Democrats are Enthusiastic; Republicans are More So

A series of recent polls have shown both Republicans and Democrats becoming more enthusiastic about the 2010 midterms as the result of the passage of health care legislation. According to USA Today, for instance, 69 percent of Republicans but 57 percent of Democrats are now more enthusiastic than usual about voting in the midterm. Both numbers are up significantly from February.

Set aside the Republicans' impressive figure for a moment. The Democrats' enthusiasm total is actually a record. On the 13 previous occasions that Gallup asked this question in advance of a midterm, neither party registered a score higher than 56 points. The Democrats just checked in at 57. Very probably, some of this is a temporary bounce and will fade as memories of the health care legislation become more distant. Nevertheless, at least for the time being, Democrats are as enthusiastic as they've ever been in advance of any recent midterm.



Their big problem, of course, is that Republicans are even more enthusiastic: 69 percent of them say they're more geeked than usual about the election. If the Democrats' total was record-breaking, Republicans just blew the competition away in Usain Bolt type fashion.

This is noteworthy for at least two reasons. One is in terms of the narrative: it is probably incorrect to imply -- at least post-health care passage -- that the Democrats are having issues with their base. They don't have a base problem: they have a Republican problem.

But also, there is a slight mathematical quirk in how these numbers should be interpreted. Say that there are 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats in the electorate. All voters cast their ballots strictly along party lines. If 40 percent of the Republicans and 30 percent of the Democrats turn out to vote -- a participation gap of 10 points -- the Republicans will get 20 votes and the Democrats 15. That translates into a 57.1 percent to 42.9 percent margin for the Republicans -- a 14-point rout.

On the other hand, suppose that 80 percent of the Republicans and 70 percent of the Democrats turn out to vote. That's still a participation gap of 10 points. But if you do the math, you'll find that the Republicans now get 53.3 percent of the vote and the Democrats 46.7: a much milder victory margin of 6.6 points.

The key, in other words, is not to measure the enthusiasm gap but the enthusiasm ratio, since this is what ultimately determines the relative share of Democrats and Republican voters on election day. Democrats now suffer a 12-point enthusiasm gap in the Gallup poll. That compares inauspiciously with their 9-point enthusiasm gap on the eve of the 1994 elections. But the Republicans' enthusiasm ratio is actually a bit smaller than it was in 1994, and considerably lower than what their own advantage was in 2006.

Not that this should be much comfort to the Democrats. The data, for the time being, tells a pretty consistent story: the Democrats are in deep trouble. This stuff matters only at the margins. And "almost as bad as 1994, but not quite!" is not exactly a rosy scenario for them.

Nevertheless, it may also have some implications in terms of the likely voter models that the pollsters use. The higher the overall turnout, the less dramatic the gap should generally be between likely voter polls and registered voter polls. Democrats -- and this ought to be scary for them -- are already in a precarious position for the midterms and Republicans will probably improve their numbers further once pollsters testing the generic ballot switch over to likely voter models. At the same time, if the post-health care enthusiasm bounce holds, I'd be a little suspicious about anyone who is super aggressive about applying a likely voter screen or who models their turnout based on a broad sample of past midterms. The 2004, 2006 and 2008 elections were high-turnout affairs, and there is some evidence that this one is liable to be as well.

What I wish the pollsters would do, actually, is to publish the percentage of people in each party who are screened out by their likely voter model. You don't have to tell us how you're doing it -- but at least let us know in broad strokes how much impact it's having. How much of Rasmussen Reports' apparent house effect, for instance, is because they're applying a likely voter screen when most other pollsters aren't, and how much of it is because there are some differences -- or bugs -- in other parts of their data collection and massaging routine? We shouldn't have to guess; this should be an easy thing for the pollsters to disclose.

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Jonah Goldberg, Anti-Maldistributionist

Oh, what the heck: Let's piggyback on my post yesterday with a post addressing another canard from Jonah Goldberg's platitude-filled column Tuesday in USA Today. After hailing the tea partiers' understanding of how taxes are inimical to liberty, he writes:

Individual liberty is far from the only concern, either. The kind of country we want to be is deeply bound up in taxation. The Tax Foundation estimates that some 60% of American families already get more from the government than they pay in taxes (and the top 10% of earners pay more than 70% of the income taxes). If all of President Obama's plans are enacted, that percentage will increase. We are heading toward being a country where instead of the people deciding how much money the government should have, the government decides how much money the people should have.

Only after they passed "ObamaCare" did Democrats clarify that this was one of their motives. ObamaCare's appeal has less to do with saving money — which it won't do — and more to do with spreading the wealth around. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., recently admitted that alleviating the "maldistribution of income in America" from the haves to the have-nots is one of the legislation's real benefits.

Ah, so the real problem with the American tax code is that it does such a great job (which is to say dastardly job, in Goldberg's view) of redistributing income and wealth--of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Again, this is an empirical issue, not merely a conveniently assertable talking point, which means we can examine just how redistributive America is relative to comparable nations.

Back we go to the OECD data. The above figure reports, for all OECD nations during the mid-2000s*, the Gini Coefficient before taxes and transfers. For those unfamiliar with the Gini Coefficient, it is a measure of the distribution of income (or wealth), bounded between 0 and 1, with zero meaning equal distribution across all citizens and 1 meaning that all the income/wealth belongs to the one, richest person. That is, the lower the number the more evenly--though not necessarily fairly, which is a normative judgment for each person to make for herself--income is distributed prior to (or after) government activity in the form of taxes and/or transfers.

As you can see, the before-taxes-and-transfers Gini Coefficient for the United States (.46) is very close to the average for all nations of the OECD (.45). Put another way, the ex ante maldistribution of income here is about the same as for comparable nations. To see what the net effect of those government policies are, we need to look next at the after-tax-and-transfer Gini Coefficients.


