Vancouver Medal Count Projections: Day 15

It's all over but the crying: it's probably impossible for Germany (or Canada) to win enough medals to surpass the United States' overall lead, whereas Canada would have to fail pretty spectacularly not to win the gold medal count outright.

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Vancouver Medal Count Projections: Day 14

I've somehow managed to write 10,000 not-totally-crappy words on my book this week and my brain is totally fried ... so not going to offer much in the way of commentary here. It's becoming increasingly clear that the United States is going to win the overall medals title -- the two medals yesterday in Nordic Combined might have all but clinched it. Canada remains the somewhat substantial favorite to take the most golds.

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Paterson Bows Out

That was quick. Less than one week after formally announcing his campaign for governor, David Paterson is out.

What a difference four years has made in New York. In 2006, the ticket of Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson romped to a 40-point victory in the New York governor's race, ending Republican George Pataki's 12-year reign. Spitzer forced to resign amid scandal. And now, with today's announcement that he will end his campaign to win a full gubernatorial term of his own right, Paterson will be gone soon, too. (Update: Reports initially indicated that the announcement would happen between 11:30 and 12:30 today, but now seems to be scheduled for 3 p.m.)

Paterson is not resigning, just abandoning his bid for re-election. His announcement today comes less than 24 hours after he insisted that he would not give up his campaign, even in the face of political pressure to step aside amid a widening scandal involving domestic violence involving a top aide, David Johnson. Reporting by the New York Times increased pressure on Patterson to explain why he and the State Police had intervened to protect Johnson.

Details of the Johnson episode aside, Paterson was already trailing badly in a head-to-head primary matchup against Democratic attorney general Andrew Cuomo, son of former governor and Pataki predecessor Mario Cuomo. More to the point, Paterson has proved to be far less competitive against possible GOP nominee and former Hillary Clinton Senate opponent Rick Lazio than Cuomo, who consistently bests Lazio in potential head-to-head general election matchups.

Paterson's approval numbers had actually been rising since last autumn, giving him and his allies hope of a political comeback until his numbers started to tank again. He abandons his campaign just four days after the latest Siena College poll shows him trailing Lazio by 7 points, while Cuomo is cruising, enjoying leads of 30 to 40 points. Suffice to say Lazio can't be happy about Paterson's departure; the longer Paterson stayed in, the better Lazio's chances of facing a divided Democratic Party in the solidly blue Empire State.

Four years ago, Spitzer-Paterson carried all but three counties in New York. Cuomo may not post a victory of that magnitude, given the national mood. But in what otherwise promises to be a tough night for Democrats from coast to coast, Paterson's departure finally clears the path for a safe Democratic seat and something for the party to cheer in November.

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Karzai's Newest Power Play

Anyone who thought Gordon Brown's proposed changes to the U.K. electoral system to a bit brash should have a look at Hamid Karzai's most recent exploit. Ahead of Parliamentary elections in September, Karzai has used a series of loopholes to issue a Presidential decree that gives him the power to appoint all members of the main electoral oversight commission.

Established in 2004 after evidence of serious fraud in the Presidential election of that year, the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) was designed to have a broad legal mandate, UN-endorsement, and independence from the political processes. With three international commissioners and two Afghan commissioners, the concept was similar to international observers, who could bring a measure of rigor to the process that was not present up until that point.

During the 2009 Presidential election, in which Karzai prevailed only when his rival withdrew from the runoff, the ECC fielded thousands of complaints regarding ballot stuffing, voter intimidation, and so forth. Based on evidence of widespread fraud, the ECC ordered a recount of ballot boxes that had evidence of obvious fraud -- a total of 3377 boxes, or 13 percent. In the end, more than 1.3 million votes, 28 percent of the votes counted on election day, were disqualified, bringing Karzai's vote share below the 50 percent threshold that would have provided him with a first round victory.

There are several good reasons why the Karzai took this strategy:

1. The Parliamentary elections will be key for his power position: Initially scheduled for January of this year, the Wolesi Jirga elections were postponed until September out of fears for security and fraud. Karzai, in his weakest position politically in some time, undoubtedly wants to ensure as supportive a Parliament as possible. In particular, the fact that they rejected 17 of his 24 cabinet nominees has built significant tension between the institutions.

2. Direct retribution: The ECC authored a damning report that declared that there was "convincing evidence of fraud" in the election and rejected over a million of his votes. It did its best to force a run-off that could eject Karzai from power. So therefore, when he had the chance to kick out the commission members -- chaired by Canadian electoral expert Grant Kippen -- he took it.

