The Weekly Standard's John McCormack is a Socialist or Something

In a post entitled, "White House: Opposing Obama's Olympics Lobbying Is Unpatriotic or Something", John McCormack, the deputy editor of the Weekly Standard, writes

I was rooting for Rio. The United States has hosted the Olympics eight times before. Not a single South American country has ever hosted the games. Isn't it only fair for Brazil to get its day in the sun?

Why, yes, that does seem fair. South America is not a particularly large continent; the whole continent has only about 30 percent more people than the United States does. But for one of its great cities -- Rio, Buenos Aires, Santiago -- to have never hosted an Olympic Games is a little jarring. Cheers to Rio, which will be a fine host.

On the other hand, doesn't this sound a little, uh, redistributive? The United States pays in slightly more than half of all Olympics broadcasting rights fees, which in turn makes up about half of the Olypmics' budget. Most of the balance is paid for by corporate sponsorships -- but six of the Olympics' twelve major sponsors (Coca-Cola, McDonald's, General Electric, Kodak, Johnson & Johnson and Visa) are based in the United States. (All supporting documentation is here). Why should those hard-working United States corporations and television networks have their money redistributed to a bunch of Greeks or Brazilians or Chinese? We should host the Olympics every other year, dammit.

OK, so the preceding was sarcastic. The truth is, the Olympics are the sort of prize that you might not want to win. The financial windfall they produce for their host cities often fails to outweigh the cost, and some cities like Montreal and Athens have ended up in debt as a result. The requirements imposed by the IOC, which fully leverages its bargaining power, are fairly ridiculous: Chicago, which recently spent $600 million to renovate the 61,500-seat Soldier Field, was going to have to build a new facility just to host the Opening Ceremony because a football stadium evidently isn't big enough.

But the fact is, we probably wouldn't be hearing conservatives like Mr. McCormack "Rooting for Rio" if John McCain had been elected President, and he were lobbying for Phoenix's Olympic bid instead. And we certainly wouldn't be hearing many of them -- including McCormack and his colleagues -- erupt in cheers after the American bid had lost.

Nor do I think you'd have seen liberals reacting that way. Although there has also been some liberal criticism of the Olympic bid, and some liberal sentiment that the United States has been a Very Bad Boy and doesn't deserve the Olympics, I honestly don't think you'd have seen the Netroots Nation convention burst into cheers once the Phoenix were rejected*.

For Obama to have gone to Copenhagen to pitch the event may have been a mistake -- a few phone calls from Washington might have had 98 percent of the impact for 2 percent of the exposure. But he went in his capacity as an American President, and not as a partisan. That the conservative intelligentsia reacted giddily to news of the Americans losing is telling. It's telling of a movement that was long ago knocked off its intellectual moorings and has lost the capacity to think about what people outside the room think about. Sometimes -- certainly on the health care debate, very probably on the bailouts question -- conservatives back into something approaching mainstream American sentiment and can cause Obama and his allies a lot of problems. But any movement which also criticizes the President for giving a speech to schoolchildren, which cheers when the United States loses its Olympic bid, is mostly just engaged in the business of throwing a bunch of Kaká at the wall and seeing what sticks. I don't know whether it's unpatriotic -- but it's pretty freakin' dumb.



* Although if you change 'McCain' to 'Palin' in my counterfactual, and 'Phoenix' to 'Anchorage' -- presumably this would be a Winter Games -- I'll grant you that it might have been a little closer.

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Disband the IOC!

Congratulation to Rio de Janeiro, which will host the 2016 Summer Olympics, having beaten out Madrid, Tokyo, and my former hometown of Chicago for the honor. Rio will be a worthy place to hold the Games, as any of these cities would have been. Nevertheless, it's worth considering whether the IOC is as just as it could be and what role this played in the defeat of Chicago and the other cities.

Here are the home continents of the 108 current IOC members:



Europe, needless to say, has a very healthy representation. Although North America has 12 percent of the seats, the United States itself has just 2 out of 108 -- as many as Morocco, and fewer than tiny countries such as the Netherlands (3) or Switzerland (5) or the much less populous Australia (3). The United States is not the only country which is underrepresented -- China, which represents about one-fifth of the world's population, also has just 2 seats, although the number rises to 4 if you count Hong Kong and Taiwan. Japan has just 2 seats, as does Brazil; India, the second-most populous country in the world, has only 1.

Aggregating things back up at the continental level, we see that it's Asia that is especially underrepresented:



Arguably, however, this is not the right metric. We can look at something like the number of participating athletes in Beijing instead:



This is quite a bit more proportionate. Likewise with the number of medal winners:



On the other hand, it's money that makes the world go round -- especially in the Olympics -- so perhaps rights fees should be taken into account instead. And there, North America takes the cake -- the United States itself pays in about half of all broadcast rights fees for the Summer Olympics.

If we average these four metrics, we get the following:



Asia and North America can make a good case for more representation; Europe and Africa should probably have less. It's extremely bizarre, for instance, that Africa has almost as much representation on the IOC as Asia when Asia has about four times as many people, sends twice as many athletes to the games, and wins six times as many medals.

If we were using this formula to determine the number of seats for the United States in particular, it would argue for 20 seats of the 108 -- not the 2 they actually hold. And were that the case, Chicago would very possibly have won the Olympics, rather than being the first country eliminated. Here were the voting totals by round:

We see that Rio's total exploded in Round 2 after Chicago was eliminated -- almost all of the people who had voted for Chicago originally transfered their votes to Rio -- and then again in Round 3 after Tokyo was ousted (somewhat bizarrely, Tokyo actually lost two votes from Round 1 to Round 2 after Chicago was eliminated). Had Rio been the first eliminated rather than Chicago, those votes might have gone to Chicago instead. And, obviously, if there were a more proportionate number of delegates from the United States, Chicago's chances would have been very strong.

The headline aside, the IOC probably does not need to be disbanded. But we should recognize that the organization is in essence a cartel, and sets the rules as it pleases -- and has goals that appear to be pretty far removed from any sort of proportionate representation of its member countries. A number of relatively obvious reforms could be adopted:

1) Apportion IOC membership on a formula basis, in reflection of population, participation, revenues, and possibly other objective metrics;
2) Publish the votes of individual IOC members;
3) Adopt a true Instant runoff voting system, rather than let the delegates switch their votes from round to round, which increases the likelihood of gamesmanship and deal-making;
4) Adopt a rule, as FIFA uses for the World Cup, that the Summer Olympics cannot be held on the same continent on successive occasions (something which has not happened since 1948/1952 anyway, when London and Helsinki hosted the games in consecutive Olympiads).

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Proportional Voting? Well, Kinda

People have long criticized the process electing the US President, where a candidate that receives the most popular votes can lose, and the incentives for geographic campaigning and representation are quite skewed. While some have called the debate impractical, the 2000 results proved that the issue was far from academic. Nonetheless, the Electoral College system, while threatened by alternative state-based measures, remains the law of the land.

In Germany, where the recent Federal election ushered in a centre-right majority, proportional voting at the Federal level is protected in the country's Basic Law (effectively, the constitution). In fact, the parliamentary voting system is designed to both to ensure proportional power of parties (and therefore the chancellorship and ministries) as well as including districts where members of parliament are directly responsible to their constituents.