And what do you know? As shown in the second figure, which reports after-tax-and-transfer income distribution, of the 26 OECD countries the United States has the most maldistributed income of all 26. This doesn't mean that tax and transfer policies don't redistribute; they do, which is why the after-t+t coefficient of .38 is lower than the pre-t+t coefficient of .46.

But that's not particularly redistributive. In effect, Jonah Goldberg is complaining about the dangers of redistribution in the least redistributive first world nation. Tax-wise, he would be doing much worse as a columnist/author/speaker in almost any other country. But why let that stop him from complaining?

Allow me let me summarize my frustrations with how conservatives like Goldberg (not all of conservatives, of course) talk about taxes, redistribution, the size of government, it's effectiveness and efficiency:

1. Dollar for dollar, America offers the most effective and efficient government on the planet, doing so for about 20 cents on the dollar nationally, 28 cents if you include state and local taxes. If you ask a conservative to name a country that provides as many quality services for less, or more and better services for the same price, they can't name one. If they do, encourage them to start packing their bags. Sure, they could save a lot of money living in Mexico--if they don't count all the bribes they'll have to pay to educate their kids and protect themselves from possible violence. Bottom line is we're simply not as big as conservatives would have us believe. This doesn't mean we shouldn't seek efficiencies, govern more effectively within budget constraints, or try to eliminate fraud and abuse. But American government is pretty clean and fairly lean.

2. American government is redistributive, but not to the degree to which boogeyman conservatives would have us believe. Again, look at the two charts above. We're clean and lean, but if you believe in sharing the wealth, comparatively we're also pretty mean.

3. When it comes to deficits and fiscal responsibility, conservatives tend to focus on the spending and not the taxation side. If you're raising less than you're spending, you can either raise more, spend less, or some combination of both. But conservatives invariably turn the conversation to how big government is as a spender, rather than how small it is as a taxer. And frankly, too many Americans of all ideological stripes simply want a free lunch. We know this because when you give them access to policies at the ballot, they vote for guaranteed spending and restrictions on taxes. (See California, the state with the single WORST debt burden in the country.)

4. It's just a myth that all this American "socialism" will only constrain our growth, turning us into one of those laggard western European nanny states. There is way too much to cover here, so I'll just point to Jon Chait's recent takedown in the New Republic of conservative Jim Manzi's supposed case-closed case for why America's smaller government produces higher growth rates.

In sum, Jonah Goldberg's boogeyman piece implies that America is too big of a government (wrong), that we redistribute significant income and wealth (wrong again), and that this redistributive pattern only fosters economic stagnation, as demonstrated by the performance of economies in "socialist" Europe (wrong yet again).

Boo! Happy Tax Freedom Day, gang.


*N.B.: I should explain why there are only 26, not 31 countries, in the figures above. If you toggle the tag at the top of the OECD data link, you'll notice that the OECD provides after-taxes-and-transfers Gini coefficients for all 31 countries but before-taxes-and-transfers data for only 26, with missing data for Greece, Hungary, Mexico, Spain and Turkey. I'm not sure why this is, but wrote this note to clarify for those who may be wondering about the missing five.

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538's UK Coverage in the Guardian

In addition to our analysis and model building here on the FiveThirtyEight page, I was invited to contribute on the Guardian's 'Comment is Free' page on UK general election topics.

On this page, I'll be writing a series of short narrative posts that in some cases boil-down and other cases elaborate on many of the issues we cover on FiveThirtyEight.

The "Cif at the polls 2010" blog, as it is being called, was launched yesterday -- with my first post here and the second post on polling pitfalls here.

---
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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Jonah Goldberg, Quarter Slave (Conceptually)

Here we go again: So-called "Tax Freedom Day" is this week, occasion enough for Jonah Goldberg to fret publicly in the pages of USA Today about how tyrannical--not quite at the level of slavery, but pretty darn near or somehow approaching that--America's tax system is. Problem is, by his logic, much of the free world isn't very free because so many of those countries tax their citizenry at much higher rates than we do.

Goldberg opens his column with this:

Congratulations! This is your last week working for the man — at least for this year. The Tax Foundation calculates that Tax Freedom Day for 2010 is April 9, which means that by Friday, Americans will have spent nearly 100 days working just to pay their taxes. If Democrats have their way, Tax Freedom Day will keep getting later and later.

Hold that thought. Imagine for a moment that Tax Freedom Day was Dec. 31. In other words, picture working 365 days a year for the government. Now, the government would "give" you a place to sleep, food to eat and clothes to wear, but all your income would really be Washington's income to allocate as it saw fit. Some romantics might call this sort of arrangement "socialism" or "communism." But another perfectly good word for it is "slavery" or, if you prefer, involuntary servitude.

Now, no one is proposing any such arrangement. But it's an important point conceptually.

Is it an important point conceptually, Jonah? Does paying a little over a fourth of the nation's GDP into federal and state treasuries make us all one-fourth slaves? This is about as logical as saying the girl who let her high-school boyfriend get to "first base" last night is now one-fourth pregnant--you know, conceptually.

First of all, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, depicted below are the tax revenues as a share of GDP (2006 data) for all member OECD countries:


Note that America isn't the lowest, but we are fifth lowest and our share (28 percent, which includes state/local taxes) is 20 percent lower than the OECD average of about 35 percent. Now I remember why I hate traveling through Europe: It's the widespread slavery that so offends.

Goldberg concedes that he knows that federal taxes as a share of GDP in America have held steady since 1950 at around 20 percent. OK, so what he must really be upset about is how that tax bill is distributed, right? Yes, he carps that those with the highest incomes pay a disproportionate share. But that doesn't mean income taxes account today for a higher share of GDP than they did in the past.