3. Show of strength to Pashto supporters: Hamid Karzai leads a government that remains dominated by the former opposition to the Taliban, with powerful Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras. Though a Pashto himself, Karzai has the reputation of a sell-out, who through his good command of English and friendly relations with the so-called Northern Alliance, charmed the invading Americans into putting him in charge. Following the controversial 2009 election, Karzai wants to take steps that can convince skeptical Pashtos (among all Afghans in fact), that he is not a puppet of the NATO occupation.

4. New appointments can bring in supporters: In any political system, an important way to neutralize a rival is by bringing them into your administration (e.g. Obama & Clinton). With the ability now to promise leverage and access in exchange for support, Karzai can draw back former supporters, perhaps in key electoral areas for the fall.

5. The U.S., above all, wants to see violence reduced: Talk to anyone among the American presence in Kabul and they will tell you that the top priority is to see reconciliation between the contested government and key allies around the country. Ahead of the Obama administration's mid-2011 withdrawal target, achieving electoral processes that meet international standards are simply not as important as promoting stable relations between the Kabul government and other power players in Afghanistan.

Karzai's gamble here seems to have worked out, as the U.S. cautiously backed his decision -- the language of which is based in the "Afghanization" motto that the Americans have been pushing for the last year or so. Breaking with European allies and the Canadians, who opposed the decision, the U.S. opted for the realist approach, even though it is in direct conflict with previous policy statements about the importance of free elections and the independence of electoral bodies.

So out comes the basic tension in Afghanistan -- international players who want to get out as soon as they can, and Afghan counterparts that know this just as well. At the same time, there is a tension between the ideal western societal model of secular and representative government, free democratic elections, and robust individual rights and the realist understanding that little of this is even vaguely applicable in an Afghan context.

Nonetheless, if you are married to the concept that a strong central government in Kabul will stabilize Afghanistan, as the ISAF allies are, taking decisions that strengthen Karzai over democratic ideals makes sense. Yet it is also possible that this, among many other developments in the "Afghanization" process, will only serve to make the Karzai administration more indebted to tribal warlords and in the end weaken the Kabul government.
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Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international affairs columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

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Did the Blair House Summit Change Anything?

I only got to watch bits and pieces of the health care summit at Blair House today. From what I saw, and what I've heard and read from others, there wasn't much in the way of real news generated, and certainly wasn't anything that might be considered a "game-changing" moment. Bear in mind that the summit took place on a weekday afternoon, had to compete with the Winter Olympics, and was cut away from (or talked over) at various points by several of the cable networks. The home audience had to be fairly minuscule, so the threshold for a breakthrough moment would have been high.

From what I did see, both the President and the Congressional Democrats certainly had their strong moments -- higher highs than the Republicans -- and I suspect that a high-information voter who watched substantial parts of the debate would come away with a slightly more sympathetic view of their position. But (i) there aren't very many high-information voters, and (ii) most of them will have had something better to do than to watch the health care summit. A medium-information voter is more likely to have noticed the testy exchange between President Obama and Senator McCain, which didn't make either of them look particularly good. On the other hand, perhaps the real audience was not so much the voters at home but the D.C. press corps. It's hard to say if either side might make a more tangible gain there as the post-game spin war has yet to really begin.

Fundamentally, one's impression of where the health care debate stands is liable to be very similar to where it was 24 hours ago. Personally, I err a bit on the pessimistic side because (i) the math in the House, already challenging to the Democrats, has gotten even tougher with the death of John Murtha and the impending retirement of Neil Abercrombie; and (ii) it seems like there are a lot of ways the Democrats could fumble the exchange between the bipartisan tone they sought to strike today and their need to pass their policy in a reconciliation/majority-rules environment later on.

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The Myth of the Incumbent 50% Rule

I don't like criticizing our good friends over at Pollster.com, but a Tuesday article by Pollster correspondent Robert Moran, also the Executive Vice President at StrategyOne, espouses a bit of conventional wisdom which happens to be completely wrong.

Citing a Quinnipiac poll that has Ohio incumbent governor Ted Strickland ahead of Republican challenger John Kasich by a margin of 44-39, Moran writes that:

Barring some massive exogenous event, the next Governor of Ohio will be John Kasich. [...]

In a two way race, political professionals don't even bother to look at the spread between the incumbent and the challenger, they only focus on the incumbent's support relative to 50%. Incumbents tend to get trace elements of the undecideds at the end of a campaign. Sure, there is the occasional exception, but this rule is fairly ironclad in my experience.

Although I have no particular comment on the dynamics of the Ohio race, which I have not spent much time following, Moran's general sentiment is demonstrably false. What the actual evidence shows, rather, is the following:

1) It is extremely common for an incumbent come back to win re-election while having less than 50 percent of the vote in early polls.

2) In comparison to early polls, there is no demonstrable tendency for challengers to pick up a larger share of the undecided vote than incumbents.

