Why Aren't Businesses Hiring?

Friday's employment report was the second disappointing employment report in a row. It stated the private sector only create 83,000 jobs. This leads to the question -- why aren't more jobs being created? There are four reasons:

Capacity Utilization is defined as:

A metric used to measure the rate at which potential output levels are being met or used. Displayed as a percentage, capacity utilization levels give insight into the overall slack that is in the economy or a firm at a given point in time. If a company is running at a 70% capacity utilization rate, it has room to increase production up to a 100% utilization rate without incurring the expensive costs of building a new plant or facility.

In other words, the chart of capacity utilization tells us there is a tremendous amount of slack in the economy. Businesses can simply tap some of this unused capacity rather than hire more employees. The number of hours worked dropped during the recession. Companies can simply increase the hours worked by their existing work force before hiring new people.
Productivity is still increasing. This means businesses are still getting more and more out of their existing workforce. Because of high unemployment, there is the added benefit of lower wages/salaries. From a business owner's perspective, this is a win/win scenario.

Uncertainty: there has been a tremendous amount of change over the last 12 months. Businesses are still trying to figure out what that means for their bottom line. Until there are firm answers, they will freeze hiring.

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Kyrgyzstan on the Edge of Even Greater Ethnic Strife

In early April, things finally came unhinged in the former-Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan. Just five years after the so-called Tulip Revolution, which violently swept the former Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev out of power after the 2005 disputed Parliamentary election, another forced change of power had occurred.

What had made up the combined revolutionary political forces in 2005 had by 2010 splintered into two groups. The first was led by former Prime Minster Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who was appointed President in the wake of the Tulip Revolution, while the second was led by former Foreign Minister Roza Otunbayeva, who has now taken the Presidency until the planned 2011 parliamentary elections.

The political unrest has led to a simultaneous explosion of violence in the ethnically volatile Southwest of the country, as lond standing grievances between the majority ethnic Kyrgyz community and the minority Uzbeks have come to a head. Dozens of people have been killed and thousands displaced in the fighting, mainly in and around the southern city of Osh.


Kyrgyzstan is a multi-ethnic nation dominated by the Kyrgyz, who make up about two-thirds of the population, along with large Uzbek and Russian minorities. The Russian minority has been systematically dropping since the fall of Soviet Union, falling from about a quarter of the population in the 1970s and 80s to 12 percent in 1999 (and estimated to be lower now).


The Uzbek population is largely focused in the West and Southwest, while the Russian population is mostly in the North around the capital, Bishkek.


The major violence and displacement in the South -- the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) estimated in June that the number displaced people in Kyrgystan has reached at least 300,000, while an estimated 100,000 have sought refuge in neighboring Uzbekistan.

As a result, it was a surprise to many observers when the interim government, led by Roza Otunbayeva, decided to move ahead with plans to undertake a referendum on a new constitution for the country. Not simply minor adjustments to the country's legal framework, the new constitution completely changes the political system of Kyrgyzstan from a Presidential system with wide executive authority to a Parliament-led system -- effectively switching the power positions of the President and the Prime Minister.

The referendum, which asked voters to endorse both the new constitutional setup as well as the interim Otunbayeva government, which would expire at the end of 2011.

Overall, the referendum passed overwhelmingly, with nearly 91 percent of the national vote in favor of the proposition, with an overall turn-out of 72 percent of eligible voters.


The 90.55 percent figure belies a significant fracturing of the vote -- and the number of voters who were able to cast their ballot -- across the country.


In the Northern provinces and the capital, the vote in favor of the new constitution was nearly unanimous, with several provinces voting more than 99 percent for the measure! In the South, however, particularly in Uzbek areas, the support was softer (though still very high).

Turnout reflects largely the same trend, suggesting that displaced Uzbeks were highly underrepresented in this vote. In Osh city, turnout was less than 50 percent, with 85 percent of those who were able to vote casting the "yes" ballot.

Nonetheless, even if the 300,000 internally displaced and 100,000 refugees (mostly Uzbeks) had managed to cast "no" votes on the measure, it would have raised the overall "no" figure only up to about 24 percent, while those in favor would have still had a big win with 76 percent.

At the same time, it is not so much the content of the constitutional proposal that ran counter to the interests of the Uzbek minority as the overall political shift towards violence with impunity in the anarchic Southwest. Politically and socially, the next government and the international community (including Russia, the US and the EU) will have to take rapid and decisive action to resolve the situation and find a stable way forward.

---
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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What Makes For a Good Party Chair?

Ed's post below got me to thinking: What exactly makes for a good national party chair? The answer might seem self-evident, and some of the points I make below are fairly obvious. But in the wake of Michael Steele's latest blunder, the implications of which I'll set aside for now, I thought I'd attempt to add some structure.

As an exercise, let's compare the qualities that Steele brought to the office with those that recent chair Terry McAuliffe brought to the Democratic National Committee's top slot. Before proceeding, let me set forth two clarifying points. First, the list of factors below is hardly exhaustive, and I'm sure other criteria could be added. Second, I hold no particular brief for McAuliffe, nor against Steele, about whom I wrote a column for the Baltimore Sun at the time of his RNC victory (link no longer available) proclaiming that Steele was a great choice who ran a smart, tactical campaign to win the RNC chair. So this is not about the two parties or the RNC v. DNC, but rather a side-by-side comparison conducted in order to assess what are ideal traits in a chair of either party in the modern era.

1. Message. Terry McAuliffe didn’t know much about public policy when he took the chair at the DNC, but that's hardly a liability and may even be an asset in a chair. It’s not the chair’s job to set policy, offer policy proposals or solutions, or even publicly ruminate about policy: His or her job is to echo the positions of the party’s president and/or congressional leaders—period. McAuliffe almost always stayed squarely and repeatedly on message. Having witnessed the Clinton scandal wars first hand, he knew more than most the value of the wash-rinse-repeat talking point approach, and peddled with pep the pet phrases produced for him by the communication shop. Steele didn’t know much about national politics when he claimed the RNC helm, but appears to fancy himself a quick and insightful wonk-wit who can speak off the cuff. And that’s exactly the problem: Like a bad jazz musician, Steele thinks he can deliver beautiful improvisations, when in fact he often produces wince-worthy screeches as if he were disassembling a clarinet as he played it. Most of what a chair says in speeches, television appearances and press releases can quickly (and correctly) be dismissed by opponents and the media as predictable pablum. A chair who is easily frustrated by such dismissals and instead yearns to be the center of attention is going to be just that--but for the wrong reasons. The first standard for judging chairs is their adherence to the Hippocratic oath: Do no harm. Because Steele fails so miserably and regularly on this count, the substantial advantage here goes to McAuliffe.

2. Morale. To be chair you need to enjoy glad-handing with everyone from heads of state to the local party goofball with the button-covered hat, and at least seem like you enjoy both types of interactions equally. You also have to be the rah-rah person when things go well for the party or you have good ammunition against the other party, and the smile-through-your-teeth person when the situation is the reverse. In short, part of the job is to serve as the party's morale officer. Both McAuliffe and Steele have vibrant, magnetic personalities suitable to this function, and Steele's natural dynamism may even give him a slight edge. But the problem again is that his blunders are morale-crushers. They require damage control and toxic clean-ups; they deflate party rank-and-file, not to mention staff; they cost the party money and lose media cycles. In fact, whatever hip and fresh qualities Steele offers may in fact compound the damages of his blunders because mistakes made by lesser lights--say, McAuliffe's predecessor Joe Andrew (you say, "Who?" I say, "Exactly.")--are not amplified as much as they are with a big-personality chair like McAuliffe or Steele. Advantage: McAuliffe.