And in fact, as the data above from the Tax Policy Center show, income taxes as a share of GDP have held steady during the same time period. Corporate and excise taxes, paid mostly by businesses and which conservatives complain are inefficient and simply passed through to consumers anyway, have gone down as a share of that 20 percent. What's gone up are payroll taxes which fund programs like Medicare and Social Security that the same tea partiers were warning Obama and congressional Democrats not to touch in the same breath they were complaining about the socialist expansion of the healthcare system.

Goldberg says he "bring[s] this up because many in the Democratic Party and in the news media have a hard time understanding what the 'Tea Party' crowd is talking about when it complains of incipient tyranny and intrusive government." Yes, many of us do, including that uber-Democratic media maven and former Reaganite Bruce Bartlett, who surveyed tea partiers and discovered they have no idea what the true tax burden in the country is. Their average response for what share of GDP goes into the (federal) public sector was 42 percent--more than twice what it actually is.

So, conceptually, this would be like asking a pack of tea partiers who by chance met Kareem Abdul Jabbar during one of their Washington rallies to estimate his height, and their average answer came back "14 feet tall." Of course, that presumes they've gotten a look at Kareem. But, worse, let's assume tea partiers never bothered to educate themselves about human height or how to measure it (translation: tax policy and data) before they got on the bus for Washington. When asked to estimate Kareem's height, even though they've never seen him--or for that matter any human who is 14 feet tall--their uninformed average answer still would come back at "14 feet." I wonder, Jonah, how these folks ever got the idea in their head that government was twice as big as it is?

Tax Freedom Day is this Friday. But what we really need is Tax Education Day.

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A Teacup Half-Full

There are two ways that one can read the Winston Group poll on the political orientation of those who consider themselves a part of the tea-party movement. One way -- the headline that The Hill very reasonably chose -- is that about 40 percent of tea-partiers are independents or Democrats. The other -- obviously every bit as mathematically valid -- is that 60 percent are Republicans. Either way, the results are more interesting than surprising, as they are broadly in line with previous polling on the subject -- as well as what I think we can reasonably infer about the movement.

First, the polling. Three relatively recent polls probed tea-partiers as to their political affiliation: the Winston poll that I mentioned (Winston is a Republican polling firm, but I don't see any obvious reason why its results cannot be trusted in this instance), a Gallup poll which is also out today, and a CBS poll from February. The CBS and Winston polls asked respondents whether they considered themselves to be a part of the tea-party movement; Gallup used a looser definition, asking people whether they supported the tea-party movement instead. Here are the percentage of people in each political camp who said yes:



About half of Republicans say that they support the tea-party movement, while 30 percent consider themselves an active part of it. Among independents, those numbers are 30 and 20, respectively. Only a few Democrats consider themselves to be a part of the tea-party: between 2 and 7 percent, depending on the poll, which is lesser than the fraction of self-identified Democrats who typically vote for a Republican candidate in Presidential elections.

Both the Winston and Gallup polls also asked people about their affinity for the tea-party by ideological group:



Although the Tea Party gets pretty decent numbers among independents, support is smaller among self-proclaimed moderates; only about 15 percent of moderates support the tea-party (Gallup) and about 10 percent consider themselves a part of it (Wilson). Liberals, who support the tea-party in the high single digits, are actually pretty close to the moderates.

OK, so what did we learn here? I think the tea-party basically has three broad defining characteristics -- to the extent we can define it at all:

1. It is conservative.
2. It is anti-establishment.
3. It has a somewhat amorphous and nonspecific goals.

The first factor explains why the tea-party potentially does well among both Republicans (almost all of whom are conservative these days) as well as conservative independents. But, the second factor introduces some tension. While, on the one hand, Republicans tend to be more conservative than independents, on the other hand they tend to support the two-party establishment while independents -- in broad strokes -- are fed up with it. I would guess that if you looked at voters who were both independent and conservative, their support for the tea-party would be at least as high as among Republican conservatives.

Although we can infer that support for the tea party is not very high among non-conservative independents or among Democrats and liberals, the movement does get some support (especially among liberal independents as opposed to liberal Democrats). Why? Because the tea-party has many different faces. It still shows its libertarian roots at times, but is also fairly populist in character. At other times still -- such as when Sarah Palin was speaking to the Tea Party Convention -- it can more resemble traditional post-Nixonian conservativism (including on social issues) while in yet other incarnations, it has some good-government goals that might be described as bipartisan or even sort of old-school (i.e. 1890s) progressive. Most of the liberals who say they support the tea-party movement probably aren't out there carrying signs and attending rallies on a regular basis (neither for that matter are most of the conservatives) -- but they may still feel some sympathy for it.

As with discussions on the racial demographics in polling, discussions of the tea-party movement tend to percolate on slow news days as the movement provides something of a Rorschach blot that anyone can use to advance their desired narrative. That does not mean that the tea-party is insignificant. Democrats underestimated it last year: it was one of the first tangible signs of trouble for Obama. Republicans may be underappreciating it now: its participants may not be loyal Republicans -- but they were instrumental in resetting the mood of the country into the skeptical and occasionally angry place in which Republicans helpfully find it today.

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Obama Surge Vote, Part 3: House Races

This is the third and final post of three in which I consider the potential implications of the decline in 2010 of the so-called "Obama surge voters," more specifically the turnout jump in 2008 of non-white voters and to what degree the drop-off in turnout among these voters potentially exacerbates the Democrats' expected problems in this November's midterm.

There could be as many as 50 House races to analyze, so to simplify matters a bit I took the 23 Democratic-held or recently-held districts presently rated as "tossups" (as of Sunday night) by at least two of the four major electoral prognosticators: Cook, Rothenberg, Sabato and CQ. Among these 23, about a third will not have Democratic incumbents running: John Murtha's death and Eric Massa's resignation created two open seats, and there are six other Democrats who will not be seeking re-election. (N.B.: There is one Republican district--Illinois Mark Kirk's, which will also be open this November--that is rated "tossup" by at least two of these rating services.)