As such, in theory, the Chancellor should always be selected from a party or coalition that has received the majority of the votes. For example, the parties of the grand coalition that has governed until the present earned a combined 69.4 percent of the national vote in 2005. The CDU/CSU, having a slightly larger share, was allowed to name the head of government.

In 2009, however, the clash between district-based seats and the overall popular vote (done by party list) resulted in a significant shift in the allocation of Bundestag seats -- almost enough to change the result. In constituency voting, shown above (from then official, provisional returns), the CDU and CSU absolute crushed all other parties at the district level. Of the 299 district seats in the Bundestag, the Christian Democrats picked up 173, while the CSU won every seat in Bavaria, for a total of 218 of the 299, or 73 percent. The Social Democrats won just 64 seats -- a mere 21 percent. The Free Democrats, who will join the new government, won not a single seat, while the Greens and The Left won 17 seats between them.

However, in terms of national popular vote -- tallied and allocated at the State level -- the results are much less impressive for the center-right.


The CDU/CSU plus FDP partnership pulled only 48.4 percent of the national vote, which by Basic Law regulations, entitles them to just 48.4 of the total seats in the final Bundestag - which ostensibly should have 598 members.

Theoretically, at this point the 299 party list members of the Parliament should be allocated to give the appropriate proportionality in the final accounting: With the CSU/CDU due 33.8 percent of the 598 (202 member) they should get enough additional seats to get up to that margin, while the SPD needs to be "topped-up" to 137 seats.

However, CDU/CSU have already earned 218 seats from the district voting and the system, of course, does not allow for seats to be taken away from a member who won the district (or forcing him or her to change party). Therefore, additional "overhang" seats are added to the parliament, in this case raising the total number of Bundestag members to 622 (24 overhang seats).

To add an extra wrinkle, party list seats (based on the popular vote) are allocated at the State level, rather than nationally. So in Bavaria, for example, the CSU won every constituency by plurality earning 45 seats, the popular vote entitled then to just 42.6 percent of the 90 seats (38 seats), meaning 7 overhang seats are required.

Overhang seats in hand, the CSU/CDU earned 239 seats of the 622 total, or 38.4 percent of the parliament (over-performing their popular vote count by nearly 5 points), while the Free Democrats pulled their proportional 93 seats (15 percent of the total), all earned from the party lists. While the popular vote should have kept the coalition below the 50 percent majority line, except the Black and Yellow coalition walked away with more than 53 percent of the seats and a comfortable majority*.

This will likely be the last time this happens, however. In 2008, the top court in Germany ordered that the system be repaired such that proportionality is restored. The Bundestag has until 2011 (two years before the next Federal Election) to get it sorted out.

Conversely, in the US, "overhang votes" for President -- where winning constituencies (states) is rewarded rather than winning popular votes nationally -- do not seem likely to be dealt with in the near future.

In the German case, it seems certain that Angela Merkel would have retained her post as Chancellor with or without the overhang situation. However, without those extra seats she would have needed to find an additional coalition partner had a sliver thin margin - possibly moving the government towards the center. While no-one will ever accuse her of "stealing" the election, as was widely said following the 2000 results in the US, it's clear that she got a powerful advantage.

---
*Update: A small, but important element was neglected in the first drafting of this article. In the party list allocation, parties that receive less than 5 percent of the vote are disqualified from receiving any proportional seats. (6 percent of the vote fell into this category, including the NPD and Pirate party). This meant that the original article overestimated the impact of the overhang seats. In fact, they were not needed for the CDU/CSU plus FDP majority.
---
Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

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Analysis: Gay Marriage Ban is Underdog in Maine

Back in April, I conducted an analysis of the prospects of a gay marriage ban becoming law in each of the 50 states. The analysis found that support for gay marriage bans was strongly tied to two factors: the degree of religiosity in a state, as measured by 2008 Gallup tracking surveys, and the year that the initiative was up for vote -- marriage bans have lost support at a rate of about 2 percent per year, ceteris paribus. That analysis concluded that a Maine is one of 11 states that would probably vote to reject a ban on gay marriage if a referendum were held this year.

Mainers, in fact, will soon have a chance to test this proposition. In November, they will go to the polls to vote on Question 1; a yes vote would overturn a law passed earlier this year by the state's legislature that permits gays and lesbians to get married in the state.

I decided to re-visit my model, which consists of a relatively simple data set of all previous anti-gay marriage initiatives. 31 of 32 such initiatives have passed, the sole exception being Arizona Proposition 107, which failed in 2006, although Arizona's voters decided two years later to approve a similar measure that limited its scope to marriage rather than civil unions. I've expanded the model to include a new variable, which -- pursuant to the Arizona case -- is whether the initiative sought to ban civil unions in addition to marriage. (Although I'd given this a cursory look before, I evidently wasn't careful enough, because it turns out to be highly statistically significant). I then placed the initiatives into a regression model, which yields the following results:



Bangay is the percentage of the vote in favor of the marriage ban; this is the dependent variable. The independent variables are year, which is the number of years elapsed since 1998, relig, which is the percentage of the state's residents that consider religion "an important part of [their] daily lives", and civil, which is whether the initiative sought to ban civil unions in addition marriage.

All three variables are highly statistically significant. Support for the marriage ban rises nearly one-for-one with religiosity; it falls by about two points (actually, 1.9) for each passing year, and it falls by 5-6 points if the amendment seeks to ban civil unions in addition to marriage.

Maine is the third least-religious state in the country, according to Gallup, with only 46 percent of that state's residents saying religion is an important part of their daily lives. That bodes well for those who are hoping the initiative fails; the comparable fraction in California, which passed Prop 8 last year, is 57 percent. We're also another year down the line on a type of initiative that pretty reliably loses support with each passing election. On the other hand, Question 1 would not seek to overturn civil unions, which gives it a better chance of passing.

Throw Maine's numbers into the model, and we come up with an estimated level of support for the ban of 43.5 percent, with 56.5 percent opposed. In other words, the model's prediction is that the ban will fail. The standard error of the forecast (not the margin of error, which is larger) is 5.2 points. This implies that the marriage ban only has about an 11 percent chance of passing.

But don't start counting your (gay) chickens yet, because there are a couple of additional circumstances that are relatively unique to Maine. One is that this is a standalone initiative in an off-year election in which voters will have few other things to consider. What sort of electorate will turn out? This precedent has previously occurred twice, in Texas and Kansas, both of which voted on marriage bans in 2005. That Texas and Kansas voted to approve the marriage bans is no surprise, but the margin was somewhat wider than the model predicted -- 76 percent in Texas, rather than the prediction of 71 percent, and 70 percent in Kansas, rather than the prediction of 67 percent.

Arguably, that implies that an marriage ban will gain about another 4 points' worth of support if it occurs in an off-year election. If that is the case, the projected support for the marriage ban is 47.5 percent, which means that it has a 32 percent chance of passing -- about one in three.

It is debatable, however, whether the same ought to hold true in Maine. In Texas and Kansas, which are conservative states, the base electorate is particularly conservative, and it's the base that comes out to vote in off-year elections. But Maine is a fairly liberal state, and it's not clear where the base lies there. In 2006, a mid-term election, 26 percent of the Maine electorate identified itself as liberal, and 26 percent as conservative. In 2008, with a much larger turnout, the numbers were essentially unchanged: 27 percent liberal and 28 percent conservative. On the other hand, while 27 percent of Maine's voters identified themselves as having no religion or an "other" religion in 2008, only 20 percent did in the lower-turnout year of 2006. On balance, I suspect the off-year status of the election is slightly more likely to help Question 1 than to hurt it -- old people vote in off-year elections, for instance, and old people mostly don't like gay marriage. But the effects are not what they might be if we were talking about a state like Oklahoma.

