Politicians Have a Lot of Leeway in How They Vote

Matthew Yglesias remarks that, when staking out positions, congressmembers are not very strongly constrained by the ideologies of their constituents.

Wow, that was a lot of big words. What I meant to say was: Congressmembers and Senators can pretty much vote how they want on most issues, whatever their constituents happen to believe. Not always, of course, but a representative can take a much more liberal or conservative line than the voters in his or her district or state, and still do fine when election time comes.

Yglesias gives some examples from the U.S. Senate, and I just wanted to back him up by citing some research from the House of Representatives.

First, here's a graph (from chapter 9 of Red State, Blue State; the numbers are based on research with Jonathan Katz) showing that, when running for reelection, it helps for a congressmember to be a moderate--but not by much:

Being a moderate is worth about 2% of the vote in a congressional election: it ain't nuthin, but it certainly is not a paramount concern for most representatives.

To look at this another way, here's a graph showing the members of the House of Representatives in 1993-1994:



Representatives from more politically extreme districts tended themselves to be further to the right (if Republicans) or to the left (if Democrats), but only slightly so, with a lot of exceptions. There's a lot of leeway on where politicians stand.

(And, yes, many of these Democrats did lose in 1994--but, pretty much, the ones that lost were those in marginal districts, not particularly those with extremely liberal ideologies. By this I'm not trying to say the extreme liberals benefited from their ideology--as noted above, I estimate that it hurt them by, on average, a couple percentage points of the vote--but that these couple percentage points didn't really matter much; the partisanship of their districts was much more of the key factor in determining whether they were reelected.)

More discussion here, in the context of the notorious "median voter theorem." As I wrote earlier, I am sympathetic to the related point that it can be a mistake to assume that politicians of your political party agree with you, deep down, on the issues, and that they're only voting differently because of expedience, craven political calculation, or whatever. It's worth considering the hypothesis that lots of Democratic politicians do not share the values and policy preferences of lots of Democratic voters, and similarly for the Republicans. Given the diversity of public opinion, this really has to be true on some issues, and it very well might be true all over the place.

Another way of saying all this is: Incumbent congressmembers almost always win reelection. And, when they don't, they're often losing as part of a national swing (as in the 1994 Republican sweep or the 2006/2008 Democratic shift). And when an incumbent does lose unexpectedly, it can be for something unrelated to their votes (remember the "check kiting scandal" of 1992?).

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How the Swine Flu Has Spread

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak with a couple of engineers from Google who are working on a product known as Google Flu Trends". This is a very simple, yet elegant and important application of what might be termed predictive analytics; if there were awards given out for such things (the Jameys?), it would be a good candidate to win one.

The product, which launched last year, works by analyzing searches that have correlated strongly in the past with flu statistics as put out by the CDC and other governmental agencies; a fuller write-up of the technology can be found in this article in Nature. The advantage of this is that whereas the CDC typically works on a 10 to 14 day lag before new flu statistics are published, the Flu Trends numbers can be turned around literally overnight. Flu Trends does not predict the future per se, so much as it "predicts the present", as the engineers describe it.

The other nice thing about the Flu Trends data is that it is all publicly available. Here, for instance, is when the Flu Trends index hit 5,000 in each U.S. State, a level that would correspond to the peak of a fairly bad annual flu outbreak in the January or February.



This map is fascinating on a number of levels. Although the initial outbreak of H1N1 back in April was centered on Texas, California, New York, Illinois and South Carolina, the place where the flu first hit critical mass several months later was in Louisiana. It then slowly radiated its way outward to most of the neighboring states -- Maine finally hit the 5,000-point threshold just last week. There also appear to be other points from which the flu spread -- a less prominent 'epicenter', for instance, centered in Minnesota and the Dakotas. And somehow, there came to be quite a lot of flu at various points in both Alaska and Hawaii -- Hawaii's peak actually came way back in June and July, well before the one in the Deep South.

