Reforming the Democratic Presidential Nomination

I attended a panel today at Brookings featuring Elaine Kamarck and her new book, Primary Politics. Kamarck is both expert on, and key figure in, the transformation of the Democratic presidential nomination process during the past few decades. The panel was chaired by Brookings' incomparable Bill Galston, and featured WaPost national political reporter Dan Balz and PoliticsDaily's Walter Shapiro. I also met briefly with Jeff Berman, the Obama campaign's "delegate guru," who has agreed to do an interview with 538.com after the upcoming, October 22 meeting of the commission appointed to review and recommend changes to the Democratic Party's nomination process, of which he is a member.
Let me recapitulate several points made either by Kamarck or one of the panelists, and then offer a few observations:

1. Before turning to the discussion of the 2008 nomination battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and the possible reforms in the nominating rules to come from the commission, Kamarck noted that for the first time the Republicans, who historically have only permitted rule changes to be considered at their quadrennial national conventions, are now also looking at their own presidential nomination process during the interim between 2008 and 2012. She noted, for instance, that Mike Huckabee was severely hampered by the Republicans' use in many states of winner-take-all allocation of delegates.

2. In the interest of fairness, notably the proportionality rules that guarantee delegates to Democratic candidates who reach a certain (presently 15 percent) threshold, Kamarck says the "Democratic Party has twisted itself into knots over the past 40 years--they have tried so hard to be fair that they have created a system that rewards losers." By which, I gather, she means not necessarily candidates who will lose the general election (though that has certainly happened), but candidates who underperform in the primaries and caucuses yet continue to remain viable because of proportionality.

3. "If there was a hero" of the 2008 Democratic nomination, at least from a rules and process standpoint, she said, it was Berman, the Obama delegate strategist. Kamarck also mentioned the irony that members of the DNC rules committee, including key Clinton supporters, were among those who sanctioned Florida and Michigan, noting that Obama campaign manager David Plouffe recently admitted that if Florida had been a legitimate and sanctioned primary Clinton might have had both the delegates and momentum to hold off Obama.

4. Balz focused on the significance of the caucus v. primary allocation of delegates, and specifically how Berman and the Obama team were able to maximize the delegates won, particularly in caucus states. He pointed out that (a) Clinton's net margin in the New Jersey primary of 11 delegates was more than cancelled out by Obama's net margin of 12 delegates in the Idaho caucus; and (b) that if delegates were apportioned winner-take-all, like they are in the Electoral College, Clinton would have won by about 300 delegates. (That is, presuming superdelegates voted the same way they eventually did, which they probably would not have.) The table above, though created by a Clinton-supporters site, depicts rather clearly the disparities that favored Obama's caucus-driven strategy.

5. Shapiro spoke to the timing and length of the primary calendar, arguing that the warrant for an earlier and more condensed calendar--which may have made sense in 2000 or previously--is obviated by the campaign finance laws and the end of soft money windfall nominees once stood to reap, and the realization from 2008 that a prolonged primary season is not necessarily a hindrance to the eventual winner and may even be of great benefit.

Some observations:

*There is a certain irony to Kamarck's "rewarding losers" comment, given that Bill Clinton, for whom she later worked, would have likely been thinned from the herd in 1992 had it not been for proportionality provisions. Kamarck says she supports a mixed system in which early primaries and caucus are proportional, which will weed out the really weak, non-starter candidates, but which at some point turns to winner-take-all contests. Depending on when that change would occur in the cycle, I suppose a candidate like Clinton in 1992 could still have won.

*There was a general consensus among the panelists that superdelegates were philosophically inimical to the Democratic Party's small-d democratic objectives and traditions. The reform commission, incidentally, is tasked with figuring out ways to reduce the number of superdelegates, which sounds like a reasonable change--although, in order to eliminate the possibility of potential horse-trading the pledged delegates won in primaries and caucuses ought not to be carried in the vessel of human delegates but replaced by an inanimate score or total. (This would deprive thousands of candidate supporters of the honorific of attending the convention, of course, but I suspect it would not be a problem to fill the convention arenas.)

*I did not have a chance to ask Kamarck and the panel the question I wanted to, which is how a reduction and/or elimination of superdelegates might have handled a "John Edwards scenario," in which a candidate wins the nomination under the existing rules turns out to be unelectable for some later-learned reason--a scenario for which superdelegates would be an ideal solution. Fortunately, Kamarck raised this very issue, saying that regular, pledged delegates would be able to handle it. (Kamarck was herself a superdelegate in 2000 and 2004.)

*If superdelegates are to be reduced in number/share of total Democratic delegates, what classes of people will lose their voting rights--party officials of the DNC and state parties, elected officials like members of Congress and governors? If the point, as Galston argued, is to reduce the input of elites, surely it would have to be the electeds who lose their superdelegate votes before party officials do.

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Obama's Prize for Peace

The wires are ringing with the news that the Nobel committee in Oslo has awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to US President Barack Obama, mentioning nuclear non-proliferation, climate change action, focus on international diplomacy and cooperation and for "captur[ing] the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future."

The pick is quite a surprise, given Obama's relatively short stint on the international stage, but the Nobel committee emphasized that the pick was made on Obama's record, not his potential for the future.

The justification for the prize, while certainly unexpected and a bit tenuous, is indeed rooted in fact. Obama has long been a booster for non-proliferation, and his speech and lobbying at the UN General Assembly and Security Council proved to be quite successful.

On climate change, the Obama administration has taken the toughest line against carbon emissions of any White House so far in terms of concrete regulations by Federal agencies. The September announcement by the EPA that the agency would begin to regulate CO2 as a pollutant, verified by the Supreme Court in 2007, was a major step towards US action on the climate change issue. Though cap-and-trade or other large scale programmes are clearly the purvue of Congress, the executive branch's efforts in the realm are likely to be a major portion of the US effort.

Regarding diplomacy, the committee was likely in part referring to the re-elevation of Susan Rice's post, the US Ambassador to the UN, to a cabinet level post, as well as his public addresses and promised strategic changes toward diplomatic action over rapid military decisions - such as Iran. The G5 plus one meeting with Iran, where Undersecretary of State Burns officially met with the Iranian negotiator, and found a way forward on nuclear energy processing was the first concrete outcome of this strategy.

