by
Tom Schaller
@
1:31 PM
I realize it's a splinter movement within a splinter movement, but let's hope those agitating for a repeal of the 17th Amendment get about as far as the vast majority of constitutional amendment advocates get, which is to say nowhere. If you want more details about these advocates, the Atlantic's
Marc Ambinder and Talking Points'
Evan McMorris-Santoro have written in detail about this latest variant of anti-government, anti-Washington mania.
As it happens, I wrote my doctoral dissertation and a
few articles about Prohibition/Repeal, so I'm familiar with the politics of passing and then repealing an amendment, which is literally the rarest of occurrences in American constitutional history (n = 1). But I don't want to talk about the political likelihood of the 17th repealers actually getting their way, which is zero. Nor am I trying to trigger a political philosophy debate about the case for and against the direct, popular election of US senators--though readers should feel free to start a thread in the comments section about that.
What I want to point out is how patently stupid repealing the 17th Amendment would be for Republicans and conservatives--and yes, tea partiers--based on a simple fact: Democrats have long dominated the control of state legislatures. And they currently enjoy a level of dominance unlike they've experienced since the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Following the 2008 elections, according to National Conference of State Legislative data,# Democrats control both chambers in 27 legislatures, to eight for the Republicans, with 14 states split. (Nebraska is unicameral and non-partisan.) Oh, and two decades ago the Democratic dominance of state legislatures included a lot more southern states, which I suppose could have produced some conservative Democrats or even a few Republicans as senators; today, that's far less likely to happen because the set of Democratically-controlled state legislature is more non-south. In ideological terms, then, the current Democratic majorities may be closer to the post-war high-water marks in the mid-1970s.
Ambinder writes:Here is something I don't think Republican strategists in Washington...many of them, anyway, understand about conservative voters now. Their discontent with the party is NOT about ideology. It is, quite simply, about them. The consultants. The leaders. The people who were NOT able to prevent Obama from becoming president. The people who were NOT able to prevent health care from being signed into law, despite promising that it wouldn't be. The people who fed the bailout engine. So ideas that seem extreme and bizarre to the powers that be might be more accepted by discontented voters simply because the mainstream forces consider them to be extreme.
Well, Marc sure has a point there. I suppose if what conservatives of the tea party variety or otherwise really want is to upset the entire partisan apple cart, including if not especially Republicans, repealing the 17th Amendment would turn the trick...
...but only for uprooting the current set of Senate elites. For I suspect the replacement, state-selected senators would be more likely to reflect their respective party's establishment, and would give Democrats a pretty solid if not unassailable majority. At that point, to change Senate party control would thus require flipping a large number of state legislative chambers, which in turn would require winning hundreds of state legislative races. And although state legislators are popularly elected, filtering US Senate selections through them would, as I said, likely make them more elitist, not less.
In any case, just as unelected senators for decades in the late 19th century and early 20th century blocked the popular election amendment proposal that eventually got the necessary two-thirds votes to go to the states for ratification, I suspect today's senators would resist changing the manner of their selection, even if repeal somehow grew in popularity, and for the very same reason their predecessors a century ago did: In general, only fools change rules that, by definition, made them winners.
#The link provided above only provides NCSL summary data for state legislative party control going back to the mid-1980s, but I happened to have a more complete data set with the totals going back to 1968. (Please don't ask why; as Ron Burgundy might say, "it's boring, but it's my life.")
There's More...
Contract Post
by
Nate Silver
@
12:00 AM
This morning, I posted an article that questioned whether polls -- and in particular, the polls released by Rasmussen Reports -- were disproportionately representative of a very small segment of very high-information voters: people whom we might think of as political junkies, or even political activists.
This afternoon, we got an interesting example of that. Rasmussen released a
poll suggesting that Ron Johnson, a businessman from Oshkosh, is running just 2 points behind Democratic incumbent Russ Feingold in Wisconsin's Senate race.
Have you ever heard of Ron Johnson? I hadn't until about three days ago. And it seems unlikely that many voters in the Badger State would have heard about him either. Johnson didn't announce his candidacy until two weeks ago. He's never held political office before. He runs a small business called
Pacur Inc that has only 73 employees. He doesn't have a campaign website up. He doesn't have a Wikipedia page. Prior to this morning, he'd been
mentioned in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the state's largest paper, just three times over the past month.
And yet, according to Rasmussen, 68 percent of Wisconsin's "likely voters" have already formulated an opinion about Ron Johnson! And 94 percent of the state's voters know how they'd vote if he were to run against Russ Feingold!
Now, it's possible that this is an artifact of Rasmussen's methodology rather than something that should be regarded as literally being true. For example, if their question wording discourages people from pressing the "don't know" button, people might be formulating an "opinion" about Johnson based solely on the fact that he's a Republican. Or perhaps they just like pressing buttons more or less at random. If you used Rasmussen's methodology and identified a fictitious candidate named Alan Smithee (but identified him as a Republican who was running for Senate), perhaps he'd wind up with 68 percent "name recognition" as well.