3) Incumbents almost always get a larger share of the actual vote than they do in early polls (as do challengers). They do not "get what they get in the tracking"; they almost always get more.

4) However, the incumbent's vote share in early polls may in fact be a better predictor of the final margin in the race than the opponent's vote share. That is, it may be proper to focus more on the incumbent's number than the opponent's when evaluating such a poll -- even though it is extremely improper to assume that the incumbent will not pick up any additional percentage of the vote.

This analysis focuses only on early polls: those conducted between January and June of an incumbent's election year. I do not attempt to evaluate such claims with respect to late polls, such as those conducted in the weeks immediately preceding an election. It is late polls which are traditionally the subject of the so-called "incumbent rule", which is the idea that voters who remain undecided late in the race tend to break toward the challenger at the ballot booth. (Note, however, the evidence for the late version of the incumbent rule is also mixed.)

For my study, I looked at all gubernatorial and Senate contests in the 2006, 2008 and 2009 election cycles in which (i) one of the candidates was an incumbent; (ii) there was at least one poll in the race conducted between January and June of the election year, as listed at Pollster.com, and (iii) the two major-party candidates collectively accounted for at least 90 percent of the vote in November. A total of 63 contests passed these screens and were included. Although the third criterion, which disposes of races in which there was a significant third-party vote, is not ideal in certain ways, it eliminates only 4 races and the conclusions here would not substantially change if they were included.

For the analysis, I took a simple average of all early polls as included in the Pollster.com database. In accordance with Pollster.com's practice, this includes partisan polls and multiple polls conducted by the same pollster. In the vast majority of races, at least two polls were available.

The analysis is summarized in the graph below. Along the horizontal axis, we have the average vote share that the incumbent candidate received in early polls; along the vertical, his actual share of the vote in the November election. The circle denoting each race is filled-in in the event of elections that the incumbent won, and blank in elections that he lost.



There are several noteworthy features of this graph:

1) It is quite common for an incumbent to be polling at under 50 percent in the early polling average; this was true, in fact, of almost half of the races (30 of the 63). An outright majority of incumbents, meanwhile, had at least one early poll in which they were at under 50 percent of the vote.

2) There are lots of races in the top left-hand quadrant of the graph: these are cases in which the incumbent polled at under 50 percent in the early polling average, but wound up with more than 50 percent of the vote in November. In fact, of the 30 races in which the incumbent had less than 50 percent of the vote in the early polls, he wound up with more than 50 percent of the vote 18 times -- a clear majority. In addition, there was one case in which an incumbent polling at under 50 percent wound up with less than 50 percent of the November vote, but won anyway after a small third-party vote was factored in. Overall, 19 of the 30 incumbents to have less than 50 percent of the vote in the early polling average in fact won their election.

3) 5 of the 15 incumbents to have under 45 percent of the vote in early polls also won their elections. These were Bob Menendez (38.9 percent), Tim Palwenty (42.0 percent), Don Carcieri (42.3 percent), Jennifer Granholm (43.4 percent) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (44.3 percent), all in 2006.

3b) If we instead look at those cases within three points of Ted Strickland's 44 percent, when the incumbent had between 41 and 47 percent of the vote in early polls, he won on 11 of 17 occasions (65 percent of the time).

4) Almost all of the data points are above the red diagonal line, meaning that the incumbent finished with a larger share of the vote than he had in early polls. This was true on 58 of 63 occasions.

4b) On average, the incumbent added 6.4 percent to his voting total between the early polling average and the election, whereas the challenger added 4.5 percent. Looked at differently, the incumbent actually picked up the majority -- 59 percent -- of the undecided vote vis-a-vis early polls.

4c) The above trend seems quite linear; regardless of the incumbent's initial standing in the early polls, he picked up an average of 6-7 points by the election, although with a significant amount of variance.

5) The following corollary of Moran's hypothesis is almost always true: if an incumbent has 50 percent or more of the vote in early polls, he will win re-election. This was true on 32 of 33 occasions; the lone exception was George Allen in Virginia, who had 51.5 percent of the vote in early polls in 2006 but lost re-election by less than a full point (after running a terrible campaign). It appears that once a voter is willing to express a preference for an incumbent candidate to a pollster, they rarely (although not never) change their minds and vote for the challenger instead.

*-*

Finally, although this is not apparent from the graph itself, it does appear to be the case that the incumbent's share of the vote is a better predictor of the final voting margin than the challenger's share. The correlation between the incumbent's vote share in early polls and the final voting margin is .85; the correlation between the challenger's vote share and the final margin has a smaller magnitude, at (negative) .80. Interestingly, the correlation between the margin in early polls and the final margin is also just .85 -- no better than that obtained from looking at the incumbent's vote share alone. This may suggest that the opponent's vote share provides little additional informational value once the incumbent's vote share is known. As I hope I've made clear, however, this does not mean that incumbents "get what they get in the tracking"; they almost always add to their number. It is probably OK to focus on an incumbent's vote share in early polls while downplaying the challenger's number, but if you do, you need to add 6-7 percent to it to have the most accurate prediction of his likely performance in November. In Strickland's case, for instance, polling at 44 percent in the early polls would predict a final vote share of 50-51 percent.

