Despite Claims, Anti-Gay Group in Maine More Dependent on Out-of-State Funds

In a fundraising plea to his mailing list this past week, Marc Multy, the President of the anti-gay marriage Group Stand for Marriage Maine, described his opponents as having "amassed a war chest from the homosexual political elite from nearly every corner of the country to impose their will on Mainers like us."

Indeed, the pro-gay marriage group No on 1 Protect Maine Equality has raised more than $2.30 million in itemized contributions from outside the state of Maine; this is more than the $1.82 million that Stand for Marriage Maine has raised from out-of-state.

However, most of No on 1's advantage is based on its substantial edge in fundraising from within the state of Maine. No on 1 has raised $1.89 million from 3,766 unique contributors within the state, whereas Stand for Marriage Maine has raised just $677,000 from 422 contributors, putting it at nearly a 3:1 disadvantage. All told, No on 1 has raised 43 percent of its funds from within Maine, as compared with 26 percent for the Yes on 1 campaign.



Additional detail on fundraising by the two groups, as gathered from the State of Maine's Campaign Finance Website, is below.



You will probably notice the large disparity in the average size of the contribution that each group has received: $3,862 for the anti-gay marriage group, versus $419 for No on 1. This is because Stand for Marriage Maine is exceptionally dependent on just two large donors: the New Jersey-based National Organization for Marriage, from which it has received $1,622,152, and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland (ME), from which it has received $529,666. Collectively, these two group's represent 83 percent of Yes on 1's fundraising. In addition, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland accounts for 81 percent of its in-state fundraising; without its contributions, Stand for Marriage Maine would have received just $127,218 in contributions from Mainers.

Protect Maine Equality, to be sure, has also benefited from some
heavyweight donors, earning $526,000 from Maine-based businessman Donald Sussman, and $267,589 from the Human Rights Campaign. And indeed, if you cull its donor list, you'll find a few big-name Hollywood celebrities: it's gotten $2,000, for instance, from Rob Reiner, $5,000 from David Geffen, and $10,000 from former U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg James Hormel.

Overall, however, its top 10 donors represent just 36 percent of its total fundraising haul, as compared to 91 percent for Yes on 1. Most of its contributions, rather, come from small donors, who account for its 9-to-1 advantage in the number of unique, itemized contributors within Maine, and its 28-to-1 advantage in its number of unique donors from outside the state.

Although it is always risky to generalize from a single example -- particularly given that the Yes on 1 campaign has been fairly inept -- it would seem that the grassroots energy on this issue has reversed, with the pro-gay marriage side feeling more emboldened than the traditional marriage groups. This is true both outside the state of Maine and within it.

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60 v. 61?

There's a lot of confusing goings-on in PublicOptionLand today, which I'm not particularly going to try to unpack -- check out Ezra Klein for the most coherent attempt to summarize the situation. But one narrative I'm seeing pretty commonly is that the White House is willing to make too many sacrifices -- for instance, giving up on an opt-out public option in exchange for a trigger -- in order to secure Olympia Snowe's vote and be able to call the health care bill "bipartisan".

I don't doubt that the White House perceives real political value in having a health care bill that has at least one Republican on board. Whether the trade-offs they're willing to make are "worth it" or not, I don't know. Nor do I doubt that, from the very beginnings of the process, the policy wing of the White House has been somewhat neutered on the public option (to put it generously).

But I don't think this is the crux of the issue -- I don't think the White House's position is primarily dictated by a desire for 61 votes on a motion to proceed with the health care bill as opposed to exactly 60. Rather, I suspect they don't perceive exactly 60 votes -- meaning, something strictly along party lines -- as being in the cards.

From a policy standpoint, Olympia Snowe is arguably to the left of at least two or three Democratic senators -- Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, Mary Landireu -- on health care. From a politics standpoint, she probably has more to lose than a Nelson or a Landrieu by opposing the bill, since health care reform is more popular in her state than in Nebraska or Louisiana.

Now, a motion to proceed is not a policy vote -- it's a procedural one. And there's certainly a case that Snowe, being a Republican, is intrinsically less easy to whip than a Nelson or a Bayh or a Landrieu on a process issue.

Nevertheless, all of this isn't happening in isolation. Snowe is meeting with Nelson and Bayh and Landrieu and Max Baucus. That group of a half-dozen or so Senators -- maybe throw Susan Collins, Joe Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln in here too -- is liable to vote as a block. It's probably not a completely impenetrable block -- Politico is breathlessly reporting that Landrieu and Lieberman, for instance, may have been won over -- but it seems like an uphill climb for Harry Reid to pick off all other members of the block but not Olympia Snowe. Bayh and Nelson, in particular, appear to be problems. By the way, it may be significant that both Bayh and Nelson are the potential holdouts. If Reid can get down to the point where there's exactly one Democratic opposing the bill, that Democrat will be under a tremendous amount of pressure since he can no longer deflect responsibility.

This is not to say that Reid should stop trying to whip votes. The situation is obviously very fluid, and given the reliance on anonymous sourcing in virtually all of the reporting on the issue, there's a lot that we don't know.

I'm just saying, however, that to castigate the White House for being willing to indefensible sacrifices to the altar of bipartianship is premature. They may not be worried about 61 versus 60 so much as 61 versus 58.

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Picking on Cliff Clavin

A few weeks ago I wrote my Baltimore Sun column about conservatives' attacks on the Post Office as an example of government ineffectiveness and inefficiency. The USPS is, after all, losing money right now--burdened as they are by hefty labor costs and massive pension obligations. But industries that rely upon the postal service to deliver their goods and solicitations are not complaining. In fact, as I noted, many are strong advocates of maintaining the USPS:

According to the USPS' 2008 annual report, of the 201.9 billion pieces of mail delivered, only about 10 percent originate from households. The other 90 percent comes from businesses, agencies and other nonhouseholds. And although the private letters, bills and magazines we receive at home comprise 40 percent of our mail, the other 60 percent is advertising: credit card applications, coupons and other forms of junk mail.

Which means that the post office is an even more important boondoggle for the companies flooding our mailboxes with solicitations. The trade groups know the score: The magazine publishers support USPS solvency, and the direct mail industry says it will gladly accept five-day mail delivery if necessary. And in 2006, a Republican Congress and Republican president passed a law mandating that the USPS set aside billions to cover its long-term pension obligations.