The flu has not been especially widespread in Florida, perhaps because Florida has a lot of old people and -- unlike the seasonal flu -- H1N1 has mostly attacked younger individuals. The other state which has yet to hit the 5,000-point barrier is Utah, which is somewhat culturally isolated from the rest of the country.

The good news is that, according to Flu Trends, the flu is pretty much on the decline in all states except Northern New England. The bad news is that we're starting to approach the point where the seasonal flu usually starts to grow in advance of its typical January or February peak; how these two trends will intersect, I don't purport to know.

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Time for Dems to Panic?

A Gallup poll released yesterday showed the Republicans with a 4-point lead on the House generic ballot -- a reversal from October, when the Democrats had maintained a 2-point lead. Making matters worse for Democrats, this was a poll of registered voters -- not the likely voter samples that have generally contained worse news for them because of the apparent Republican edge in enthusiasm.

So -- is it time for Democrats to push the panic button? Or is this poll some kind of outlier?

Probably a little of both. There's no obvious flaw in the Gallup poll -- the question wording is as standard as it gets, the sample size is decent (894 people), and Gallup is a classy and reliable pollster. Scenarios in which Democrats lose a large number of seats in the House are fairly likely, and scenarios in which they lose their majority are quite possible.

Still, I find it unlikely that there's been quite as substantial a shift as Gallup suggests. Rasmussen also shows significant problems for the Democrats, giving the Republicans a 6-point lead in their generic ballot using their likely voter model. That's somewhat worse than the Republican leads of 1 to 5 points that they had shown since Labor Day, although Rasmussen has generally painted a pessimistic case for the Democrats, with Team Red polling as high as +7 on two occasions in August.

Pew, on the other hand, shows the Democrats at a +5 -- actually a little better than the +1 they polled in their last generic ballot test in late August. And YouGov has the Dems at a +9 -- showing essentially no trend for the past several months -- although as an Internet-based poll and one that samples all adults rather than registered or likely voters, I'm not sure how seriously that data point should be taken.

Meanwhile, there's been no obvious trend in Presidential approval -- Barack Obama's numbers have been essentially unchanged for three months now. On the other hand, some of the latest Senate numbers have not been kind to the Democrats, with Quinnipiac bringing a double-dose of bad news in Ohio and Connecticut today.

Gallup's poll was also conducted entirely after the elections of last Tuesday, which none of the other polls were. But that can cut both ways. On the one hand, the poll is the most recent; on the other, the elections were generally regarded as a 'win' for the Republicans, giving them a couple of days of favorable news coverage, and it's not atypical to see a (temporary, usually) bounce in a party or candidate's numbers if polling is conducted during such a period.

My 30,000-foot view is that between the pressures of the jobs situation and the health care debate, the Democrats are in fairly bad shape. But, there's a long way to go before next year, and their situation does not seem to be quite as bad as it was in August.

Certainly, if I were the Democrats, I'd be adopting a fairly defensive posture, putting money into defending seats -- especially those held by non-Blue Dog incumbents -- rather than getting cute and trying to pick off more than a handful of potentially vulnerable Republican seats. I'd also be thinking about policies -- like a jobs package and financial regulation -- that tap a little bit into the populist spirit and might result in somewhat awkward Republican positioning.

So, should the Democrats be panicking? Yeah, maybe a little. But the fundamentals -- particularly the poor labor situation and the Republican enthusiasm advantage -- should be the reasons for their concern, rather than the results of any one particular poll.

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For the Soccer Fans Among You

Much of my summer was spent on a consulting project that I did in conjunction with ESPN, in which I helped them a design a soccer ratings system known as the Soccer Power Index (SPI). SPI launched today and we're pretty proud of the results, which feature a combination of intuitive (Brazil and Spain are #1 and 2, natch) and somewhat bolder rankings (SPI is fond of 'second-tier' South American teams like Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay, as well as African up-and-comers Ivory Coast). The United States is ranked 14th.