In the US realm, this is a great boost for the Obama foreign agenda - which certainly played into the decision by the Nobel folks. While the US political scene is often quite skeptical of the international community, the Peace Prize is a quite lauded affair. Even major Obama detractors will have a bit of hard time criticizing his win, especially after their poorly received revelry of Chicago's olympic demise. For Obama liberal supporters, it is a bittersweet moment --many have criticized the administration's foreign policy for moving to the center, particularly on war issues, and the Peace Prize designation takes a great deal of air out of that balloon.

Perhaps the happiest people in the US on this one will be the centrists - and those who wanted Obama to reshape the US image abroad. Whether the award is warranted (too soon? too uncertain?) or relevant (peace prize as we're discussing escalation in Afghanistan?, for the leader of the largest and most powerful military force in the world to be awarded a prize for peace and diplomacy is quite an interesting development.

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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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CBO Report Could Be Turning Point

The path of President Obama's health care reform thus far has been very bumpy and full of sharp, unexpected turns. But this week, the path may have gotten a bit smoother and a bit clearer.

First, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office yesterday ruled that the Senate health care plan--commonly referred to as the Baucus plan, named for Montana Sen. Max Baucus--with its 10-year estimated price tag of $829 billion does, in fact, meet Obama's "budget-neutral" promise. Here's the CBO report's language and specific figures in terms of costs and revenue offsets:

[E]nacting the Chairman’s mark, as amended, would result in a net reduction in federal budget deficits of $81 billion over the 2010–2019 period (see Table 1). The estimate includes a projected net cost of $518 billion over 10 years for the proposed expansions in insurance coverage. That net cost itself reflects a gross total of $829 billion in credits and subsidies provided through the exchanges, increased net outlays for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and tax credits for small employers; those costs are partly offset by $201 billion in revenues from the excise tax on high-premium insurance plans and $110 billion in net savings from other sources. The net cost of the coverage expansions would be more than offset by the combination of other spending changes that CBO estimates would save $404 billion over the 10 years and other provisions that JCT and CBO estimate would increase federal revenues by $196 billion over the same period.

Then, earlier today, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the Senate Finance Committee will vote Tuesday on the Baucus Bill. On the other side of the aisle, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has sent three House bill versions to the CBO seeking similar budgeting assessments.

The CBO scoring is important rhetorically. It provides political cover for those who want to support the bill but do not want to expand deficits or explain to voters why they are voting for "bigger government." Carrie Budoff Brown of the Politico writes today:

[T]he analysis was as good as the White House or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) could have wanted. The Baucus bill came in under budget, covers 94 percent of American citizens, reduces the deficit by $81 billion after 10 years and continues to rack up savings in the second 10 years.

The estimate removes a major hurdle toward a vote in the committee, because senators ­— in particular, Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, who could be the only Republican senator to support the legislation — said they needed to see the cost breakdown before taking up the bill.

Meanwhile, two more good pieces of news for Obama. First, a new Quinnipiac poll shows voters moving toward him and away from congressional Republicans on the health care issue. Second, and perhaps relatedly, the latest AP-GfK poll shows Obama jumping from +1 net approval a month ago (50 percent approving, 49 percent disapproving) to +17 (56 percent approving, 39 percent disapproving) now. As for his specific ratings on health care, he's net-plus again (but narrowly, 48 percent to 47 percent), after being down 10 points a month ago.

The Administration is not home yet. But to continue an already bad metaphor, this may be remembered as the week Obama turned the corner.

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Opt Me Out of Public Option Purism

Some of the usual suspects are out this morning with criticism of Tom Carper's compromise proposal to insert a robust public option into the Democrats' health care bill, but allow states to opt out of it by legislative or popular action. I'm not going to call these people out by name because I consider some of them friends and they're doing good, important, productive work. But this compromise is leaps and bounds better than most of the others that have been floated, such as Chuck Schumer's proposal to have a public insurance option that would be forced to negotiate at private market rates. Here's why:

1) If the public option is indeed popular -- and the preponderance of public polling suggests that it is -- we should expect the solid majority of states to elect to retain it. Perhaps some Republican governors or legislatures would seek to override the popular will in their states -- but they would do so at their own peril (and at Democrats' gain).

2) Behavioral economics further suggests that default preferences are extremely powerful. Making the public option the default would probably lead to much greater adaptation than requiring states to "opt in".

3) If the public option indeed reduces the costs of insurance -- and most of the evidence suggests that it will -- than the states that opt out of it will have a pretty compelling reason to opt back in. Say that Kansas opts out of the public option and Missouri keeps it. If a Kansan realizes that his friend across the border is buying the same quality health insurance for $300 less per month, he's going to vote restore the public plan in a referendum or demand that his legislator does the same in Topeka.

4) Even in states that do opt out of the public option, the fact that voters could presumably elect later to restore it creates an extremely credible threat to the private insurance industry that will itself help to create price competition.

5) The ability to negotiate at Medicare or Medicare-plus-X-percent rates really is what makes the public option so powerful. It's not just having "another option". Although creating an additional competitor would certainly be valuable, as health insurance is a virtual monopoly or duopoly commodity in some regions, you could achieve that goal through a variety of other means such as co-ops or exchanges, some of which are already in the health care bill. Rather, it's the ability of the government to potentially provide more efficient (i.e. cheaper) delivery of health insurance than private industry because of its advantages of scale that distinguishes the public option from something like co-ops. As a general rule, then, compromises that allow the government to take advantage of its size and negotiate at Medicare-type rates should be preferred strongly to those that would neuter it.

6) If the policy wonks are wrong about the public option reducing health care costs -- I don't think they will be, but they could be -- this creates a relatively pain-free way to remove it.

...

Now, if you could have a Jay Rockefeller-style, Medicare-for-Anyone type public option with no strings attached, would that be a superior alternative? Of course. But that amendment was rejected 8-15 by the Finance Committee and has very little chance of becoming law. Some sort of compromise is almost certainly going to be necessary. This is almost certainly the best compromise that has been floated so far. I don't really see what the problem is.

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Afghanistan's Dangerous (and Expensive) Soap Opera

From day one, the relationships between the various elements of the international community in post-9/11 Afghanistan were quite challenging to negotiate. Led by the US/UK invasion in October 2001 and bolstered by the December 2001 UN Security Council resolution that established the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the international prescence has had many mandates, many strategies, some success and no shortage of controversy.