But if we indeed take this result literally, it is pretty ridiculous. Johnson is good on the stump and has started to generate a lot of buzz among the conservative and tea-party intelligentsia. He has some upside potential -- and may well defeat Feingold in the end. But common sense would dictate the number of Wisconsinites (even "likely voters") who know who Ron Johnson is right now is closer to 6.8 percent than 68.
I've had a lot of criticisms for Rasmussen Reports over the past couple of weeks. Many of the problems their polls exhibit are common to other pollsters throughout the industry, if they seem to be a bit exacerbated in Rasmussen's case.
But the fact is that Rasmussen is the 500-pound gorilla in the room. They drive a lot of traffic and narrative. They account for something like 30 percent of all horse-race polls that have been released thus far this election cycle.
And their polls really stick out, with results that are as often as not vastly different than what other pollsters show, almost always being more favorably disposed toward conservative candidates and causes. A lot of what I do -- especially when we're still pretty far removed from November and when nobody should sweat any individual poll all that much -- is to highlight polls that seem weird or misguided. If Rasmussen accounts for 30 percent of all polls, they probably account for an outright majority of weird polls. Even if Rasmussen is right and this winds up being a disastrous cycle for Democrats (indeed, I remain fairly bullish on the Republicans' prospects right now), this is not a particularly healthy state of affairs for the industry.
There's More...
Contract Post
by
Ed Kilgore
@
5:00 PM
Quite a few commenters
here on Alan Abramowitz'
study of the negative impact of conservative ideology on Republican incumbent senators' general election campaigns from 2000 to 2008 wondered if he might do a counterpart analysis of Democrats over the same period.
From your lips to Alan's computer: he's done the
counterpart analysis, and found that ideology does not seem to have had much impact on Democratic senatorial incumbents from 2000-2008; being more liberal didn't hurt them, all other things being equal. The numbers are clear, but the reasons for the very different partisan results are not at all obvious.
In an email exchange with Alan, I offered a couple of hypotheses which he quickly shot down. Were Democratic Senators more ideologically heterodox than Republicans, and thus more capable of adjusting to local political realities? No, in fact, Republicans had a significantly greater degree of ideological diversity than Democrats over this period. Were Democrats more ideologically suited to individual states? No, Republicans had a slight advantage here as well.
Alan thinks perhaps Republicans are more likely to be frank about ideological conservatism than Democrats are about liberalism, making their campaigns more ideological. That's another way to say that Democrats, whatever their voting records, try to "seize the center" more than Republicans.
And that leads to another factor in this analysis: Democratic incumbents did much better over this period than their Republican counterparts, losing only 4 of 67 races, while Republicans lost 17 of 69 races. It's probably helpful to remember that there was one very strong Republican cycle during these eight years (2002), and two stronger Democratic cycles (2006-2008). So it may be that ideology is more important when a candidate is already swimming against the partisan tide. That's not good news for those Democrats in this cycle with strong liberal profiles, but remember that if they are replaced by strongly conservative Republicans, the latter may have some serious problems down the road when the tides, as can suddenly happen in this turbulent era of U.S. politics, change.
There's More...
Contract Post
by
Nate Silver
@
7:15 AM
How closely are Americans following the story of Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court? Two different pollsters provide two very different answers.
On the one hand, we have this recent
poll of American adults from CBS. According to that poll, just 11 percent of Americans are following Kagan's nomination very closely; another 35 percent are following it somewhat closely.
On the other hand, we have
this survey of likely voters from Rasmussen. In that poll, 37 percent are following Kagan's nomination very closely -- more than three-and-half times the CBS figure:
Of course, these polls are not directly comparable. CBS surveyed all adults, whereas Rasmussen surveyed what it describes as likely voters. Notwithstanding that Scott Rasmussen has described his likely voter model as
"fairly loose", could this account for the differences?
Let's take the CBS poll as our baseline. Suppose that 100 percent of people in the poll who say they are following Elena Kagan's nomination "very closely" are likely voters. (This doesn't seem entirely implausible; it's a fairly boring story for anyone other than political aficionados.) Suppose furthermore that 70 percent of people who are following the story "somewhat closely" are likely voters, as are 40 percent of those who are following it "not very closely" and 10 percent of the people who are following the story "not at all closely". (This would imply that about half of the adult population are likely voters overall).
If we apply this likely voter "model", the CBS poll reconstitutes itself as follows:
This is certainly much closer to the mark. Still, there are some significant differences. Even with these very aggressive-seeming assumptions, we still only get the pecentage of "very closelys" up to 22 percent -- not to the 37 percent that Rasmussen shows.
The discrepancy probably arises from self-selection bias. I've never received a call from Rasmussen, but from anecdotal accounts, they do indeed identify themselves as being from Rasmussen and I'm sure that the respondent catches on very quickly to the fact that it's a political poll. I'd assume that someone who is in fact interested in politics are significantly more likely to complete the poll than someone who isn't.