Unlike other soccer ratings systems, SPI is explicitly designed to be predictive -- so a team like Argentina, which in fact struggled to qualify for the World Cup, won't be penalized that much provided the system is convinced that the talent is still there. The two main innovations in the SPI are to incorporate results from club play -- if Cameroonian striker Samuel Eto'o scores a goal for Inter Milan, it will (marginally) help Cameroon's rating -- as well as to incorporate a "competitiveness coefficient" based on the actual lineups that each team used in each match. The latter is important because international soccer clubs play a lot of matches -- friendlies, some second-tier international tournaments -- in which they're essentially sending their taxi squads in, which tell us very little about the teams that will actually be on the field in South Africa next year.

Anyway, this is a politics blog -- not a sports one -- so I'll direct you over to the very, very, long article on methodology I did at ESPN.com if you're curious about the details -- or check out the Wall Street Journal's Carl Bialak for a good capsule summary.

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House Handicapping One Year Out

One year out, how many losses might we project for Nancy Pelosi’s House majority? Which Democrats are most vulnerable? Piggybacking on the post I wrote last week after attending the latest Cook Political Report political briefing at their Watergate offices, I'll take a look the analysis by CPR’s David Wasserman, and perhaps tweak it a bit.


Wasserman identified five factors--in chart above, the five columns starting with "CT" for "cap-n-trade"--that might be indicators of vulnerability for House Democratic incumbents next year:

1. 1. Did they vote “yes” on the so-called cap-and-trade bill?
   
2. 2. Is their district’s Partisan Voting Index—a measure produced for CPR by Polidata which reflects the partisan performance of the major parties’ presidential candidates during the 2004 and 2008 cycles—scored at D+5 or less?
   
3. 3. Is their district’s PVI R+5 or more?
   
4. 4. Was their 2008 popular vote 55 percent or less?
   
5. 5. Does their opponent have at least $100,000 cash on hand as of 9/30/09?

Based on those criteria, there are 28 Democrats who match on at least four factors, including one--Maryland 1st District rookie Congressman Frank Kratovil--who matches on all five. Though these are not necessarily the 28 Democrats Wasserman rates as most endangered--there is some but not perfect overlap between these 28 and the 12 Democratic-held districts he rates as "toss-up" races and another 21 he rates as "leaning Democratic"--many could be in serious trouble next November. (Kratovil, I should note, has at least one compensatory advantage over the others: The Democratic Campaign Committee Chairman, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (MD-8), has a vested interest in defending a seat in his home state.)

Wasserman included the cap-and-trade vote, he says, because voting for it may be particularly dangerous for Democrats from districts containing significant chunks of those white working-class areas depicted in that now-famous map of the 22 percent of counties nationally where John Kerry in 2004 outperformed Barack Obama in 2008. "In the rural areas of the South—the parts of the South were Barack Obama did worse than John Kerry in 2004—there is an open revolt against Democrats and particularly Barack Obama," said Wasserman. He cited as specific evidence of this revolt from last week the coal-heavy and thus highly cap-and-trade resistant 3rd Delegate District in the southwest corner Virginia, the Appalachian county that uniquely borders both Kentucky and West Virginia. Mark Warner got 61% of the vote in 2001 in District 3, Tim Kaine dropped to 49% in 2005, Obama slipped further to 40% last year, and Creigh Deeds plummeted to just 32% last week. "In places like this all across the South," Wasserman quipped, "as Toby Keith would say, ‘the fit’s gonna hit the shan.’ ”

For kicks, I decided to add two factors/columns to Wasserman's analysis. The first is for the recent vote on the House health care bill ("HC"), on which 39 Democrats voted nay. (A good list and analysis of the 39 can be found in the New York Times.) Those Democrats are explaining their votes in a variety of ways, and of course a "nay" vote may be the potentially more electorally damaging for many Democrats. But, for the sake of argument, let's presume that voting for the House bill is an added risk factor for 16 of the 28 who voted "aye."