As discussed a couple weeks ago, internal and international political calculations have dominated the public discourse on Afghanistan for most of the 40 partner countries that make up the ISAF. At the same time, Afghanistan's heavily contested election has brought to light major fractures in the United Nations mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), further undermining the legitimacy of the government and efforts towards reform.

Most damaging in recent weeks has been the rather family crisis-esque saga that has played out between UN Special Representative of Secretary General in Afghanistan Kai Eide, and his former deputy Peter Galbraith. While Eide came out in support of the election results and the institutions that produced them, Galbraith heavily criticized the UN's response to apparent fraud, implying, then accusing a bias towards Karzai. Galbraith was dismissed from his appointment by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon as result of the dispute. He has alternatively been referred to as a principled "whisleblower" and as meddling in a sovereign state's affairs while endagering the whole international mission in the country with his actions and subsequent media tour.

Since 9/11, Afghanistan has been a main location for the implementation of the industrial powers' laundry list of best practices, though the effort has been explicitly focused on eliminating Al Qaeda. The last eight years have been, in a way, a referendum on the ideas that the West has been pushing for decades -- democracy, personal freedom, interntional military forces (in many ways akin to peacekeepers) that have strong mandates and flexibility in their rules of engagement, lots of money at the table, full political and diplomatic resources, and the focus of the international media.

However, at the same time, Afghanistan has also emerged, more so than Iraq or elsewhere, as a location where grievances between western powers come to home to roost.

Whether battles between the US military and diplomatic forces and the UN, or the UN "slamming" donor nations for spending little of their aid budgets on the priority intiatives of the Afghan government, the situation sometime seems like a poorly coordinated extended-family reunion.

The US, UK and Canada have pushed other allies, particularly France, for being "not sufficiently committed," while the US's hard line policy on Iran has meant the the mission has great difficultly working with Afghanistan's eastern neighbor (with whom most anti-Taliban forces share a language and some share the minority Shi'a Islam faith).

The bottom line for most international partners in Afghanistan is that this military and diplomatic committment often represents a huge portion of military and diplomatic effort and spending.

Though the United States spends tens of billions in Afghanistan each year, it represents a small proportion (around 4-7%) of the more than 620 billion of US military spending per year, and a small deployment of US troops.

While the UK spending is far lower in aboslute terms, the Afghanistan excursion also represents a small proportion (about 4-5%) of the USD 65 billion (GBP 40 billion) defense budget of the nation. Much more spending has been done in Iraq.


For countries like Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and the UK, as well as many small contributors of troops, however, the Afghanistan situation represents a major portion (if not almost all) of the foreign engagements.

As a result, the stakes are very high for all players involved - the UN for credibility as as neutral arbitor and peacemaker, and for the western powers as state-builders and security forces. With the national moods for continued efforts in Afghanistan souring around the world, and big money going out the door to financenthe activities, many question how sustainable it is.

On the other hand, major military players in Afghanistan are seriously consider major new influxes of spending and troops, particularly in the US and UK. At the same time, political stabilization has been halted, if not turned back, by the ongoing electoral saga. It seems likely that the turning point has been reached -- either the goals of the major internationals will have to be met (or have signficant milestones to point at) in the next 2-3 years, or a major pull-out is likely.

In Obamaland, this means less public focus on the war, fewer leaks, and more time to deliver meaningful results before 2012 comes knocking.

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Generic Congressional Ballot 400 Days Out

In a post two weeks ago, our own Andrew Gelman tackled the question, raised elsewhere by Chris Bowers, of whether the generic congressional ballot indicates that the Democrats face serious trouble next year in the midterm congressional elections. Following a summer in which the Democratic advantage on this measure had steadily shrunk, by September the Democrats seemed to stabilize and even recover somewhat; but as Gelman noted, the measure's predictive value is dubious this far out from election day.

Piggybacking on that post, it is interesting to look at the history of the congressional ballot over a series of cycles, and across time within those cycles. Fortunately, fellow political scientist Charles Franklin of the University of Wisconsin wrote a blog post two years ago with this nice graphic:


As Franklin pointed out--and Real Clear Politics Jay Cost later reiterated--the Democrats consistently enjoy an advantage. At times the Democratic margin has dipped to zero or slightly below, and at other moments it pushes up closer to 10 points. But, with the exception of the months leading up to the tectonic 2006 election, cycle after cycle the Democrats seem to hover around a range between a 2-point and 8-point lead. This is true in cycles where they did well (e.g. 1998) or poorly (e.g., 2002). For most of the cycle leading up to the actual day when votes are cast, the generic congressional ballot is, well, rather generic.

Franklin's chart provides useful, temporal cut points at 200, 400 and 600 days out. And as it happens there are basically 400 days to go until Election Day 2010, and here's how the generic congressional ballot for 2009-2010 looks so far:



If you visualize in your mind the gap between the two parties in the above graph, it basically starts around +6 or +7 for Democrats and slowly collapses to around +1 or 0. Comparing that with the trends to the left of the 400-day mark in the seven graphs of Franklin's figure, the two cycles that most look like 2009 so far are 1994 and 2004. Neither were particularly good years for the Democrats--although it must be said that 2004 was basically a break-even cycle on the House side for Democrats (the significant losses were in the Senate, and if you discount the Texas re-redistricting the House results were essentially a draw), and we all know what happened in 1994. As Andrew noted in his review of the relevant lit, the generic congressional ballot has predictive value in the months closer to the actual election day.

So how is it that a measure can consistently skew towards the Democrats, regardless of whether the cycle turns out to be good for the party or bad? The short and largely correct answer is that generic ballots are not actual ballots, and how one feels about a no-name Democrat running against a non-name Republican is a context-free choice. But I wonder if the persistent Democratic skew of the generic congressional ballot is actually a function of the fact that Democratic-leaning voters are distributed in inefficient ways.

The chart below, which appears in my book, shows the Partisan Voting Index for every congressional district as of 2005--reflecting presidential results in 2000 and 2004 where the country split almost 50-50. The PVI is a measure of the partisan voting for president by congressional distirct, and is arrayed here from left (most Democratic district) to right (most Republican). Though the PVI is a measure of presidential rather than congressional voting, it is in some ways a better partisan measure than the actual votes for congressional candidates because there are many House incumbents who run either literally unopposed or essentially unopposed because they face lamb-to-the-slaughter challengers.