Of course, that should be a problem with the CBS poll too -- and to some extent, I'm certain that it is. But they have some advantages. They use a live interviewer, who will probably elicit more patience from the respondent. They'll call you back if they miss you the first time around. They'll use selection procedures to generate a random sample, rather than simply speaking to the person who happens to pick up the phone. And they'll call throughout the course of the day, not just between 5 and 9, which happens to be the peak time for news programming. They may also be more sophisticated about using weighting procedures to mitigate their response bias, but who knows.
In general, if you're trying to understand what makes Rasmussen polling "different", the key heuristic is to assume that their polls are suffering from significant self-selection bias, and that the people who respond to their polls are significantly more likely to be active consumers of political news. This is probably why Rasmussen polls tend to show extremely large "bounces" associated with seemingly banal political events, and why they tend to show good results for candidates associated with activist movements, even if those candidates are barely known among the broader public. In essence, they're about half-way toward being polls of political junkies. (I'd love to see the percentage of people in their polls who claim, for instance, to have donated to political candidates, something which we could cross-check against FEC records; I'd bet you that it's very high.)
This isn't entirely a bad thing. Political junkies are almost certain to vote (which is why it's redundant to apply a likely voter screen). And they may be "early adopters" for candidates and causes that will penetrate into the mainstream later on. Still, the more response bias a poll suffers from, the more potential there is for it to manifest itself as partisan bias.
There's More...
Contract Post
by
Nate Silver
@
2:23 PM
Have to be briefer than I'd like here, but I'm in the midst of putting together a new set of
pollster ratings. In addition to populating the database with 2008 General Election results (as well as contests held in 2009 and 2010), I'm also doing a fair amount of backfilling to try to make the database, which goes back to 2000, more comprehensive. Previously, for instance, we did not have Rasmussen's polling in place for 2000, which can be hard to come by. But thanks to the magic of The Internet (as well as a tip from
Chris Bowers) I was able to track it down.
Here are the results of statewide polling in the 2000 Presidential Election. Although the pollster ratings will eventually involve some fancier math, the numbers you see below are as simple as it gets: I've simply looked at the average error of the last poll issued by each pollster in each state in terms of projecting the margin between Bush and Gore. (A cut-off is established 21 days prior to the election.)
While 2000 was generally a fairly rough year for pollsters, who had to deal with an unenthusiastic electorate, some third-party challengers, and some late-breaking developments like Bush's DUI charge, Rasmussen was the worst of the lot, missing by an average of 5.7 points. They also called 7 states wrong.** Some of this was the result of bias, as they were 3.5 points too high on Bush's margin in the states they surveyed, on average.
Although Rasmussen has certainly gotten a lot of things right, their high pollster rating was mostly based on their strong performance in 2004 and 2006. Their rating is likely to go down now that we've found their 2000 data, and are adding in the 2008 data, when their performance was mediocre.
** The figure for 'miscalls' in the chart assigns half a point when the pollster's final survey has the race in the state exactly tied.
p.s. If anyone happens to have Harris Interactive statewide polling for 2000, which seems to have disappeared from the Internet, please drop me an e-mail.
There's More...
Contract Post
by
Ed Kilgore
@
4:04 PM
Last week I did a
post suggesting that candidates like Rand Paul and Pat Toomey would offer an interesting test of the frequently-heard argument among conservatives that a more rigorous ideological stance would help Republicans win general elections. My skepticism about the "move-right-and-win" hypothesis earned me some abuse in the comments thread, partly on the legitimate grounds that I didn't systematically demolish it with data and instead relied on the long-standing views of political scientists and election practitioners (a "conservative" assessment of the burden of proof on this subject, but not one that persuades enthusiasts).
As it happens, Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz was intrigued by the post, and did a quick study of Senate general elections over the last four cycles to weigh the impact of conservative ideology. His
findings, published over at
The Democratic Strategist, supply some strong empirical support for the
"median voter theorem" that has long influenced political efforts to "seize the center" in general elections.
You can read Abramowitz' write-up yourself, but when he charted every Senate race since 2000, there was a clear negative correlation between conservative ideology as measured on the DW-NOMINATE scale and general election vote percentage. He then went further and controlled the study for factors like challenger strength and the existence of scandals, and again found the same negative correlation. In fact: "For every additional one point increase in conservatism, Republican incumbents lost an additional three percentage points in support relative to their party's presidential candidate."
Abramowitz' study was necessarily confined to incumbents, as the only candidates with a reliable objective indicator of ideology. But the apples-to-apples comparisons of conservative with more "moderate" incumbents indicates that a rightward tilt does not in any way produce some general election advantage.
Now to be extremely clear on one critical point: There are abundant reasons other than candidate electibility for conservatives to urge the GOP to become more conservative, with the most obvious being the desire to achieve conservative policy goals. Most activists, after all, are not involved in politics just to win elections for one "team" or the other, with no consideration of what that means in the real world of consequences for the country. Indeed, I'd say that the prevailing opinion on both the Left and Right is to encourage as much ideology as the political marketplace will bear.
But a clear-eyed view of the political marketplace remains essential, and in a representative democracy, it's also a matter of principle to care about what a majority of actual voters want, if not each minute, then over time. And let's face it, there's really no recent precedent for a major political party reacting to two consecutive bad election cycles by becoming more ideologically rigid.