A table of all races included in the analysis follows below.

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In Support of Question Time: Congressman Kendrick Meek

We are pleased to present this guest article in support of Question Time by U.S. Congressman Kendrick Meek, the four-term incumbent from Florida's 17th Congressional District and a candidate for U.S. Senate.

Why I Support Question Time for our Democracy

by Kendrick Meek

On the occasion of today’s White House Health Care Summit, I would like to offer my full support for Question Time – a bipartisan effort to hold regular, unmediated, and open exchanges between the President and members of Congress, the direct representatives of the people.

Over 18,000 Americans, representing all political stripes, have joined the online movement for Question Time and many young supporters have approached me about getting behind the idea. After seeing the success of the President’s appearance last month at the House Republican retreat in Baltimore and his subsequent Q&A with Senate Democrats, I’ve become convinced that Question Time will both strengthen our governance and help revitalize our political process.

Democracy doesn’t take place in a vacuum. It requires commitment, energy, and openness. And, most importantly, it is not a solo act. Too often, we think of politics in a top-down, hierarchical sense instead of treating it as a two-way street. Holding regular, publicly-televised and webcasted conversations between the President and the people's representatives has the potential to combat hyper-partisanship and political stagnation.

The President’s open dialogue with House Republicans afforded Americans a valuable opportunity to see their elected policymakers in action, debating the great issues of the day in a meaningful and civil manner. For an entire day, the 24-hour cable news cycle stood at a virtual standstill, transfixed by what they saw. Gone were the sound bites and political sniping. For once, ideology took a back seat to substance.

Given its success, why not make Question Time a permanent fixture of our democracy?

Today, our nation stands at a crossroads. We can continue down a dangerous path toward increased partisanship and polarization or we can choose to place trust in our system of governance. As an American, I have faith in our democracy. If we institute a regular, open forum for our elected leaders to publicly air and debate their ideas, we all win.

Ideally, Question Time would be both bipartisan and bicameral. However, I’m not interested in advancing a specific proposal so much as building momentum behind the idea. I’m far from the first member of Congress to call for this type of forum. As some may recall, Senator McCain endorsed Question Time as a presidential candidate. At the time, some pundits mocked the suggestion, but it was actually quite an innovative and bold proposal. Simply put, it was a good idea.

Even the White House has dismissed the idea of instituting Question Time, claiming it is "going to be hard to recreate the spontaneity that happened." However, is “spontaneity” really the end goal? Or is it something much greater, a deepening of our democracy and renewal of our basic governing process?

Politicians today are heavily scripted and risk-adverse. Too many are unwilling to reach across the aisle and forge a bipartisan consensus for the good of the country. Question Time would have a healthy effect on me as an elected leader by providing a regular opportunity to hear views that differ from my own.

I understand that Question Time is no panacea to our country’s challenges. There is no magic wand that will suddenly break our political impasse. I do think, however, that it’s worth a shot. I would be curious to know what you think @KendrickMeek on Twitter or via Facebook at facebook.com/kendrickmeek.

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Vancouver Medal Count Projections: Day 13

The U.S. picked up a couple of bronzes that weren't necessarily expected today, particularly the medal in the women's short-track relay. But, just as importantly in the race for the podium, Germany failed to medal in some places where they'd been widely expected to -- most notably women's bobsled, where some forecasters had Germany earning two medals and they were in fact shut out. The U.S. now projects to win the overall medal count 34-30. Canada, whose projected total of 26 medals is lower than the 28 that the U.S. already has, is probably out of the running in the overall medals table, but remains the reasonably strong favorite to emerge with the most golds.

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Vancouver Medal Count Projections: Day 12

Way late in getting this posted. Still a terrific Olympics for the United States. But Germany is catching up! And the United States has very few remaining opportunities where they can plausibly win gold medals, meaning that we may need to win the gold in both men's and women's hockey if we want to resurrect our diminishing chances of a gold medal crown. And why can't we score against freakin' Switzerland? Nervous. Full results below the jump.

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A Few Final Thoughts on the Ublicpay Optionway

In his press conference today, Robert Gibbs asserted that "there isn’t enough political support in the majority" to get a public option through the Congress. This follows on the heels of a comment by Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, once a strong supporter of the public option, that he wouldn't support inserting one via reconciliation because it "cannot" and "will not" pass.