I also added a column showing the comparative cash-on-hand advantage (or in some cases disadvantage) for each of these 28 incumbent Democrats ("Ratio"). I calculated this as cash-on-hand minus outstanding debts as of September 30, 2009 (data courtesy of the Center for Responsive Politics here), and then created an incumbent-to-challenger COH ratio by dividing the incumbent's COH by the challenger's. This relative money advantage is useful because (a) it contextualizes the financial competitiveness of challengers who have cleared the $100K bar relative to the incumbent they aim to unseat, as least as of 9/30/09; and, relatedly, (b) because the party committees (DCCC, NRCC) look at fundraising competitiveness as one indicator of challenger strength, the smaller this ratio is for the incumbent the smaller still it could become, as the RNCC and strategic givers gravitate to races they believe will yield better returns on their investments. For lack of a better cut point, I counted as another risk point any Democrat who does not presently enjoy a 3:1 or better COH ratio. (I rounded up OH's Boccieri ratio to 3; all others below that gained a point.)

I'm not quibbling with Wasserman's analyses. Maybe the health care vote will not be very predictive next November, and surely there will be some well-funded incumbents who lose and others who win despite well-funded challengers. I'm just updating the analysis to include one new policy factor and one updated political factor. One could also set different (wider?) thresholds for the PVI ratings, and so on.

In any case, the way I've done it stratifies these 28 into three groups, including those who may be most at risk among the at-risk: the ones score a "6." (Kratovil was the only one with a chance for a "7," but he voted "nay" on the health care bill.) There are not a lot of members from those Appalachian-area districts who voted for the health care bill--which is ironic, given that some of them represent districts with high uninsured rates, but let's not even go there right now. NH's Carol Shea-Porter and northern Virginia's Gerry Connolly are good examples members who may be helped by voting "aye." On the other hand, those who are from such areas and voted "nay" may still face money problems, like AL's Bobby Bright and MS's Travis Childers.

We'll just have to wait a year to see how much these key votes and the candidates' finances matter come 2010 midterm Election Day.

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Is the Prognosis For Health Care Getting Better or Worse? The Market Weighs In.

It's a bit hard to assess where we are in the health care debate. On the one hand, the Democrats pushed through and passed a bill in the late hours of Saturday evening, clearing a hurdle that meaningful health care reform has never before cleared. On the other hand, the vote in the House perilously close, there were new complications introduced by the Stupak amendment, and the bad jobs numbers and arguably the outcomes of the elections last Tuesday Virginia and New Jersey last will give nervous lawmakers plenty to worry about.

One leading indicator of the prospects for health care reform so far has been the performance of the half-dozen or so publicly-traded health insurance company stocks. Favorable developments for health care reform have been met with decreases in the prices of these stocks, and unfavorable developments with improved valuations. So what's happened to these stocks since market close on Friday -- before the House passed its health care bill?

Well, not much. Actually, that's not true: they've gained an average of 1.8 percent so far, weighted for market capitalization. But the S&P 500 has gained 2.1 percent over the same day-and-a-half of trading, meaning that the performance of the health insurance stocks is right on par with the market. The news has not been good or bad so much as indifferent -- which feels, intuitively to me, like about the right assessment.



Interestingly, the markets had a much less ambiguous assessment of the elections, with health insurance stocks gaining an average of 3.7 percent over the course of the day on Wednesday while the S&P -- after a volatile session -- was basically unchanged:



I don't necessarily think that the stock market is particularly adept at forecasting political risk, but to the extent that you're looking for an objective assessment of the consequences of lats week's results for the Democratic agenda, this is a pretty decent one.

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Many Previously Pro-Choice Dems Voted for Stupak Amendment

When I first learned that the Stupak Amendment, which would prevent abortion from being covered under health care plans included in the health care insurance exchanges, had passed by a 240-194 margin in the House, I assumed that something like the following happened: anybody who was either pro-life or who disapproved of the health care bill in general had voted for it.

Certainly, that description is apt for the half-dozen or so generally pro-choice Republicans, all of whom voted both for the Stupak Amendement and against the health care bill. But it doesn't really hold for the Democrats.