I then collected two pieces of data for each, both courtesy of this National Journal dataset: The minority share of the district, based on a three-year average between 2006 and 2008; and Barack Obama's district share. Of the 23 districts, 14 of the Democrats are so-called "McCain Democrats"--those who won in districts carried by the 2008 Republican nominee.

The presumption here is that a district with a large minority population share is potentially more perilous for the Democrats because a drop-off in minority turnout in 2010 will remove the electoral cushion necessary to survive a so-called "wave" cycle. Of course, as I said before, if one wants to presume that this midterm will be a precedent-breaking one because these newly-mobilized "Obama surge" voters are still engaged and will rally to the president's defense by showing up for downballot Democrats this autumn, that assumption can be turned inside out. But again, I think the more likely expectation is the former.

In any case, these 23 districts offer quite a bit of variance on both dimensions. Obama's performance ranges from around 35 percent to 55 percent, and there is even more variation in estimated minority population share: ranging from the late Murtha's low of 6.0 percent in PA-12 to Harry Teague's Hispanic-dominated, 59.1 percent minority NM-2 district.

I asked Isaac Wood, who covers House races for Larry Sabato's "Crystal Ball" at the University of Virginia which districts with high minority populations where the Democratic incumbents are in a lot of trouble stick out most in his mind. He named two, both of which turned out to be on the list of 23: Steve Dreihaus in OH-1 and Tom Perriello in VA-5. "OH-01 is the clearest example, perhaps in the entire country," Wood wrote me by email. "Steve Driehaus won a 5% victory in a battleground district with 28% African-American residents. In 2004, Bush won the district by 2% but with a surge in minority turnout Obama easily carried the district by 11%. That is a 13% swing in just four years, due mostly to the third of voters who are non-white in the district." As for Perriello, Wood noted that he "won a 727-vote victory in the closest House race in the country in this district where 23% of the residents are African-American. While McCain garnered 6,000 more votes in 2008 than Bush won in 2004, Obama outperformed Kerry by a whopping 36,000 votes. That is a lot of votes to pick up in just four years and the 28% of the district that is non-white likely played a big role."

I then thought it might be worthwhile to scatterplot these 23 to see if any clusters emerge, and there is one worth noting.


In that oval in the top-left corner are 10 districts with fairly solid Obama performance despite low minority population shares. That means Obama and the incumbent Democrat both fared sufficiently well enough among white voters in these swing districts to win. White voters may abandon the Democrats this fall, of course. But the Democratic candidates in these 10 districts are less likely to be victims of a possible midterm drop-off in 2008 Obama surge voters. Sorted in ascending share of minority population, they are: PA-12; NH-1; NH-2; IN-8; IN-9; NY-29; MI-7; WA-3; PA-7; OH-15.

What's interesting is that all but retiring Brian Baird's Washington district are located in a string of states ranging from Indiana to New Hampshire. There are a lot of southern and western districts that will be tough for Democrats to hold if African American and Hispanic voters disappear this November. That said, the fate of Nancy Pelosi's majority is therefore likely to be decided by key races in a band of Rust Belt states.

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Att'n: City-Dwellers

EDIT: The survey is now closed -- thank you to all who responded and Happy Easter, all.

I am currently working on a project with New York Magazine to rate New York City's best neighborhoods based on a wide array of objective indicators. Literally everything from the number of cockroaches to the number of Whole Foodses is considered, along with all of the more obvious things that can make an urban neighborhood a great or terrible place to live. Although this all sounds very whimsical it's actually a fairly rigorous project and from what I can tell is the first time that anybody has tried to evaluate New York's neighborhoods in exactly this fashion.

One thing that's difficult to know, however, is how to rate the different factors relative to one another. And because New York has a lot of great neighborhoods (the top two-dozen or so are all within a couple of points of one another), the weighting happens to make quite a bit of difference. Toward that end, I could use some help from those of you who currently live or have recently have lived in a major city by taking a brief survey. What is a "major city"? You tell me, but I'm generally thinking about cities that are both large enough and dense enough enough to support a number of distinct and "livable" neighborhoods within the city limits -- cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Washington, London, Toronto, along with what I'm sure are many others.

The survey should take only about 5 minutes and can be completed by clicking here. And, no, I've by no means come around to the virtues of online surveys in general -- but this is one of those cases where a blunt instrument is better than nothing.

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The Best Jobs Report In a Long Time

On Friday, the BLS reported the latest job figures. As I will explain, this was a good report overall. Both the household and establishment survey printed some good, solid numbers. Put another way, it's pretty obvious the recession is over.

From the BLS:

Nonfarm payroll employment increased by 162,000 in March, and the unemployment rate held at 9.7 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Temporary help services and health care continued to add jobs over the month.

Employment in federal government also rose, reflecting the hiring of temporary workers for Census 2010. Employment continued to decline in financial activities and in information.

Remember there are two surveys -- the household and the establishment. The household provides information for the unemployment rate. So, let's start there.


It appears the unemployment rate has topped out in the 9.5%-10% range. While we're not seeing any downward momentum, we aren't seeing anymore strong upside moves either.

Also note the unemployment rate continues to be high for those with low educational achievement and low for those with high educational achievement:

Unemployment rate for

Less than a high school diploma: 14.5%
High school with no college: 10.8%
Some college or associates degree: 8.2%
Bachelor's or higher: 4.9% (this is near full employment from an economic perspective).

The civilian labor force increased by 398,000. This led to an increase in the participation rate (the percentage of the population that is part of the labor force) of .1%, from 64.8 to 64.9. In addition, this number is the denominator in the unemployment calculation. Last month we also saw an increase of 134,000 in overall unemployment. That means the unemployment rate remained stable at 9.7%.

In addition, according to the household survey, the number of people employed increased by 264,000. This led to an increase in the employment to population ratio of .1%, from 58.5% to 58.6%.