Big business and the GOP are not trying to starve this federal beast.

I went on to suggest that privatizing mail delivery would lead to far more expensive shipping costs. The idea that a private company would both deliver mail to every office and home six days a week, and collect it from the same plus thousands of drop boxes scattered across the nation-- all the while maintaining walk-up offices in every town--and still be able to deliver a first-class envelope to any address for a mere 44 cents (an amount that hasn't changed in real terms after 30 years) is simply an absurd expectation. And, while that means taxpayer dollars now subsidize the mail, again, a lot of the redistribution is going from taxpayers' pockets to corporate balance sheets.



Anyway, I got a lot of nice emails from postal carriers, both active and retired, about the column. (They must have some network for circulating such stuff, because the emails came from many corners of America.) But a late straggler of an email that just arrived two days ago from a man whose identity I will not disclose--other than to report that he's from southeast Oklahoma--really surprised me. Here's the key excerpt:

Pres. Obama made the comment that UPS and FedEx are doing fine. [See video clip, above.] What I'm writing to you about is that in the very rural areas both UPS and FedEx take packages to the local post office and pay the Postmaster to have the rural carriers deliver their packages, neither UPS or FedEx want to take their trucks down the rough back roads to be shaken apart. I am a retired Postal employee, I was the [title redacted] in southeast Oklahoma where I serviced 125 post offices. Nearly every time I was in a rural post office FedEx or UPS would show up, bring a load of packages to be delivered and pay the postage to have them delivered. I asked a few Pm's [postmasters] about it, they each explained that it was cheaper for them to pay the Postal Service to deliver the packages than to have to drive their trucks sometimes miles into very remote areas. I just never hear the USPS officials even mention this when being compared to the other delivery services. I don't think Oklahoma is the only state where this happens. (emphasis added)

So there you have it. If the private carriers could afford to deliver everywhere for one flat rate and still turn a profit, they'd be doing so. But they can't. And that means that, in terms of redistributive nature of the USPS, at least insofar as redistribution occurs from one segment of the American population to another, some portion of that redistribution goes from urban and suburban areas to rural areas. Maybe rural voters--who tend to vote Republican, and preferred John McCain over Barack Obama last year by eight points--ought to keep that in mind the next time they criticize health care reform by comparing it to Cliff Clavin.

And so should the president.

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Comparing the Votes of the Rich and the Poor

As just about everybody knows by now, richer Americans tend to vote Republican while poorer Americans go for the Democrats.

But this isn't true for all groups. For an amusing example that we discussed in our book, a survey found that richer journalists were more likely to identify as Democrats (a fact which I'm sure will not surprise Michael Barone).

To look at this more thoroughly, Dan Lee and I took the 2000 and 2004 Annenberg surveys and looked at a bunch of different categories of people, classified by self-identified political ideology (very conservative to very liberal), religion (Catholic, Protestant, etc.), church attendance, age, ethnicity, sex, marital status, urban/suburban/rural, education, and attitude on abortion (just as an example of an opinion question).

Dan made this graph which shows the difference in support for the Republican candidate for president, comparing voters in the upper and lower third of income, looking separately at each of a bunch of different slices of the population. At the top of the graph are the people who self-identify as conservative: among this group the rich are about 25% more Republican than the poor. At the bottom are liberals, for whom the rich are slightly more likely to vote for Democrats. Here's everybody:



(Click on any of these graphs to see larger versions.)

A striking pattern. The differences between rich and poor are much larger among conservative, Republican groups than among liberal, Democratic groups. At the very bottom of the graph above, you see a few groups where richer people are more likely to vote Democratic. All of these are groups that are mostly liberal and Democratic.

To look at it another way, we made a graph showing the different subsets, plotting rich-poor voting differences vs. average Republican vote for the group. Separate graphs for 2000 and 2004:





Pretty consistent, I'd say. Now we have to think about what this all means.

P.S. In the lower graphs, the x-axis is the Republican-ness of the group (as measured by % favoring the Republican candidate for President, minus % favoring the Democratic candidate for President), compared to the U.S. average. The y-axis is the difference in Republican vote preference, comparing people in each group who are in the top third of U.S. family income, comparing to those in the bottom third. "Rich" and "poor" are defined here based on the national income distribution, not using separate income levels by subgroup. And we're looking at vote preference (from pre-election polls), not actual votes. We're using the Annenberg pre-election surveys, which is what we used for a lot of our analyses in Red State, Blue State.

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The Public Option Playing Field, in Two Dimensions

You should definitely go and read Ezra Klein's handy guide to the various public option compromises that are working their way through the Senate. One thing to bear in mind however is that the public option compromises are really being discussed along two dimensions.

One dimension concerns implementation: when and how does the public option come into being? Does the public option come online right away ("right away" in this instance meaning 2013)? Will it come online immediately, but states are allowed the right to opt out of it? Alternatively, might states have to affirmatively opt into the public option? Or might the public option be implemented only by a trigger?

The other dimension concerns the public option's operation. Will it operate as a federal program charging Medicare (or Medicare +5%) rates? As a federal program that must negotiate its rates in the market? As programs run by state governments? Or as non-profit co-ops, operated on a state-by-state basis, but not run by state governments themselves?

If you drew a grid of these issues in two dimensions, then almost every box would be filled by some or another version of the "public option". Actually, let's go ahead and do that...



The yellow triangle represents the sort of "Zone of Compromise". I'm pretty sure that a co-ops provision, with immediate implementation, could pass the Senate (or at least not be filibustered by it). Likewise with Olympia Snowe's trigger. A strong-ish opt-in amendment proposed by Maria Cantwell was approved by the Senate Finance Committee along party lines, but did not get Snowe's vote; it might or might not pass the full Senate.

Basically, any square that is overlapped by the triangle seems like a plausible outcome. The most robust public option available is probably a federally-run program that states would have the right to opt out of and which would have to negotiate its rates in the market. The worst-case scenario is probably state level programs with an extremely stingy trigger, as proposed by Snowe. (This is assuming, of course, that health care reform as a whole will pass, which people may be a little bit too sanguine about.)