Rather, I was surprised at the number of Democrats who have solid pro-choice voting records but who nevertheless voted for Stupak Amendment. And the vast majority of these Democrats voted for, not against, passage of the underlying health care bill.

The below chart lists the 'yea' votes on Stupak among those representatives who had a rating of 67 in 2007-08 according to Planned Parenthood, and a rating of 33 or lower according to the National Right to Life Committee. (Note: no freshmen representatives are listed on this chart as they have not been rated yet.)



As you can see, 17 of the 20 Democrats who fell into this category voted for final passage of the health care bill. So what gives?

I'm sure there are idiosyncratic explanations in a number of cases, but I take this as a sign that they're worried about the re-election environment they'll face in 2010. 11 of the 20 pro-choice Democrats who voted for Stupak reside in districts that are rated as vulnerable according to Cook Political (note: candidates who are leaving the House to run for Senate or governor are rated based on those races instead). And, interestingly, they seem to think that a pro-choice vote would render them more vulnerable than a pro-health care vote, even though the pro-choice position is generally more popular than the health care bill on the table at the moment (although some recent polls have shown the pro-choice position losing ground).

Certainly, on health care, some of this may be a consequence of the logic that James Carville and others have espoused: Democrats know -- or believe -- that they'll be damned if don't pass a health care bill, so why not take the chance that things will turn out OK if they do? But there may also be something more here. Whereas the pro-life (anti-choice) movement is very well organized and has a long history of delivering votes, the anti-health care movement is somewhat disjointed, seemed to be limited in its electoral reach in NY-23, and carries a lot of baggage -- Glenn Beck, Michelle Bachmann, town hall screamers, and the like. And it may also be revealing of how they perceive their own base: whereas health care is a sine qua non for most Democratic base voters, they seem to be betting that the pro-choice position might no longer be.

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Republicans Far Behind on Women Legislators

On the front page of Politico this morning, a message of warning to congressional Republicans:

The gist of the article was as follows -- as the Republican party has pushed out moderates, it has tended to appear more hostile to women candidates and congresswomen. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) was quoted as saying that the GOP "is a party that doesn’t respect women, a party that doesn’t believe women are equal to men," while former Republican conference chair Deborah Pryce bemoaned the loss of moderates in general -- many, she maintained, being women.

The article cites the major difference in proportion between Republican and Democratic women, with women making up nearly 23 percent of the Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives, while less than ten percent of Republican congresspeople are women. In the U.S. Senate, the proportions are just about the same.


However, truth be told, the problem identified in the Politico article is quite a bit broader than simply the GOP's turn to the right in recent years.

The US trails behind OECD allies other than Japan and Turkey, often by a significant margin.

However, when we compare the Republican Party with other conservative parties and coalitions in the OECD DAC (wealthiest democracies in Europe, North America and Japan) -- the case studies are bolded above -- there is a fascinating result.

Let's start with Sweden, the highest OECD country on the list.

Both the governing centre-right coalition in Sweden, led by the Moderate party, and the left side of Sweden's political spectrum have extremely high representation by women in the Parliament. The range is fairly high, with the farthest left party ("the Left") having more women than men, while the conservative Centre party has just 38 percent women.


In Germany's Bundestag (using 2005 data, since current data on gender and party was hard to come by), again the break between left and right is quite significant, with a 17 point gap separating the two coalitions, though at this time the government was run by a grand coalition between the SPD and CDU/CSU.


Japan's Diet reflects the recent strength of the Democratic Party of Japan, which just months ago thrashed the traditionally powerful Liberal Democratic Party. The rather low percentages of women in both camps reflect Japan's low position on the global chart -- 97th overall.

In order to compare apples to apples in this analysis, the real question is how a party fares within its own political system, as compared to other parties within their systems. So, for example, comparing U.S. Republicans to the Swedish Liberal Party or the Moderates would tell us more about the difference between Sweden and the U.S. rather than how close each party is to the center of their electorate.