3. Money. Do I really need to do a side-by-side comparison of McAuliffe’s fundraising history—arguably the greatest party fundraiser in history—with Steele? This is no contest: advantage McAuliffe.

4. Machine. There is added value and legitimacy (especially among rank-and-file loyalists) if a chair worked his or her way up through the party hierarchy as a county and then state party official chair, demonstrating a mastery of machine politics and proving effective as a fixer-footsoldier. McAuliffe jumped to national politics pretty quickly from Syracuse/Onondaga County politics in New York (he was national finance chair for the DNC in his 20s), so he didn’t climb the ladder very steadily; on the other hand, he spent a lot of time on the finance side of the DNC thereafter. Steele served as chair in a tough state (Maryland) for the GOP. Let's call this a draw.

5. Megalomania. This is a very intangible criterion, but hear me out. McAuliffe was already wealthy by the time he took the helm of the DNC. He’d flown with, golfed with, star-trekked with and generally buddied around with a sitting and later ex-president. He had less need to slake a thirst for elbow-rubbing with top politicians, Hollywood celebrities, business magnates and international leaders. (If you read McAuliffe's book, it’s one name-drop moment after another.) Nor would “the Macker” be tempted by the perks (jets, etc.) that somebody like Steele, whose pre-political professional failings forced the Ehrlich campaign to put him on their payroll during the 2002 gubernatorial race. Put simply, Steele arrived in his chair as a climber-in-the-making, whereas McAuliffe was already an accomplished climber several rungs higher in the grip-and-grin, glory-shot-on-my-desk, look-at-me-on-the-red-carpet political ladder. Both McAuliffe and Steele have healthy egos, but when you mix that with a lack of message discipline and a climber mentality, you get a very, very toxic combination. Slight advantage, McAuliffe.

6. Meaning. This is the one and only area where Steele makes for a better chair than McAuliffe ever could—because Steele’s election as the first African American RNC chief sent a powerful message in the Obama era about the recognition by Republicans that they need to reach out to non-white segments of the electorate who for the most part vote Democratic. Demonstrable advantage, Steele.

The bottom line is that Steele has thus far not been a good chair and may in fact be turning out to be a bad one. I think the fact that big name Republicans and conservatives are seizing on his latest blunder has as much to do with replacing him as solving America's policy problems and strategic concerns in Afghanistan.

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Steele's "Democrat War"

As you may have heard, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele is in the news again, and not in a good way, with reports of a speech he made in Connecticut referring to the war in Afghanistan as "a war of Obama's choosing," and warning of the futility of a "land war in Afghanistan."

Very quickly, calls for Steele's resignation came from the formidable chattering class duo of the Weekly Standard's William Kristol and RedState's Erick Erickson.

Whatever else they represent, Steele's remarks have created a sudden and surprising fault line in the GOP over foreign policy at a time when that party has (following public opinion) focused its attention heavily on domestic issues, largely confining itself with attacks on the administration's alleged weakness and fecklessness in dealing with other countries, while tolerating anti-Iraq-War heretics like Rand Paul.

The RNC has put out a statement defending Steele though not really addressing the underlying issues of Bush administration responsibility for launching the war in Afghanistan, or of longstanding Republican support for its aggressive prosecution.

Any explanations of Steele's motivations in committing this apparent gaffe are speculative. But among us old-timers, it's reminiscent of Bob Dole's self-destructive remark about the death toll in "Democrat wars" (including World War II) in the 1976 vice-presidential debate, reflecting a habit of blaming specific administrations for wars waged with strong bipartisan support.

We'll soon see if Steele can survive, and if this event turns out to be a momentary embarrassment, or the beginning of a real debate among Republicans about the party's foreign policy message going into 2010 and 2012.

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Is Research 2000 Merely Mangling Its Data -- Rather Than Fabricating It?

Talking Points Memo received a long and somewhat rambling e-mail from Research 2000's Del Ali concerning the accusations from Daily Kos that it has fabricated some or all of its polling data. In the e-mail, Ali suggests another mechanism by which some of the unusual patterns observed in Research 2000's polling data might have occurred.

To you so-called polling experts, each sub grouping, gender, race, party ID, etc must equal the top line number or come pretty darn close. Yes we weight heavily and I will, using the margin of error adjust the top line and when adjusted under my discretion as both a pollster and social scientist, therefore all sub groups must be adjusted as well.

[Note: Some of Mr. Ali's typographical errors have been cleaned up and the emphasis is mine.]

Although it is not crystal-clear what Ali is suggesting, one interpretation is that he feels he has the liberty "under my discretion as both a pollster and social scientist" to adjust his topline results anywhere within the margin of error. Thus, if his raw data had the Democrat at 46 percent and the Republican at 44 percent, and had a margin of error of +/- 4 percent, the Democrat's number could presumably be adjusted by Ali to be anywhere from 42 percent to 50 percent, or the Republican's anywhere from 40 percent to 48 percent.

As you can see, this would give Ali quite a bit of discretion: he could adjust his poll to show essentially anything that he wanted, from a decent-sized lead for the Democrat to a modest one for the Republican. Needless to say, this is not what they teach you in Polling 101. There are differences of opinion about whether pollsters should just report their numbers "as is" no matter what, or whether, if the result "feels wrong" to them, they should have the liberty to re-examine their assumptions, such as by applying a different likely voter model. Now, in practice, a pollster will usually have enough knobs to twist between likely voter screens, weighting and sampling assumptions, etc., that they could back into almost any result they wanted more often than not. But there would usually be some scientific pretense for it. Ali's attitude seems to be considerably more cavalier and his process considerably more ad-hoc.

In another context, this would not be a flattering admission for a pollster to make. But it does formulate something of a defense against some of the statistical evidence that has been presented against Research 2000. For instance, Grebner, et. al. have discussed the "missing zeroes" problem -- the fact that Research 2000 has rarely had Obama's favorability rating remaining the same from week to week, even though this will occur fairly often statistically:

So far as we are aware, no such algorithm shows too few changes of zero, i.e. none has an aversion to outputting the same whole number percent in two successive weeks. On the other hand, it has long been known that when people write down imagined random sequences they typically avoid repetition, i.e. show too few changes of zero.

Grebner et al. argue that this phenomenon could only be a reflection of human intervention -- no naturally occurring statistical process could produce it. In my view, that conclusion is correct beyond the shadow of a doubt. This does not necessarily imply, however, that the human being is making up the numbers entirely. He could also be manipulating real data in a scientifically unsound way. Perhaps it feels abnormal to Ali when his raw data has not shown some change in Obama's ratings: he would therefore tweak the numbers upward or downward by a point, as he feels he has license to. In essence, he could be using real data and making it look fake.

The other major set of statistical claims against Ali concern the odd patterns in his cross-tabular data, which produce results inconsistent with any naturally occurring statistical process. But it doesn't seem out of the question that you could wind up with some very unusual-looking crosstabs through some horrible buggy mess of a spreadsheet model, particularly if your attitude was that you generate the topline number first and then back into the cross-tabs mostly as a formality.