And what you see from the lopsided tilt of the figure is that, at least this decade, Democratic voters are distributed inefficiently. That is, there are too many Democrat-surplus districts compared to the Republican ones. If the generic congressional ballot support is equal for both parties, and Democratic-leaning voters are packed--in part because of racial gerrymandering--into fewer districts, equal poll support can translate into unequal electoral results. In a simplified scenario with five districts and 20 voters, 10 each preferring Democrats and Republicans generically when polled, if the GOPers are grouped 3 each into 3 districts they could elect Republicans to 3 of the 5 seats, with Democrats winning the other two. This, despite parity in the generic ballot survey results.

UPDATE: Charlie Cook contacted me to let me know two things. First, he gently reminded me that the Partisan Voting Index (PVI) is constructed by Polidata on behalf of The Cook Political Report, a proprietary fact I should have mentioned originally. And second, he says that as a rule of thumb he subtracts two points from the Democratic margin in the generic ballot to account for the lopsided distribution of Democratic supporters across House districts. Thanks to Charlie for the nudge and the clarification of his view of the generic ballot.

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Obama's Domestic Afghanistan Puzzle

The national security, regional stability and humanitarian elements of the Obama Administration's Afghanistan policy are a difficult mess of intertwined problems to disentangle. Reading the lengthy profile of Richard Holbrooke, Obama's "special representative" for Afghanistan, in last week's New Yorker, only makes one depressed. "The conflict in Afghanistan will be far more costly and much, much longer than Americans realize," predicted Holbrooke in March, 2008. "This war, already in its seventh year, will eventually become the longest in American history."

Tomorrow, in fact, Afghanistan enters its ninth year, and now stands just four months shy of the American Revolution, six shy of Vietnam. With no end in sight, Afghanistan is also the riskiest and most dangerous foreign policy issue--and thus one of the riskiest electoral gambits--of Obama's presidency. Yesterday, Obama met with relevant congressional leaders from both parties to discuss American policy in Afghanistan. Legislators on both sides of the aisle expressed reservations; Obama's vanquished 2008 presidential opponent John McCain was apparently a particularly vocal critic. The president is having top-level staff meetings later this week to discuss both Pakistan and Afghanistan, specifically Gen. Stanley McChrystal's recommendation of an additional 40,000 troops.



Putting aside the policy challenges and uncertainties, how thorny is the political thicket for Obama?

Pretty thorny. There are divisions between the parties, divisions within his own party, and divisions among the American public more broadly. A new Quinnipiac poll shows how divided and discouraged Americans are. Though a 52 percent majority think "the war...is the right thing to do," 37 percent do not and by only a 49-38 percent margin do they think the war there will successfully remove the terrorist threat to the United States. (I cannot help but pause here to note that critics of Obama's health care reform who say the public option is unpopular with Americans ought to be reminded that public support for the public option is higher than that for the war in Afghanistan.)

As for pols, McCain, who expressed support for the administration's policy back in March, reportedly warned Obama against moving at a "leisurely pace" s outburst yesterday. On her Facebook page, McCain's 2008 running mate says Obama should stand firm. "Our allies and our adversaries are watching to see if we have the staying power to protect our interests in Afghanistan," wrote Sarah Palin. "I recently joined a group of Americans in urging President Obama to devote the resources necessary in Afghanistan and pledged to support him if he made the right decision. Now is not the time for cold feet, second thoughts, or indecision -- it is the time to act as commander-in-chief and approve the troops so clearly needed in Afghanistan."

There are two fundamental domestic political truths about Afghanistan for Obama. The first is that this is a war without much of a political upside because it is difficult to ever prove that we have "won" it, for even temporary victories can be reversed. There will be no armistice, convention, or capitulation, and the asymmetries of the fight mean that the "enemy," such as it is, can always regroup or displace. We can only measure victory by the vague metric of days during which no major terrorist attack hits America or its allies, or by the withdrawal or reduction in resources invested there. The second is that, although Obama inherited the war, he owns that inheritance by virtue of his statements during the 2008 campaign. He can complain about the war's intractable nature, but he cannot complain about its burden or point as directly to the persistence of the problem as a result of his predecessor's (in)actions.

Having said that, and given the grumblings by McCain and Palin, I wonder if we are about to witness the (partisan) politicization of Afghanistan in the way we saw the "Waterloo"-style opposition to Obama's health care plan. During the Bush era, Republicans used the politics of warmaking to cudgel Democrats, and warned that criticisms of the president or his policy amounted to near-treasonous politicization of, and thus the undermining of, America's national security interests. There are no real good solutions in Afghanistan, but whatever semi-promising options are available to us need not be clouded by a new round of shameless politicking designed to batter the president at the expense of non-failure--I hesitate to use the word success--in Afghanistan.

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Checking in on Tim and Mitt

Given the focus on health care, the 2009 gubernatorial races and 2010 congressional cycle, it's surprising how much Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney have been in the news of late. Let's check in on these two 2012 Republican presidential primary frontrunners.

Starting with the Minnesota governor, last week Pawlenty launched a new political action committee called Freedom First to being amassing funds for his expected '12 bid. "T-Paw," as he refers to himself (yes, on the site), is quoted in the inaugural press release saying that the "organization is dedicated to putting freedom first again in America. By helping candidates and translating our ideas into policies that everyone can relate to and support, we can turn back the growth of Washington and renew the promise of freedom." The 285-word mission statement uses the word freedom or some variant 14 times. We got it, Guv: You're for freedom--really, really, really for it. With such generic, conservative talking-point fodder, perhaps he should start going by the nickname "T-Pap."

Despite the thin rhetorical gruel, Pawlenty boasts a promising profile for a potential nominee--a governor from the key swing region of the country, young and attractive and without a lot of the social issue baggage. He's raising eyebrows. Newt Gingrich recently called him a "terrific talent...a very attractive guy [with] a good reform record." Gingrich further told The Politico that Pawlenty will be a "player" in 2012 and that there "is every reason he should run, there is wide open field right now." Politico's Jonathan Martin earlier reported that, in addition to jetting around the country to raise dough, Pawlenty has assembled a top-notch support team boasting a variety of people with presidential-level experience, including advisers Terry Nelson, Sara Taylor, Phil Musser, Freedom First co-chairmen William Strong and former Rep. Vin Weber, and a corps of tech consultants.

