 2007.
Looking back to the election last time that the LDP lost power - - a brief stint from summer 1993 to spring 1994 -- we can see a rapidly changing landscape in Japanese politics.
The 1990 election reaffirmed the dominance of the LDP, though with a caucus that emerged 30 members lighter than in 1986.
Looking at the 1990 results, we can see a curious trend. While the LDP won significantly less than a majority of the national vote, nearly four points shy, they walked away with almost 54 % of the seats in the House of Representatives. The next two largest parties, the Socialists and the Clean Government Party, also profited beyond their share of the national vote, while the smaller parties and independent candidates lost ground. Moving on to the 1993 balloting, however, things got worse for the LDP.
Following this election, the 8 minority parties pulled together a short-lived coalition government, led by Morihiro Hosokawa of the Japan New Party, which then merged with the Shinseito party's members and other left-leaning groups to form the current Democratic Party of Japan.
The main outcome of the Hosokawa government was the installation of Japan's current mixed electoral system, where both single-member district seats and overall proportional representative seats exist within the Parliament. Japan is broken up into 300 districts and 11 electoral blocs, where previously all members of the House of Representative were elected from (multi-member) districts . Voters cast a ballot for a specific candidate for their district, as well as for a party for their electoral bloc, which together contribute the remaining 180 members of the House of Reps. As a result, a strong national showing only guarantees you a portion of the 180 proportional "electoral bloc" votes - meaning that winning individual seats is key. The LDP has dominated the single-member districts for generations, in part because of the normal power of incumbency, which seems to particularly robust in this case.
Looking a bit deeper into the results, it turns out that the DPJ has performed well at the national level for some time, even winning a plurality of the proportionally distributed seats in 2003.
However, it was not until 2009 that the DPJ was able to pick off a significant number of LDP-held single-constituency seats and take the overall majority, while at the same time expanding their strength in the proportional "electoral blocs"
The new administration under presumptive Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has promised to parlay their resounding win into a number of reforms in Japan. Given the poor performance of the Japanese economy, and continued public dissatisfaction with the pace of foreign policy reform, there are many things for the new government to tackle. We will take a closer look at what this means for US-Japan relations and politics in a future article.
In the meantime, we can summarize the strategy of the DPJ/Hatoyama government with the following few points:
1. Domestic issues: While the election included elements of foreign policy, it is clear that Hatoyama is focused on reform at home, including traditional moderate left priorities of minimum wage, worker protections, and subsidized education costs.
2. Reform relations with US and region: Following fifty years of relatively stable expectations on both sides of the Pacific, Japan is ready for closer cooperation with regional partners like China, Korea, and south-east Asia. At the same time, Hatoyama promises to review the relationship, particularly regarding the military presence, of the US and allies.
3. Government efficacy: The DPJ has spoken widely of decentralization and transparency in government, something that they alleged the LDP was poorly deficient in.
Moving forward, we should expect to see a focus on more "democratic socialist" style policies in Japan, while maintaining relatively low taxes and OECD-type foreign policy goals. The key question for observers is whether this is the beginning of a path of reform and change in Japanese political culture, or if perhaps this election simply confirms a change that began in the mid-1990s and early 2000s and was not brought to fruition until this year.
Given the history of rewarding political stability and steady progress -- we saw that the DPJ victory was portended by strong national showings beginning in 2000 and 2003 -- it seems more likely to be the second. Rather than a flash in the pan, like the brief 1993 overthrow of the LDP, we are more likely to see another 5-10 years of slow but important political and societal adjustment and change in Japan, this time with the very conservative LDP on the sidelines.
Correction: The first version of this article did not well explain the change in electoral system that occurred in 1994, which has now been adjusted. --- Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com
These having been a slow couple of weeks in politics, I've been trying to educate myself a little bit on the very fascinating debate surronding high-speed rail, which received $8 billion in funding in the stimulus package. I've come to some fairly substantive conclusions that I hope to share with you over the next week or two -- but in the meantime, it's worth thinking about how Americans travel currently.
One fascinating statistic, for instance, which I found in a 2001 survey by the Department of Transportation: about 90 percent of Americans' trips of 50 miles are more are made by personal vehicle rather by plane or by other means.
Now, this somewhat oversells the story: trip frequency resembles a gravity function, with trips becoming exponentially less likely with increasing distance. Of all trips at a one-way distance of 50 miles or more, the average distance traveled is only about 260 miles, and the median is closer to 100. Distances of that magnitude are fairly easily negotiable by car.
Even among truly long-distance trips with a one-way distance of between 500-1000 miles, however, a majority (54 percent) are made by car, versus 42 percent by air. Taking the raw data from the survey and using it to plot a smooth function, we wind up with the following:
The breakeven point here is at about 875 miles -- that's when a typical American is equally likely to make a trip by plane as by car. (Note: the chart above excludes the small percentage of trips that are made by bus, train or other means.)