Those "not in the labor force" decreased 238,000.

Unemployment numbers are presented in a time-based orientation. That means we look to see how long people have been unemployed. It begins with initial unemployment claims and then moves out to the number of weeks people are unemployed. With the exception of the 27 weeks and longer series, all these numbers are showing improvement.


The 4-week moving average of initial unemployment claims continues to move lower. This indicates that the number of people entering the ranks of the unemployed continues to drop.


The number of people unemployed for less than 5 weeks continues to drop. In addition, this number is approaching more "normal" levels.


The number of people unemployed for 5-14 weeks is also dropping. However this number is still very high and will require a fair amount of time to get back to a "normal" level.


The number of people unemployed for 15-26 weeks is also dropping. However this number is still very high and will require a fair amount of time to get back to a "normal" level.



The number of people unemployed for longer than 27 weeks is still increasing. The primary reason for this is a large percentage of job losses during the recession (over 70%) occurred in construction and manufacturing. Construction will never return to the levels seen in the last expansion and manufacturing is undergoing a productivity revolution where employees are being replaced by automation. As such, former construction and manufacturing employees will face an incredibly difficult job environment going forward.

Those working part time for economic reasons increased 263,000.

Let's move onto the establishment survey by beginning with this chart of job losses and gains:


First, note that from October of 2008 to March 2009 the economy lost over 600,000/month. That means that over a 5 month period the economy lost over 3 million jobs. In addition, remember that during the recession the economy lost all the jobs created in the last expansion:



I raise these two facts for the following reason. While there is understandable frustration with the current high rate of unemployment, it's important to remember the severity of the damage caused by the recession to the overall employment situation. To use a medical metaphor, a person who had quadrupole bypass on Monday will not be running a marathon on Friday. An economy that lost all of the jobs created in the previous expansion will not turn around and start adding 300,000 jobs/month anytime soon.

The establishment survey was solid. First, total private hiring was 123,000 -- meaning the "census workers tilted the numbers" argument is wrong. Secondly, goods producing jobs increased 41,000. This sector of the economy has been a drag on growth for the last few months. In addition, construction and manufacturing jobs account for the vast majority (over 70%) of all job losses during the recession. So an increase in this area of the jobs market is welcome.

In addition, both January and February job totals were revised higher:

The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for January was revised from -26,000 to +14,000, and the change for February was revised from -36,000 to-14,000.

In addition, service jobs saw an increase of 82,000, with only two service sector areas (financial services and information technology) showing decreases.

While average hourly earnings decreased (largely because of labor market slack) weekly hours increased by .1 because the index of aggregate weekly hours increased from 91 to 91.4. This means weekly earnings increased from $762.41 to $763.98.

Overall, this is a solid report.

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Getting It "Right" on the UK Numbers

Over the last few weeks, we've had multiple discussions about the numbers games in the UK general election. Whether it is looking at swing voters, redistricting or proposed changes to the electoral system, the goal has been to examine the relevance and strength of various factors on the optics and outcome of the upcoming election.

With David Cameron and Gordon Brown alternatively on the offensive -- bullying; class war; he's ruined the economy and the budget; the NHS and granny will both die -- and Nick Clegg and the "fourth" parties trying desperately to make the case for wholesale change, personality and polling have made for a dynamic series of news cycles.

This is not lost on the major pollsters in the UK, upon whose work a significant amount of media back-and-forth is written.

Each time a new poll comes out, as it is often in the US context as well, the key reported information is the top-line party and candidate numbers and how they have changed since previous polls done by the given newspaper/TV station and pollster pair. The poll release formula then dictates that any minute changes be cast in quasi-apocalyptic terms for the party(ies) or candidate(s) on the decline. Finally, talking points from the involved candidates and parties are mentioned, usually with the implication that some recent event caused the shift in numbers.

As the election comes to a close, however, it is a slightly different barometer (rather than newsworthiness) that occupies a pollster's mind. In fact, throughout the election campaign, horserace polling is in some ways simply a series of test-runs that calibrate for the real test: the final numbers. Get them right and you reign supreme until next election; get them wrong and travail in obscurity for the foreseeable future.

Hyperbole aside, the truth is that the economics of being a pollster today dictate an approach not too dissimilar from the one above. Nick Moon of the pollster GfK-NOP explained to me that with "very little money," the political polling industry in Britain today is "very cut-throat." When I spoke with Andrew Cooper of Populus (another pollster) he concurred, adding that "with low entry cost in new internet polling and quite small number of viable clients, there is consolidation bound to happen."

Peter Kellner of the very prolific online pollster YouGov went a step further in explaining how the business model works for them. "YouGov does polling on lots of subject, most of them not politics," he said. With numerous offices across Europe, North America and the Middle East, YouGov brands itself as a "market research agency," with a 250 thousand strong internet panel who can answer just about any question a client may like to ask.

This is where the pollsters really make their money, not on quadrennial sets of dense national polling of party politics, but day-in-day-out market research for companies, governments, political and economic organizations or think tanks.

This has an important impact on the way national polling is done in British politics. "Getting it right" for the major British election pollsters is measured by how close to the national popular vote share numbers you get, looking at the three large parties and an aggregate of all the "fourth parties" in another category.

After the 2005 election, the British polling council released the following regarding the accuracy of the top five UK pollsters:

Unfortunately, as we have looked at repeatedly, the popular vote shares listed tell us only a fraction of the story. Only the Gfk-NOP exit polling on election day itself included an actual seat projection (which, by the way, they projected correctly -- admittedly said Nick Moon of GfkNOP because "two minor biases canceled each other out"). For other election day projections, it was up to John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde and his team at the BBC, rather than the pollsters themselves.