Another factor is that this is the first time that a state's voters will be considering on a gay marriage bill that was actually affirmed by the state legislature. With the exception of Prop 8 -- which was a response to court rather than legislative action -- all of the other marriage initiatives have been preemptive in nature. In addition, unlike virtually all other initiatives, Question 1 would not seek to ban gay marriage in the state Constitution; it would merely overturn the legislature's decision. I figure that the first contingency is probably slightly unfavorable to Question 1 second is probably favorable, but this is fairly speculative.

There have also been three polls conducted on the gay marriage ban, although one is somewhat out of date:



On average, the 'No on 1' position -- which would preserve gay marriage -- appears to be about 3 points ahead. It trails slightly, however, in the only poll of likely voters, which is the one from Research 2000 / Daily Kos.

Time to play oddsmaker: I'd lay about 3 to 1 against the marriage ban passing. But it's liable to fairly close -- clearly a winnable campaign for conservatives and a losable one for liberals, especially if the sort of complacency sets in that we saw in California*.


* With that said, the model predicts that Prop 8 should have gotten 54 percent of the vote in California when it actually got 52 percent. So it's not clear if the No on 8 campaign deserves quite the flak that it's gotten.

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Senate Rankings, September 2009 Lightning Round Edition

Well, there are all of about five hours left in September, and I haven't gotten the monthly Senate rankings out to you. What follows is an abbreviated version; it's been a relatively dull month, besides, for movement in most of these Senate races. We'll be back with a more full-fledged update in October.

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

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

1. Missouri (R-Open) -- Rasmussen has the race tied which is not bad news for Robin Carnahan considering that they've generally had pessimistic numbers for Democrats in this cycle. Not sure that Roy Blunt says "change" in what might be a fairly anti-establishment election. Then again, neither does Carnahan -- but you'd rather be a credible state-level official in this election than a member of Congress.

2. Nevada (D-Reid) -- He's now tied with or trailing what amount to generic Republican opponents in many polls. He'll have money and organizational firepower, but not sure if it will be enough -- he's a big target -- and I don't see what narrative angle he's going to take to turn things around.

3. Ohio (R-Open) -- Numbers have been fairly static, generally continuing to show the Democrats in a slightly stronger position than Rob Portman. As with Roy Blunt, I'm not sure that Portman is the right kind of challenger for this cycle, although certainly he'll be formidable organizationally. The top four races are very close and hard to distinguish from one another.

4. Connecticut (D-Dodd) -- Some slight abatement of his negatives in the latest Quinnipiac poll, although Rob Simmons, the most electable of his challengers, appears to be cleaning up in the GOP primary field.

5. Colorado (D-Bennet) -- Jane Norton's entry into the race creates real problems for Bennet. I may be jumping the gun since there's only been one poll with Norton listed (Rasmussen, which showed her with a 9-point lead), but this is a state that has grown more skeptical than most of Obama and not the sort of race where you want to be running a rookie.

6. New Hampshire (Open) -- Polling suggests that Kelly Ayotte is the very slight favorite, reversing the dynamic we observed before she entered the race. A libertarianish GOP message ought to play fairly well in this state. I've grown cautiously pessimsitic for Paul Hodes.

7. Kentucky (R-Open)

8. Arkansas (D-Lincoln) -- Polls are all over the place, but Arkansas has turned red in a hurry and Lincoln may be on the verge of triangulating herself out of office with her waffling positions on health care and other issues.

9. Illinois (D-Burris) -- Continue to think Mark Kirk is slightly overrated. Even if it's a fairly bad cycle for Democrats, not sure it will be bad enough for them to start losing open-seat races in the President's home state.

10. North Carolina (R-Burr) -- SOS Elaine Marshall has entered the race and trails Richard Burr, but Burr's numbers are well below 50 percent.

11. Delaware (D-Open) -- Beginning to get a little late for Mike Castle to enter. Although Beau Biden would be an underdog against him, he'll be no pushover and a half-hearted effort might not do it.

12. Pennsylvania (D-Specter) -- New Quinnipiac numbers should be coming out tomorrow. For the time being, demoting this because of a Franklin & Marsrhall poll that put Specter 8 points ahead (although with high undecideds). Clearly Specter is vulnerable, but I will need to see more consistent polling evidence before I'm persuaded that Pat Toomey is mainstream enough to capture 50%+1 of the vote. With that said, you can make the case that Specter comes up short relative to Joe Sestak on electability dimensions.

13. Texas (R-Open?)

14. Louisiana (R-Vitter)

15. Iowa (R-Grassley) -- His numbers are falling in a hurry -- probably not enough to make him truly vulnerable -- but we might have said similar things about Blanche Lincoln or Chris Dodd a couple of months ago. Worth a recruitment effort on behalf of Democrats, especially considering the slight possibility he might get fed up and retire.

16. North Dakota (D-Dorgan) -- Not ready to demote this yet, but Hoeven's purported interest is again starting to look like more of a bluff, and Dorgan has not put himself in the spotlight on health care in the same way that Kent Conrad has.

17. Florida (R-Open)

18. New York (D-Gillibrand) -- Variations on theme: Pataki and Giuliani are running out of time to make their decisions, particularly in a state where you're liable to need $20-$30 million to run a viable campaign.

19. Georgia (R-Isakson)

20. Hawaii (D-Inoyue)

21. Wisconsin (D-Feingold)

22. California (D-Boxer) -- Rasmussen polled this race again, showing a 9-point lead for Boxer; their July numbers that had her just four points ahead of Carly Fiorina now look like more of a fluke. The main question is whether Fiorina decides to self-finance and creates a money suck for Democrats. I'm on the record as not being that impressed by Firoina as a political entity. I also want to go on the record as being unimpressed by the customer service at Hewlett-Packard, her former company, but we'll save that complaint for a tweet or something.

23. Arizona (R-McCain) -- Finally some polling numbers out; PPP shows McCain with somewhat tepid approval numbers, but doesn't show any of the potential Democratic candidates coming particularly close -- certainly not close enough to get anyone like Gabby Giffords interested in a kamikaze mission. Still, McCain has been very quiet, and it might be wise to hedge some against the possibility of a last-minute retirement.

24. Massachusetts (D-Open) -- Don't really see this one happening for Republicans, but it's too early to write off their prospects completely.

25. South Carolina (R-DeMint) -- State Sen. Brad Hutto, considered a moderately viable opponent, has decided against challenging DeMint.

26. Oklahoma (R-Coburn)

27. Alaska (R-Murkowski)

28. Kansas (R-Open)

29. Maryland (D-Mikulski)

30. Washington (D-Murray)

31. Alabama (R-Shelby)

32. South Dakota (R-Thune)

33. Indiana (D-Bayh)

34. Vermont (D-Leahy)

35. Oregon (D-Wyden)

36. Utah (R-Bennett)

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

38. Idaho (R-Crapo)

DELISTED -- Nevada (R-Ensign). Almost certainly, he's going to be near the top of the charts in 2012, but the scandal seems to have blown over enough that it's not worth worrying about this race for 2010 purposes unless some further, Andrew Brietbart-esque news breaks.