Perhaps the accumulated economic and political traumas of the last couple of years have changed everything, and made Abramowitz' study, the political science consensus, and recent precedents irrelevant. And maybe the pro-GOP tilt of the political landscape is so pronounced at the moment that the ideology of this or that candidate will not even matter to voters (in which case Republicans can "move right and win" not as a result of ideology, but in spite of it). But we'll have to see some election results before concluding that the conventional wisdom of "seizing the center" is wrong.
There's More...
Contract Post
by
Tom Schaller
@
7:19 PM
Below is the second half of my
two-part interview with former Speaker Newt Gingrich. In this portion we talked more specifically about his book,
To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine, and his opinions on a wide range of policy issues:
Fivethirtyeight.com: The subtitle of your book refers to Obama's "secular-socialist machine." Can you explain to our readers what you mean by each of these three components?
Speaker Newt Gingrich: The Obama Administration ignored the public’s opposition to the stimulus package. The Administration ignored the fact that a majority of the American people were opposed to Obamacare. And they ignored the loss of the Teddy Kennedy’s senate seat, and ended up ramming through a bill that the country clearly did not want. That’s the behavior of a machine. So I’m first of all prepared to defend the concept that it’s a machine.
Second, working backwards, by any reasonable standard Obama is committed to socialism. I mean socialism in the broad sense. I’m not talking about a particular platform adopted by the International Socialist Movement in the late 19th century. I’m talking about a government-dominated, bureaucratically-controlled, politician-dicatated way of life. Not only have we taken over GM, Chrysler and AIG, but there’s a czar in the White House who believes he can establish the pay scale for 30 companies he’s never been in, for hundreds of people he’s never met. They just nationalized the student loan program. They designed Obamacare so there’s a backdoor road to socialized medicine because it creates an incentive for companies to drop their employees. There’s evidence that hundreds of companies may drop millions of employees from their health insurance and have them go buy individual insurance. So there’s a lot of different practices that would lead us to believe this is socialist operation.
And socialism is inherently secular because it believes the center of authority is not god, the center of authority is not your rights as an individual—the center of authority is the state, and the state gets to decide what you’re allowed to keep and what you’re allowed to do. And in addition, if you look at some of Obama's appointees, like his nominee for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, who has explicitly stated that religious liberty has to be subordinated to identity politics. The Democratic candidate for Senate in Massachusetts said if you’re Catholic maybe you shouldn’t work in emergency rooms. Two Democratic legislators in Connecticut introduced a bill that would have destroyed the Catholic Church. You have a judge in Wisconsin who said a day of prayer is unconstitutional. Everyday you turn around and you see a continuous assault on religion in general, and on Christianity and Judaism in particular.
538: Do you consider Medicare and Social Security socialist, and why or why not?
NG: I think that Medicare is part of the Bismarckian insurance state because it in fact pays all the money to the private sector. But I think we are going to have to dramatically reform Medicare, and increase the individual freedom and increase the individual responsibility in the system.
These models that grew up a 100 years ago, when Bismarck first developed them in 1870s and 1880s, have proved not sustainable in a modern world market. We need a new and better model which has much more individual responsibility.
538: What about the corporate bailouts in October 2008 where people complained that we got privatized profits and socialized risks and that that’s a form of corporate socialism—how do you feel about that?
NG: I feel very strongly about that. I said at that time that I thought Henry Paulson should not have been Treasury Secretary. I thought it was totally wrong for the former chairman of Goldman Sachs to be funneling billions of dollars from the taxpayers to Goldman Sachs. And I have said over and over, you can’t have capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down because you get socialism both ways.
I think that we should basically start moving away from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which was a government guarantee, and frankly break them up. One of my deepest beliefs is that if you’re too big too fail, you’re too big to manage. And we need to find ways to get to a more risk-accepting system, and not find a way to have more government control of the risk.
538: In your book you call Barack Obama the most radical president that America’s ever elected. I haven’t talked to his spokespeople, but I suspect they'd respond by saying he's cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, ramped up troop levels in Afghanistan, and goes to church as often if not more often than Ronald Reagan ever did. So I guess I would ask, what’s so radical about him?
NG: First of all, no president in American history has gone around and said as openly and as directly as Obama has that he gets to decide who earned too much and who didn’t earn too much, he gets to decide what to redistribute and how to redistribute it. No Administration had as few people with private sector or corporate experience as this Administration.
No administration has done as much to expand federal spending in peace time. And remember all this expansion in spending is peace time spending; it has nothing to do with Afghanistan and Iraq. It has to do with their desire to prop up big government and prop up state and local governments.
538: A lot of conservatives have dissociated themselves with Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, under whom the first $3 trillion budget and first $1 trillion deficit was passed. You make a few passing references to the former president, but you really don’t mention him that much. How would you in retrospect classify the former president and rate his presidential performance?