As for Romney, he too is fundraiser-hopping across the country to rake in the bucks for his Free and Strong America political action committee. (I'm detecting a "freedom" theme here, aren't you?) To bolster his image as a kingmaker and party leader, he's done a fundraising event for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell and will soon do one for New Jersey GOP nominee Christ Christie. "Should the former Massachusetts governor decide to run for president a second time, his team from the 2008 race would be largely intact," The Hill's Reid Wilson reports. "Veterans of the first race have stayed close, and they frequently get together when their former boss is in town."

Stacking up side-by-side, Newsweek's Andrew Romano argues persuasively that in a potential matchup against Romney in '12 Pawlenty's health care record could provide an advantage: "Assuming...Romney and Pawlenty do face off in the finals, Pawlenty has at least one distinct advantage: while Gov. Romney passed a universal health-care plan in Massachusetts that looks largely like whatever will come out of Congress, Pawlenty recently took the opposite tack, seeking to balance the budget by cutting millions of dollars in funding from MinnesotaCare, a government-supported insurance system for working-class Minnesotans that had previously slashed the state's percentage of uninsured residents to one of the lowest levels in the country."

The Wall Street Journal's Allysia Finley agrees:

[T]here's also one huge elephant in the room that Mr. Romney will have to clear if he decides to run in 2012: Massachusetts' universal health care legislation, which hasn't been popular with fellow GOPers. Indeed, it must pain Mr. Romney that so many Republican critiques of ObamaCare cite the cost overruns and other problems encountered by RomneyCare. As he geared up to run for president a few years ago, Mr. Romney notably switched his positions on abortion, gun rights, immigration and "don't ask, don't tell." He won't find it so easy to flip-flop on Romney care, and he apparently knows it. Mr. Romney is sticking to his guns by defending the Massachusetts plan.

I'll go on the record right now as saying I don't think that Romney will win the nomination. He had enough problems with the evangelicals and social conservatives, and he now has an equally bigger policy problem on health care. As for Pawlenty, I think he's more likely to be on the bottom of the ticket.

UPDATE: Pawlenty will head to Iowa soon for an event.

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Delaware Leaps to #1 in Senate Rankings; Is 60-Seat Majority Doomed?

Although we haven't generally been updating our senate rankings more than once a month, I am making an exception in Delaware, where it was reported today that Mike Castle, Delaware's lone U.S. Representative, will be running for the seat formerly occupied by Joe Biden.

Previously, Missouri had held the number one position, another open-seat race in which polling and fundraising numbers have been slightly more favorable to Democrat Robin Carnahan than Republican Roy Blunt. I'd estimate that the Democrats have somewhere between a 55 and 60 percent chance of taking over that seat, which is now held by Republican Kit Bond.

Castle's odds are somewhere north of that range. With that said, the race is no gimme, particularly if as expected Castle is opposed by Joe Biden's son Beau, who is currently Delaware's Attorney General. Polling released by Rasmussen and PPP had shown Castle with leads of 5 and 8 points in an as-then-hypothetical matchup against Beau Biden. Castle recently turned 70 and has had some health issues and is unlikely to be as energetic his 40-year-old opponent. Although a gifted and experienced handler of his constituents, Castle may also run into trouble trying to balance some of the more radical elements of the his party with his centrist positioning, a problem common to all moderate Republicans. And, given that the Vice President's son is running, we can expect the White House to go "all-in" on this race, although the Biden last name could be a fundraising magnet for Republicans as well.

Although there's not a lot of territory to cover in Delaware, this race could get fairly expensive, as most of the state is in the pricey Phiadelphia media market.

Nationally, I think some of the gloomier analysis for Democrats are overwrought. If I assign rough probability estimates to each of the 38 available Senate seats changing hands, I come up with an average of about 3.5 Democratic seats being won by Republicans, but 2.7 Republican seats being won by Democrats. There is no particular reason to think that Carnahan can't win in Missouri, or Lee Fisher or Jennifer Brunner in Ohio, or Paul Hodes in Ohio, or one of the Democrats in Kentucky. The Democrats also have more tenuous prospects in states like North Carolina, Texas, Louisiana, and possibly Iowa. Currently, I would guess that there is about a 55 percent chance that the Democrats will enter 2011 with fewer than 60 seats, a 20 percent chance that they'll hold exactly 60, and a 25 percent chance that they'll have more than 60. With that said, the situation has certainly deteriorated from what once looked to be an extremely fortuitous cycle for the Democrats, and since the outcome of individual races are correlated based on national conditions, the prospect of a net loss of as many as 5-7 seats for the party is distinctly possible.

It should also be born in mind, however, that the mechanics of the 60-seat majority has always been fuzzy. Several of the Republican candidates in this cycle, including Castle, Mark Kirk of Illinois, Charlie Crist of Florida, and Rob Simmons of Connecticut, have a track record as moderates and could form a working group of moderate Republicans along with Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. That is not to suggest that President Obama should be sanguine about his prospects to advance major legislation post-2010, as he's had enough difficulty even with his large majorities. But if, hypothetically, an improving jobs picture had re-charged Obama's approval numbers into the high 50's or low 60's by mid 2011, and the Democrats found themselves with only a 57-seat majority in the Senate but 4-5 Republican moderates to work with versus the two they have now, the situation would not be obviously inferior for them as compared with today. The House, where the entire chamber is up for re-election and more seismic-type shifts are possible, arguably remains the bigger worry for them.

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Obama-Corzine 2009?

Democrats continue to trail both the New Jersey and Virginia governors races. Last week, I raised the question of whether Northern Virginia voters can save Democratic nominee Creigh Deeds. This week I ask, Can Barack Obama save Jon Corzine in New Jersey?

As Nate wrote a couple days ago, evidence of a Corzine comeback is mixed. And there is mounting evidence that Corzine knows that perhaps only with Obama's help can he stagger across the finish line ahead of Republican candidate Chris Christie--namely, the mounting of billboard signs around the state juxtaposing the two men's names.


But the real testament is found in the state registration data and recent poll results showing Corzine either tied or potentially ahead--if, that is, one projects an electorate next November that looks like the registered votership in the state as opposed to the likely votership in the state. This key distinction requires a bit of unpacking, so let's start with the party registration data in New Jersey today as compared with the recent past.

Here are the most current voter registration data from the NJ State Board of Elections. If we hold aside the very small fraction of voters who identify as third-party registrants--that is, those registering as something other than "DEM"ocratic, "REP"ublican, or "UNA"affiliated--the three-way splits for registration work out as follows: Democrats, 33.9%; Republicans, 20.4%; and Unaffiliateds, 45.7%. These are not the final data, but registrations in the final month will not alter these shares very much.