In an election where it is likely to come down to the wire, of course, the national popular vote fraction of the story is simply not enough. Even the inclusion of occasional broad polls of marginal seats, which according to Nick Moon "don't get included in the poll-of-polls" calculations by most media outlet, will not explain the whole story.

But at the end of the day, this is not the point of media-based national polling, says Peter Kellner of YouGov. "We don't include undecided or refusals because we ask how people would vote if the election were held tomorrow," he explained. These polls are intended to show snapshot of the race, he continued, "not the final winner."

Of course, in political polling or otherwise, it is pretty easy to win when you set your own rules.

---
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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Encouraging Employment Data...Sort Of

The March labor numbers are out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and, at first glance, they look pretty good: 162,000 net new (nonfarm) jobs, and the national unemployment rate holding steady at 9.7 percent. 538's Hale Stewart will have more on this subject in the near future, but for today let's just set out the good and bad news in the latest jobs data.


The good news, of course, is that the economy added any jobs. Against the backdrop of the pattern during the past two years, which is depicted above and resembles an inverted bell curve during the year leading up to Obama's inauguration and the year afer his inauguration, 162K new jobs is generally encouraging. And those 162K jobs added in March were the most added since three years ago, in March 2007. (This month's and last month's data are still preliminary and as-yet uncorrected, so the 162K could be adjusted.) And the 9.7 unemployment holding steady, as it did for the third month in a row, is at least not bad news.

Of course, the economy needs to add about 150,000 jobs just to keep up with growth of the working-age population, which is why 162K is basically a break-even figure. Moreover, about a fourth of the new jobs are temporary, many of them courtesy of the federal government's hiring of Census-takers.

The worse news is the share of unemployed persons who are long-term unemployed, defined as having been unemployed for more than six months (27+ weeks). That percent looked like it had capped out in January 2010 at 41.2 percent, dipped slightly in February to 40.9 percent, but jumped in March to 44.1 percent. These figures are all seasonally adjusted, so they account for payroll drop-offs that occur naturally at the end of summer or as the drop in temperature forces certain types of employment to cease for winter. By comparison, the seasonally-adjusted long-term unemployment share a year ago, in March 2009, was 24.6 percent. (For details, see Table A-12, p. 23, here.)

Meanwhile, involuntary part-time workers jumped from 8.9 million to 9.1 million, and the unemployment rate for African Americans continued to rise. "The overall picture here is not very positive," writes liberal economist Dean Baker. "While we are seeing job growth it is at a very slow pace. The average in the private sector over the last two months was just 66,000 jobs. With the public sector shedding jobs, we will need more rapid job growth just to stay even with the growth in the labor force."

Not surprisingly, House Minority Leader John Boehner pounced, issuing a statement saying, "A 9.7 percent unemployment rate is no cause for celebration, and any politician who takes a victory lap for it is out of touch with the struggles working families and small businesses asking ‘where are the jobs?’ are facing." And, not surprisingly, he pinned the blame on what he believes is a failed stimulus bill. "Today’s private-sector job gains are encouraging but not nearly what President Obama promised when he signed the trillion-dollar ‘stimulus’ into law last year with promises it would keep unemployment below eight percent and create jobs ‘immediately.’ Our economy has lost more than three million jobs since then and unemployment remains near ten percent."

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Veronique de Rugy Responds to Critique of Stimulus Study

Veronique de Rugy has issued a fairly gracious response to my critique of her study on the disbursement of stimulus funds, the crux of which was that she had failed to account for a variable (the presence of a state capital) that was extremely important in predicting the allocation of stimulus funds (because much of the money is intermediated by state governments).

Most importantly, she has promised to evaluate some of my concerns and to re-run her analysis. This is terrific -- and she is to be commended for her responsiveness. de Rugy is also to be commended for having released portions of her dataset** on the Mercauts Center website (something which she had done originally). Nevertheless, some further comment on her response -- and the issues in research design that her study raised -- is warranted:

-- I share de Rugy's disappointment with the quality of the data available at recovery.gov. Frankly, I am not sure that testing her hypothesis to a peer-reviewable level of robustness is possible given the middling quality of data and the inherent ambiguity with how particular projects must be assigned to particular congressional districts.

-- de Rugy writes: "The unemployment data for the regressions has in fact been used by congressional district, not by MSA. The confusion comes from the fact that the Excel file on the website includes unemployment by MSA." Good: that particular issue is cleared up, as well as the reason for my confusion.

-- For me, personally, the notion that the allocation of stimulus funds could have reflected a broad-based and widespread effort to benefit districts represented by Democrats seems implausible -- something which is well worth examining but something which should have received especially rigorous scrutiny. This is particularly so given that many of the funds were intermediated by state governments, not all of which are controlled by Democrats, as well as federal agencies that were constrained by formula rules.

There are two other variations that I find less impluasible:

I find it less impausible that the funds could have been directed toward those sorts of districts which tend to vote Democratic (e.g. as measured by PVI or by Obama vote share) -- even after controlling for other demographic variabes -- a possibility that de Rugy raises in her response but which was not the focus of her hypothesis. The difference is that that this could have resulted from a sort of unconscious bias in the design of the stimulus rather than a deliberate conspiracy.

I also find it less implausible that some *particular* projects could have been directed toward those districts that had a Democratic representative who was either especially influential or who a key swing vote in the House. (This is what we call pork.) However, de Rugy ran various tests on the types of Democratic districts that benefited from the stimulus and did not find any relationships with the characteristics of the Democratic members of Congress that tended to represent them.

-- There are a few passages in the response where de Rugy is still taking her initial results a bit too credulously, such as:

"So even after I use his methodology I will find that Democratic districts, other than state capital ones, are getting 30 percent more than Republican ones. That does seem like a possible political bias to me, which would be worth looking into.

How much of a bias? I don’t know. Let’s not forget that my take on the data has always been the following: The regression analysis shows that district’s party representation matters. However, I cannot say how much it matters compared to other factors (such as the formula used by different agencies).