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Can NoVa Save Deeds?

Creigh Deeds is bidding to become the third Democrat in a row to win the Virginia governorship. Though he has made progress since mid-summer, he is trailing Republican nominee Bob McDonnell. The growth of suburban Northern Virginia helped Mark Warner and Tim Kaine in 2001 and 2005, respectively. Can recent growth in the Washington-area suburbs boost Deeds, too?

Maybe, but the growth rate of the NoVa counties is not going to be enough. To explain what I mean, let's first start by comparing the regional performance of those past three Democratic nominees: Don Beyer in 1997, Warner and Kaine.


The figure above compares, by region*, the two-party vote shares of the three Dem nominees in all three possible pairwise combinations: Warner relative to Beyer four years earlier; Kaine relative to Beyer eight years earlier; and Kaine relative to Warner four years earlier. Both Warner and Kaine outperformed Beyer's poor performance in all nine regions of the state: Warner made larger strides in what you might call the more Republican regions of the state (more rural, less-populated and/or further-from-DC); Kaine made larger strides in the more Democratic regions (Northern Virginia, Tidewater, Richmond areas).

The geo-demographic difference in the Warner and Kaine coalitions is apparent when comparing them head-to-head: Kaine's two-party share was worse than Warner's in six of the state's nine regions, yet Kaine not only won but won by a wider margin than Warner because Kaine really pushed up his margins in the big and/or faster-growing Democratic regions of the state, most notably the 10 Northern Virginia jurisdictions (five counties, five independent cities). I have been in a few arguments with Mudcat Saunders, leading advocate of a rural strategy for Democrats and a consultant who claims that Democrats can only win when they appeal broadly to rural, white voters. This chart demonstrates that Mudcat and others like him are wrong: Kaine targeted a more suburban and multi-racial coalition in 2005 and won bigger than Warner did in 2005.

Northern Virginia's growth still outpaces that of the rest of the state. Looking at final registration statistics from 2005 and the most current data (as of Aug 31) this year, shown in the table below, there has been an 11.6 percent growth in registered voters statewide. Of the three regions where Kaine outperformed Warner, growth since 2005 has outpaced the statewide registration growth in two--Northern Virginia (13.1 percent) and the Richmond area (13.6), while the third (Tidewater, 11.2) grew slower. That's the good news for Deeds.


The bad news is that this growth is not as dramatic as might be useful to him. As the last two columns of the table show, NoVa and Richmond have a larger share of registered voters than they did four years ago, but the increases are not that big. In fact, I calculated what the registration changes alone would mean if Deeds got the same share of the two-party vote in each county/city and region this November as Kaine did four years ago. Kaine beat Republican Jerry Kilgore by 113,615 votes; again, using the same county-level two-party splits, Deeds, thanks to the registration gains, would win by 131,146 votes, a net gain of 17,821. That hypothetical increase is more than accounted for by an expected pickup of 132,382 votes from Northern Virginia's 10 jurisdictions alone.

But let's keep in mind that the above projections assume that the newly-registered voters in all parts of the state will turn out to vote at the same rates, and then vote the same way, as the people who registered and voted in their respective counties four years ago. This is not merely improbable; it is impossible. What the 17,821 potential net vote gain total tells us is that, all else equal, the registration growth in the respective areas of the state would hypothetically add 17,821 votes to Deeds total (or, perhaps more accurately, Kaine's total in a re-run of the 2005 race using the 2009 electorate). To put that into fuller context, if we assume an 11.6 percent increase in statewide turnout, given the registration increase since 2005 at that rate, the two-party vote total will jump from 1,938,269 votes in 2005 to 2,242,288 this November. An additional projected net 17,821 votes translates to less than a one-percent increase (.79 to be exact). That's the net boost Deeds can expect from projected regional-demographic changes in the state over the past four years, holding all all factors other than registration changes constant. It ain't much to bank on.

Meanwhile, I'm sure many readers have been barking at the screen while reading this post, shouting "How can you account for the registration changes that are attributable to Barack Obama's 2008 operation, which turned a state that went Republican in every presidential election since 1964 into a comfortable Democratic win in 2008--and thus are not necessarily transferable to Deeds?" Well yes, indeed, this is the big question. Forget the innumerable reasons why 2005 isn't 2009: Deeds isn't Kaine, McDonnell isn't Kilgore, the economy then isn't the economy now, etc. The big unknown here--and in New Jersey, and for the 2010 midterm races next year--is the degree to which voters delivered by the Obama machine are deliverable to other Democrats.

Frankly, I don't think Deeds can rely on the projected additional votes from post-2005 registration growth pulling him over the finish line, because so much of that growth was among Virginians who registered in order to vote for Obama--and many of those voters are not going to turnout this November without Obama and the presidential race as a draw. That was true for Kaine, of course, before most of the country outside Illinois could even identify Barack Obama.

I want to tinker around a bit more with the numbers I've collected, and look at them in conjunction with recent polling data. But that's for a future post(s).

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An Open Letter to Strategic Vision CEO David Johnson

Subject: couple questions
From: Nate Silver 
To: xxx@strategicvision.biz

Hi David,

I'm writing you for two reasons.

Firstly, I wanted to make sure that you had some 
decent contact information for me.  Was really 
looking forward to the lawsuit and figured you 
might be having trouble getting in touch. I'm
at this e-mail address -- xxxxxxxx@gmail.com, 
or at xxx-xxx-xxxx.

Secondly, I wanted to provide you an opportunity 
to clear the air about one singular fact.  What 
call center(s) have you used to conduct your 
public-facing polling?  For every call center that
you're willing to publicly disclose, up to a 
maximum of 5, I will donate $538 to Children's 
Healthcare of Atlanta (http://www.choa.org/).

Best wishes,
Nate Silver

cc: FiveThirtyEight.com

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Bad News for Public Option?

The Senate Finance Committee voted today on two amendments which attempted to insert a public option into its health care bill. Both amendments failed. The first amendment, sponsored by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, would have benchmarked the public option to Medicare rates. That amendment failed 15-8, with all Republicans joining Democrats Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, Bill Nelson, Tom Carper and Blanche Lincoln in opposition. The second amendment, a version sponsored by Chuck Schumer that would have created a level playing field for the public option, failed 13-10, with Carper and Nelson voting in favor but Lincoln, Baucus and Conrad remaining opposed.

The overall margins are probably about what we might have anticipated going in, but some of the individual votes were surprising. Baucus, who had told his constituents that he wanted a public option, voted against it, as did the waffling Lincoln. But Carper, who had suggested that he'd only vote for a public option with a trigger, supported Schumer's version, which did not include a trigger, as did another fence-sitter, Bill Nelson, who had made similar statements.

Here are a couple of relatively self-evident things I think we can conclude from these votes:

1) A "robust" public option like Rockefeller's, which sets reimbursement at Medicare plus five percent and lacks a trigger, almost certainly will not pass the Senate. That this version of the public option failed to obtain any of the five or six plausible "swing votes" suggests that it probably wouldn't receive the support of more than about 47-48 members of the chamber.

2) A weak public option may still get 50 votes in the Senate, although it almost certainly won't get 60. There are still plenty of reasonable whip counts under which you can get into the range of 50-53 votes for a weak public option. It is not clear, however, whether 50 votes or 60 votes will ultimately be required for the inclusion of a public option; this may very much be up to Harry Reid and the floor leadership.