This is not a perfect representation of the alternatives by any means. Co-ops and government-run programs are not necessarily mutually exclusive. A "loose" trigger could conceivably be more robust than an opt-in provision, or even an opt-out provision, although in practice Snowe's proposal is not. Moreover, state-level options and triggers could be combined in various ways: maybe states have to opt in initially, but they'd be enrolled automatically if a trigger kicks in. An final complication is is that certain of the options -- for instance, a state-run opt-out -- do not make particularly much sense. Still, it should provide a reasonably useful schematic.

Note: Chuck Schumer's position has been clarified in the chart based on some helpful feedback from his office.

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The Other Public Option

Don’t have health care? Or a steady job that provides health care? Then you may view the health care reform's public option as a very, very attractive idea. But that public option may not come to pass, so to speak.

Of course, some folks can find insurance via another public option: They can join the U.S. armed forces, which people are doing in record numbers lately. Yes, after years of lowering standards in order to reach (and sometimes still miss) recruitment targets, the U.S. government has finally figured out a way to get people to join the military despite two ongoing wars and thus the prospect of possibly serving in harm’s way: Create a national economic crisis unlike anything seen since the Great Depression and at a moment when health care premiums have doubled in the past decade!

Some people are doing the Bill Murray/Ivan Reitman thing under extreme duress, it seems. A 39-year-old Wisconsin husband and father of three recently enlisted not despite the fact that his wife just learned she has cancer, but precisely because she has cancer. He has no other way to insure her.

The quota-making trend has been happening for some time now, with signals of an upsurge evident last year and earlier this year:

Recruiters report that they are seeing older walk-ins as a result of a battered economy. Changes in recruitment rules — the Army, for example, in 2006 raised its enlistment age limit from 35 to 42 — are also behind interest from older candidates.

With conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Army brought in more than 80,000 new recruits in 2008, while the Marines filled 38,000 positions.

It is a “seller’s market,” according to anecdotal reports from Marine recruiters.

Military service is noble. But let’s be clear: It comes with housing, health care and a very generous pension earned after just 20 years of service. And that’s true whether you are on the front line dodging sniper fire and tip-toeing around land mines in Afghanistan every day, or driving a desk at a recruitment center in Albany. Wherever the Wisconsin father ends up, there is something seriously wrong with our system of government when a guy pushing 40 with three kids has to sign up for a four-year enlistment in order to save his wife's life. At that point ours ceases to be a fully volunteer army.

The military has already lowered or relaxed the grade scores, moral conduct requirements, health standards and drug/alcohol usage rules in order to make quotas. It's raised the enlistment age and, until recently, used stop-loss policies to keep personnel in service beyond their enlistment commitments. And now, if unwittingly, we have found yet another enticement: The most public of public health options for a citizenry either without a job, health insurance or both.

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Arguments Against Gay Marriage Literally Stop Making Sense

Yesterday, I was sent an e-mail from the Stand for Marriage Maine campaign, which I signed up for under a secondary e-mail account. The message suggests talking points that opponents of gay marriage might use when calling into local radio stations:



So, paraphrasing somewhat, the arguments that the Yes on 1 campaign seems to be making are as follows:

1. The new law won't make gay marriage equal to straight marriage. Instead, it will create a new kind of marriage in which gay people and straight people are equal.
2. Although we may not have proven any connection between gay marriage and public education, our opponents haven't disproven the connection, and it's their fault that the subject came up.
3. If gay marriage is upheld, then marriage will exist solely to make people happy.

These arguments run from the literally incoherent (#1) to the sublimely unpersuasive (#3), with #2 somewhere in between. Yet, they are, apparently, the best arguments that the Yes on 1 folks can muster -- the ones they're using to close out their campaign.

The fact is that the overwhelming majority of people who dislike gay marriage do so for one of two reasons: either their religion has a taboo against homosexuality, or they find the practice gross.

But "Adam and Eve, Not Adam and Steve" does not make for a good tagline in a "serious" political discussion. And in Maine, for whatever reason (perhaps because it is one of the least religious states in the country), the Yes on 1 campaign has chosen to deemphasize the religious angle. Meanwhile, the primary "substantive" argument that they've made -- that the same-sex marriage law might alter the public schools curriculum -- has been discredited. This is what they have left to work with.

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Scozzafava is a Conservative Republican (by New York State standards)

My colleague Boris Shor has performed some analysis (jointly with Nolan McCarty) on the ideological positions of state legislators. The estimates are based on state legislative voting, which might make you wonder how you could possibly compare legislators in one state with those in another. The trick is that some state representatives (for example, Barack Obama) also end up in Congress. There are enough of these overlap cases that you can put legislators from all 50 states on a common scale.

Boris and Nolan most recently applied their method to compare Deirdre Scozzofava, a state assemblywoman running on the Republican ticket in special election in New York's 23rd congressoinal district. Boris writes:

Scozzafava has been assailed from the right for being far too liberal. For example, the libertarian Wall Street Journal this morning wrote, "Democrats want to portray this race as a familiar moderate-conservative GOP split, but the real issue is why Ms. Scozzafava is a Republican at all. She has voted for so many tax increases that the Democrat is attacking her as a tax raiser. She supported the Obama stimulus, and she favors "card check" to make union organizing easier, or at least she did until a recent flip-flop. . ." The conservative National Review writes: "In spite of its having gone for Obama in 2008, the district's history suggests that it is basically conservative; Ms. Scozzafava is basically not. Boy, is she not. . . ."

Actually, though, Boris and Nolan find Scozzafava to be pretty much in the exact center on a national scale:

Her ideological "common space" score is 0.02. These scores, similar but far superior to interest group ratings, put state legislators around the country on the same scale with each other, as well as with members of Congress.

Being in the center nationally puts Scozzafava to the right in New York:

Scozzafava's score puts her in the 58th percentile of her party, which makes her slightly more conservative than the average Republican legislator in Albany, so she's a conservative in her [state] party.

Here's Boris's graph showing the estimated positions of Democratic and Republican legislators in all 50 states in the past decade:



The Republican Party appears to be particularly liberal in Massacusetts, Connecticut, Hawaii, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Oregon, Illinois, and Delaware (although not, as has been much remarked, in California). (The gray lines on the graph show the average ideologies ofcongressional Democrats and Republicans in approximately the same time period.)