Obviously, the logic embodied by Gibbs and Rockefeller is a bit circular. When a Senator says...

This bill doesn't have the votes ... so I'm not voting for it!

...what they usually really mean is that

I'm not voting for for this bill ... so it doesn't have the votes!

Still, there's also this bit of conventional wisdom that the Democrats almost had 60 votes for the public option before, so surely they must have 50 now. This too is fairly specious, as it's not clear how many votes the Democrats really did have for a public option in the first place. The compromise that Joe Lieberman scuttled included a Medicare buy-in, not a public option per se, to which there appeared to be at least several objections. Moreover, as I've written about before, 5 of 13 Democrats voted against the robust, Rockefeller-type public option in committee, and 3 of 13 voted against the Schumer "level playing field" public option. In August, a whip count on the public option showed only 43 firm yes votes, one of which was Senator Kennedy. Last month, Jane Hamsher claimed to have found 51 votes for a public option, but that included three Senators (Byrd, Baucus and Warner) who made ambiguous or non-germane statements that Hamsher optimistically counted as yesses, and a couple more supposed yes votes who actually voted against one or both versions of the public option in committee.

And these totals reflected how Senators claim they would have voted if the public option were considered under regular order -- not under reconciliation, which is the process in play now. You might have to subtract some additional votes from among those Senators who are either opposed using reconciliation for health care in general, or opposed to including a public option in a reconciliation package specifically.

What's reasonably clear is that the Democrats were quite a ways away from having 50 firm commitments to the public option. How close they could have gotten if Obama and Harry Reid had done everything in their power to whip the votes for it, we don't know. Instead, it's been pretty obvious, from the reporting of people like Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn, that the White House regarded the latest reincarnation of public option as a nuisance that they hoped would go away.

But frankly, I think the White House is right on the politics of this. Yes, as public option proponents are fond of pointing out, the measure polls well in the isolate. But that's true of a lot of the individual components of the bill -- and the public option is not one of the most popular components, nor one of the ones that ordinary voters consider to be the most "important". The overall package fares poorly not because of concerns about the presence or absence of certain individual measures, but because people are exhausted and turned off by the process and have vague and ill-informed concerns about what the bill would do.

Does the public option, for instance, make it easier for opponents of the bill to perpetuate the perception that the bill represents a "government takeover" -- which certainly does weigh down its polling? Probably at the margins, but that in and of itself almost certainly wouldn't be a reason to reject a sound and popular piece of policy. On the other hand, in the post-Massachusetts environment, inserting a public option would smack of partisanship and backroom dealing -- and trigger a nasty floor fight about its germaneness under reconciliation rules. Voters may not care as much as they claim to about bipartisanship, but they do care about broken promises -- and if the Democrats insert a public option after Obama has gone through all of this rigmarole to demonstrate that he's soliciting Republican input, it's going to look like a flip-flop. I suspect the near-term politics of including a public option in a reconciliation bill are a net negative, although it's hard to know for sure.

Perhaps the White House could have taken a different approach after Massachusetts and embraced populism rather than bipartisanship. In that case, the framing would have been that they were soliciting input from all parties on the health care bill, and the bill that they'd endorse might include quite a few changes from the House and Senate versions -- not just a public option, but also things like drug re-importation and tort reform, which also poll well and also had been taken off the table before. This is a fairly seductive idea -- although bear in mind, again, that the reason for the bill's unpopularity have nothing to do with its individual components. Instead, rather, it polls as considerably less than the sum of its parts -- and it's not clear that changing the parts would have made all that much difference.

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Vancouver Medal Count Projections: Day 11

Germany had a very good day yesterday, picking up 3 medals in events where little was expected of it, and may have resuscitated its chances of catching up to the United States. Meanwhile, the U.S.'s failure to take gold in ice dancing was a pretty big blow to our ability to win the gold medal count, particularly since Canada came away with the hardware instead.

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Hindsight and Health Care

Here's a good back-and-forth between Charlie Cook and Jonathan Bernstein about Cook's strong assertions that the White House should have put health care reform in mothballs once it had became clear that the employment picture would turn as bad as it has. I'm a big fan of Charlie's, generally share in his pessimism about the difficulty of the political environment for the Democrats, and know that this argument isn't new to him: he'd said the same thing to me as early as August, when I got lunch with him after we'd been on a panel together. But I think Bernstein gets the better of the exchange with this:

Barack Obama ran on health care reform. It wasn't incidental to his election; it was absolutely essential. Not, to be sure, to the general election campaign, but to his nomination in the first place. Without a firm commitment to health care reform, Barack Obama would have folded his tent immediately after the Iowa caucuses, if he had even managed to make it that far in the first place. Democrats demanded it.