875 miles happens to be about the travel distance from St. Louis to New York City. To me, it seems pretty insane, under most circumstances, for a St. Louisan to choose to drive his trip to New York rather than to fly it.
Let's consider, indeed, the costs of flying from St. Louis to New York. Imagine that we have a solo traveler making a three-day business trip and staying at a hotel in Midtown Manhattan:
* The prevailing price of a non-stop, round-trip ticket from St. Louis to New York these days is about $250. * In addition, assuming a 3-night stay, you'll pay about $35 in long-term parking fees at Lambert Airport in St. Louis. * Assuming a 20-mile trip to and from your home in St. Louis to the airport, you'll also spend the equivalent of about $15 in mileage costs to make this trip to and from the local airport (I'll explain in moment how I calculate this number). * A cab from LaGuardia to Midtown Manhattan wil run you about $40, assuming some traffic. You have to take a cab both to and from LaGuardia, so this is a total of perhaps $80. * Finally, once you're in Manhattan, let's assume that you'll incur about $75 in additional transit fees (cab fares and public transit) that you could have avoided if you'd had your car with you.
This works out to a total of $455.
Now, how much would it cost to drive from St. Louis to New York?
* The AAA estimates that the cost to drive a typical American sedan is about 52 cents per mile. However, this includes some fixed costs -- like insurance -- that don't depend on how frequently you drive. If we strip these out, the true, marginal cost of driving is about 36c/mile. An 875-mile one-way journey equals a 1,750-mile roundtrip, which means that it will cost you the equivalent of $630 to operate your car for this length of time. * You'll also have to park your car for three nights. If you're fairly lucky, you might be able to get away with doing this for $70 in a Midtown Manhattan garage. * Finally, you'll need to drive your own car around Manhattan as desired. Let's say that another 15 miles go on your odometer as a result; this comes at a cost of about $5.
The cost of driving to and from St. Louis is $705. So you're already paying about $250 more to drive than you would to fly.
And that's before considering the time savings from flying. Certainly, there are a lot of "hidden" time costs associated with air travel. You'll have to arrive at the airport about an hour early to board early and get through security. It might take you half-an-hour to drive to the airport, and another half-hour to drive from the airport to your hotel once you've arrived at LaGuardia. You'll need to wait a quarter-hour or so to pick up your luggage, and maybe another 15 minutes or so to arrange local transit. Let's also build in another 15-minute fudge factor for delays. All of this, in addition to the listed flight time of about 2.5 hours (which already includes an ample allowance of tarmac time), means that the door-to-door journey will probably take you something like 5-5.5 hours.
But driving from St. Louis to New York, assuming an average travel speed of 65 MPH, will take you about 13 hours. If you value your time at $30 an hour, the net cost of driving rather than flying to St. Louis works out to the equivalent of another $260. That makes flying roughly a 2:1 bargain over driving: $475 in time and expenses versus $970.
Now, certainly, a one-size-fits-all approach isn't perfect here. If, for instance, this is a personal rather than a business trip and you have your kids along with you, driving will be much more competitive. It's not particuarly more expensive to drive four people 875 miles than to drive one (unless you're considering the extra time wasted), whereas each additional passenger requires you to purchase a separate airline ticket. If you're uncomfortable using taxis and public transit, meanwhile -- or were traveling to a city that didn't have them in such abundance as NYC -- you'd probably have to rent a car instead, which is a pretty big marginal expense.
Still, I'd expect the numbers for most 875-mile trips to be slanted fairly heavily in favor of air travel -- but instead, Americans are just as likely to drive this distance as to fly. There are, I believe, two reasons for this.
The first has to do with the nature of people's mental accounting. When people think about the costs of driving to St. Louis to New York, they probably think about the price of gas, but don't go much beyond that. In fact, gas is a relatively small piece of the puzzle: about 10c per mile. It's the other costs -- maintenance, tires, and especially depreciation -- that are the killer. Consider: if you buy a car for $25,000 that you're hoping to operate for 100,000 miles, this means that your paying about 25c per mile of travel. You probably forget about this cost since you've paid for your car up-front. But the 1,750-mile round trip from St. Louis to New York is 1,750 miles sooner that you'll have to replace your vehicle -- this alone costs you $437.50, almost $200 more than the round-trip airfare!
The other factor is that a lot of Americans don't like flying -- they either find the experience unpleasant or are afraid of it. A 1999 poll from ABC News found that 14 percent of Americans are very afraid of air travel, and another 29 percent are somewhat afraid of it. These Americans take substantially fewer journeys by air than do those who don't fear flying: a reasonable extrapolation from ABC's numbers is that there's about 20 percent less aggregate air traffic than there otherwise would be if nobody were afraid of it.
In addition, some people might not be afraid of air travel, but may nevertheless find the experience unpleasant. A 2008 survey from the Travel Industry Association found that about 41 million air travel round-trips were avoided because people found the experience irksome: this is about 10 percent of the total number of domestic round-trips in a typical year. Thus, between the fear and other unpleasantness that people associate with commercial air travel, it occurs about 30 percent less often than it otherwise might.