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The Issue That Could Fracture Both Right and Left

It's becoming increasingly likely that regulation of the banking and financial sector is liable to be the issue that dominates the first half of 2010. Why? Well in the first place, it's badly needed -- there is fairly broad consensus among economists and regulators that there is still very profound systemic risk in the banking industry.

In the second place, it's not clear what else the Obama administration will do on the domestic policy front, once the health care issue gets resolved. Although the unpopularity of the cap-and-trade program is greatly exaggerated -- most polls in fact show it receiving a plurality or narrow majority of support -- the swing districts in 2010 tend to be big carbon emitters. Immigration reform, likewise, is liable to be a less favorable issue for the Democrats in 2010 than it will be in 2012, when we'll have a younger, more diverse electorate in which Hispanics play a larger role as swing voters. EFCA -- the White House's support for which has always been questionable -- almost certainly isn't going anywhere. Movement on gay rights issues is a possibility, but is more dependent on the White House's willpower than its bandwidth. A second omnibus stimulus bill is probably out of the question, although certainly there will be piecemeal efforts -- extended unemployment benefits, greater investments in transportation infrastructure -- that the White House will pursue. Still, for a hard-working White House, that leaves plenty of time on the table for a big-ticket item, and that item will probably be banking reform.

What's fascinating about this issue is how unevenly it breaks down along traditional political lines. The roll calls on the TARP bills that the Congress passed last year were among the strangest in the history of the institution, with divisions between leadership and rank-and-file, between service-sector states and manufacturing states, and between swing districts and safe districts -- all of which played a larger role than one's partisan affiliation.

From a 30,000-foot view, the debate will be between the Volckerists and the Summersists, with the Volckerists arguing that large financial institutions need to be broken up -- probably through something resembling a modern Glass-Steagall Act -- and the Summersists arguing instead for more extensive regulations.

The 'hard', online left will almost certainly take the Volckerist position. In fact, I expect this to be the "public option" of 2010, the badge of pride that "movement progressives" will use to distinguish themselves from "kleptocrats". Like the public option, the Volckerist position ("break up the banks") is easy and intuitive to understand. Also as in the case of the public option, I suspect the Volckerists will ultimately have the preponderance of polling evidence to show in their favor (although no polling has yet been conducted on the issue). In contrast to the public option, opinion among policy wonks is likely to be a little bit more evenly divided -- see for example the difference of opinion between Yves Smith and Simon Johnson, neither of whom have any inherent sympathy whatsoever for the banks.

How the right will respond is less predictable, but this may become the issue that tests whether the "tea party" movement is ultimately more libertarian or populist in character. While on the one hand, the zeitgeist within the movement is to bemoan any government intervention in the economy, on the other hand, much of the impetus for the movement was the bailout bill and the deference that both the Obama and Bush administrations have shown toward Wall Street. I really don't know how they'll come down on this issue (initially, perhaps, they'll take whatever position that the White House doesn't), but it could be a defining one for the movement.

Ultimately, I think there is more political upside than downside for the White House here, although there is plenty of both. I don't think the Republican Party as a whole can afford to take an anti-regulation stance. If they're afraid of handing Obama a bipartisan victory on the eve of the elections, they may simply argue that whatever type of regulation the Administration wants to do is the wrong kind. But without any agenda-setting powers, it's easy to envision them getting outmaneuvered. Meanwhile, the progressive left is likely to have a more specific viewpoint about what type of regulation is the right kind (Volckerist) and may drive the conversation on the issue, whereas the White House is liable to be reluctant to get engaged in a debate about details. Buckle your seatbelts -- it's going to be a bumpy ride.

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Older and Wealthier People are More Likely to Oppose Government Health Care

You will perhaps not be surprised to hear that people who are over 65 and with higher incomes are more likely to oppose government health care. But I was surprised the pattern was so strong:


(Click to see the full-size version.)

The exact question wording was, "Providing health insurance for people who do not already have it--should the federal government spend more on it, the same as now, less, or no money at all?" Our maps show our estimated percentages of people responding "more" (rather than "the same," "less," or "none") to this question, within each age/income group, within each state.

I apologize right now for only having data from 2000 and 2004. I'm trying to get more recent polling data, but in the meantime, the relative stability from 2000 to 2004 gives us a little bit of confidence that we're seeing something real here, not merely an election-year blip.

Here's 2000 ("Providing health care for people who do not already have it--should the federal government spend more money on this, the same as now, less or no money at all?"):



Some changes have occurred since then--for one thing, the issue is now on the front burner politically, and survey respondents are now more evenly split on support for increased government involvement in health care. That's why we're focusing on the relative numbers here (with coloring defined relative to the national average) rather than absolute levels of support.

Comparison with party identification and ideology

OK, so health care is opposed by oldsters and richies (or, at least it was in 2000 and 2004, but I have no reason to doubt this is still happening now). Is that just because these are where the Republicans are?

No, it's not so simple.

Here are maps of Democratic party identification (among those who identify with the Democrats or Republicans) in 2004 and 2000 (and, yes, we get similar pictures if we map vote intentions):





Richer people are more likely to identify as Republican. But, in comparison to the health care maps, we see almost nothing going on with age, and we see a lot more state-to-state variation.

We made a similar set of maps showing political ideology:





This time, age makes a big difference. Older people are much more likely to identify as conservative--even in 2004, when Barack Obama was a mere senatorial candidate, and in 2000, before Obama was even born. But the interaction with income is much weaker than in the maps of health-care attitudes shown above.

The age factor

One other thing. The age pattern on the top sets of maps above surprised us at first. After all, people over 65 have Medicare, which they're generally satisfied with, so why wouldn't they want this federal presence expanded? But, on second thought, maybe this makes sense: maybe they're suspicious of expanded government involvement in health care because they see it as competing with Medicare for scarce dollars. (And, remember, these graphs are from 2000 and 2004, so you can't attribute these patterns to any sort of recent political awakening involving Obama's plans.)