Actually, I'd go a bit further than Bernstein: health care is one of those core issues that gets Democratic base voters to the polls -- in the same way that Republicans have palpations about lower taxes -- and was an important motivator for the Obama vote in the general election as well as in the primaries (where, in fact, he tended to cede ground to Hillary Clinton on that issue). The 2008 exit poll asked voters about the most important issue behind their vote; although just 9 percent picked health care, those who did went for Obama by a 73-26 margin, adding a net of 4.2 points to his margin of victory over McCain. By contrast, while 63 percent of voters cited the economy, Obama won those voters by only 9 points, adding 5.7 points to his margin -- more than health care but not by much.



Now, perhaps Obama could have called an audible and tabled health care once the January, February and March employment reports came in as bad as they did and after the Republicans voted almost unanimously against the stimulus and several other popular initatives, which was considered surprising at the time. I'm not quite as convinced as Bernstein that Obama couldn't have sold the caucus on a wait-and-see approach. But it would have taken a lot of foresight to do so: the decision to proceed aggressively on health care had been made at least by early April, at a time when Obama's approval rating was about 60 percent and what few polls there were indicated a general desire for reform. The bigger mistake -- and I've been saying this since at least last June -- may have been in giving the Congress so much latitude to craft its policy, which resulted in an extremely protracted process and news cycle after news cycle in which the lead story was Democrats yelling at one another.

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Is 56 is the New 60?

The Senate's vote this afternoon to end a filibuster on Harry Reid's scaled-down jobs bill, which passed with not one but five different Republican votes (Scott Brown of Massachusetts; Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, and the retiring Kit Bond and George Voinovich) was interesting on a number of levels. For one thing, it suggests that a bipartisan process, which Reid aborted on this bill after complaints that it had been laden down with unrelated provisions, is not necessarily that highly correlated with a bipartisan outcome.

Secondly, this reflects a bit of a change of pace for a Senate which, as recently as January 28th, had voted on a bill to reinstate pay-go rules (another seemingly popular endeavor) on a strictly partisan basis. One difference between this vote and that one is that Scott Brown was seated in the interim, meaning that the Democrats officially lost their 60-seat supermajority. I can't help but wonder if someone like an Olympia Snowe is going to be more inclined at the margins to support Democratic pieces of legislation when she knows they can't pass without her support and that it will no longer suffice simply to blame Democrats for their own problems.

Of course, one can reasonably ask why this bill -- which is supported by something like 70 and 80 percent of the public -- received only five Republican votes for cloture and not more. But just as the Democrats 60-seat majority was far more tenuous in practice than it was on paper, so too a 59-seat majority may is not nearly as hopeless at it seems. Although the equation by which a Snowe or Brown might decide to vote for or against a particular piece of legislation is complicated, at least at the margins the popularity of the bill matters as might other circumstances like Presidential approval.

If nothing else, the vote confirms what we anticipated, which is that Scott Brown will add a third authentically moderate Republican to their caucus, joining Collins and Snowe. When the new Congress convenes next January, that number will almost certainly increase to 4, as another East Coast moderate, Mike Castle, is projected to win election in Delaware.

Hence, the title of this post: is 56 is the new 60? If the Democrats can keep 56 of their own seats in the new Senate -- which will be a bit tough, but is far from out of the question -- then they may frequently be able to cobble together a coalition between the 56 Democrats and the four moderate Republicans -- Brown, Collins, Snowe and Castle. There are other Republican whose votes might be in play on particular issues -- Linsday Graham on climate change, Dick Lugar on foreign policy stuff -- but those the Snowe/Brown/Collins/Castle block should be up for grabs on almost every issue.

There are a couple of other moderate Republicans running for office too. If Mark Kirk defeats Alexi Giannoluias, for instance, he'd add a fifth moderate Republican member. The same goes for Tom Campbell if he prevails in California over Barbara Boxer, or Charlie Crist of Florida if he somehow comes back to win the Republican primary.

That's about it, though -- most of the Republicans running for office are conservatives. And of course, the Democrats won't hold all of their own votes on many issues -- Ben Nelson, for instance, defected on today's jobs vote. But holding their losses to somewhere in the neighborhood of 56 seats could be significantly better for the Democrats than a slightly lower number, like 53.

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There's More Than One Way to Lose a Majority

I'm somewhat pressed for time this morning and am going to have to be a bit more circumspect than I'd like. But to follow up on Friday's post: I think any serious attempt to evaluate the root causes behind the Democrats' catastrophic electoral losses in the 1994 and their potential issues later this year would reveal as many differences as similarities between the two cycles.

The chart below is color-coded. Green arrows indicate cases in which one of the factors behind the Democrats' electoral problems in 1994 have a relatively direct parallel to this cycle. Blue arrows indicate a partial or indirect parallel, whereas red arrows reflect a phenomenon that was relatively unique to the cycle in question.