Long story short, the line between a pollster who is fabricating data and one who mutilates real data beyond recognition is rather blurry, perhaps even intractably so. While I wouldn't want to hire either one of them, it might make quite a bit of difference from a legal standpoint.

This is why looking at the non-statistical details of the case seems to be essential. Mr. Ali's dog-ate-my-homework excuses for not releasing either his raw data or the names of his call centers to the public are unpersuasive, to say the least, and from a Bayesian standpoint, makes the hypothesis of fraud much more likely than it otherwise would be. Still, there is nothing in Ali's long statement to TPM that would convey much confidence in his facility with statistics, and there remains a theoretical possibility that he is guilty of nothing other than having a cavalier and scientifically unsound attitude toward the sanctity of his data.

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Kos Legal Filing Raises Further Questions about Research 2000

Via the Washington Post's Greg Sargent, Daily Kos has followed through on its plans to sue Research 2000 for what it alleges to be misrepresentation and fraud; a copy of their complaint can be found here.

The bulk of the complaint consists of legal boilerplate or charges which have already been made publicly. However, there is also a new set of facts that raises potential red flags about the financial terms of the deal. It concerns Research 2000's willingness to provide Daily Kos with a substantial amount of "free" polling, in exchange for modifying the payment terms. The relevant sections of the complaint are extracted below.

16. Shortly after the 2008 election, Plaintiffs entered into negotiations with Research 2000 for a long term, multi-poll deal that included a weekly “State of the Nation” poll and state/race specific polls as requested by DailyKos through Kos Media. The agreement was reached orally, requiring Kos Media to make lump-sum payments twice in 2009 as well as an additional large payment in December 2008 at the initiation of the agreement.

17. The parties specifically agreed that the weekly “State of the Nation” poll was to include 2,400 respondents. This remained in effect until March 4, 2010, when the parties agreed to poll 1,200 respondents weekly.

18. The parties specifically agreed that polling as to specific electoral contests was to include 600 respondents, with primary oversamples of 400 respondents.

20. By the request of Ali, claiming it would provide “immense” help for cash flow reasons, Plaintiffs agreed to advance the second lump-sum payment to May 2009 in exchange for additional polls to be performed free of charge. More specifically, in 2009 the agreement between Plaintiffs and Defendants provided that Defendants would supply 150 polls to DailyKos. Plaintiffs offered to add an additional 59 polls to the 2009 agreement if Plaintiffs agreed to make a substantial advance payment. Kos Media accepted Defendants’ offer and advanced Defendants the money in exchange for the promised 59 polls.

Bear in mind that this is just one side's re-telling of the story. Particularly since many of the commitments that Research 2000 and Daily Kos made appear to have been made orally, or otherwise fairly casually, Research 2000 might well have a substantially different interpretation of events.

If this portion of the complaint is accurate, however, it raises some troublesome questions. Research 2000 agreed to conduct 150 polls for Daily Kos in 2009, according to the complaint, which would be paid with three large lump-sum payments, one coming in December 2008 and two others coming at some point during 2009 itself.

Research 2000 asked, according to the complaint, and Daily Kos agreed, that the third and final of these payments be advanced to May 2009 because Research 2000 was having cashflow problems. This in and of itself is not especially interesting. If Research 2000 really were conducting polls, it would incur substantial fees, probably totaling at least several hundred thousand dollars per year, from the third-party call centers that it contracted with. Particularly if it were operating on a fairly low profit margin, Research 2000 could fairly easily encounter cashflow problems, if for example the call center itself demanded prompter payments.

What is more troubling, however, is how much Research 2000 was willing to give up in exchange for receiving payment from Daily Kos more quickly. They were willing to provide Daily Kos with 59 additional polls -- an increase of almost 40 percent from the 150 polls that they had originally agreed to provide them with.

Say that it cost Research 2000 about $4 per interview to complete the 52 weekly, State of the Nation polls that it had agreed to provide to Daily Kos, which at the time consisted of 2,400 adult respondents each. Please note that the cost estimates included here are hypothetical. Based on my limited experience in actually commissioning polls, this would have been quite cheap for traditional telephone polling, but we'll run with it for demonstration purposes in the absence of other evidence; it works out to $499,200 over the course of the year. Say also that the 98 state- and district-level polls that Research 2000 had originally agreed to provide to Daily Kos in 2009 cost it $6 per interview; the higher cost reflects the fact that these were polls of likely voters and therefore would have been more expensive to complete, since it takes time to screen the unlikely voters out from your sample. With 600 respondents per local poll, this would have cost Research 2000 an additional $352,800 over the course of the year.

Thus, the total cost of Research 2000's polling in 2009 would have been $852,000 -- $499,200 for the national poll, and $352,800 for the local polls. Suppose that 40 percent of the fees that Daily Kos owed Research 2000 for this polling were due with the third and final payment -- this would have been $340,800.

In exchange for receiving this $340,800 a few months earlier than it otherwise would have, Research 2000 was willing to conduct 59 additional polls for Daily Kos. The cost of these polls, assuming they were 600-person state and local polls conducted at a cost of $6 per interview, would have been $212,400.

In economic terms, Daily Kos's willingness to push forward the timing of the payments it made to Research 2000 represented a loan. Meanwhile, the additional polls that Research 2000 was willing to do represented interest on this loan. Therefore, in exchange for receiving a $340,800 loan, Research 2000 was willing to pay $212,400 in interest, in the form of additional polls.

Needless to say, that is an alarmingly high interest rate -- 62 percent over a period of a few months -- for a short-term loan. One would think that Mr. Ali could have done significantly better than that through a third-party institution like a bank. On the other hand, if the marginal cost of conducting polls was essentially zero to Ali, because he was not actually contracting with call centers to place real phone calls to real people, he might understandably be willing to give additional "polling" away rather cheaply.

Again, the dollar figures surmised here are hypothetical, although the proportions are the most important thing. If, for instance, Research 2000's polling was twice as expensive as I hypothesized, or twice as cheap, it would still be incredibly generous to increase the amount of polling you were doing by 40 percent, in exchange for receiving some fraction of the payment a few months earlier. If the facts are as Daily Kos has alleged, then, this is another troubling set of circumstances for Research 2000.

By the way, the absolute amount that Daily Kos was paying for the polls is not immaterial. There is a threshold below which it would have been physically impossible for Research 2000 to conduct the volume of polls it claims to have been conducting; traditional telephone polls are fairly labor-intensive, and call center operators can only work so fast, even if they are working for not much more than minimum wage. Daily Kos did not detail the overall cost of the polling in its complaint, but it is possible that those figures themselves would raise red flags. (EDIT: Patrick Ruffini has made a similar point).

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Can Democrats Interfere with the 2012 GOP Presidential Nomination?

It's a subject that only the hardiest of political junkies follow regularly, but next month both parties are expected to make some serious decisions about the calendar and rules governing the 2012 presidential nominating process. And as Tom Schaller reported here in May, both parties seem to be moving--in concert, no less--towards a calendar aimed at reversing the recent trend towards "front-loading" of primaries and caucuses, essentially moving the entire process back a month.

But The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder has raised an intriguing possibility:
Could Democrats, whose 2012 nominee is already known, manipulate the "coordinated" process to make life difficult for Republicans by encouraging low-turnout caucuses that could be dominated by the Tea Party movement or other hard-core conservatives?