3) Preventing the public option from charging Medicare rates may weaken it as much as adding a trigger. Nelson and Carper, who had indicated they'd support a public option only if it included a trigger, voted for the trigger-less version from Schmuer. This may reflect a point I had made a couple of weeks ago: it's not clear to me that a Schumer-type public option which lacks a trigger but must abide by "level playing field" provisions is any better than one that contains a trigger but could charge Medicare rates if it were enacted.

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Will GOP Outraise Dems in '09-'10?

The Washington Post's Paul Kane had a front-page story last Friday about Democratic hill committee fundraising struggles. Here's Kane:

Democratic political committees have seen a decline in their fundraising fortunes this year, a result of complacency among their rank-and-file donors and a de facto boycott by many of their wealthiest givers, who have been put off by the party's harsh rhetoric about big business.

The trend is a marked reversal from recent history, in which Democrats have erased the GOP's long-standing fundraising advantage. In the first six months of 2009, Democratic campaign committees' receipts have dropped compared with the same period two years earlier.

The vast majority of those declines were accounted for by the absence of large donors who, strategists say, have shut their checkbooks in part because Democrats have heightened their attacks on the conduct of major financial firms and set their sights on rewriting the laws that regulate their behavior...

Kane may well be right about the reasons for the decline. And maybe the Democratic committees will continue to struggle between now and next fall. But I suspect they will not be outraised when all is said and done--though I also doubt the Democrats' advantage in the two-party share of all dollars raised will be as big as it was last cycle.


For one thing, keeping pace with last cycle may simply be too much to ask. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee pummeled their Republican counterparts (the National Republican Senatorial Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee) in the 2007-08 cycle. As shown in the figure above, produced from FEC data reported here, the Dems' two-party share of national party monies has tended to lag well below 50%/50% parity--with the exception of 2003-04, when super rainmaker Terry McAuliffe catapulted Democratic National Committee fundraising to unprecedented levels. The DSCC, meanwhile, has been very competitive over the past decade, basically keeping pace with the RNSC until 2007-08, when the DSCC broke out to a roughly 5:3 ratio. Likewise, though overall less competitive, the DCCC consistently hovered for most the past decade at around 40% of all fundraising, then busted loose in 2007-08. Given how unpopular George W. Bush and Republicans were then, the Democratic fundraising explosion of 2007-08 may simply be unsustainable.

The 07-08 cycle was also, of course, the first with the Democrats as the new majority party. Here's Kane again:

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee was considered the party's best-run organization as it oversaw pickups of 14 Republican seats in 2006 and 2008. But through August, the DSCC had raised just $27.5 million, a drop of more than 25 percent, or $9.2 million, from the same point two years ago. While donations from special interest political action committees have increased, individual donors are disappearing at a rate that has alarmed party leaders: The DSCC's contributions from individuals was $18.5 million through August, a drop of $12.6 million, or nearly 40 percent, from two years earlier, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.

A midyear analysis by the FEC showed that the DSCC declines at that stage had come entirely from individuals who gave $10,000 or more, a small slice of overall contributors but a group that traditionally provides about half the committee's fundraising total. Through June, those individual donors' contributions had declined by more than 50 percent from 2007. The committee is running 12 percent behind its 2005 pace among large donors...

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which has been pitching itself to conservative donors as the only check against Obama's agenda, has stayed roughly even with the DSCC in overall receipts, and its cash flow is 30 percent ahead of its 2007 level...

House Democrats have seen donations to the DCCC drop 16 percent, with individual contributions more than 25 percent off their 2007 pace. But party leaders saw a 50 percent increase in small-dollar donations in August, after what they hope was a wake-up call to liberals who watched endless cable news footage of conservative protesters dominating town hall meetings.

There is still a year to go, and perhaps a more disparate advantage for the majority Democrats will yet emerge--although by using through-August totals, Kane is making the point that majority-party Democrats this cycle are trailing majority-party Democrats last cycle, in both absolute and (party)-relative terms. However, as the figure below shows, the declining relative performance of the Democratic hill committees may be offset somewhat by improved Democratic fundraising by the candidates themselves.

Created from reported FEC totals for last cycle and this cycle--again, both of which feature Democratic majorities in power in both chambers--you can see that the Democratic candidates' two-party share of all monies raised is, for now* at least, well ahead of final 2007-08 splits. Among House candidates, the Democrats went from a 5:4 ratio last cycle to a 5:3 now; on the Senate side, the jump is smaller, from roughly 5:4 to 3:2.

These ratios may, of course, steadily regress toward parity in the next year, as Republican challengers win primaries or otherwise emerge. But the Democrats, by definition, know the identity of more of their putative candidates because they have more incumbents running who will, presumably, be re-nominated. And those incumbents enjoy ex ante fundraising advantages as incumbents. Sure, after 2008 there are more of them for operatives at the DSCC and DCCC to protect. But there are also more of them ringing the register. (And keep in mind that the GOP has more Senate seats to defend this cycle than the Democrats.)

A concluding point: Donors, institutional or individual, know how to read the tea leaves and they thus tend to hedge their bets when they believe the party in power stands to lose seats--especially if those seats losses have some chance of flipping majority control. We are almost assuredly seeing this hedging effect again...just as we witnessed during the 2005-06 cycle, when the Republicans still controlled Congress, yet there was a pretty decent spike (as evidenced in the first figure, above) in Democrats' fundraising competitiveness at both the DSCC and DCCC in anticipation of the possibility of a Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi.

*The asterisk in the figure and text merely indicates that the 09-10 data reflect totals taken today, Sept. 29, 2009.

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The Attention Deficit

Gallup has some interesting data out on the percentage of Americans who pay a lot of attention to political news. Although the share of Americans following politics has increased substantially among partisans of all sides, it is considerably higher among Republicans than among Democrats:

This is not necessarily a new feature of the political landscape. News tends to be consumed by people who are older and wealthier, which is more characteristic of Republicans than Democrats and has been for some time. Nor is it clear that a measure like this has any sort of predictive value for upcoming elections. The "attention deficit" was fairly high in 2006, but Democrats nevertheless has a very good election. In 2004, by contrast, the attention gap had actually reversed itself -- Democrats were watching the news more than Republicans -- but John Kerry lost to George W. Bush and the Democrats failed to make any tangible gains in the Congress.

But this probably is important from the standpoint of day-to-day news cycles. If you want to "win the day" on the cable networks, you probably need a message that appeals to older people of a higher socioeconomic status. Republicans, recently, have tended to place more emphasis on winning daily news cycles where as Democrats -- particularly the President -- seem instead to go for "big" moments. Both parties are really playing to their strengths.

This may also be important from the standpoint of interpreting polls. It is hard to weed out response bias -- people who are more interested in politics are more likely, maybe much more likely, to take a political survey. Although weighting for demographics can remove some of this response bias, it probably cannot remove all of it, or it may do so in weird ways that tend to cause the polling results to be less reliable. This is one reason why polls on policy issues tend to be less consistent with one another than polls on elections.

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The New Party of Medicare-Mongering

Last week, I had to do one of those triple-takes at the TV screen. There was Dick Morris complaining to Sean Hannity about how the Democrats were going to cut back Medicare spending by $500 billion. I rubbed my eyes and thought, "Wait, aren't the Democrats the party that tries to scare seniors by talking about cuts to Medicare--what's going on here?"