Registration over the past four years, however, has changed these numbers dramatically. If you think the nearly 46% "unaffiliated" share is big today, four years ago on the eve of the last statewide election, as indicated by the final, official registration figures for 2004, Garden State "unaffiliateds" were an eye-popping 53.0% of registrants. More tellingly, the 14-point net (and 62 percent two-party share) Democratic advantage today is significantly wider than the 5-point (and 56 percent two-party share) advantage Democrats enjoyed just four years ago.

So, how the heck can Corzine possibly be trailing Christie? Setting aside the myriad campaign, candidate and issue-related reasons, the short answer is two-fold:

1. The electorate expected to turn out five weeks from today contrasts starkly with the registered votership, most notably in that the former is likely to be both whiter and older. (These are not mutually-exclusive distinctions, of course.) If you look at the very bottom of the Monmouth results, you'll see that the likely-voter screen they use results in a drop of about four percent in the statewide share of non-white voters. The share of likely voters ages 18-34 drops six percent. The younger, more multiracial electorate on the state registrant rolls puts Corzine ahead, 41% to 40%; the older, whiter likely-voter one has Christie ahead, 47% to 39%. (After speaking yesterday to reps from Monmouth and Quinnipiac, I'm satisfied they are weighting the samples appropriately--but more on that below.)

2. Though some of the unaffiliateds have strong partisan inclinations, among those who do not Christie is holding down a significant enough share to compensate for the wider, two-party registration gap he faces today, as compared to the one Republican Doug Forrester faced in 2005. In the Quinnipiac poll, Christie's lead among independents has shrunk from 30 points in July to just 13 now. If registered "unaffiliateds" or self-defined "indepdents" were a much smaller share of the state, the two-party advantage Democrats enjoy statewide would be enough to swamp that margin.

Which brings us back to Obama. His election--in New Jersey and nationally--depended upon forging a new coalition. Nationally, the white vote increased just 1% between 2004 and 2008, but the non-white vote jumped 19%. The (somewhat overlapping) youth voter turnout also surged. In short, an Obama-style turnout has the potential to tilt the NJ electorate closer next November toward its registration splits than its presently estimated likely-voter splits. And Obama has proved previous turnout models to be wholly wrong before (think Iowa, January 3, 2009). Which is why an Obama-Corzine may well be Corzine's best, even only, hope.

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Question Order May Bias Fox News Health Care Polling

There's a Vietnamese proverb, con sâu làm sầu nồi canh. This loosely translates to: a drop of poison spoils the whole glass of wine. Here is an analogous proverb in polling: a drop of bias can spoil your whole poll. Let me explain what I mean.

Fox News yesterday came out with a poll that suggested that just 33 percent of registered voters favor the Democrats' health care reform package, versus 55 percent opposed. These are not good numbers for Democrats, as they represent a backtrack from the improvement that other pollsters had shown in their health care polling recently.

The Fox News numbers on health care, however, have consistently been worse for Democrats than those shown by other pollsters. Since the health care debate began, the average non-Fox poll has shown 43 percent of the population supporting health care and 45 percent opposed -- producing a net score of -2. By contrast, the average of four Fox polls on health care has shown 35 percent in support of health care and 49 percent opposed -- an ugly -14. The differences in the net numbers statistically significant at the 99 percent threshold.

The first instinct that most of the liberals in the audience will have simply this: well, it's a Fox poll, so of course it's biased. The reality is a little bit more complicated, however. Fox News's pollster, Opinion Dynamics, generally hasn't shown much evidence of a Republican-leaning "house effect". Take a look, for example, at their Obama approval numbers. Since the beginning of Obama's term, they have shown, on average, 58 percent of registered voters approving the President versus 32 percent disapproval. This is, if anything, generous to Obama, as the average non-Fox polls has shown 57 percent approval and 37 percent disapproval over this interval.

The next suspect would ordinarily be the question wording. But Fox News's question is perfectly fine:

Based on what you know about the health care reform legislation being considered right now, do you favor or oppose the plan?

No bias that I can detect there. The question is slightly unusual in that it mentions neither "Congress" nor "Obama" nor "the Democrats", but it's not unusual in a biased way. If anything, the question is particularly unbiased -- it looks to me that support for health care improves slightly if Obama's name is mentioned, but goes down slightly if Congress is mentioned instead. Fox escapes this problem by simply phrasing things in the passive voice and not mentioning either institution.

So how can Fox News ask a seemingly unbiased question of a seemingly unbiased sample and come up with what seems to be a biased result?

The answer may have to do with the questions Fox asks before the question on health care. This weekend, for example, Fox News put out a separate release with their health care questions -- but the health care questions weren't asked separately. Instead, they were questions #27-35 of their larger, national poll, which you can find here. And what were some of those questions? Here are a few:

3. Do you think Barack Obama's travel and speaking schedule makes him look more like he is a candidate on the campaign trail or more like he is the president of the United States?

4. Do you think President Obama apologizes too much to the rest of the world for past U.S. policies?

5. Do you think the Obama administration is proposing more government spending than American taxpayers can afford, or not?

6. Do you think the size of the national debt is so large it is hurting the future of the country?

7. Would you rather: [ROTATE OPTIONS 1 and 2]
Cut spending now so future generations don't have to pay
Keep spending at current levels and let future generations pay

20. When Barack Obama was a candidate campaigning for the presidency, he spoke of the urgent need to finish the fight in Afghanistan, which he called the central front on the war on terrorism. Do you think that, as president, Obama is doing what it takes to win in Afghanistan?

These questions run the gamut slightly leading to full-frontal Republican talking points. Some of them, such as question #3, are almost literally rhetorical questions, which are never good things to have on a poll. And no, you can rest assured that Fox News was not asking questions formed from comparably biased Democratic talking points.

A respondent who hears these questions, particularly the series of questions on the national debt, is going to be primed to react somewhat unfavorably to the mention of another big Democratic spending program like health care. And evidently, an unusually high number of them do.

The reason Fox's Presidential approval numbers are not affected is because Obama approval is question #1 -- asked before the leading series of questions on spending and foreign policy or anything else. Likewise, when Fox was conducting its Presidential polling (which also did not have any discernible house effect), the horse race questions were asked before any of the policy ones.