Ambinder notes that the proposed Republican (and for that matter, Democratic) calendar for 2012 would instantly place 23 states whose nominating events are controlled by state laws out of compliance, forcing them to change dates, risk delegate sanctions, or, in a provision that might well be dropped, seek a "waiver" from RNC chairman Michael Steele:

The other way these 23 states could deal with their forced primary dates is to not hold primaries at all. They'd hold caucuses -- beauty contests -- or conventions instead. The more caucuses and conventions there are, the more conservative the resulting nominees are likely to be. This is why many mainstream conservative candidates like Mitt Romney, assuming he decides to run, hope to participate in as many early primaries as possible. Primaries, paid for by states, encompass a wide range of Republican ideologies. Caucuses and conventions don't. And in 2012, they'll probably be full of energetic Tea Party activists.

Democrats can sit back and watch. They have every incentive to nudge the GOP into holding caucuses and conventions and, in fact, can very easily influence what the GOP does by changing their primaries to caucuses and conventions, assuming the cooperative effort passes and each party follows the same rules. Why? Because they KNOW who their nominee is going to be, and provided the conventions and caucuses are large enough to accommodate a range of delegates, Democrats don't really need to hold primaries.

That sounds plausible enough, but do Democrats actually have that much control over what happens to the nominating process in states that could run afoul of the new calendar? Not really.

Of the nineteen states we are talking about (Ambinder's count of 23 includes Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, which are going to receive preferred "go first" treatment under the proposed new rules for both parties), one, Hawaii, already plans a Republican caucus. In the remaining eighteen states, Democrats have "trifecta" control of state government (control of the governorship and both legislative chambers) in only four: Delaware, New York, Maryland and Wisconsin. That count could change in November, but not dramatically, and probably not in a pro-Democratic direction.

It's also a highly dubious proposition that Democrats or Republicans in individual states are thinking so strategically about their impact on their own, much less the other party's, nominating process. The most powerful impulse seems to be maintaining influence via early contests; indeed, some states, as 2008 showed, may decide to defy the national parties, hold early primaries, and accept the sanctions that would accompany that decision.

So if it's unlikely that some cabal of Democrats scattered around the country will shift the nominating process from primaries to caucuses or conventions, what about the more general proposition that an attack on front-loading will have an invidious effect on the GOP presidential landscape, directly or indirectly? Does, as Ambinder suggests, Mitt Romney need a bunch of early primaries to avoid getting ambushed in low-turnout contests?

Maybe, but that's extremly hypothetical, since we don't know the composition of the GOP field, and because the dynamics of the nominating calendar are almost impossible to anticipate. Recall that the front-loading mania of 2008, motivated in no small part by the desire to reduce the power of the Iowa-New Hampshire "duopoly," arguably increased that power. Among Democrats, it's hard to imagine that Barack Obama would have won the nomination without winning Iowa, and equally hard to imagine that Hillary Clinton would have remained in the race to the bitter end without winning New Hampshire. And Mitt Romney's stumble against Mike Huckabee in Iowa may well have been the most fateful development in the GOP contest, opening the way for John McCain's resurrection in New Hampshire while enabling Huckabee to split the conservative vote in the South. The one viable candidate who defied the duopoly, Rudy Guiliani, disappeared quickly. Since no one in either party is proposing to mess with the duopoly (or with the newly entitled next-in-line status of Nevada and South Carolina), it's unclear whether calendar changes will make much of a difference.

More generally, recent political history is littered with the unintended consequences of various schemes to manipulate the primary/caucus calendar, dating back at least to the original southern-centered Super Tuesday of 1988, which helped make Mike Dukakis and Jesse Jackson the finalists for the Democratic nomination.

While you can make the case that the coordinated move towards calendar "order" for 2012 is a significant development, the really big news is that neither party has given serious consideration to more radical schemes like rotating regional primaries (yes, Democrats are playing with the idea of delegate "bonuses" for states participating in regional "clusters," but not at the expense of the entitled early states). If Democrats really wanted to do something dramatic to their own or to the GOP's nominating process, this would be the time to do it, with an incumbent president presumably running for re-election. Short of that missed opportunity, it's unlikely Democrats or Republicans are really up for anything more ambitious than a concerted effort to keep rampant front-loading from pushing the nominating process back into the November-December holidays.

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How Research 2000 Could Make Its Life Easy

The National Council on Public Polls (NCPP) has a commonsensical suggestion for Research 2000:

The National Council on Public Polls is calling for full disclosure of all information about the polls conducted by Research 2000 for the Daily Kos website after controversy erupted over the polls.[...]

"NCPP believes public disclosure of all the relevant information about the polls in dispute will provide a solid basis for resolving this controversy," said Evans Witt, NCPP President. He said the release by Research 2000 and Daily Kos should include all the information detailed in the three levels of NCPP guidelines, including the interview data and full sample dispositions.

"Releasing this information will allow everyone to make a judgment based on the facts," Witt added. "Failure to release information leaves allegations unanswered and unanswerable."

Emphasis is mine. What NCPP has suggested that Research 2000 do is to release the raw records from each of the individual interviews that it conducted. This would typically take the form of a simple spreadsheet that might look something like this, with codes to indicate each possible response (e.g. 1=Democrat, 2=Republican, 3=independent) to each question:



It would be very, very commonplace to have a document like this -- it is in essence the DNA of a poll, and any call center would provide it as a matter of course. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that Research 2000 could have lived without it, as the weighting schemes that pollsters typically use usually operate at the level of the individual observations.

Particularly if the data release occurred as soon as possible, and was as comprehensive as possible, Mr. Ali would be entitled to a strong intellectual (rather than merely legal) presumption of innocence. In addition, the spreadsheet could presumably contain the weights Ali assigned to individual observations, which would help to explain why Research 2000 has produced results that are unusual, even if they are not fraudulent.

But so far, Research 2000 has not made such documentation available, certainly not to the public, nor apparently to its client, Daily Kos, in spite of having had two weeks of warning that Daily Kos was about to publish a study that called the propriety of their polling into question. Perhaps he will take the opportunity to do so now.

Horeover, although it would not be easy to fabricate or reverse-engineer such data, a sufficiently cunning and unscrupulous person could presumably do so, given enough time. Just as the Iranian government, in its disputed 2009 election, aroused suspicion in the way that it quickly released province-level results, but city-level results only after a delay, and precinct-level results only after a further delay, if there is an extended delay before Ali releases such data, any subsequent attempt he makes to do so might be regarded more skeptically.

Another form of proof that Ali could offer would be records, such as invoices, from the call center(s) that he used to conduct his polling. Research 2000, which lists only a post office box as its contact information, almost certainly does not have its own call center (nor do most pollsters, for that matter). Instead, it would contract out with a third party to conduct the fieldwork, and in turn add its value by applying its judgment about how to conduct weighting and apply likely voter models, by designing the survey instrument, by being a liaison to the media sponsors of the polls, and so forth. The volume of business between Research 2000 and its call center would presumably be extremely high. If the call center could conduct interviews for Research 2000 at a rate of $5 per completed survey -- and that's probably a very aggressive rate for traditional, non-automated telephone polling -- it would be doing about $12,000 worth of business with Research 2000 per week, assuming a 1,200-person national survey and two 600-person state surveys, as is fairly typical for them. That would amount to more than $600,000 worth of business per year, which surely would have produced a long paper trail.