But here's something that bothered us at first. When I posted on "Seniors Skeptical on Health Care Spending" a couple of months ago, it looked like a pretty steady and continuous drop in support by age; for example:



But in the top map above, there's a sharp fall-off after age 65. What's happening here? For the longest time I was sure we had a mistake, but then Daniel looked more carefully at the graphs of attitudes vs. age, and he pointed out that the graph is actually pretty flat between ages 30 and 60. From 18-30, there's a drop--the youngest voters are particularly supportive of increased federal spending on health insurance--but voter turnout is very low for those under 25, so these people don't show up so strongly in our summaries. Then, at the high end, the big dropoff occurrs beyond age 65: if you average all the over-65's into a single category, you'll see it's much lower than the younger age groups. So it all ended up making sense.

Summary

1. The age and income factors are huge.

2. Opinion does not vary that much from state to state. People in liberal-leaning states are more supportive of Federal health care spending, and people in conservative states are less supportive, but the differences between states are small.

P.S. Daniel Lee made these graphs, and Yu-Sung Su and Yair Ghitza helped with this project also. We're still working on the technical report that explains the details of our implementation of multilevel regression and postratification ("Mister P") for this and related examples.

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Palin Will Not Run for President in '12

...or so, at least, I predict. And I'm putting my money--and stomach--where my keyboard is, as Nate and I made a two-part bet. We wagered a steak dinner on whether or not Sarah Palin runs for the Republican nomination, me betting she doesn't. We have a second wager on whether she wins the nomination, with me giving Nate 3:1 odds on a cash bet of undisclosed amount that she doesn't. (The second bet is not conditional on the first: If Palin doesn't run at all, I win the steak and the cash.)

Wagers aside, in this post I'll make the case for why I don't think Palin will win and may not even run, and at some future point Nate will provide his response. A new Rasmussen poll shows her trailing by significant margins in head-to-head matchups with Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. But more on that in a second. Appropos of any sequential decision tree, I will work backward from Palin's prospects of winning the general, to winning the nomination, to the calculus for her even entering the primary in the first place.

For starters, winning the White House against an incumbent is more difficult than in an open-seat year. In the concluding chapter of The Elections of 2008, Yale political scientist David Mayhew pulls back the lens on presidential electoral history to reveal a simple but compelling fact: When an incumbent runs, the party in power wins about two of every three times, but when the seat is open the party in power wins only about half the time. The two-thirds pattern has held more recently, too: Since World War II, there have been 10* elections in which the incumbent--whether he won a first term or succeeded to the White House by death or resignation--has run for re-election: '48, '56, '64, '72, '76, '80, '84, '92, '96 and '04. And the incumbent, and thus the party in power, won seven times.

So a strategic politician seeking the Oval Office should, all else equal, wait until she is not running against an incumbent president enjoying the many advantages incumbency provides, from access to the bully pulpit to control over the levers of government. History says the odds are better if you wait.

But all is not equal every cycle, of course, and maybe the national political environment by late 2010 and early 2011 will look so dismal for Barack Obama that Palin decides to jump in. Presuming she does, what are her chances of winning the nomination?

I realize that polls more than two years out from the Iowa caucuses may well be meaningless, but what's most interesting about the head-to-head matchups between Palin and both Huckabee and Romney is that she is losing to two candidates from very different parts of the GOP coalition. Romney is a very recently converted social conservative who is probably at heart more liberal on social issues than he sold himself in 2008. He's a northerner-midwesterner from the business wing of the party who is expected to struggle with the hardcore, evangelical conservative base, given his social issue flip-flopping and his Mormonism. Yet Palin trails him because, presumably, he outflanks her to the center-right side of the party.


Huckabee? Just the reverse: a southern man of faith with broad appeal to social conservatives who is probably viewed with some wariness by the GOP's business elements. Yet he also leads her, presumably because he has a stronger appeal among the base than does Palin and thus outflanks her from the right. My point is this: Palin's ideological appeal is easily dominated because it is wide but not deep on the far right and neither wide nor deep among the party's institutional and more mainstream elements. Though her chances will increase, perhaps dramatically, if Huckabee opts out--and he very well may, given his rising media presence--it's unclear to me how she can unify the party. Though neither Huckabee nor Romney displays a strong command of foreign and defense policies, on this potentially tiebreaking count Palin for the moment remains as weak if not weaker than either of them--recent speeches in Hong Kong or not.

Here's how that squeeze for Palin is described by Rasmussen:

Suggesting that Romney’s Mormon faith may still be a problem among some Christian conservatives, Palin leads him by 14 points – 52% to 38% - among GOP primary voters who describe themselves as Evangelical Christians. But Romney beats Palin by 26 points among other Protestants – 58% to 32% - and holds similar winning margins among Catholic voters and those of other faiths.

On the other hand, Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, beats Palin by 17 points among Evangelical Christians and 29 points among other Protestants. A similar spread is evident among Republican voters of other faiths, but Huckabee has just an eight-point edge over Palin among Catholic voters.

Rasmussen notes that Palin's numbers have dropped significantly since polls taken in July prior to her announcing that she would resign the Alaska governorship. And that brings me to the first decision she must make, whether to run or not. I think she won't.

First, some candidates who run and lose still gain because they emerge as national figures. But Palin already achieved that status in 2008; her marketability is secure, especially given that she presently has a book that rose to the top of the Amazon rankings before it was even available for (non-advance) purchase. (As of this writing it ranks #2.) Palin's star burns bright enough that only a successful bid for the nomination would brighten it, while a failed bid might diminish it. Few failed vice presidential candidates have won so much from a loss as she did last year.

Second, there is the matter of her resignation. I recognize that this may have been done to avoid a potential scandal and even indictment. But if you want to run for president you run for re-election in 2010 and then, and only then, maybe resign the governorship in order to make an unencumbered bid for the White House. The resignation signals her desire, confirmed by the self-interested and possibly unreliable father of her grandson, to cash in now rather than invest in her long-term electoral future. After all, Palin could have reaped the book royalties and still governed Alaska. But she bolted anyway.

In short, the opportunity costs of running seem to me higher for her than not running. Palin has near-universal name recognition, a book that will bring her significant income, and maybe a chance to become a television personality who could some day serve as the Right's answer to Oprah Winfrey. Though the latter may be a bad move for her in the short term, I wouldn't be surprised to see her make a future bid for TV stardom. (Update: When I first posted this, I had not yet seen this item about Palin's scheduled appearance on Oprah's show.)