But when you ask biased questions first, they are infectious, potentially poisoning everything that comes below. I don't particularly care if Fox News wants to ask leading or even outrightly biased questions -- but they have to ask them after any questions they expect the policymaking community to take seriously.

Another problem is that Fox tends to ask different sets of questions before they get to the health care ones -- sometimes, questions about Afghanistan, sometimes questions about deficits, etc. What seems, then, to be "movement" in the numbers may simply be an artifact of what sort of mood they've worked the respondent into before they get to the health care stuff.

To be clear, these question order effects can arise even when pollsters have the best of intentions, and even when they are asking unbiased questions. If, for instance, back during the Presidential campaign, you had asked a series of perfectly neutrally-worded questions on the economy before asking about the horse race, they could easily have tipped the numbers slightly in Obama's direction, since the economy was perceived to be the Democrats' strength. (The LA Times poll had this exact problem at various points). Pollsters have to grapple with these sorts of considerations all the time, and some do a better job of handling them than others.

But when you ask a series of biased questions before taking the voters' temperature on health care or the horse race, you have much less excuse. Going forward, Fox News should put its health care questions closer to the top of their survey or break them out into a separate poll; take their numbers with a grain of salt until they do.

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Seen Through Sharper Statistical Lens, Anomalies in Strategic Vision Polling Remain

Note: the below is fairly technical, but since the discussions of Strategic Vision's polling had become quite technical in the comments, I thought it was worth giving Michael Weissman, a retired physics professor at the University of Illinois and a frequent commenter at this website, a guest column in this space. Using a robust and fairly elegant statistical technique known as Fourier analysis, Weissman has found that Strategic Vision's polls indeed contain unusual statistical artifacts that are highly unlikely to have arisen by chance alone and which differ substantially from those of comparable pollsters. I have given Weissman's words a light, non-technical edit, with his permission, from the version he originally sent to me. --Nate Silver
____

Fourier visits Strategic Vision
by Michael Weissman

Three weeks ago, a polling association censured Strategic Vision LLC ("SV") as the only pollster who refused to answer repeated requests for routine information on their methodology -- twenty other pollsters had complied. Nate Silver followed up by checking whether there was anything statistically odd about SV’s results, finding that the distribution of trailing digits in their reported percentages for the two major candidates showed much larger deviations from uniformity than would be expected by pure chance draws from a uniform distribution. Some digits, such as 8, appeared much more often than others, such as 1. A closely matched comparison group of polls from Quinnipiac also showed larger-than-expected deviations from uniformity, but not nearly as extreme. A commenter on this site, "steve", sent in the results from a comparable collection of SurveyUSA polls, showing no unusual non-uniformities at all. A discussion immediately ensued on this blog and others as to whether the strongly non-uniform SV results could easily arise by normal causes or whether they constituted evidence suggesting that the results had not been obtained by other-than-normal polling methods.

One potential source of non-random non-uniformity, pointed out here and elsewhere, could be some rounding method that systematically favored evens or odds. It turns out, however, that evens and odds appeared with nearly the same frequency in the SV result. In addition, the sample sizes that SV typically uses are divisible by 100, making rounding errors unlikely.

A more challenging objection was as follows: There is no a priori reason to expect the distribution of trailing digits to be uniform, even in a large sample. We know that the full percentage poll results are not uniformly distributed from 0 to 100. Polls, rather, are generally taken in races where the leading candidates each have some major chunk of the vote. There are usually a few undecideds as well. So you might expect the distribution of ideal poll results to have a broad peak somewhere roughly in the vicinity of perhaps 45, trailing off smoothly on either side. That’s not uniform – although, if the results were routinely spread throughout the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s (as is the case with Strategic Vision’s polls), you would expect a pretty smooth distribution. The distribution should also be cyclic, in that 0 – such as in the number 50 -- is just as ‘close’ to 9 (49) as it is to 1 (51).

The problem is that pretty smooth isn’t definitive enough to say whether the extra variance (the average of the squared differences from uniformity) should be considered alarming or not. Nate explored tentatively some other possible non-uniform distributions, but there were some justified objections that these were arbitrary. What’s needed is a way to remove the variability due to the non-uniform distribution without pretending to know just what the distribution is. Fortunately, we have some tools – in particular, a tool called Fourier analysis -- to solve what might sound like an intractably subjective problem.

Fourier waves of different frequencies combining to form

another, seemingly complex wave.

First, regardless of the true underlying distribution of results, the actual poll results cannot show any major non-random variations between adjacent digits. The reason is that SV’s polls are taken of relatively small numbers of subjects (generally 600, 800 or 1200), leaving random uncertainties in each result of about 2 percent. If, for example, there were some (wildly implausible) real tendency of the true values to cluster on even digits as opposed to odd, the poll results wouldn’t show it very much because the random errors would smear them out too much.

Second, we have a standard mathematical tool called Fourier analysis to describe our ten digits in terms of components. These components can be manipulated such that the non-random non-uniformity is concentrated in some of the components, while leaving others random. This provides for a big advantage over the initial form, in which the non-uniformity might be distributed among all ten numbers.

One of the Fourier components is completely flat and just represents the average value. The other nine Fourier components are sinusoidal waves on our plots of occurrence rates for the ten digits. These include a range of broad and narrow waves. The wave with the most frequency is the period-2 even-odd cycle -- but I have chosen to ignore this because it might plausibly arise from rounding methods. The most slowly-moving wave has period 10. There are two such period-10 components, with different peak locations. These are the components where some plausible non-uniform distribution could show up, even after smoothing by the random sampling error. So we can remove them too, without bothering with arguments about what we think they should be.

Now comes the fortunate part: the smoothing of the distribution from random sampling effectively wipes out all the non-random shorter-period components. This reduction in the shorter-period components can be calculated with great quantitative precision using the known width and Gaussian shape of the sampling error distribution, providing for very clean random sampling variations.

Does this leave us enough statistics to work with? There were originally ten Fourier coefficients, and we’ve thrown out the irrelevant mean, the two that could reflect non-uniformity, and the one that could come from rounding. That leaves six with random amplitudes. It would be nice to have more than six, but that’s enough to catch extreme cases. We know how big the coefficients should be on the average because standard simple statistics tell us precisely how big the random variations are on average in our numbers.