Comparing U.S. Republicans to U.S. Democrats, it turns out that Republicans (the right of the U.S. in this model) are by far the lowest in terms of proportional representation of women legislators within their political system, as compared to other conservative parties and coalitions

In other words, as a proportion of the Democrat's percentage, the Republican Party has the lowest percentage of women legislators, as compared to the shares of the conservatives in the other three countries. In fact, as the percentage of women parliamentarians in Germany rose in the 2009 election (from 31.8 percent to 32.8 percent, with 9 new women) in an election with a victory from the center-right, the gap is likely even larger than this chart suggests.


The U.S. political right, namely Republicans, has a long way to go to modernize and moderate towards the center of the American political spectrum on gender issues, something we have know for quite some time. A turn towards a hard conservative line since 2006 has only amplified the gap. Perhaps the rising influence of moderate Republican women like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, signals the importance of this change for the future of the party, but no such high profile individuals have yet been spotted on the House side. Indeed, the flogging of Dede Scozzafova in NY-23 indicates that those who might want to step into this role could be quickly pushed out by conservative activists.
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* A star signifies that a party is in the majority or in the governing coalition

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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Real Oklahoma Students Ace Citizenship Exam; Strategic Vision Survey Was Likely Fabricated

In detailing some of the evidence against Strategic Vision LLC, a pollster I am now almost certain is disreputable and fraudulent, I pointed in particular to a poll that they conducted on behalf of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, an conservative-leaning educational thinktank. The poll purported to show that Oklahoma's high school citizens were deficient in some of the most basic aspects of citizenship. Only 23 percent of them knew that George Washington was the first president, the poll claimed! Just 43 percent knew that the Democrats and Republicans are the two major political parties!

These conclusions seemed dubious to me on their face. Several years ago, at my old consulting job, I participated in a project for the State of Ohio's public schools which involved sitting down in a third or fifth grade classroom for the better part of a day and seeing how the students were learning. Most of these observations took place in poor, post-industrial towns, which were still suffering the effects of the steel mill or the axle plant that had long ago left town. What struck me, most of all, was how smart the kids were, relative to my expectations. These kids might not have been the highest achievers -- but I'm pretty sure that more than 90 percent of them would have known who George Washington was. And these were third and fifth graders.

There were other hints too, that Strategic Vision's poll may have been fake. The scores that Strategic Vision claimed the kids had gotten, for instance, were strangely underdispersed. And they seemed to contradict results from Oklahoma's own standardized testing, which asked much more difficult citizenship questions and found most of the students doing just fine.

It turns out that I was not the only person who had doubts about the survey. So did Ed Cannaday, the State Representative from Oklahoma's 15 House District.

In a telephone interview yesterday, Cannaday told me he was shocked when he heard of the results, which had received widespread media attention. "When I saw the statistics, I was just flabbergasted and said it cannot be true," he told me.

There were two items in particular that sent up warning flags for him: the one claiming that only 23 percent of the students knew the identity of George Washington, and another that claimed that about one in every ten students had listed the two major political parties as "Republican and Communist".

"Given the dialog of today, if they had said Republican and socialist, then maybe," Cannaday told me. "But communist -- that's just not something that you throw out there any more. I don't think Sarah Palin even used that term."

Cannaday, age 69, would be in a position to know. Before entering the State Legislature three years ago, he had spent decades in education, first as a teacher in a large public school in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and then in Oklahoma where he set up an alternative school. After a stint in private business, Cannaday returned to classroom, first as a teacher and then as a principal, and then -- finding he missed the one-on-one interaction with his students -- as a teaching principal at a small school in House District 15. He now serves on the House's education committee in Oklahoma City, and continues to pay regular visits to the schools in his district. "Most schools like to have me once a month," he says, to talk about legislation pending before the state.

Cannaday therefore had little difficulty setting up an experiment: he arranged to have all the seniors in the 10 secondary schools in his district take the Strategic Vision/OCPA survey. Cannaday tried to replicate the Strategic Vision survey to the greatest extent possible. The same exact questions were used, and as in the case of the original survey, the answers were open-ended rather than multiple choice. The survey was administered to a total of 325 seniors, including special education students.