NG: I think that he was very sincere in his desire to protect America. I think he was very sincere in his basic conservative social values. I think he began his Administration with a real commitment on lower taxes and more economic growth, precisely in the Reagan model. And I think that late in his Administration that he was frankly worn down by the bureaucracies in Washington.
Three things happened. The State Department gradually dominated his national security policy, to the disadvantage of freedom and our security. The victory of [Harry] Reid and [Nancy] Pelosi led him to negotiate in a way where he accepted some really bad ideas because he thought he had to find a way to get along with Democrats in Congress.
And then I think when the crisis hit in the fall of 2008 everybody panicked. Candidly, there was a period there when you had the Federal Reserve chairman and the Secretary of the Treasury saying, “If we don’t do X, Y and Z, the entire world economy is going to collapse.” That’s pretty good grounds for stopping and trying to do something. It’s easy for people to say, "Well, I’d rather have risked a world depression." But most of the people I talked to in the private sector at the time were really worried about the system freezing up totally.
538: You mentioned Nancy Pelosi. She certainly comes in for her share of criticism in the book. How would you have responded legislatively and political to the Obama agenda?
NG: It depends on what your majority is. Look, I was very fortunate. I led a national movement which won an election on a specific contract. That election attracted a whole new generation of freshmen members who were very militant. So we had a very cohesive group taking on Bill Clinton and the Left. So, you know, that’s a different environment than if I inherited her majority—I couldn’t do anything because there’s not much I could do because it’s a left-wing majority.
I think the Democrats completely misunderstood the elections of 2006 and 2008. Those were performance elections. They were not values elections. And you can tell that by the fact that Obama campaigned with a very explicit, constantly repeated promise that he would not raise taxes on anybody earning less than $250,000. And they are clearly and decisively going to break that promise. And I think they’re going to break that promise at enormous expense to their re-election opportunities.
538: You discuss at length the wealth the country has created since Reagan came into office. But when you adjust for inflation the people in the bottom three quintiles haven’t seen their incomes go up, and adjusted for inflation incomes went down during the Bush era. It’s one thing to create wealth and another to create income that goes into people’s pockets. Where’s all the wealth gone?
NG: That was true from Reagan through the end of the 1990s. From Reagan through the end of the nineties, you saw a continuous improvement in economic opportunity for all Americans. You saw a substantial decline in the number of people living in poverty. You in fact saw real opportunity across the system. Now, I think starting with the shock of 9/11, frankly the last decade has been disappointing.
But I would also suggest to you that when talk about the poorest Americans, until you talk about the crisis of the American education bureaucracy and the failure of large public school systems to deliver education for the poor, and until you talk about the degree to which bad government, high taxes, big bureaucracy and corrupt politicians make it very hard in the inner cities to create jobs, I think you can’t understand what’s happening. I think we’ve had a political-cultural failure in the poorest neighborhoods of America that has economic consequences.
But the answer—and I’m actually giving a speech in June to the Detroit Chamber of Commerce on the topic of what you would do if you wanted Michigan and Detroit to be prosperous again—and one of my key points is going to be that if you create an unsafe community with very high regulations, very high taxes, a political class that is totally unreliable, a union movement that is anti-work and anti-business, don’t be surprised if business leaves.
538: We recently saw a failed terrorism bombing in New York. How would rate Obama’s performance on terrorism?
NG: Well, first of all, if we’re going to go back, in Detroit we did not know about the Christmas Day Bomber until his pants caught on fire. In New York, we did not know about the car bomb until a vendor noticed the car was smoking. In both cases, the national security apparatus of the United States failed—period, end of story, non-negotiable.
Second, recognize that this is an Administration trying to write a national security document in which they avoid using the word "Islam," although there’s no other plausible connectivity. You start with the killings in Arkansas a year and a half ago, the killing in Fort Hood, you go to the five Americans picked up in Afghanistan going to a terrorist training camp, you go to the Detroit bomber on Christmas Day, you go to the New York Times Square bomber, and the one connectivity that all of them have is radical Islam. Now, if you have an administration which won’t confront that reality, won’t even use the word “Islam,” and won’t think about the implications, how are you going to win this war?
538: Last question. In your book you talk about and defend the small regulatory state. And yet Americans across the ideological spectrum, including yourself earlier in this interview, are furious about the bailouts caused at least in part by unregulated or at least under-regulated markets. Meanwhile, we just saw Congress, which rarely votes unanimously on anything of substance, voting unanimously to keep a closer eye on the Federal Reserve. Aren’t taxpayers entitled—whether they’re bailing out AIG, an insurance company, or GM, an automobile maker—aren’t they entitled to a government that supervises markets a little bit better in order to avoid bailouts in the first place, and how do you get there?
NG: I’m not at all sure that government regulations are the right answer. I have said publicly and have been saying for almost a decade that I thought Sarbanes-Oxley was a disaster. I didn’t think it accomplished anything. I thought it crippled American business. It slowed down venture capital. It stopped new start ups. It added enormous additional costs to smaller and mid-sized businesses. People like Bernie Marcus of Home Depot—and he created 325,000 new jobs—he said he really could not have created those kinds of jobs at Home Depot under Sarbanes-Oxley rule. Sarbanes-Oxley failed. It doesn’t teach us anything about Lehman Brothers. It doesn’t teach us anything about Bear Stearns. Doesn’t warn us about anything. So now we add another layer of bureaucracy.