I've written previously about seniors and the health care debate, and specifically with the 2010 elections in mind. We know that seniors are the most skeptical age cohort when it comes to health care reform; that may be a generational effect, or it may just be that as the age cohort most dependent on government subsidization they are most risk-averse, or change-averse--even if only as a matter of reflex.

But the specter of Republicans essentially running to the left of a Democratic President and Congress borders on the surreal. In a front page piece today, the Washington Post's Lori Montgomery writes about this role reversal:

After years of trying to cut Medicare spending, Republican lawmakers have emerged as champions of the program, accusing Democrats of trying to steal from the elderly to cover the cost of health reform.

It's a lonely battle. The hospital associations, AARP and other powerful interest groups that usually howl over Medicare cuts have also switched sides. Last week, they stood silent as the Senate Finance Committee debated a plan to slice more than $400 billion over the next decade from Medicare, the revered federal insurance program for people over 65, and Medicaid, which also serves many seniors...

Americans 65 and over have long been among those most critical of Obama's reform plans, and a key factor is their concern about Medicare, according to an ABC News-Washington Post poll conducted this month. Fifty-six percent of seniors said they thought reform would weaken the Medicare program. With seniors likely to make up nearly 20 percent of the electorate in 2010, Republicans see Medicare as a potent campaign issue. In the Finance Committee, GOP senators moved repeatedly to strip the spending cuts from the bill.

Obama and other Democrats have assured seniors that the cuts will skim off a small margin of waste and inefficiency without affecting services. They say the cuts will actually strengthen a program that is rapidly outgrowing its primary source of funding -- the payroll tax -- and threatens to exhaust the surplus taxes accumulated in the Medicare trust fund by 2017. Cutting payments to providers, they argue, can help stabilize Medicare finances.

Is this smart strategy for the GOP?

In the short term, the answer has to be "yes." Seniors tend to have less of a drop-off effect between presidential and midterm cycles. Senior citizens are also whiter than younger generations, which in part both explains why they supported John McCain at higher rates than any other age cohort in 2008, and why they are the best possible voting block for the GOP to begin any recovery.

But I have to ask: Are there not risks to this strategy? Specifically, does it not further cement the GOP's image as an aged, out-of-touch coalition? Also, how is the GOP defense of cuts to Medicare not creating at least some dissonance with the very protesters who turned out for town halls and the recent march on Washington complaining about a too-big government getting bigger? (I suppose I'm presuming that people complaining about big government are, in fact, able to identify such contradictions; surely, some are not.)

Then again, maybe the risks are low and the upside for self-described small government Republicans far too tempting to pass up. In a recent poll analysis, ABC News' Gary Langer confirmed the level of apprehension--downright fear, you might say--among the 65-plus set:

*56% of seniors think "reform would weaken the Medicare program," compared to 37% of those under 65 who do.

*Opposition to reform generally is 61% among seniors, just 45% for everyone else. For the public option specifically, 59% of seniors oppose it, while just 39% of those under 65 do.

*62% of seniors say "reform will do more harm than good," compared to 41% for those under 65.

*60% of seniors say reform will mean "too much government involvement" health care, with just 43% of those under 65 agreeing.

Then, Langer's key graph: "We’ve further sussed this out with a regression analysis testing the predictive strength of views about the impacts of reform, and basic demographic variables, on opinions about reform overall. Result: Among seniors, the single strongest independent predictor of opposition to reform overall, and to a public option in particular, is the sense it’ll weaken Medicare." (emphasis added)

And there you have it. For seniors, opposition to reform is related partially to fears about big government or deficits, but secondarily to worries about government tinkering with Medicare. Republican politicians and operatives can read these poll numbers too, of course--which goes a long way toward explaining why the GOP has taken to scare-mongering senior citizens about Medicare with a relish that would make even many Democratic consultants blush.

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Monday Mish-Mash: Strategic Vision, Las Vegas, and String Theory

I hate these kind of catch-all posts, but I'm pressed for time here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I'm doing wall-to-wall research for my upcoming book project. If everything goes according to plan, then within the span of about 36 hours, I will have interviewed the 2008 American League MVP, the man who really did invent the Internet, and some of the world's leading authorities on hurricanes, artificial intelligence, and string theory. I've been reluctant to talk too much about the book project out of a sort of fear of jinxing it, but if you start to see me make a few more Tyler Cowen-esque random asides about, say, earthquake forecasting or the Netflix Challenge, you shouldn't be entirely surprised.

-- A few people have alerted me to another oddity in Strategic Vision's polls: their numbers -- when you take all the candidates plus the undecided vote -- always add up to exactly 100 percent (except for exactly one case -- question 9 here -- where they implausibly add up to 102). Adding up to 100 -- that sounds like a good thing, right?

Well, not really. For instance, if your raw numbers are something like...

Oxendine 44.3
Barnes 39.4
Undecided 16.3

...those should round to 44, 39, and 16, which add up to 99 percent rather than 100. In a two-candidate poll, in fact, the numbers should not add up to 100 percent about a quarter of the time because of this rounding error, and the likelihood increases with every additional option you introduce into the poll.

For most pollsters, including Rasmussen, Gallup, CBS/NYT, ABC/Post, Pew, PPP, SurveyUSA, FOX News, and Quinnipiac, it's very easy to find plenty of examples like these.

Nevertheless, there are a couple of exceptions. NBC/WSJ, and Research 2000, like Strategic Vision, seem to calculate their undecided/don't know number only after having rounded all the other numbers off, and then subtracting that total from 100. In other words, they correct any rounding error in the undecided column. I don't think that's the proper way to do it ... but it's certainly not a huge deal.

So this piece of evidence alone isn't particularly incriminating. Still, if you want to get all Bayesian about it, although perhaps 2 out of the 11 most prolific pollsters do things this way, I'd imagine that the likelihood would be much higher than that if a pollster were fudging numbers -- they'd have to be fairly clever to build in examples of rounding error and this is the sort of thing they might easily overlook.

-- I owe people more coverage of New Jersey and Virginia. My general thoughts: these races have taken on something of a life of their own because of what are frankly a pretty flawed set of candidates. So I don't know how reliable of a barometer they'll really be as we look toward 2010. If Bob McDonnell loses the governor's race because of some uncouth things he said in a thesis in law school, when he might have won if he'd written something about -- I don't know -- the Holy Roman Empire instead, does that suddenly imply that the Democrats are in a much stronger position for 2010? I don't think so.

-- In a feature over at Esquire, I look at declining gambling revenues in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and elsewhere around the country. The conclusion: states may no longer be able to count on expanded gaming as a cash cow. But Vegas itself, where gambling is much more of a "luxury good" than is generally believed, has a reasonable shot of bouncing back along with the rest of the economy.

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Iran Announcement Underscores Complexity

The eventful aftermath of June's heavily contested Presidential election in Iran, which was marked by evidence of fraud, violence and the eventual declaration of victory for conservative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by the Supreme Leader, now seems like a blip on the radar.

Friday's announcement by the US administration and allies marked a return to normal for US/EU-Iranian relations, an aggressive relationship defined by threats and discussions through intermediaries. The US and allies are redoubling their efforts for tougher sanctions against Iran, which now has only a Chinese veto threat to overcome on the UN Security Council.

These days, most discussions of Iran in the North American and European media inevitably focus on the Iranian nuclear programme, while the contested election added a second element of democracy, human rights, and so forth for some time.