Now we can ask: how big is the variation of the numbers, after all the suspect components of the variation are filtered out, compared to the statistical expectation? Remember, this filtering is done precisely in response to the serious objections, largely by defenders of SV, which were made to Nate’s original post, removing the potentially innocent components which could have made SV’s statistics look suspect. Here, then, is the filtered variance as compared to the statistically expected filtered variance:

SurveyUSA: 0.46
Quinnipiac: 0.30
Strategic Vision 4.40

How unlikely are those results? The SUSA result is pretty much typical. Quinnipiac actually has notably low variance, but random chance would result in variances that low or lower about 5 percent of the time. The Strategic Vision result, on the other hand, or something more extreme, would occur by chance with probability only 0.00019. That’s not as low a p-value as the results obtained without filtering the non-uniform components, but it’s still very low -- less than one chance in 5000 to have occurred by chance alone. For statistical sophisticates, this is a genuine relevant p-value, testing a well-specified prior hypothesis, not the sort of misleading p value obtained when one screens many data sets looking for anything unusual.

I’d like to thank Nate for getting this started and various commenters for helping keep the discussion lively: especially ecarlson, Mark Grebner, MarkinIL, steve, shma, and loner. Finally, since the core issue here is transparency, I’ve included the code by which the p value was calculated. Anybody who writes real programs will get a kick out of this, since I used a baby language (Basic) to handle a fairly basic statistical problem.

>list
10 dim d(10)
15 d(0) = 562
16 d(1) = 431
17 d(2) = 472
18 d(3) = 490
19 d(4) = 526
20 d(5) = 599
21 d(6) = 533
22 d(7) = 639
23 d(8) = 676
24 d(9) = 616
30 for i = 0 to 9
40 sum = sum+d(i)
41 sumcos = sumcos+(d(i)-554.4)*cos(0.6283*i)
42 sumsin = sumsin+(d(i)-554.4)*sin(0.6283*i)
43 sumdif = sumdif+d(i)*(-1)^i
45 sumsq = sumsq+d(i)*d(i)
50 next i
60 ave = sum/10
70 print ave
80 var = sumsq/10-ave^2
90 print var
100 lowf = 0.02*(sumcos^2+sumsin^2)+0.01*sumdif^2
110 print var-lowf
120  dev = (var-lowf)/(0.6*ave)
130 print dev
140 p = exp(-3*dev)*(1+3*dev+4.5*dev^2)
150 print p
>run
554.4
5521.44
1463.071532
4.398363
1.882962E-04

Michael Weissman is a retired physics professor (University of Illinois) whose research has focused on using random noise to characterize disordered materials. He is a Fellow at the American Physical Society, was once nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Barbara Boxer, and was born and raised a St. Louis Cardinals fan.

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In New Jersey, Two Glasses Half-Empty

Stu Rothenberg has New Jersey half-right:

Describing Corzine as closing the gap or pulling closer conveys the impression that Corzine is gathering support and increasing his standing in the contest. He is not. He hasn't moved in the Quinnipiac University poll (or in other polls, for that matter) since the beginning of the year.

Corzine's chances of winning re-election now are no better than they were a month ago. The governor continues to be stuck between 38 percent and 42 percent in the ballot test, where he has been for many months, and the fundamentals of the race continue to favor the Republican challenger.

Rothenberg is absolutely correct that it would be improper to convey the impression that Jon Corzine, the embattled Democratic governor of New Jersey, is surging in his race against Republican challenger Chris Christie. Corzine's numbers, which have been stuck around 40 percent some time, haven't really moved at all. What's happened, rather, is that Christie has been losing support:



But Rothenberg is wrong that "Corzine's chances of winning re-election now are no better than they were a month ago". Those voters that Christie is losing aren't disappearing into the ether. They're moving, rather, to independent candidate Chris Daggett, who has run on a Bloombergian platform (pro-reform, pro-environment, pro-choice) although without any of Michael Bloomberg's monetary firepower. The decline in Christine's numbers since July and the rise of Daggett's correspond nearly one-for-one.

It's hard to say what will happen to those Daggett voters on Election Day. You can perhaps draw a parallel to Minnesota's Senate race, where you had an unpopular incumbent (Norm Coleman) running against a challenger (Al Franken) that many people were uneasy with. In that race, the third-party candidate, Dean Barkley, wound up with 15 percent of the vote, almost exactly where pre-election polls had pegged him.

But Minnesota was different; there was a Presidential race on the top of the ticket and Minnesota was a swing state. People who showed up to cast their votes for Barack Obama or John McCain had to vote for someone in the Senate race. Well, not technically: it's perfectly legal to undervote a race and a few people skipped the Senate contest. But the vast majority figured, as long as they were there in the ballot booth, they might as fill out one the ovals for Senate; 15 percent went ahead and voted for Barkley.

In New Jersey, it's the gubernatorial race at the top of the ticket, and this being an odd-numbered year, in fact, there are no federal races at all on the ballot. So what will those Daggett voters do? There are two more debates remaining in New Jersey and I suppose there is an outside chance that Daggett can surge further, to the point where he actually appears he has a shot at winning. But if he doesn't (and in all probability he won't), and the Daggett vote appears to be purely symbolic, a lot of those folks might exercise their right to stay home. From the standpoint of Corzine and Christie, however, this makes no difference: a Daggett vote and a nonvote are essentially the same.

Then there's the issue of New Jersey's undecideds, which constitute about 7 percent of the electorate. In the latest Quinnipiac poll, 8 percent of Democrats are undecided as are 7 percent of independents. The Democratic undecideds, most likely, will probably be deciding between Corzine and not voting. Although it's likely that a plurality of the independent undecideds will turn to Christie, to whom they give somewhat better favorability ratings, a lot of them will probably stay home too. And there are hardly any Republican undecideds -- just 2 percent of them, according to Quinnipiac. So Christie won't get much help there.

Here's what this boils down to: there are probably a finite number of people willing to get out of bed and vote for Jon Corzine on November 3rd. And it's a number, moreover, that wouldn't ordinarily be enough to allow a candidate to carry the state. But the voters who don't want to vote for Corzine have two alternatives, other than voting for Christie: they can vote for Chris Daggett or they can sit the election out. If enough of them choose one of those options, then Corzine can still win a low-turnout election. Although Corzine remains the underdog, that possibility is indeed looking much stronger than it did a month ago, and Christie still has some work left to do to convince people that he is worth voting for.

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