That reality, coupled with the prospects of, first, an unclear route to the nomination and, second, an equally uncertain path to the White House even if she is nominated, provides Sarah Palin ample disincentive to run at all. Methinks she will play stay-at-home hockey mom in 2012.

*Corrected typo in which I wrote "seven". The data is correct, though: 10 post-war races with incumbents running, seven of whom won.

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Why The (Impure) Public Option is (Probably) Gaining Momentum

1. The tireless, and occasionally tiresome, advocacy on behalf of liberal bloggers and interest groups for the public option. Whatever you think of their tactics -- I haven't always agreed with them -- the sheer amount of focus and energy expended on their behalf has been very important, keeping the issue alive in the public debate.

2. The fact that the CBO thinks it will save money.

3. The seeming inevitability of health care reform, which neuters the voices of those who aren't opposed to the public option per se so much as the entire project of health care reform.

4. The fact that the locus of power has shifted from the Gang of Six -- Bingaman/Conrad/Baucus/Snowe/Grassley/Enzi to the Group of Six -- Pelosi/Dodd/Obama/Reid/Baucus/Snowe.

5. The "innovation" of the opt-in/opt-out family of compromises, which have more liberal "street cred" than co-ops or triggers and are potentially also much more politically advantageous.

6. The fading from memory of the tea party protests and the "government takeover" meme.

7. Polls in myriad swing states and swing districts showing the public option is reasonably popular in these regions.

8. Constituent letters and e-mails.

9. The insurance industry's "senior moment": forgetting that this isn't 1993 and that the shelf life of a misleading study would be measured in hours (rather than days or weeks) and would damage its credibility in the process.

10. The Washington Post's somewhat bizarre decision to make its poll showing support for the public option its lede in yesterday's paper, even though public opinion has been fairly steady on the issue for months.

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Turnout is the Maine Issue

Here are the results of the four recent -- and somewhat contradictory -- polls on Maine's Question 1, which seeks to overturn the state legislature's decision to provide for same-sex marriage in the state.



Pick your poison. The Democracy Corps poll is of registered voters (bad); the other three are of likely voters (good, usually). The PPP poll has the largest sample (good), and the Pan Atlantic Poll has the smallest sample (bad). The PPP poll is the most recent (good) -- although the poll showing the worst result for gay marriage, from Research 2000, is the least recent. Pan Atlantic is a Maine-based pollster (good); the other three are national pollsters (bad). The PPP poll is an automated poll -- which Tom Jensen thinks might be preferable in this instance -- whereas the other three use traditional telephone methods.

I tried to come up with a crude weighting scheme based on these various factors and scored the PPP poll at 10 points, the Pan Atlantic poll at 6 points, and the other two polls at 3 points each. That would produce a weighted average of 46 percent (actually, 45.7 percent) voting 'yes' (meaning rejecting the same-sex marriage law), and 49 percent voting no, although this is not much different from the unweighted average of 45/49.

In addition to the polls, we also have a statistical analysis I conducted a couple of weeks ago that predicts the ban would fail 43.5-56.5, although with a fairly large margin of error; a more conservative version that accounts for the fact that this is an off-year election would change the numbers to 47.5-52.5.

What I think is reasonably clear is that if you had a 2008-type turnout, the marriage ban would fail. California approved the similar Proposition 8 by a 52-48 margin last year, but Maine is quite a bit less religious than California -- it's one of just four states in which a majority of citizens do not consider religion an important part of their daily lives -- and religiosity is the big driver of support on this issue. But, there's not going to be a 2008-type turnout. Compare PPP's aged-based demographics, for instance, to 2008's, as well as the 2006 and 2004 elections.



PPP has just 31 percent of the 2009 electorate being under age 45, versus 43 percent in 2008, 36 percent in 2006, and 45 percent in 2004. They also show a more conservative electorate, with 22 percent identifying as liberal versus 33 percent conservative, whereas those numbers have been about even in the exit polls for Maine's last three general elections. (Note: PPP uses very slightly different age brackets than the exit polls, and so I'm extrapolating accordingly).

If that's what the turnout looks like, I have little doubt that Question 1 is a toss-up, as PPP suggests. But I think that's probably somewhat toward the pessimistic side. In contrast to California, where the Yes on 8 folks seemed to be better organized, the anti-gay Stand for Marriage Maine campaign seems fairly shoddy, trailing 2-1 in funding, relying on manipulative advertising that the majority of the state doesn't buy, and with an amateurish web interface which, for instance, when I checked it yesterday, didn't list any "House Parties for Marriage" within 50 miles of any of the ten largest cities in Maine.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave the marriage ban 3:1 odds against passing. I might lower that slightly to about 5:2 given the PPP poll, but the fundamentals remain fairly good for proponents of marriage equity. If the marriage ban passes, the pro-gay marriage side is really going to need to rethink its messaging strategy (my suggestion on how to do so here.)

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The Not-So-Bad-Case Scenario

If the conventional wisdom of the summer was that Democrats were in deep, deep trouble when it came to the midterms of 2010, the emergent theme of the fall seems to be that things might not be so bad. See Paul Krugman or Ezra Klein for an articulate distillation of this; the argument in a nutshell is that, for all the trouble the Democrats might get themselves into between now and next November, the Republican brand is simply too damaged for them to capitalize on this in more than a marginal way.

Indeed, there is little sign that very many Americans have come to view the Republican Party more favorably. Party identification among all adults hasn't shifted much (to the extent it has, independents have gained a couple of points at both major party's expense) and in yesterday's Washington Post poll hit 20 percent for Republicans, their lowest figure since 1983.

But most adults don't vote in midterm elections -- only about 40 percent do. And there's still plenty of suggestion -- both anecdotal and statistical -- that those adults who are most inclined to vote next year will tend toward the conservative side of the ledger. Over the past two months, 11 distinct organizations have released 'generic ballot' polls asking voters how they're planning to vote in their House district. Those polls show quite a strong discrepancy depending on the sample frame used:



Between three polls (ABC/Pos, Bloomberg, and YouGov) that sample all adults, Democrats hold a 10-point lead -- not much different than the 10.5-point margin by which they won the House aggregate popular vote in 2008. But their advantage is reduced to 7.4 points in polls of registered voters -- which would probably correspond to a loss of perhaps 10-15 seats -- and just 1.4 points in polls of likely voters, which might correspond to a 30-40 seat loss.