Her results suggest correlation -- but until confounding variables are rigorously tested and rooted out, they are no proof of casuation at *any* order of magnitude. (It is emphatically not just a question of how much bias there was.)

-- de Rugy seems more concerned than I am about my four word-aside ("and possibly deliberately biased") that raises the question of whether her research design could have been the result of any deliberate political bias. She says it wasn't and I take her at her word, particularly given her fairness and transparency in responding to me. But I don't really see raising the possibility that the bias was deliberate as being particularly "inflammatory" -- it was manifestly a *possibility*, given how obvious the design flaw was relative to how smart and capable de Rugy obviously is.

Far more likely, however, is unconscious bias: how hard do you push back and cross-check your assumptions when you initially come up with a research finding that you "like" (or one that you don't like)? This kind of bias, almost by definition, is very hard to avoid, and potentially threatens the work of virtually every social scientist, not just de Rugy.

-- de Rugy is correct that many demographic variables are correlated with one another, which makes model speification more difficut and can lead to potential problems with overfitting. However, these demographic variables are also correlated with the poltical representation in the Congress. Moreover, because the stimulus consists of many different 'layers' (categories of projects), it is quite plausible that many different demographic variables (as well as intercations between two or more such variabes) could come to bear on how funds were ultimately distributed.

This is a sticky (albeit common) problem. The best way to handle it would probably be to make several different specificiations of the model and to publish them explicitly. If you have five different model specifications, all of which have roughly the same explanatory power, publishing only the one that you most like can potentially reflect bias. I have no idea how many other model specifications de Rugy tested and how many of them might have relieved the partisanship variable of its significance: it is not uncommon for a variable to go from *highly* significant to *completely* insignificant when a new variable with which it is correlated is introduced.

-- In general, there are a lot of things that de Rugy could have done -- both in terms of her research design and in terms of her presentation -- to give one more confidence that she had rigorously cross-checked and scrutinized her design, assumptions, and findings. If this were a chickenscratch, reasonably well-caveated, back-of-the-envelope blog post, I would have been more gentle in my critique. However, given that she has used her study to testify before the Congress, I believe it proper to hold her to a fairly high standard. That she is now willing to revisit her assumptions speaks highly of her, but until she does, her original study should be given no deference.


** Although its a relatively minor point, she did not, in fact, release the entirety of her dataset -- such as the economic variables she used in her regressions.

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Study Claiming Link Between Stimulus Funding and Partisanship is Manifestly Flawed

A study purporting to find a connection between stimulus spending and the partisanship of a district suffers from an obvious flaw. But in so doing, it provides an example of why it's important to retain some common sense -- and some sense of context -- when conducting a statistical analysis.

The study, by Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University and the National Review, claims that congressional districts which elected a Democrat to the Congress received a larger amount of stimulus finds by a margin which is statistically significant even after controlling for certain other effects like the unemployment rate. However, the study does not control for at least one other variable that is overwhelmingly important in determining the dispensation of stimulus funds.

The variable in question is in fact pretty obvious if you simply look at the districts that have received the largest amount of stimulus money, according to de Rugy's dataset.

The district that received the largest amount of stimulus funding in the 4th Quarter of 2009, according to de Rugy's tally, is California's 5th Congressional District. Is there anything notable about the 5th Congressional? Well, it is home to the state capital, Sacramento. Let's keep that in mind.

Next on the list is New York's 21st Congressional District. The largest city in the 21st is the state capital of New York, Albany.

Third is the 21st Congressional District of Texas. It contains parts of Texas' state capital, the wonderful city of Austin. (Another district that contains parts of Austin -- the 25th -- ranks 14th on de Rugy's list.)

At this point, it ought to be pretty obvious what is going on. The three districts receiving the largest amount of stimulus funds are home to the capitals of the three largest states -- New York, California, and Texas. Let's pause for a moment and make a bold prediction. I'll bet you that the district that ranks 4th on the list will contain the capital of the 4th largest state, Florida.

Bingo. Up 4th on the list is Florida's 2nd Congressional, home to Tallahassee.

Fifth is Pennsylvania's 17th, which hosts the state capital, Harrisburg.

The sixth through tenth districts contain the capital cities of other large states: Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, Illinois and New Jersey, respectively. They are followed by districts that include the state capitals of Indiana, Tennessee, Virginia -- then another part of Austin, Texas -- then Arizona, Missouri, North Carolina and Wisconsin. Finally, in 19th place is South Carolina's 3rd Congressional District, which does not host a state capital. (Ironically, it has elected a Republican -- J. Gresham Barrett -- to the Congress).



This, of course, makes perfect sense. A lot of stimulus funds are distributed to state agencies, which are then responsible for allocating and administering the funds to the presumed benefit of citizens throughout the state. These state agencies, of course, are usually located in or near the state capital.

In fact, the differences are pretty overwhelming. There are 78 congressional districts that contain all, or part, of a state's capital city. Collectively, they received $118 billion in the fourth quarter. The 357 districts that are not home to a state capital received only $48 billion, however. On a per-district basis, the districts with state capitals received 11 times more funding. The ratio would be higher still if we excluded districts that included only outlying areas of state capital cities that do not host any state governmental institutions.

The other piece of the puzzle, of course, is that state capitals are much more likely to elect Democrats to Congress for a variety of reasons. They are, by definition, urban (although some smaller state capitals like Montpelier stretch the definition). They are, by definition, home to large numbers of governmental employees, who may be more sympathetic to bigger government. They tend to be highly educated and often are home to large state universities.