Perhaps more interesting at the current time is the economic conditions in the country, an issue that played an important role in the political turmoil that gripped Iran for weeks after the June elections. In addition, economics has some important implications at the international level.

As summarized by the Congressional Research Service in a report to the US Congress in 2008:

"Iran’s economic policies [since 2005] have worked to reduce regional and class disparities through oil wealth redistribution. Mr. Ahmadinejad has tried to reduce unemployment and poverty through expansionary monetary and fiscal policies, including large energy subsidies and
subsidized lending."

Oil exports are very important for the embattled regime, providing more than 40 percent of government revenue. While the petroleum sector only represents 10 to 20 percent of Iran's GDP, it supports the income redistribution, subsidies on gasoline and other products that drew Ahmadinejad many rural supporters.

Though flush with petroleum reserves -- over 130 billion barrels (about 10 percent of proven global reserves) -- Iran is a net importer of finished petrol products, such as gasoline and diesel. Low refinery capacity forced the country to import a significant portion of the more than 400,000 barrels per day in 2006 and 2007, though gasoline rationing that began in June 2007 began to reduce the import burden*.

This all worked quite well when oil prices were high. From 2005 to 2008, Iran had a quite significant and favorable trade balance, buoyed by crude oil prices reached nearly $150 per barrel in July 2008, after breaking the $100 mark in January. By December, however, light sweet crude was selling at a mere $33.87.

As a result, big deficits and growing discontent among both the rapidly urbanized next generation and frustrated traditionalists created a perfect storm for political discord.

Economic and social populism and political shenanigans are quite effective in the short term, as recent rural (and significant urban) support for Khamenei and co. has shown. As well, distracting the public from significant domestic malaise through international posturing, while a time honored tradition by embattled leaders throughout the world (us or them!), only buys so much time.

While overblown by the western media, the June unrest in Tehran showed significant cracks in the regime. Thirty years after the fall of a corrupt and beholden monarchy, many promises of prosperity and commitment to revolutionary ideals have been slow to be fulfilled for many.

At the same time, Iran's main trading partners have a number of economic incentives that have driven the international thinking on sanctions and security. While the United States, which has maintained an embargo on trade with Iran since the 1979-1981 hostage situation, remains relatively insulated from Iran economically (though globalized trade and multinational companies mean that this is only partially true), many major European and Asian nations are tightly intertwined.

Figures from January to May 2009 indicate that China, the remaining major adversary to sanctions, relies on Iran for more than a half a million barrels of oil per day - about 15 percent of their portfolio.
China has a diversified portfolio, with sources that range from central Asia, east and west Africa, and traditional OPEC sources in the Middle East. However, both volatile Iran and stable Saudi Arabia represent significant portions of the imports. With demand rapidly growing in China, Iran's portion is 15 percent they cannot afford to lose.

At the same time, other US allies are big purchasers of Iranian crude. Though this are largely private sector deals, rather than state-run operations, it is clear that Iran's oil flows are important to the market - something that instability, sanctions and escalation would scuttle. At the same time, other OPEC countries, hurting in a time of low oil prices, would be happy to let instability in Iran drive the market prices up.
Finally, at the commercial level, gasoline continues to be supplied by major European retailers, such as BP (UK), Total (France), Shell (Netherlands), as well as Russian and Chinese companies.

Moving forward, the forces within Iran will continue to adjust and change, as will the expectations at the international level. Though the US continues to be driven by memories of the hostage situation and worries about WMDs, the evolving conditions inside Iran and the country's economic relationships demand a more nuanced view.

While posturing by the UK, France and the US may put pressure on Iran to weaken the nuclear programme, it strengthens and provides future political ammunition for the weakened Iranian regime. While the US refuses to do business with Iran, it now has few tools to threaten with, short of risky military action. There are no serious non-military sanctions that the US can demand that are not fully dependant on the actions of the international community, especially China and Russia.

The Obama administration has endorsed this view -- that a strategy is needed that reaches beyond sword rattling and refusing to officially speak. So far, however, no concrete actions have been taken that show what this new approach would entail.

The G5+1 meeting with Iranian leaders will be an interesting starting point, where the soft edge of the Obama "dual track"is at work, accompanied by hard edge calls for new UN sanctions. The US hope is for the international community, especially the UN, to play a stronger admonishing role - something helped by Susan Rice's cabinet status and Obama's appearance at the GA. At the same time, the US and allies will require a new way of thinking that acknowledges a wider set of incentives , both inside Iran and outside.
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Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

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Strategic Vision Office Is Located in Rural Blairsville, GA, Not Atlanta As Firm Claims

The public relations firm Strategic Vision, LLC, which we have raised pointed questions about for the past several days, lists on its website a mailing address of 2451 Cumberland Parkway, Suite 3607 in Atlanta, Georgia and describes itself as being "headquartered in Atlanta". However, the firm's physical offices appear to be located some two hours away in rural Union County, Georgia, in a motel park in Blairsville, far outside the Atlanta Metro Area.

The website for the Union County GOP, for which Strategic Vision co-founder Laura Ward Johnson is listed as a webmaster, recently advertised a BBQ, for which tickets could be purchased at the Strategic Vision offices. The address listed in association with the offices is:

Strategic Vision
22 Town Square, Suite 6
(Seasons Inn Plaza)

This appears to match the listing for the Seasons Inn Motel & Plaza, which is located at 16 Town Square in Blairsville. Laura Ward Johnson had also formerly listed the 22 Town Square address in a posting at the Union County Republican Party facebook page, although the reference has since been edited. Last year, Laura Ward Johnson and David Johnson, the husband-and-wife team that founded Strategic Vision, gave an interview to the Philadelphia Inquirer in which they indicated that they had moved to Blairsville from Marietta in suburban Atlanta.

The firm's Blairsville offices are located some 1 hour and 48 minutes away from the mailing address the firm lists in Atlanta, which in fact appears to be location of a UPS Store. Blairsville is a small city (pop. 659) near the North Carolina border and the Chattahoochee National Forest, and outside of the Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta metropolitan area as defined by the Census Bureau. It is approximately as far from Atlanta as Milwaukee is from Chicago, or Philadelphia is from New York City.



A photo of the Strategic Vision office, as posted at the firm's facebook page, is reproduced below. The address listed in the photo indeed appears to be "22 Town Square", although the image is not of a high enough resolution to say so definitively.



In an interview to the Washington, DC daily The Hill, David Johnson claimed that he and his employees had been harassed and threatened by readers of this website. Although I frankly find these allegations somewhat dubious, I would nevertheless urge everyone to strictly and completely avoid any unsolicited physical contact or any verbal threats of any nature with Strategic Vision and its employees, and would further urge the Blairsville police department to keep a close watch on Strategic Vision's offices and make sure that everyone's security and peace of mind is protected.

Thank you to the readers of this website and Pollster.com, which have assisted with the development of this story.

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Untrustworthy Polls

Nate's takedown of "pollster" Strategic Visions reminded me of another questionable pollster that gets bigtime media exposure. I'm thinking of Prince & Associates, a Connecticut-based consulting firm that does surveys of the super-rich that get featured in the Wall Street Journal and in Slate. I didn't dig as deep into Prince & Associates as Nate did with Strategic Visions, but what I did find [link fixed] made me suspicious. From an article by Robert Frank in the Wall Street Journal (from October, 2008):

According to a new survey by Prince & Associates, voters worth $1 million to $10 million are favoring Sen. John McCain, while voters worth $30 million or more are favoring Sen. Barack Obama. The survey of 493 families showed: More than three quarters of those worth $1 million to $10 million plan to vote for Sen. McCain. Only 15% plan to vote for Sen. Obama (the rest are undecided). Of those worth more than $30 million, two-thirds support Sen. Obama, while one third support Sen. McCain.