The fact is that in 1991 we created a regulatory agency to look at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with a $62 million budget and 200 full-time bureaucrats, and they knew nothing. Warren Buffett said that he looks at more than two companies a day and he can’t imagine what the bureaucrats were doing. So I would be very cautious in believing that more bureaucracy is necessarily the answer.
538: You don’t think we need a systemic-risk regulator looking at the whole system?
NG: I believe if you give enough power to systemic-risk regulators you’re going to incur corrupt, and you’re going to dramatically cripple the system. I think you’re far better to say, “How do we redesign the system so that it has dramatically less systemic risk?”
For example, you could build in a system of countervailing bond issuance that simply says that the bigger you are the more bonds you have to buy, so that you’re paying for your own collapse. That would be a reasonable and prudential policy. And you also have to accept that some companies are going to fail.
538: Well, I hope if you do make that announcement next February you will come back and join us again at 538. Thank you.
NG: You’re welcome.
There's More...
Contract Post
by
FiveThirtyEight.com
@
4:20 PM
From 538's Tom DollarAfter losing eleven straight special House elections,
Republicans are taking comfort in Charles Djou's victory. If the Democrats aren't safe in the birthplace of President Obama* and a
D+11 district, they aren't safe anywhere. Of course, being elected to the House with 39.4% of the vote is only possible under extraordinary circumstances.
Nate crunched the numbers and attempted to extrapolate what (if anything) this three-way race really bodes for November. Results: inconclusive.
In this case, the Democratic vote was split between State Senator Colleen Hanabusa (30.8%) and former Congressman Ed Case (27.6%). (Minor candidates and spoiled ballots accounted for 2.5%.) All voting was done by mail, and there were no party primaries to select the candidates. After it became clear that neither Democrat would withdraw, the DCCC pulled resources and resorted to urging voters to vote for Not Charles Djou. But staying in the race was the dominant strategy for both Case and Hanabusa. There will be a real election in November, and the Democrats will hold a primary to choose one candidate. Better to cede the seat to a Republican for seven months than to let the other Democrat enter the fall race as an incumbent. And in this district, Charles Djou now challenges Anh Cao of New Orleans for the title of most-endangered House Republican.
Possibly the only thing this election demonstrates is that first-past-the-post systems are ill-equipped to handle more than two serious candidates. The winner can be elected with far less than a majority, while other candidates split the vote. In the UK, this is the source of much vexation for the Liberal Democrats, who are the weak sister in most parliamentary constituencies. One possible solution is to adopt a system of
instant-runoff voting, called
alternative voting in Britain. As in a proper runoff, a candidate must secure 50% of the vote plus one to be elected. But unlike a runoff, which requires the time and expense of holding a second election, an instant runoff is, well, instant.
In IRV, instead of voting for one candidate, voters rank their preferences: 1st, 2nd, 3rd...(theoretically, up to one fewer than there are candidates in the race). The talliers then count the candidates' 1st-choice votes. If one person has a majority, it's over: he or she wins. If not, the last-place finisher (or finishers, if their combined vote total is less than the next highest candidate's) is eliminated, and their 2nd-choice votes are divided up amongst the remaining candidates. If still no candidate wins an outright majority, then again the last place finisher is eliminated, the 3rd-place votes divided, and so on, until someone reaches a majority. This system is used for electing the President of Ireland, and in some local elections in the US, such as for Mayor of Burlington, VT.
What would have happened if Hawaii had used IRV in its special election? Here's the vote breakdown as it actually happened:
Under IRV, Case and the minor candidates would be eliminated, as their combined vote total (51,005) is less than Hanabusa's (52,802). That leaves Djou and Hanabusa in a two-way race. Now for some speculation. In Burlington's first IRV race, 10% of voters failed to make a 2nd choice vote. I'm assuming the same level of drop-off in this race. For Case voters, I'm giving 30% of their 2nd choice votes to Djou, and 60% to Hanabusa. I've given such a high percentage to Djou because of that reluctance to let Hanabusa enter November's election as an incumbent. For the 'Other' voters, I'm assuming that those who did vote in the 2nd round split the same way as the overall 1st-round breakdown (i.e., Djou 39.4%, etc.):
This produces the following result:
Djou still wins under these conditions. But what if Case voters are in fact more favorable to Hanabusa? Here's what we get assuming Hanabusa gets 80% of Case voters, Djou 10%:
This time Hanabusa wins quite decisively. To prevail under IRV, Hanabusa would have to win just over 60% of all available 2nd-round votes, while Djou would have to win about 30%. (Still assuming 10% drop-off.) So who would have won the race? It's hard to say, and depends largely on whether Case voters were voting for Ed Case or for a Democrat. Prior to the election, Case had been polling better, and was considered the favorite to come in second. Some Case voters may have actually preferred Hanabusa, but voted for the more "electable" candidate. (It's also quite possible that the 'Other' voters' second preferences would have looked nothing like the overall vote breakdown.)