Now, I'm generally not a huge fan of applying a likely voter model more than a year in advance of an election -- enthusiasm, which is essentially what a likely voter model is measuring -- tends to be more fluid than one's underlying political preferences. But this does present, in my view, a highly plausible scenario. No, the Republicans will not present a particularly compelling rationale for voting for them (they certainly haven't so far). But their anti-Democratic message could tend to capture the most angry and motivated voters -- people who are not voting "Republican" so much as they're voting "not Democrat".

Needless to say, there are a lot of contingencies. Will the Tea Party/Glenn Beck crowd go to the polls in large numbers, or are they so disillusioned that even that feels like selling out to them? Will Democrats be motivated to turn out to support a President who has managed to pass, say, a major stimulus package, a big health care bill, and a financial regulation initiative -- or will their expectations have been so high that they'll prove to be complacent? What role will third party candidates play? (They're playing a very important role right now in New Jersey and NY-23). And of course, what will the economy and the situation in Afghanistan look like one year hence?

Over the summer, I estimated about a 30 percent chance that Republicans would take over the House. I would now dial that back slightly to 20 or perhaps 25 percent, as key metrics like Presidential approval and the generic ballot appear to have stabilized for the Democrats. The bottom, for now, doesn't seem to be falling out. But it still could, and even if it doesn't, the enthusiasm gap remains something for them to worry about.

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Afghanistan Audit Doesn't Look Good For Karzai

Well, the results are in (again). The Electoral Complaints Commission has published three important decisions, which confirm that major fraud occurred during Afghanistan's August Presidential election. At least a million votes will be thrown out -- and likely more.

There are three main areas where votes have been disqualified from the total.

1. Electoral Audit: On 8 September, after a two week investigation, the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) ordered that the ballots from a number of polling stations be audited for fraud. They were categorized into six categories (originally three, but an error in logic accidently left a number of ballots out, so three more were added)

The polling stations that fell under these categories numbered 3377 out of a total of more than 26000 polling stations that were open on election day, about 13 percent. However, these stations, which largely had more (often many more) than 600 votes -- almost three times the average -- represents a significant chunk of the vote.

The process of auditing the 3377 suspected stations was done by "representative sample," with 10 percent of each of the six categories of fraud chosen (random selection of polling station number), and the proportions of fraud found there applied to the whole selection of stations.

Not surprisingly, most ballot boxes in the sampled polling stations had significant and obvious fraud, with all but one category (the widest net) breaking 70 percent of votes being identified as bogus.
A conservative estimate (using 600 for A1, A2, C1 & C2, 215 for B1 and 50 for B2) suggests that at least 960,000 votes are no good, about 17 percent of the overall vote total.

Bottom Line: The 3400 polling stations that were captured in the audit were the most blatant offenders. So it is possible that many more than 600 votes from many of them will be removed by the IEC from the total (see section three about 1000 vote stations). We do not yet know how many votes will be subtracted from each candidates total, but much of the disqualified vote is going to be coming out of Karzai's column here.

2. Electoral Complaints: More than 2500 specific fraud complaints, with more than 3000 allegations of fraudulent activity (7 types) were fielded by the ECC, with a wide geographic distribution. Only Priority A claims have been pursued so far.

While focused in the volatile capital region and Baghlan, where heavy electoral violence was noted, electoral complaints of top concern were reported in all 34 provinces. The ECC's investigation resulted in a total of 359 invalidated polling station, however, 138 of them were covered in the above audit.

Using the above average of 215 votes per polling station, another 50,000 votes have disqualified because of specific electoral complaints. This, of course, is a conservative estimate, given that many of the stations were accused of ballot stuffing or number tampering, which would inflate totals farther. In addition, stations that were counted in the audit and only partially disqualified could be indeed further reduced by being caught in this category as well. Finally, this tally does not include priority B and C complaints, which add up to another 1500 challenged polling stations.

Bottom Line: Another at least 50,000 votes (likely 2 or 3 times that number in reality) are gone from the total. Based on the geography, Karzai likely suffers more, with perhaps 65-70 pecent of the lost votes coming from his column.

3. Other Fraud (IEC): The Independent Electoral Commission, which has widely been reported as being "pro-Karzai" also quarantined a number of polling stations that it deemed to have fraudulent characteristics. Some of these overlap with the ECC's list, others do not.

In the first type, we will include just 400 votes in the estimate, since we can assume that these stations were caught in the audit in section one, capturing at least the first 600 votes. For the other three categories, we can use the average of 215 again. Again, at least 83,000 votes are disqualified here, likely more.

Bottom Line: Nearly every 1000 vote station publicly identified came from Karzai strongholds, as well as almost all the polling stations that did not open but still sent in results. The too many ballot syndrone (those not captured by the audit), could affect either candidate, but still impacts Karzai more given the run-off situation.

Using our conservative affected-vote estimates, the situation remains fairly damning for Hamid Karzai. Assuming that the results are equal to or less favorable than our estimates, it seems likely that a runoff will ensue. With just four percent of cushion, it would take a miracle for him to walk away with a majority after this, where 20 percent of the vote is fraudulent, much from his tally. Dr. Abdullah Abdullah is in the strongest position he has been in thus far, and could conceivably win a run-off held in strict conditions.

Of course, strict conditions we do not have in Afghanistan, where winter is rapidly approaching. If another round of voting is ordered, it could be difficult or impossible to complete before the freeze brings movement around the country, outside of major cities, to a halt. Perhaps a coalition government or tribally negotiated solution is in store?

Nonetheless, the Afghan government and all internationals remain in a pretty tight spot.