Of course, Ali is under no obligation to release any more information than he feels like -- and under the threat of a lawsuit, it is perhaps understandable that he does not want to be more forthcoming. But a key factor here, again, is that the threat of a lawsuit was not made against Ali immediately. On the contrary, Daily Kos claims to have given him two weeks notice about the Grebner and Weissman report in advance of its publication. It is hard to understand why Ali would not have taken that time to provide Daily Kos with information that a pollster would ordinarily have at its fingertips and which presumably could have cleared his name.

None of this, certainly, proves guilt, and I still think there's modestly more ambiguity here than in the Strategic Vision case. But presuming he is innocent, Ali could be doing a lot of things to make his life easier.

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In Europe, the World Cup is Not for Wimps

At the United Nations Office in Geneva, the World Cup started with a party.

In the environment section, where I was, the June 11th start of the world's premier sporting event meant work effectively ground to a halt at about three in the afternoon, timed to give at least an hour to prepare for the inaugural match between South Africa and Mexico. The excitement was palpable, as UN staffers from around the world packed into the unit's conference room to watch Bafana Bafana take on El Tri.

The wine and beer flowed. Dramatic speeches about brotherhood in the world and the struggles of Africa were punctuated by screams of delight and yelps of tragedy from the peanut gallery as the two teams raced up and down the pitch. With each strike on goal, the din grew louder, as even casual observers, hardened UN field veterans with years of experience working conflict-affected countries like Afghanistan, Sudan, Palestine/Israel, Nigeria, DR Congo and Sierra Leone, joined in the fray.

The World Cup is at its core enigmatic. Though it is the most popular sport in the world, association football's domination is based in just a few places, namely Europe and Latin America (with Africa, North America and Northeast Asia on the rise). While ostensibly global in nature, all 18 editions of the Coupe du Monde have been won by teams from either South America (Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina) or Western Europe (Italy, Germany, France and England), and though 76 nations have made it to at least one World Cup, only two squads* not from Europe or South America (South Korea and the United States) have made it to the final four.

Accordingly, in a European context -- even one as normally tame as Switzerland -- emotions run high. For the nail-biting last 25 minutes of the Swiss' 1-nil upset of Spain in Group H, there was a tense quiet in the town. As each Spanish assault was turned away with a grimace by the rugged Swiss defense, the possibility that Gerson Fernandes' scrappy and slapdash goal would prove the game-winner grew stronger. When the whistle blew, the honking began. Across Geneva, for the next eight hours, people raced around town in their flag-adorned cars, horns (and vuvuzelas) blaring 'til the wee hours of the morning.

As a diverse and international town (the city proper is about 50 percent Swiss and 50 percent foreigners), Geneva has numerous supporters for each team that made the Cup (perhaps with the exception of North Korea). More often then not, especially as I watched the American matches against England, Slovenia and Algeria alongside natives from each of those places, they have been vigorous but friendly in their rivalries.

But of course, sometimes things get personal. This past weekend, my father and I drove out with some friends for a food and wine weekend in small-town France, in the Burgundy region. Naturally, on Saturday evening, we went to watch the USA-Ghana match at the town's one beer pub -- an American-style bar called "Route 66." With all the requisite Yankee accoutrement -- wagon wheels, photos of New York, and so on -- the bar clearly sold its faux American-ness as much as its beer.

Nonetheless, after the USA game had been running on the pub's TV for just 15 minutes (enough time for the US team to concede a goal, of course), the barman, apparently annoyed by the concentration of US soccer fans that had trickled into the bar, abruptly and angrily changed the channel.

No amount of protest would change his mind. As I tried to ask for an explanation (in French, by the way), he simply walked into the back, leaving his patrons to fend for themselves. To be fair, my pleas to switch the game back were probably not helped by my father's loud muttering behind me: "You've got to be kidding, you froggy bastard!"

Incensed, we walked around the town, trying to find another venue in which to watch the game, to no avail. For a country that is football-obsessed, it was incredible to see that no one among the locals seemed remotely interested in the games being played.

As it turned out, however, it was not lack of interest that drove that disdain, but instead a prolonged period of national mourning. Last week's total implosion of Les Bleus, champions in 1998 and finalists in 2006, had driven most French fans (and the Parliament) beyond sadness to a Gaullic mix of bitterness and contempt. And as explained by a French friend with whom we were traveling, "no amateur soccer squad from the US would ever be allowed to upstage proud French football."

On the positive side, by the time we returned to our hotel (which turned out to be the one place we could watch the match), the Americans had managed to equalize, and were pushing hard for a game-winner. Vuvuzelas and beer in hand, we thought we would be rooting home another comeback win from the plucky, though inconsistent, US squad. Instead, we watched in horror as Ghana held back the American attack in regulation, and then just three minutes in overtime, converted the winning goal.

Stunned, we considered that the team had just blown its best chance in decades to return to the World Cup semifinals (last time in 1930). And though we were on holiday in one of the most beautiful spots on the planet, the utter impotence of the US offense, the lame defending on routine crosses and the inability of the strikers to finish, had managed to drive us into depression for the rest of the evening. In spite of all the incredible progress in American soccer since the 1994 World Cup, when a critical knock-out game against a beatable opponent was on the line, they choked.

Finally, I understood the cross French barman, the crushed Swiss, Mexican and South African fans, and the spiteful English press. World Cup football is not for the weak of heart.

---
Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international affairs columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

* Turkey and the Soviet Union reached the semifinals, both coming from UEFA, the European confederation.

For a political view of international (and French) soccer, see article from last November.

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Nonrandomness in Research 2000's Presidential Tracking Polls

This is one of the things that I pointed out to Mark Blumenthal had been odd-seeming about Research 2000's polling:

Likewise, take a look at their Presidential tracking numbers
from 2008 (http://www.dailykos.com/dailypoll/2008/11/4).
They published their daily results in addition to their
three-day rolling average ... and the daily results were
remarkably consistent from day to day.  At no point, for
instance, in the two months that they published daily results
did Obama's vote share fluctuate by more than a net of 2
points from day to day (to reiterate, this is for the daily
results (n=~360) and not the rolling average).  That just
seems extremely unlikely -- there should be more noise than
that.

Let's put some flesh on them bones.

In 2008, Research 2000 published the results of its daily samples in its Presidential tracking poll. To clarify, this means that if they had a tracking poll that ran from Wednesday through Friday, they'd tell you what the individual results were for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday respectively, in addition to the aggregated numbers. I for one appreciated this and actually used the daily numbers rather than the multi-day tracking averages in our forecasting models.

A lot of pollsters would have been reluctant to do this because the sample sizes were quite small -- on average, about 360 persons for each daily sample -- and presumably would have revealed rather striking variation from day to day simply due to sampling error. The margin of error on a sample size of 360 is +/- 5.2 points, so it would be fairly normal for Barack Obama's numbers to careen (for example) from 54 points one day, to 48 points the next, to 52 the day afterward.

But in fact, this didn't happen. In fact, their daily samples showed barely any movement at all. In the 55 days of their tracking poll, Barack Obama's figure never increased by more than 2 points, nor declined by more than 2 points.