That de Rugy has testified before Congress on the basis of her evidence, and never paused to consider why the top five congressional districts on her list overlap with Sacramento, Albany, Austin, Tallahassee and Harrisburg, is mind-boggling. The presence of a state capital is the overwhelmingly dominant factor it predicting the dispensation of stimulus funds. This could have been discerned in literally five minutes if she had bothered to look at the apparent outliers in her dataset and considered whether they had anything in common -- a practice that should be among the first things that any researcher does when evaluating any dataset.

By the way -- if you throw out the districts that are home to state capitals, those which elected Democratic members to Congress still rank higher, receiving 31 percent more stimulus funds, on average, than those which elected Republicans. So, perhaps there is hope for her analysis yet. At that point, it would become important to consider other variables such as the economic conditions within each district. I'm not going to do her work for her, but I would suggest to de Rugy that she consider the following recommendations to correct other flaws with her research design:

First, she should look at unemployment rates at a district-by-district level, which are available through the American Community Survey, rather than at a metropolitan area level as she has done. Unemployment rates are often much higher in poor, downtrodden, inner cores of cities (which are also much more likely to elect Democrats to Congress), as opposed to suburbs and outlying areas.

Next, I would suggest that she look at a more robust array of demographic variables, such as the urban-rural distribution, the poverty rate (as opposed to just average income), the population, the number of seniors and children, and perhaps the racial composition. Were she have to considered these variables initially (particularly the urban/rural distribution), they may have nullified her conclusion, even without accounting for the presence of state capitals.

But my bet is that this is all a bunch of noise resulting from an incomplete -- and possibly deliberately biased -- research design. If de Rugy follows my recommendations -- excludes state capitals, accounts for a broader array of demographic variables, and evaluates unemployment rates at the district level -- and still finds a statistically significant positive relationship between the distribution of stimulus funds and whether the district elected a Democrat to Congress, I will buy her and three of her colleagues lunch anywhere in Washington or New York City. And if such a study is published in a credible, peer-reviewed journal, I will buy them dinner as well.

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Drill, Barry, Drill

What to make of the president's decision yesterday to permit offshore drilling? A coldly rational decision that will reduce our dependency on foreign oil from politically unstable parts of the globe? A sell-out of his liberal base? A shrewd bit of wedge politics? A political bouquet to--or electoral boxing in of--a certain former Alaska governor?

Short answer: Probably a bit of all of the above. (Although on the last, it should be noted that Alaska's Bristol Bay was specifically cited by the administration as an area to be protected from drilling.)

For starters, let's get this out of the way: Offshore drilling polls pretty darn well. A Rasmussen poll from late December pegs general support at 68 percent nationally--although they note that many Americans, demonstrating their federalist sympathies, would support allowing individual states to exert veto power over drilling off their shores. The number was almost identical a year earlier in autumn 2008. Those from states along the eastern seaboard are less enthusiastic, but a slight plurality is still supportive. Hell, even a slight majority of Californians give drilling the green light.

Here's the key excerpt from Obama's remarks yesterday morning at Andrews Air Force Base announcing the policy as part of a new comprehensive energy plan. After talking about energy-saving initiatives and demand, he transitioned to the issue of supply:

"But we have to do more. We need to make continued investments in clean coal technologies and advanced biofuels. A few weeks ago, I announced loan guarantees to break ground on America’s first new nuclear facility in three decades, a project that will create thousands of jobs. And in the short term, as we transition to cleaner energy sources, we’ve still got to make some tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development in ways that protect communities and protect coastlines.

This is not a decision that I’ve made lightly. It’s one that Ken [Salazar] and I -- as well as Carol Browner, my energy advisor, and others in my administration -- looked at closely for more than a year. But the bottom line is this: Given our energy needs, in order to sustain economic growth and produce jobs, and keep our businesses competitive, we are going to need to harness traditional sources of fuel even as we ramp up production of new sources of renewable, homegrown energy."

In many ways, this is a classic Obama split-the-difference-with-a-tilt-to-the-left play straight from his Audacity of Hope playbook. Trying to preempt the kind of obstruction he experienced with healthcare reform as energy reform moves forward, the emphasis on drilling is an opening bid to win over some Republicans. The Post's Juliet Eilperin and Anne Kornblut correctly assess the move this morning as follows: "Some conservative critics questioned whether the policy will have any real impact on energy production, while liberals decried the risks to the environment. But the White House's key audience -- undecided senators who will determine whether a climate bill succeeds on Capitol Hill this year -- suggested that the move had helped revive the legislation's prospects."

Now, my initial reflex is, Haven't we been here before? Didn't the president learn from the drawn-out healthcare fight that the extended hand simply gets bitten, and that any attempts to cobble together anything beyond a Democrats-plus-maybe-one-Maine-senator "bipartisan" coalition is mostly a waste of his and our time? Yes and no.

Yes, because in the end, of course, it's gonna take mostly Democratic votes to pass any major energy bill. But no, because, well, energy is just not politically the same as health care. Let me explain what I mean.

In the period after Obama's win and before his first 100 days were over, one of the predictions I made in several public presentations--and got completely wrong--was that Obama would have to do energy before healthcare. My reasoning was akin to what we saw with George W. Bush tackling education early in his first term: You win on a stolen issue from the other party's traditional agenda. And, generally speaking, energy is more of a Republican issue, or certainly more Republican of an issue than healthcare. In other words, you win an away game to build confidence and momentum (political capital) to then win a much tougher home game. I'm mixing my metaphors here, but you get the point. And there's an obvious historic analog here with Bill Clinton and welfare reform, which many later concluded was a victory he could have used to then go for healthcare reform second, instead of the failed order in which he tackled them. (We'll never know.)

If offshore drilling--along with nuclear power investments, which should surprise nobody given Obama's background and Illinois roots, not to mention his clear if under-emphasized signals during the campaign about his support for nuclear--can win some converts, it's good politics; the poll numbers confirm that. Whether that politics is enough to win GOP converts, we'll see. As to whether it's good policy, well, I'll leave it to the readers to argue about below.

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