What does this mean for something high-speed trains? It could be either good news or bad news. If a people are driving more than they "should" because they don't like air travel, then trains could pick off quite a bit of that traffic. A "true" high-speed train from St. Louis to New York, traveling at 150 MPH, could make the journey in just under 6 hours, which is quite competitive with air travel once the additional door-to-door costs of air transit are considered (although there are some incumbent to rail travel too). And many of the hang-ups that people associate with air travel, indeed, aren't likely to transfer to rail. Train travel can often be quite comfortable, for instance, and acrophobes won't have to worry about being suspended 30,000 feet above the ground in a flying cigar box. On the other hand, if people are attached to driving for "irrational" reasons -- they find it romantic or improperly evaluate expenses like depreciation -- rail travel might not make much of a dent.
This past Friday, I woke up at the crack of dawn to do an interview for Fox and Friends. As I walked into the studio on the ground floor of the News Corporation building, a producer, the urgency apparent on her face, handed me a printout of an article indicating that Barack Obama's approval rating had dropped to 50 percent in the latest Gallup poll, which is where it remains as of this morning.
This is modestly unorthodox, for what it's worth. I've done a few dozen television interviews now and have never before been handed a piece of paper with what I guess are supposed to be that day's discussion points. But this is a morning show and Obama's approval numbers were not a topic that I'd discussed the previous night with the producers; they wanted to make sure I was prepared. No harm there, I suppose.
The thing is, though, that Obama's approval rating haven fallen to 50 percent is not particularly newsworthy. There's no reason that a drop from 51 percent to 50 percent, or from 50 percent to 49 percent, means anything particularly more than a drop from 58 percent to 57 percent, or from 37 percent to 36 percent.
First of all, although I'm on record as being quite pessimistic about what's liable to happen to the Democrats in 2010, odds are that Obama's approval will have to be somewhat worse than 50 percent for the Democrats to lose the House. The relationship between Presidential approval and his party's fate at the midterm elections is quite linear. An approval rating of 50 percent would typically be associated with a loss of about 26 seats:
The Democrats, however, currently have a 78-seat advantage in the House, meaning that it would take a 39-seat loss for them to lose control of the chamber. The over-under for how unpopular Obama would have to be in order to be more likely than not to cost his party those seats is not 50 percent -- it's probably more like 42 percent. Now, certainly, there's some margin for uncertainty there: Dwight Eisenhower's Republicans, in '58, lost nearly 50 seats even though his approval was in the high 50's. But the point is, there's nothing particularly magical about Obama being above or below 50.
Likewise, Obama can probably afford an approval rating below 50 percent and still be a favorite to win re-election in 2012. George W. Bush won in 2004 with an approval rating of 48 percent, and Harry Truman won in what was considered a huge upset in 1948 with an approval number that had last been tested at 39 percent, although that poll was several months old at the time of the election.
Recent trial-heat numbers, indeed, have shown Obama beating several Republican challengers by margins ranging from 5 to 15 points, even as his approval rating hovers around 50:
Against Sarah Palin, frankly, Obama could conceivably win re-election with an approval rating well into the 40's and possibly even into the 30's. He'll have less margin of error, potentially, if the GOP nominates someone like Mitt Romney (although if I were a Republican strategist, I'd still be holding out hope for none-of-the-above). But again, there's nothing particularly special that happens at 50 percent. Something like 45 percent, which is where Gerald Ford was when he lost to Jimmy Carter by two points in 1976, might be the more relevant number. A quick-and-dirty probit analysis, based on the dataset you see above and placing slightly more weight on recent elections, puts the breakeven number at 44 percent, and suggests that a President at 50 percent approval is as much as a 90 percent bet to win a second term:
This is not to suggest that Democrats should not be worried. They absolutely should be: they should be worried that Obama's approval numbers will dip even lower. But, if you held a Presidential election today, Barack Obama would almost certainly be retained, and if you held a Congressional election today, the Democrats would quite probably keep their majorities.
As for that interview, incidentally, it was one of the more aggravating experiences that I've had in my brief "career" in politics. The host misread his teleprompter (that's the generous interpretation), introducing me as someone who had correctly predicted "29 out of 50" states last November, and then recited a series of pre-spun questions, seeming flummoxed afterward that I hadn't agreed verbatim with his talking points and complaining aloud that the very smart conservative who was supposed to have been on the panel with me (a last-minute cancellation) hadn't been there (to "balance" me, I suppose). Then as I was leaving the studio past a huge trailer serving Johnsonville Brats, they launched into a segment about Britney Spears and Alzhemier's. There was just no pretense of trying to do anything even vaguely resembling the news. I'm not reflexively anti-FOX; in fact, I'd had a couple of good experiences last year on Shepherd Smith and on their business channel. But as for their morning program: Wow. I've never met people more terrified of what might happen if they actually tried to engage in a rational discussion.