Cannaday's survey however, found his students doing just fine: They answered an average of 7.8 out of the 10 questions correctly. By comparison, the high school students that were purportedly surveyed by Strategic Vision had gotten just 2.8 out of the items correct. 98 percent of the students on Cannaday's survey -- not 23 percent -- knew that George Washington was the first President. 81 percent -- not 14 percent -- knew that Thomas Jefferson had written the Declaration of Independence. 95 percent -- not 43 percent -- knew that the Democrats and Republicans are the major political parties. There was just no comparison between the two.



Cannaday distributed his results via e-mail to the constituents on his mailing list, including Karina Henderson, who published his findings in a dairy at Daily Kos. He also sent hard copies to each of the schools in his district, as well as all of Oklahoma's state legislators. The reaction so far has been entirely positive -- "even from the Republicans," said Cannaday, a Democrat.

Cannaday also sent his results to OCPA, the thinktank that had commissioned the survey, but has yet to receive a response. In October, before the results of Cannaday's survey had surfaced, OCPA had told the Oklahoma Gazzette that they were taking "a closer look at the raw data and the methodology,” behind the Strategic Vision survey but were not yet ready to "toss out" the results.

House District 15 is generally quite representative of Oklahoma, especially its Eastern portion, but is somewhat poorer than the state as a whole. "Rural" was the first adjective that came to mind when I asked Cannaday to describe his district -- no town has more than 3,000 people. Most of the residents make their living in the natural gas industry, commute to service-sector jobs in the comparatively large towns of Muskogee, Oklahoma or Fort Smith, Arkansas, or are engaged in what Cannaday calls "cow/calf operations". The five counties that make up the district range from middle-class to impoverished. Haskell County, for instance, where the town of Stigler is located, has one of the highest unemployment rates in the state and one of the largest proportions of its students on free and reduced lunch programs, the preferred benchmark of socioeconomic status in public education. House District 15 has no private schools.

Cannaday is proud of the achievements of his students -- particularly their low drop-out rate, which is about five percent, and their success in the state's mock trial tournaments, where they've frequently finished in the top 5 in the state competing against much larger schools. He has seen his students become doctors, attorneys, optometrists and accountants, he told me. "Any time you can have one of your former students in your district who's on speed dial in Oklahoma City as a physician, that's not too bad," he said.

But the schools in House District 15, which sends 40-50 percent of its students to college and sees 20-25 percent compete it -- are not exceptional in any obvious way. The students at Haskell High School, for instance, received below-average scores in 5 of the 7 categories tested by Oklahoma's standard exam, including in U.S. History.

There is no reason to think, in other words, that the students in House District 15 should have gotten such profoundly superior results to the "students" in Strategic Vision's survey. Nor could Strategic Vision's results have been the result of any sort of mathematical or methodological oddity. Consider their claim that literally none of the 1,000 students they surveyed were able to answer more than 7 of the 10 questions correctly -- lower than the average score achieved in Cannaday's test.

There are, rather, only two possibilities. Either the Strategic Vision survey was entirely fabricated -- or Cannaday's was.

I would put every dollar to my name on Cannaday, who has kept the surveys and is happy to show them to them to anyone who comes asking.

Next week is Celebrate Freedom Week in Oklahoma, with public schools students to be taught from a special curriculum highlighting the Declaration of Independence. "If were going to be pass education reform then we need to be out in the classroom demonstrating it," Cannaday said of his fellow legislators. "I will be in a classroom Friday," he told me. "I enjoy it."

I e-mailed to David E. Johnson, the CEO of Strategic Vision, a draft of this article and asked for any comments. The entirety of his comments were as follows:

"Thank you for the opportunity to respond. Our company did survey the Oklahoma students grades 9-12 for the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. Our client has all of the raw data, cross tabs, methodology from the survey."

Johnson did not reply to a second e-mail asking for his interpretation of the substantial difference between his results and those found by Cannaday.

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