In contrast, we can run a simulation to see how much movement there "should" have been in the daily samples based on the following assumptions:

* Since the average performance of Barack Obama over the course of Research 2000's tracking poll was 50 percent, we assume that a voter has a 50 percent chance of choosing Obama and a 50 percent chance of not choosing Obama (i.e. either McCain or undecided; it doesn't matter which). Note that we assume the true, underlying level of Obama support is constant at 50 percent over the course of the tracking period. In fact, it of course would have varied some, owing to events on the campaign trail. But this should have resulted in more day-to-day variation rather than (as we see in Research 2000's polling) less. So, this assumption is actually favorable to them.

* We assume that the sample size for Research 2000's daily sample was some random number between 350 and 370 persons.

* We take the number of Obama "voters" from our random sample and divide by the sample size, and then round to the nearest whole number, to produce that day's result.

* We then then measure the change in Obama's performance from one day to the next, repeating this process about 30,000 times to create a robust sample.

The simulation found that Obama's daily numbers should have moved by at least 3 points from one day to the next about half of the time, given the sample sizes that Research 2000 was using. In fact, they never moved by as many as 3 points, not even once. This behavior is exceptionally nonrandom. Indeed, we should also have seen a fluctuation of 5 or more points about once every four or five days, and a change of 7 or more points about once every two weeks -- this obviously never happened, either.



We can run the same experiment on John McCain's numbers, the only difference being that we assume his true level of support is 42 percent (the average that he polled at during this period) rather than 50 percent. Research 2000 did show McCain's numbers change by more than 2 points on two occasions: he improved to 44 percent from 41 percent on 10/26, and to 46 percent from 43 percent on 11/1. Those were the only instances, however, and overall the results were just as nonrandom:



Even Bob Barr's numbers were unusually behaved. Research 2000 had Barr at exactly 2 percent for 50 consecutive days from 9/10 to 10/29; he then fluctuated for a few days before eventually settling in at 1 percent:



You only get results like these if something is orders of magnitude upon orders of magnitude divergent from random. Now, just because Research 2000's polling is extremely nonrandom, does that necessarily indicate that it is fraudulent? I suppose there are alternate hypothesis, although the jury is out (or soon will be) on how compelling they might be.

They might cite their weighting procedures, but the weighting techniques that pollsters ordinarily use would not cause this kind of underdispersion. In fact, the normal weighting methods have the effect of essentially reducing the sample size (since you're effectively double-counting some voters while throwing out others), so they would increase, rather than decrease, the amount of variance relative to the sample. (** see note) But perhaps Research 2000 is using some really avant-garde techniques that have the effect of stripping a lot of variance out of the sample, e.g. a statistical model which uses polling as one of its inputs, along with making certain other fairly strong assumptions. This could also be a bug of some kind rather than a feature. Either way, it would take a lot of explaining on their part -- but it's possible.

As a slight variation of this, it's possible that Research 2000 actually did the polling, but that Del Ali puts his finger on the scale to an usually large degree, i.e. he decides what he thinks the numbers "should" be, and then works backward (such as through his assumptions about likely voters) in order to achieve it.

And it's possible that Research 2000 actually did the polling, but for some reason were too lazy to do the cross-tabs and decided to reverse-engineer them, including the daily figures that were printed alongside the tracking averages.

None of these alternate hypothesis exactly speaks well for Research 2000, as all would imply significant departures from what we ordinarily think of as sound and scientific polling practice. Nor, even if they were plausible explanations for this particular anomaly, would they necessarily account for others. But this is another oddity that begs an explanation from them, and none has been forthcoming.

** Actually, having thought about this more (and read a few comments), this won't necessarily be true, since while it's true that you're reducing the effective sample size, you're also introducing additional a priori information, i.e., that you know the true distribution of party weights in your sample. In different circumstances, this could either increase or decrease the degree of dispersion.

Based on some additional simulations that I've done, the average absolute change in Obama's day-to-day numbers with a party ID weighting scheme should be about 2.3 or 2.4 points, rather than 3.0 points, and a shift of 3 or more points in either direction should occur about 40 percent of the time, rather than 50 percent of the time. Still, this would not explain why Obama's numbers moved by an average of only 1.0 point each day in Research 2000's daily samples, or why they never moved by more than 3 points.

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Research 2000 Issues Cease & Desist Letter to FiveThirtyEight

About 15 minutes ago, I was sent a cease and desist demand by Howrey LLP, the lawfirm that Research 2000 has contracted with to defend it against Daily Kos, which is suing it for fraud based on evidence that its polling may have been fabricated.

The cease and desist letter, which is published below, attributes to FiveThrityEight statements that were made by others. It alleges that "you have engaged in a campaign to discredit and damage R2K by posting negative comments regarding Mr. Ali, the Company, and its work products on the "Daily Kos" blog. It further threatens a lawsuit, unless I "immediately cease and desist all such activities, and retract all previous publicly transmitted statements."

I emphatically stand behind any statements I have made about Research 2000, and will be constrained by nothing other than my common sense and my professional integrity in any comments I should elect to make about Research 2000 in the future.

2010-6-29 Nate Silver Ltr

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My Own Suspicions About Research 2000

Although I expect to proceed fairly carefully with respect to Research 2000, which Daily Kos will be suing for alleged fraud, I have suggested here and to at least one reporter that I had my own suspicions about Research 2000 which paralleled some of the findings in the study by Mark Grebner, Michael Weissman, and Jonathan Weissman. I want to be a bit more explicit about what I mean by that.

This is a copy of two e-mails that I sent to Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com in the wee hours of the morning on February 4th. Like the examples in the Grebner study, they point toward cases in which Research 2000's data appeared to be other-than-random (although, as I declaim in the e-mails, not necessarily triggered by fraud).

from Nate Silver [xxx@xxx]
to Mark Blumenthal [xxx@xxx]
Mark Blumenthal [xxx@xxx]
date Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 4:17 AM
subject Research 2000 weirdness
mailed-by gmail.com

Mark,

Not to sound too conspiratorial, but to be honest I'm getting
a little bit suspicious about Research 2000, or at least the
polling they've conducted for Markos over the past two years.
Do you know those guys at all?

I'll keep this pretty brief.  In part it's because of the
occasionally really weird result they turn out -- for instance,
they had only 27 percent of Republicans or something in favor
of gays in the military whereas Gallup and ABC/Post have had
those numbers in the 60s.  There are two or three other examples
like this I could point to.  For another, their contact
information and web presence is pretty sketchy relative to that
of other pollsters and there's not a lot of detail about the
scope of their operations.

But mainly, it's that that their data feels way too clean for
me.  Take a look at the attached chart, for example: these are
the age breakdowns in the Democratic vote share for the last
20 contests surveyed by R2K and PPP, respectively.  The age
breakdowns in Research 2000's numbers are almost always close
to "perfect" -- in 20 out of 20 cases, for instance, the
Democrat gets a lower vote share from among 30-44 year olds
than among 18-29 year olds.  PPP's data, on the other hand,
is *much* messier -- which is what I think we should expect
when comparing small subsamples, particularly subsamples of
lots of different races that are subject to different
demographic patterns.

Likewise, take a look at their Presidential tracking numbers
from 2008 (http://www.dailykos.com/dailypoll/2008/11/4).
They published their daily results in addition to their
three-day rolling average ... and the daily results were
remarkably consistent from day to day.  At no point, for
instance, in the two months that they published daily results
did Obama's vote share fluctuate by more than a net of 2
points from day to day (to reiterate, this is for the daily
results (n=~360) and not the rolling average).  That just
seems extremely unlikely -- there should be more noise than
that.