If the race had been IRV from the get-go, there would have been no incentive to vote for electability. The instant runoff system prevents candidates from playing spoiler, and frees voters to choose their truly preferred candidate.
Don't hold your breath waiting for instant runoffs in American congressional races, though. Most US races are still won with outright majorities, and Americans have a general aversion to "complicated" voting mechanisms. In the UK, however, parliamentary elections could move to alternative voting. Voting reform has long been the Holy Grail of the Liberal Democrats, with proportional representation their favored method. PR is almost certainly a non-starter for the Conservatives, but AV could be an acceptable alternative. Having AV in place would have made little difference in the outcome of the May 6th election, but would likely change the vote calculus in future elections.
IRV/AV is not without its critics. Besides the obvious "it's too complicated" complaint, it's criticized for encouraging tactical voting and allowing some voters to vote twice. (First-past-the-post also encourages tactical voting, just in a different way.) And, of course, it's not a proportional system: one winner still emerges from one district. But IRV/AV can prevent impasses like the one in Hawaii, where someone can win even while over 60% of the electorate voted against him. And it does so without the added cost, hassle and delay of holding a separate runoff.
*If you believe the lame-stream media.
---
This article was authored by research assistant Thomas Dollar. Please send comments or suggestions to sexton538@gmail.com
There's More...
Contract Post
by
Nate Silver
@
7:55 AM
This is a graph, per the
CDC, of the percentage of "cellphone-only" adults in the United States. The fraction, as of the second half of 2009, was 23 percent of all U.S. adults, or 25 percent of all U.S. households. These adults -- about a quarter of the population -- are simply ignored by many pollsters.
This is not a new problem -- in fact, it's one we've
written about on several occasions. But it's continuing to get worse. The percentage of people who have replaced their landlines with cellphones has climbed at a remarkably steady rate. (There may have been an especially large leap from the second half of 2008 to the first half of 2009, when the recession was at its worst and many people were looking for ways to trim household costs.)
Bear in mind that these figures are already somewhat out of date. The fraction could be in the high 20s by the time we get to November. And if the current trends hold, it could be in the mid or high 30s by the time we get to 2012. Nor does the figure include so-called "cellphone-mostly" households, which is when the house has a landline, but rarely or never uses it to receive incoming calls; another 15 percent of the population falls into this category.
Cellphone-only households are different from their landline-using counterparts. They tend to be younger, poorer, more urban, less white, and more Internet-savvy. All of these characteristics are correlated with political viewpoints and voting behavior.
The pollsters' usual defense mechanism against this is to weight their polls by demogrpahics -- something which they need to do anyway, since polls are subject to many forms of non-response bias (for instance, it's harder to get men on the phone then women). But this is potentilly an inadequate response for several reasons. First, some characteristics that correlate with both cellphone usage and political preferences may not correspond to those that are most commonly used to weight polls. It is somewhat rare, for instance, for pollsters to weight their polls by characteristics like urban/rural location or marital status, which are predictive of both cellphone usage and political beliefs. Being cellphone-dependent also appears to be significantly correlated with media consumption habits (in particular, getting more of one's news from the Internet and less from television), which also seems to be increasingly important in determining one's political views. And there are some characteristics that may be even more subtle. For instance, there are some hints in the CDC data (such as the higher prevalance of binge drinking) that cellphone-only adults are less "domestic" and more "bohemian". I suspect that, in young adults, this is correlated with more liberal political views.
Secondly, even where weighting occurs, one may encounter problems when upweighting from very small subsamples. It is now very difficult, for instance, to get young people on the phone when using a landline-only sample. About half of all adults from age 25-29, for instance, are cellphone-only, and two-thirds are either cellphone-only or cellphone-mostly. (The numbers are actually slightly better for adults aged 18-24, who are more likely to be living in a college dormatory, or still to be living at home, where a landline will usually be available.) Couple this with the fact that young people have grown up in a call-screening culture, and their response rates are often completely inadequate. Say that you're supposed to have 100 people aged 18-29 in a poll of 500 adults, but in fact you only get 30 because of problems with call-screening and cellphone usage. The margin of error on a sample of that size is 18 percent. And yet, you may essentially let each of these young people speak on behalf of two or three of their peers, to compensate for the ones you haven't gotten in contact with.
A new study from Pew, in fact, has found that these weighting schemes may have become inadequate. In their experiment, a weighted landline-only sample produced a generic ballot result of Republicans 47, Democrats 41, whereas a weighted landline-plus-cellphone sample had the generic ballot tied 44-44. That six-point net difference is statistically significant, and needless to say, could have huge implications for where the parties finish in November.
With that said, I certainly wouldn't go out and append 6 points to the Democrats' generic ballot number. For one thing, some pollsters do include cellphones in their sample. For another, the results from Pew reflect just one study/experiment, one which itself is subject to sample bias. Also, Pew's study finds that cellphone-only adults are less likely to vote, so the differential is probably less in the case of likely voters.