If you want to point to similarities, you can certainly find a few, such as the Democrats' attempt to push forward a health care that had become rather unpopular with the public, and the fact that the GOP had very strong recruitment in both 1994 and 2010 (although that may be as much an reflection of the political environment as some kind of exogenous variable). And then there's the obvious but often overlooked fact that the Democrats had large majorities in each cycle, and therefore a lot of targets to pick off.

On the other hand, in 1994, the economy had already started to add jobs at a fairly rapid clip; that's certainly not the case this year, when even somewhat best-case forecasts anticipate a relatively stagnant employment picture for the immediate future. In 1994, there were a lot of Democratic scandals to worry about. That's not been the case this year; the Obama administration has been fairly squeaky-clean , whatever scandals Andrew Brietbart might want to gin up. The 1994 cycle had some relatively unique geographical contingencies in play; many of the Democrats' losses were in the South and reflected a sort of punctuated equilibrium response to their former dominance there. There's not a direct parallel to that this year, where the Democrats' numbers have fallen by a relatively equal margin across all different geographies. 1994 featured an affirmative, smart, and centrist GOP agenda -- the Contract With America -- to which there's no direct parallel this year Finally, in 1994, you had a President who definitely didn't have a mandate, as Bill Clinton had been elected with just 43 percent of the vote in a three-candidate race. This year, Barack Obama's may be more that he'd raised too many expectations among too many disparate groups of people.

On the other hand, the Democratic base to be seems especially fragmented this year, much more so in 1994. The notion of structural dysfunction with the Congress has played a much larger role in the discourse this time around -- and the optics of those conversations have generally worked against the Democrats. The psychology of the cycle is a bit different: Republicans got really beat up in 2006 and 2008, and there were very rapid shifts in the composition of the Congress, perhaps begetting some natural human desire for retribution and revenge and thereby helping to catalyze the Republicans' enthusiasm advantage. By contrast, in 1994, the Democrats were coming out of a long period in which they had dominated the Congress -- which created its own set of challenges for them, but not the same ones that they're facing this time around.

Again, none of this is to suggest that the results that Democrats will encounter any fewer problems in 2010 than they did in 1994. Frankly, it has become easy enough to imagine Democratic losses of the same magnitude as 1994 or even worse. But the less superficial one is in comparing the two cycles, and the more one is willing to uncover root causes, the less similar they seem to be. There's well more than one way to lose a majority.

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Canada Not Owning the Podium

Not to pick on our neighbors to the North -- especially after the whoopin' the Americans gave them in hockey tonight -- but the host nation is starting to have a very disappointing Olympic Games. After having explicitly adopted a goal -- through its "Own the Podium" program -- to come away with the most medals from Vancouver, Canada instead has won just 9 so far, some 13 fewer than the United States. According to the latest consensus projections, they now project to finish with 26-27 overall, a healthy count which would beat the 24 medals they won in Torino, but which will likely place them third behind the United States (which projects into the low 30s) and Germany.

Canada was supposed to have 15-16 medals by this point, according to the consensus forecast, rather than 9; where have they underperformed? Actually, their problems have been somewhat across the board, but the performance of their speed skating team -- which has won 3 medals but was supposed to have won 5 or 6 to this point -- has been the most disappointing.



This may merely reflect some bad luck, rather than any failure of the Own the Podium strategy. Still, it's interesting to look at where Canada has spent its money versus the number of medals at stake in each sport.



One thing that's interesting is Canada's failure to invest substantially in cross-country, biathlon, or nordic combined (ski jumping + cross-country), which themselves account for almost 30 percent of the medals awarded at the Winter Games. Canada has spent 50 percent less on these sports than on hockey and curling, which are of enormous cultural significance to Canadians but which account for just 5 percent of the medals. If I were developing an Own the Podium type of program, biathlon in particular is one of the first sports that I'd target, as it's rather obscure although it does have a professional tour. On the other hand, some of Own the Podium's decisions would seem smart, such as investing substantially in freestyle skiing and the sliding sports (luge, skeleton, bobsled), which are also relatively obscure and not terribly well professionalized. Still, there isn't nearly as much to pick from among the winter sports as there is among the summer one. China, which launched a similar program in advance of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, picked up lots of medals in extremely obscure sports like synchronized diving, badminton, judo, weightlifting, and shooting.

Our updated medal projections follow.

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An In-Depth Look At the Federal Budget

This week, the president announced the creation of a panel to look at the federal budget. As such, it seems appropriate to look at the federal budget in detail to get a sense of what's there. All of the information contained in the graphs that follow is available from the CBO. Please click on all images to see a larger image. Also, all data starts in 1970 and goes through fiscal 2009.