Maybe/probably they're just using some weighting procedures
that smooth out a lot of the noise that you would ordinarily
expect to see, but it all looks pretty weird to me.

Anyway, let me know your thoughts.  If you think there's
enough smoke there, my next step would probably be to bring
this to Markos's attention.

Nate

Attachment:


On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 4:46 AM, Nate Silver wrote:
>
> OK, here's something else weird.  This is the Democratic share
of the vote in the last 30 races that they've surveyed, this time
broken down by gender.  The Democrat does better among women in
all 30 cases -- no doubt that's generally going to be the case, but
between races local idosyncracies and sampling noise, I don't know
if the poll should hit the bullseye that often.  What's also weird
is that in every single case, the gender gap is an even number.

As I stipulated in the e-mails, this evidence was fairly circumstantial -- and Mark suggested to me that the results could have been caused by excessive party weighting rather than anything more ulterior. So I declined to go public with them, although I did forward a copy of this information to Markos and encouraged him to do additional due diligence on Research 2000.

In retrospect, of course, I wish that I had been a bit more dogged about this. But I'm happy that Grebner, Weissman and Weissman -- whom, to be clear, I was not in touch with during this process, and from what I understand initiated their research independently of Daily Kos -- came along to study the issue properly. Their work is excellent and is to be commended.

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BREAKING: Daily Kos to Sue Research 2000 for Fraud

Following the results of an investigation conducted by three independent researchers, Mark Grebner, Michael Weissman, and Jonathan Weissman (Michael Weismann assisted FiveThirtyEight in its investigation of another allegedly fraudulent pollster, Strategic Vision), Daily Kos will be suing its former pollster, Research 2000, which it dismissed three weeks ago, partly as a result of its poor results in our pollster ratings as well as other concerns I had expressed to Markos Moulitsas about their polling.

I find the results of the investigation conducted by Grebner, Weissman and Weissman to be highly compelling and it confirms other oddities that I had detected in Research 2000's polling. Their report is worth reading in full, but one relatively obvious problem they identified was the unusual movement in Obama's weekly tracking numbers. In particular, Obama's favorability number rarely remained the same from week to week in Research 2000's tracking, instead almost always moving in one direction or the other by at least a point:



Compare this to Obama's weekly approval numbers in Gallup's polling, which resembled a far more natural and indeed fairly normal distribution.



Grebner, Weissman and Weissman conclude, on the basis of this and other evidence:

People who have been trusting the R2K reports should know about these extreme anomalies. We do not know exactly how the weekly R2K results were created, but we are confident they could not accurately describe random polls.

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Senate Forecast: After Primaries, Picture Slightly Improved for Dems

It's been about two months since we last issued a Senate forecast and now I remember why: these things take a whole day of work. So let's not waste any further time; here are some emerging themes that I see.

Nationally, the trends are very flat. We are now using generic ballot polling, rather than the polling from individual Senate races, to create our trendline adjustment, a feature that was imported from our Presidential model. (Trust me, it's better this way.) However, we may as well not have bothered; we show essentially zero change in the national environment over the past several months, and only a net gain of one or two points for Republicans since the start of 2010. In contrast, Democrats lost about 12 points on the generic ballot over the course of 2009. They are not really climbing out of the hole the dug themselves, but on the other hand, it does not appear to be getting worse.

Locally, Democrats helped themselves in the primaries. Democratic fortunes were improved by the primaries in Nevada and Pennsylvania, California, North Carolina, and Kentucky, and worsened probably only in Arkansas (and South Carolina, which they had almost no chance of winning anyway.) This accounts for most of the movement in the rankings. Whereas, as of our last update, or simulations were projecting an average of 54.0 Democratic and 46.0 Republican seats, we now show 55.2 Democrats, 44.2 Republicans, and 0.6 Charlie Crists.

Republicans will need a lot of luck to take over the Senate. There are eleven Democratic-held seats that we show Republicans with a nontrivial chance of winning. In four of them, they are heavy favorites: North Dakota, Arkansas, Indiana, and Delaware. Four more are toss-ups: Pennsylvania, Nevada, Illinois, and Colorado. Finally, there are three where they are underdogs: Washington, California, and Wisconsin.

Republicans would need to win 10 of these 11 races to take over the Senate; even if they gained further momentum nationally (our model does not assume that the races behave independently), this is somewhat unlikely, given the idiosyncrasies involved in many of the contests. Meanwhile, they would need to hold Ohio, which is a toss-up with a slight Democratic tilt, and Missouri, which is a toss-up with a slight Republican tilt, as well as retain Kentucky, North Carolina and New Hampshire, either have Marco Rubio win in Florida or persuade Charlie Crist to caucus with them, and avoid a wildcard somewhere like Arizona or Louisiana.

Therefore, even though states like Washington and Wisconsin are now in play (more debatably so in the latter case), this is counteracted by the fact that they are now engaged in competitive contests in places like Nevada, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania -- which looked like clear edges for them before. In April, or model showed a 6 percent chance of a Republican takeover; this month, it shows an identical 6 percent chance, provided that Charlie Crist is counted as a Republican, and roughly a 4 percent chance if he isn't. If Republicans could hypothetically persuade both Crist and Joe Lieberman to join them, however, their chances would improve to 12 percent.

Alternatively, they can hope that Rasmussen is right and everybody else is wrong. Right now, we are identifying about a 4.5-point Republican-leaning house effect in Rasmussen's polls, relative to a robust average, weighted based on pollster quality. But suppose for a minute that Rasmussen is right and everyone else is wrong, and we calibrate to Rasmussen's average instead. In that case, the projected number of Republican seats goes from 44.2 to 47.4, and their chance of taking over the Senate more than triples to 22 percent, counting Charlie Crist as a Republican.

We are using the new version of the pollster ratings for this update, by the way, which still rates Rasmussen as a somewhat above-average pollster. The problem is not necessarily that Rasmussen is bad but rather that they're so dominant; something like 40 percent of our state-level polls were put out by Rasmussen, and they are just about the only pollster at all in some states. A guiding principal of our house effects adjustment is that nobody should be advantaged (or disadvantaged) simply because they poll more often, so it effectively mitigates the impact of Rasmussen flooding the zone, as it would for any other pollster which did something similar. With that said, Rasmussen certainly could be right, so it's useful to check sometimes on what what the overall Senate picture would look like through their lens.

If Democrats somehow got a wind at their backs, they have enough offensive opportunities to take advantage of it. Suppose on the other hand that the Democrats got a 3-point boost nationally (or the current average of polls is biased 3 points against them, which is effectively the same thing). In that case, they would have about a 27 percent chance of actually regaining a 60-seat majority, and closer to a 40 percent chance if they could persuade Charlie Crist to caucus with them. There's no particular reason to think that this will happen, however, particularly with economic momentum being rather tepid.

Some comments on individual races. For the most part, I'll let the numbers speak for themselves, but some brief comments on a few contests:

Arkansas. Our model now shows Blanche Lincoln's chances to be close to zero (technically, about 0.3 percent, which rounds down to zero). Bypassing an esoteric debate about whether the probability distribution should be more fat-tailed than we have it (if I could get 300:1 on Blanche Lincoln, I'd definitely take it), it's not hard to see why she's in trouble. She's way behind, her approval ratings are terrible, the polling is robust, the GOP nominated a competent challenger, Arkansas is a red state, and the numbers in races with incumbents tend to be less amenable to dramatic last-minute comebacks than those with two newbies. If Democrats spend much money on her, they are potentially costing themselves a win somewhere like Missouri or North Carolina, or a hold in an Illinois or a Washington.