Update: Democracy International (an experienced election observer) has done its own projections, which were able to take into account the split of disqualifications more effectively than I could. They suggest that about a million Karzai votes, 200,000 Abdullah votes and 120,000 other candidate votes were disqualified, putting the final split at Karzai 48.3% and Abdullah 31.5%.
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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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Geoengineering is No Free Lunch -- A Comment on SuperFreakonomics

I'm not going to wade too deeply into the controversy over SuperFreakonomics, the sure-to-be-bestseller by Steve Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, which is due to be released this week. This is partly because other folks have done a good job of discussing the issues and partly because I feel like I have various conflicts of interest. On the one hand, I've met Steve Levitt a couple of times and can vouch for the fact that he's a relatively apolitical person (and also a kind and generous one). On the other hand, I'm working on my own book project, which while not particularly similar to Superfreakonomics in content or approach will undoubtedly will be competing for some of the same audience (the percentage of the U.S. population that buys "serious", nonbiographical nonfiction is fairly small). Suffice it to say that I think it's a good book -- more engaging in some ways than the original and easily worth a purchase -- but that the fifth chapter on climate science is by far the weakest material in either of the two Freakonomics books.

The fifth chapter comes down in favor of a geoengineering approach to combating the global warming problem, which Levitt and Dubner argue will be cheaper and more practical than a substantial reduction in carbon emissions. What is geoengineering? It is intentionally altering the Earth's climate system, presumably with the goal of balancing out the effects of global warming. Arguably the two most promising geoengineering approaches are:

-- Finding some mechanism to shoot sulfur into the atmosphere -- this is the approach that Levitt and Dubner concentrate on in SuperFreakonomics. Sulfur has a cooling effect, as can be observed, for instance, when there is a large volcanic eruption -- volcanoes emit lots of sulfur and when Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991 it cooled the planet's temperatures by approximately 0.9° F for several months.

-- Creating artificial cloudcover. Or to be more precise, modifying clouds to be more reflective, which would modify the earth's albedo and cause more sunlight to be bounced back into space. This is the approach pursued by Dr. John Latham, a seventysomething British scientist employed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, whom I spoke with on the phone several weeks ago.

I'm not going to describe the entirety of my conversation with Latham -- which is intended primarily for the book. But the three most essential points he raised are as follows.

Firstly, Latham thinks geoengineering approaches are woefully underfunded -- the word he used to describe the current levels of funding was "derisory" -- just a few million dollars toward an approach which could potentially combat the multitrillion dollar problem of climate change. "All I can hope for in my lifetime is to see some real funding of the examination of the viability of geoengineering schemes," he told me.

Secondly, Latham was adamant that geoengineering programs are not looked at as a substitute to carbon reduction schemes but rather as a complement to them. He told me:

"The thing that has scared everyone I know working in geoengineering, and the thing that has caused a lot of very good scientists to say we shouldn't have it is the worry that if it was announced that geoengineering was to be thoroughly examined, there would be a temptation on behalf of the oil companies to say, “Oh well, they’re going to solve the problem, we can keep burning fossil fuels”. Which is the last thing anyone wants. But then to not examine it would be irresponsible. If we reach that tipping point, we want to be in the position to be able to help out."

Thirdly, the largest hurdles to geoengineering are arguably not scientific but political. Although geoengineering approaches would almost certainly succeed in reducing the earth's average temperature, the effects would not be uniform across the globe, nor would they precisely counterbalance the warming effects of CO2.

"There will be a different distribution of temperatures, and rainfall and wind features," Latham told me. "If our technique was applied and it reduced rainfall in areas where they are struggling for every drop, than in case we couldn’t remedy that, we would consider not using our scheme."

Certain computer simulations that Latham and his team ran identified, for instance, a reduction in rainfall in South America as a result of one of his suggested implementation proposals. A different implementation scheme might avoid that particular problem, but could cause problems in other areas. Latham seemed reasonably optimistic that with further funding for computer modelling**, such problems could be reduced -- but they could not be entirely eliminated. Some regions would have their climates impacted negatively (in terms of crop yields, habitability, etc.) by geoengineering, certainly relative to the status quo and in some cases relative to large-scale warming.

That doesn't mean that geoengineering would be "bad", relative to the scenario of runaway warming. It could potentially be a lot, lot better, on balance, for most of the planet. But "on balance" skirts over the regional discrepancies. How would Brazil feel, for instance, if the most optimal scheme happened to reduce its crop yields by 20 percent? How would Bangladesh feel if the approaches increased precipitation in the Himalayas, which in turn increased the flooding in its river deltas? What if we were trying pick between two approaches, one of which might increase the habitability of the Australian Outback, but others of which might make it even less hospitable to human settlement? And just who has the right to shoot a few volcano's worth of sulfur up into the atmosphere, anyway?

Finally, it should be remembered that geoengineering is not a one-time fix -- if we continue to pollute the atmopshere with carbon, we would have to continually release more sulfur into the atmosphere (or seed more clouds, etc.) to combat it.

What you'd have, in other words, is a massive global coordination problem -- exactly the sort of problem that makes global warming hard to control in the first place. "I suppose the only hope is for some much more powerful global body to exist that could override the shrill requirements of the particularly selfish," Latham told me. "But goodness knows how to do that and whether it’s feasible."

*-*

It's routine to describe geoengineering as a "last resort". I don't prefer that language, because it might be the case that geoengineering is the only resort, and it could conceivably also be the case -- as Levitt and Dubner argue -- that it is actually cheaper than reducing carbon. Almost certainly, these approaches require much more funding and much more serious study. But it would not be a free lunch -- the political hurdles would be massive, arguably larger than the scientific ones. And the larger the scale of the warming problem, the more geoengineering will be required, and therefore the higher the political hurdles will be.


** One potential irony here is that, because geoengineering approaches do not lend themselves very well to large-scale, physical experimentation prior to their actual implementation, they would almost certainly require extensive computer modelling. So anyone who is skeptical of what computer models tell us about carbon should be at least as skeptical of any guarantees made by geoengineers.

p.s. I've received a couple of e-mails to the effect that while geoengineering approaches like releasing sulfur might "solve" the temperature problem, they would not address the issue of ocean acidification, which also results from CO2 emissions. This is certainly worth mentioning; one of the scientists who wrote me described it as a problem "with consequences so enormous and unforseeable as to make a few degrees C of warming pale in comparison".

p.p.s. To be clear, I have read the book (I was sent an advance copy two weeks ago).

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