Do I believe this? Not really. My problem here is that I don’t know where the survey is coming from. How did Prince & Associates sample people making $30 million or more? Without knowing at least something about the sampling, it’s hard to say anything at all about these claims.

For example, a graph accompanying the article linked above gives estimates of about 0.1 million households with over $25 million and 9 million households with over $1 million. This ratio is about 1%; thus, in a simple random sample of 493 people worth over $1 million, you’d expect to see about a whopping 5 people in the survey worth over $30 million. Or maybe there were 6 such people in the sample; that would explain why the percentages of the super-rich cited in the linked article are 16% (1 in 6) and 67% (4 in 6).

The survey might have more than 6 super-rich people in it; I don’t know since no details are given. (I searched on the web for the survey but all I could find were links to the Robert Frank article discussed here.)

How do you take a sample of super-rich people? Prince & Associates is a Connecticut-based consulting company that describes itself as “the foremost empirical research firm in the realm of private wealth. . . Using purposive sampling methodologies, Prince & Associates, Inc. has created statistically valid single-study and panel samples providing detailed insights into the hard-to-reach and exceptionally private universe of the affluent.”

I respect that this sort of sampling is difficult but it’s hard for me to evaluate it when no description is provided of the sample. I emailed Russ Alan Prince to see if he could enlighten me on this, but he didn't respond. Really, though, I’d think it would be the responsibility of a Wall Street Journal reporter to ask some questions here. (I guess it’s possible that Frank did ask some questions but for proprietary reasons did not want to describe the sampling methodology, but if so I would’ve appreciated just a sentence or two on it, to give me a little more confidence in the results. He also didn't respond to email. Again, he is not obliged to do so--but, then again, I'm not obliged to believe what he writes, either.)

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Party Politics in Germany

Voting has begun today in Germany, Europe's largest economy and the most populous country in the EU. Between threats from Osama bin Laden, voter frustration with economic and foreign policy and a general sense that today's voting will change little in the top leadership, turn-out is foreseen to be relatively low.

Germany usually has quite motivated voters - in the last Federal election in 2005, almost 78 percent of eligible voters cast ballots. Earlier this year, however, the European Parliament elections -- which, granted, usually attracts less interest -- had a turn-out of just 43 percent.

The election campaign has been described as "boring, and the "Valium campaign," while the much hyped television debate between Chancellor Merkel and the Social Democrats' was regarded by the moderator as "more like a duet and less like a duel," with the candidates of the two grand coalition parties agreeing with one another on nearly every subject.

With little movement in the pre-election polls and no major policy shifts occurring in the last week, the name of the game will be inter-party jockeying to find a seat at the governing coalition table, without breaking hard and fast rules of party interaction. Much like the goofy logic riddles from middle school math class, only a few possible endgames are possible at this point, depending the on final vote totals.

1A. Christian Democratic Union (CDU): The party of Chancellor Angela Merkel and half of the current governing coalition, the CDU has voter strongholds in the rural western portions of the country. The CDU is a leading center-right party in the European Parliament, along with regional sister party CSU.

- Prefers to coalition with the FDP. Will coalition with the SPD and the Greens if necessary. Refuses to join with The Left or any far-right parties.

1B. Christian Social Union of Bavaria (CSU): Bavaria is the largest of the sixteen German states in area and the second largest in population terms. Noted for its heavily Catholic and relatively conservative political culture, Bavaria has elected the CSU, which supports essentially the same party platform as the CDU, in nearly every major vote since 1957. The CSU is the most conservative mainstream party in Germany on social issues.

- Same coalition priorities as the CDU, as they operate as a unit at the Federal level, except that the CSU supports the Greens (the third strongest party in Bavaria) more than the CDU does.

2. Social Democratic Party (SPD): Focused in urban and cosmopolitan areas, and affiliated with the Party of European Socialists at the EU level, the SPD supports a mainstream center-left European platform of social democracy. Out of power from 1982 to 1998, the SPD led Germany from 1998 to 2005 under Chancellor Gerhard Schroder. In 2009, current foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is seeking the Chancellorship.

- Prefers to coalition with the Greens. Willing to join with the CDU/CSU, as it is currently, as well as with the FDP (such as the Willy Brandt SPD-FDP coalition of the 1970s). The SPD has a rocky relationship with The Left (Die Linke), which leaves this possibility as the real wild card. Not wanting to be painted as too far left, SPD has generally avoided joining with Die Linke, though at the city (e.g. Berlin) and state level, these unions have occurred. In part because Die Linke is so heavily based in the former GDR and in part because of SPD's flirtations with The Left's arch rival FDP, the relationship for 2009 has not been made clear.

3. Free Democratic Party (FDP): Free market oriented (European liberal) and commanding a small but significant place between the old West German main rivals, the FDP currently sits in opposition to the CDU/CSU-SPD government. Generally associated with the ideals that in the US are called libertarian, the FDP still supports generous government intervention in market failures and social support nets.

- Prefers to coalition with the CDU/CSU, though has joined with the SPD in the past. FDP has publicly declared that it will not join with the SPD, Greens in a 2009 coalition. They do not need to make such a declaration regarding The Left (something about hell freezing over?)

4. The Greens: The Green party in Germany is one of the strongest in Europe and has played a significant role in several governing coalitions since its establishment in the 1970s. Commanding a slightly smaller number of seats than the FDP, however, it was not able to play a power broker role in 2005.

- Prefers to coalition with the SPD. Willing to join the FDP and the Left. Refuses the CDU/CSU.

5. The Left: Finally, Die Linke is the party farthest left in Germany, enough so that they have been investigated by Federal authorities for links to "extremists." The Left, which represents a fairly strong brand of the European communist ideology (in some ways similar to the French Communist Party, for example), enjoys strong support in the East, particularly among those who have seen their standing deteriorate since reunification. Die Linke is a relatively new party - a conglomeration of other lefty activists and parties, which has significant support, but not yet a serious governing track record.

- Would prefer to coalition with SPD and the Greens if allowed in. Refuses to join CDU/CSU or FDP.

There are basically three possible endgames, depending on the strength of the vote for the top few parties.

A. CDU/CSU and FDP: Preferred for the right, and looking possible but not likely. Merkel remains chancellor.

B. CDU/CSU and SPD: The status quo, with a possible reshuffling of the number of ministries allocated to each grand coalition partner. Merkel remains chancellor.

C. SPD, Greens and the Left: If the three left-side parties gain enough for a majority, and the SPD is willing to risk going into coalition with Die Linke, a center-left government is possible. But given the lack of experience of Die Linke, and the possible backlash at the state level and the next Federal election, this option may not be exercised. In addition, the Greens have been a volatile coalition partner on some issues, particularly the war in Afghanistan and the level of action on climate change. Even if the votes are there, getting the three parties in line might be a challenge.

Update: Merkel looks to be on track for a win, with the CDU/CSU and FDP pulling somewhere around 48%, which with district and overhang seats looks to be enough for a majority. Here is the geographic distribution of the vote.
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Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

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