It also may be that this is case of two wrongs making a right. For instance, many pollsters aren't yet using a likely voter model, which tends to work to the benefit of Democrats since their voters are less likely to turn out, especially in a cycle like this one in which there appears to be an unethusiasm gap. There's also some evidence that Democrats underform the generic Congressional ballot on election day. If the failure to include cellphones biases the numbers in Republicans' direction, it may compensate for these other deficiencies. If so, however, it does so in a tenuous way, and there may be other cycles where the biases run in the same direction.
What can the pollsters do to make up for this?
The most obvious solution, of course, is to call cellphones, which more and more of the major-media pollsters (like Gallup, Pew, ABC/Post, CBS/NYT, NBC/WSJ and AP-Gfk) are doing, as are some academic polling centers like Quinnipiac. But this is expensive: calling a cellphone is about twice as expensive as calling a landline, according to Pew. And the cost differential may be greater for pollsters using robodialers, since cellphone numbers are subject to additional FCC restrictions on automated calling.
I have mixed sympathies for the pollsters on this one. On the one hand, traditional media budgets are still being cut, and running a high-quality, traditional polling operation is expensive. On the other, there are a few pollsters who seem to emphasize quantity and speed over methodoligical soundness, and they are unambiguously a part of the Problem.
Another approach, in the absence of calling cellphones, is to increase the sample size that one uses. Although there's not that much difference between calling an unbiased sample of 500 respondents or 1,000 (the associated margins of error are 4.4 points and 3.1 points, respectively), these differences are magnified if one relies upon upweighting results from smaller subsamples to correct for response bias, such as those for young voters or Hispanics.
Finally, pollsters might want to consider weighting based on "non-traditional" criteria such as urban/rural status, technology usage, or perhaps even media consumption habits.
Polling, like the media environment itself, is becoming increasingly fast, cheap -- and arguably, out of control. That many pollsters willingly ignore the full quarter of the population who do not have landlines is but one symptom of the problem.
There's More...
Contract Post
by
Nate Silver
@
9:58 PM
Yesterday, Republican Charles Djou
won the special election in Hawaii's 1st Congressional District encompassing Honolulu. Djou received 39.4 percent of the vote. Two Democrats, Colleen Hanabusa and Ed Case, received 30.8 and 27.6 percent of the vote, respectively, to finish in second and third place.
Placing the election into context is tricky. Djou won, becoming the first Republican to represent the District since 1991. And he isn't exceptionally moderate -- opposing for example civil unions in addition to gay marriage.
Still, Democratic candidates got most of the vote -- specifically, their candidates got a combined 59.8 percent of two-party vote, after excluding spoilt ballots and votes for minor-party candidates.
Hawaii has a PVI of D+11. As per the chart that we posted last week, Democrats would ordinarily be expected to get about 65 percent of the two-way vote in such a district in a political environment which looked like 2006 or 2008:
60 percent, on the other hand, would have been a fairly typical performance in a D+11 district in an environment that looked more like 2004 -- which of course would be bad news for the Democrats since the Republicans won a majority of seats in the House that year.
However, there is a fair amount of variance in these estimates. PVI is a useful bechmark, but will hardly tell us everything that we might want to know about the contingencies of a particular race in a particular district. Perhaps Hawaii, for instance, is not truly a D+11, since PVI is based on the performance of the candidates in the past two Presidential elections, and in 2008 Barack Obama, who is from Hawaii, significantly overperformed in the Aloha State. Prior to 2008 -- based on the election results of 2000 and 2004 -- Hawaii had a PVI of D+7. In an open seat election in a D+7 district, getting about 60 percent of the vote would fairly typical for Democrats, even in a good political climate like 2006 or 2008. On the other hand, maybe Barack Obama should still have been expected to have some coattails, even though he wasn't on the ballot.
You can make an argument that Democrats got more of the vote than they would have if there were merely two candidates. It's conceivable, for instance, that some of the votes for the moderate, Ed Case, would have gone to Djou rather than the liberal Hanabusa had he not been on the ballot. On the other hand, the internecine battle between the Democrats, and the fact that the national party pulled out of the race two weeks early, may have hurt their their enthusiasm and turnout and could have cost them a couple of points from what they otherwise might have achieved.
Long story short, this election was really just an amuse-bouche that served to whet our appetities, but didn't really provide much sustenance in terms of our understanding of the political environment. It clearly wasn't good news for Democrats. But, given the circumstances of the election, the outcome wasn't out-of-bounds from something that might have occurred to them even in a good political environment like 2008. (Had Djou received, say, 45 percent of the vote, or obviously an outright majority, that would have been a more peruasive indicator that the Democrats were in trouble.)
Also, the election wasn't such bad news for one particular Democrat: Colleen Hanabusa. Most polls projected her to finish in third place, although some smart observers had warned ahead of time that the polls might be lowballing her numbers. Having done better than Case in the special election, she may have undermined his claim to be the more electable Democrat, which could help her when the candidates square off again in the primary later this year.
There's More...
Contract Post