Let's start with a chart of government revenues and expenditures, starting in 1970:


The US has run a surplus 4 years since 1970, or about 10% of the time. Over those 39 years we've had Republican and Democratic control of both the White House and Congress. This leads to a very simple conclusion: no party can make a legitimate claim to being fiscally responsible.


Above is a chart of the total deficit for each year going back to 1970. First, note (again) only four years show a surplus. This means that for 35 years (and in fact for a longer period) the US has issued debt on a continuing basis to pay for its revenue shortfall. This means the US -- like most US corporations -- has to manage its Treasury operations. All this means is the US Treasury has to decide what maturity of Treasury bond to issue, how much of a particular Treasury bond to issue and when to issue it. Again, this is standard procedure from a corporate finance perspective.

Currently, total US debt is approximately $12.4 trillion and total US GDP is approximately $14.4 trillion. That makes the debt/GDP ratio 86%. While that is not good, it is not fatal.


Above is a chart of total federal outlays as a percent of GDP. Notice the number has been remarkably constant since 1970, fluctuating right around 20% for most of that time.

Let's take a look at the components of federal revenue.


Personal income taxes (the top blue line) comprise the largest percentage of federal tax receipts. In addition, these have continually comprised about 45%-50% of total federal receipts. The biggest change since 1970 has occurred in social insurance taxes (the yellow line), which have increased from a little over 20% to about 35%-40% over the last 10 years. Corporate taxes (the light purple line) have also been consistently responsible for about 10% of total tax receipts. Finally, note that estate and gift taxes (the light blue line at the bottom of the graph) overall contribution is more or less negligible on a percentage basis.


The above chart looks at federal receipts from a percent of GDP basis. Fist, note the percentages have been fairly consistent since 1970. Personal income taxes total between 8%-10% of GDP, corporate taxes total about 2% of GDP and estate and gift taxes account for less than 1% of GDP. The only big change has been an increase in social insurance taxes, which have increased to about 6% of GDP.


The above chart breaks federal spending down into mandatory, discretionary and interest payments. Mandatory spending has increased from a little under 40% of the federal budget in 1970 to right around 60% over the last few years. Discretionary spending has decreased from right around 60% in 1970 to a little under 40% over the last few years. The progression of mandatory spending is at the center of much of the budgetary concern in Washington and the public.

Finally, note that interest payments are in fact pretty much under control. The primary reason for this is the near 20 year downward trajectory in interest rates:


Above is a chart of the 10-year CMT (constantly maturing treasury). Interest rates have been dropping for about 20 years. While there is considerable debate regarding the possibility of this continuing, we'll have to wait and see how that plays out.


Above is a chart of mandatory and discretionary spending as a percent of GDP. Interestingly enough, despite the increase in the dollar amount of discretionary spending, it has remained more or less constant on a percent of GDP basis. The recent spike may be the result of the extraordinary budgetary circumstances the country is currently in. Additionally, discretionary spending actually dropped until the beginning of the decade when it started to rise again. Finally, interest payments are under control for now.



Finally, the chart above shows the percentages of SS, Medicaid and Medicare of mandatory spending. The big issue here is clear: note the increase of medicare as a percentage of mandatory spending. It's been increasing for some time.

So, what does all of this tell us about the US budget?

1.) The total federal debt/GDP ratio and interest rate payments (both on a percent to total expenditures and percent of GDP) are manageable at current levels. All of this has been aided by a two decade long decrease in interest rates. It's doubtful that will continue given the current pace of expenditures. Most importantly, given the current rate of spending and debt growth, changes will have to be made once we are out of the recession for sure. And that's where the real political problem lies.

2.) While mandatory spending has remained constant as a percent of GDP, it's increase to about 60% of the current federal budget is perhaps the biggest problem the US faces going forward. And as the percentage increase in medicare payments indicates, medical payments are a primary reason for the problems the country faces at the federal fiscal level.

3.) The argument that the US is taxed to death is wrong. On a percent of GDP basis the US is taxed at moderate rates.

4.) I'm surprised how unimportant estate and gift taxes are to the overall scheme of things. Even before the generous estate tax credit of the last few years (essentially exempting estates worth less than $3.5 million), estate and gift taxes are remarkably unimportant from a total revenues perspective. It's obvious they serve another purpose such as the theoretical prevention of dynastic wealth transfer.

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Vancouver Medal Count Projections: Day 9

Although the United States continues to project to win the most medals overall in Vancouver, our chances for the gold medal title took a bit of a hit today as a couple of the golds that many forecasters had predicted -- Linsday Vonn in the women's Super-G, Shani Davis in the 1,500, Apolo Anton Ohno in the 1000m short-track -- turned into silvers or bronzes instead. Full projections below the jump.

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