Delaware. The numbers have reverted to the mean here a bit because there has been very little polling. And the dynamics are the reverse of what they are in other "sure things" on the Republicans' target list like Arkansas, North Dakota, and Indiana; Delaware is a blue state, and the Republican candidate is the de facto incumbent. Mike Castle will probably be fine, but it's worth keeping an eye on.

Florida. We're somewhat crudely trying to model a 3-way race by running three 2-way races and then amalgamating them together. It's not an ideal solution by any means, but it will probably change, so I'm not going to go into any great amount of detail telling you how ugly it is. With that said, somewhat to my surprise, the polling has pretty clearly established Charlie Crist as a favorite.

Nevada. That this race has become competitive again is mostly about Sharon Angle, but not completely so: Harry Reid's favorability/approval numbers have also improved some, and are now merely godawful rather than mind-bogglingly wretched.

New Hampshire. Although Paul Hodes has been underwhelming, the Republican primary is not until September 14th here, and the model thinks that Kelly Ayotte's numbers are running a little ahead of where they should be even relative to the very pernicious national environment for Democrats. There's also the chance that Republicans could nominate someone other than Ayoette, like Bill Binnie, who would turn the race into a toss-up.

North Carolina. While Democrats have a shot here, don't get too excited about that Rasmussen poll. Yes, ordinarily a Rasmussen poll showing a dead heat is good news for Democrats, but their polls also have this weird tendency to give very large bounces to candidates who just won primaries, as describes Elaine Marshall in this case.

Arizona. Although Democrats would prefer to run against J.D. Hayworth, John McCain's approval numbers are quite poor, and it's not completely out of the question that they could make the general election competitive against him.

Wisconsin. The model is not really willing to bank very much money on Russ Feingold being beaten by some no-name based on Rasmussen polling alone, especially with Feingold's approval numbers still being okay-ish. If other pollsters start to show the same thing, as PPP has hinted that they might, it could start to feel differently.

***

Numbers follow below. And yes, I know this particular graphic is ugly to the point of being unreadable, but we'll have much, much prettier ways to present this information once we get to the New York Times.

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Scott Brown Political Check-Up

It now seems like eons (and millions of gallons of leaked oil) ago, but Republican Scott Brown's victory in the special election to fill Ted Kennedy's vacant US Senate seat in Massachusetts remains one of the biggest political stories thus far in 2010. Brown's win sent a chill down the spines of Washington Democrats, and was viewed as a possible signal that an avalanche of tea party-led victories would soon follow.

Five months later, how is Sen. Brown--who has made a lot of news during recent debates over financial regulatory reform--holding up politically?

Quite well, actually. A new Boston Globe poll out today shows his approval numbers are holding up fine. His approval number (55 percent) far exceeds his disapproval (18 percent); by compare, John Kerry, the state's senior senator, has a much smaller disapproval/approval split (52 percent/37 percent), and President Obama is at 54 percent/41 percent.

The Globe points out the sole good news for Mass Democrats from the poll is that Massachusetts voters seem generally happy with their (all-Democratic) US House delegations: "Yet there’s one surprising consolation for Bay State Democrats who hope to defuse the voter backlash. When asked whether they will vote for a Democrat or Republican in their own congressional district in November, 42 percent of likely voters say they will vote for the Democrat and 27 percent will vote Republican."

In the regulatory reform debate and negotiations, Brown has been able to exercise significant political leverage for the first time in his Senate career. Think Progress has a good summary of his actions during the legislative negotiations, further noting that Sen. Byrd's death probably empowers him all the more. Despite his strong early numbers, Brown will need some bragging points when he comes up for election to a full, six-year term. But for now at least, he looks like a candidate who will give Democrats all they can handle in 2012.

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[UPDATED] WV Special Election is Unlikely Until 2012

UPDATE: 11:50 AM. I'm now hearing from a well-placed source that the Secretary of State's office is very likely to interpret the law as requiring a special election in 2012, rather than in November, because the candidate filing period for this year has already passed and because there is a court precedent on the books which supported this interpretation.

If this scenario comes to transpire, there would actually be both a special election and a general election on the ballot in November 2012 -- although the winner of the special election would only serve during the lame duck period between the elections and when the new Congress convened in January, 2013.

The West Virginia Secretary of State will hold a press conference at 4:30 today at which an official decision is announced.

ORIGINAL STORY: 9:16 AM. I just got off the phone with Jake Glance, the Public Affairs and Communications officer for West Virginia Secretary of State Natalie E. Tennant.

Glance told me that no decision has been made yet on when a special election would be held to replace Robert Byrd, who passed away early this morning. Various interpretations of the law might require the special election to be held this November -- or not until November, 2012, when Byrd's term was set to expire anyway.

"There are a lot of sections on state code that apply to this kind of thing and we're examining each one of them and we'll be making an announcement soon," Glance told me. "We just need to make sure that what we say fits this specific situation."

Glance added that it had been a difficult day at the office. "It's really difficult to imagine this state without Robert Byrd," he said. "Everything has his name on it out of appreciation for what he did."

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Advocacy in the Form of a Poll

John Sides reports on a paper by Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs about so-called deliberative forums, in particular a set of meetings called America Speaks that have been organized and conducted by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, an organization formed by the former advertising executive, Secretary of Commerce, and investment banker to focus attention on the national debt.

Sides, Page, and Jacobs discuss three key points:

1. Any poll or focus group is only as good as its sample, and there is no evidence that the participants in the America Speaks forums were selected in a way to be representative of the nation. Page and Jacobs write:

Deliberative forums often fail to get a representative sample of Americans to participate, even when they try hard to do so. Worse, some deliberative forums make little or no serious effort to achieve representativeness. They throw open the doors to self-selected political activists with extreme opinions, or they compile a secret list of invitees. The result can be an extremely skewed, unrepresentative picture of “public opinion” that little resembles the actual views of the American public as a whole.

2. The results of the deliberation are to a large extent a product of the information given to the participants during the meeting. Page and Jacobs discuss the choice of what arguments are presented, how they are framed, what competing arguments are presented (the problem of "presenting the spectrum from A to B"), and even the possibility of giving false or misleading information with an air of authority.

3. Actual public opinion on economic policy, as measured by representative samples, is much more concerned about jobs and economic growth than about deficits.

This is not to deny concerns about deficits--in particular, a voter can be primarily concerned about jobs and the economy but, at the same time, feel that deficit spending is not a good economic plan. If, for example, you feel that we cannot simply spend our way out of a recession, you might strongly support measures to reduce the deficit--even while still feeling that jobs and the economy are the #1 concern.

Political actors, not impartial measurement devices

Sides, Page, and Jacobs make a convincing argument that the America Speaks forums, as currently designed, are a pretty useless way to assess public opinion, "deliberative" or otherwise.

Here I want to talk about a slightly different angle. As noted above, the Peterson Foundation is not playing the role of an impartial research organization here. Now, sure, just about anyone who goes to the trouble of studying public opinion has political views, often strong ones--otherwise, why study opinion in the first place. (Just for example, Columbia University, where I work, has few institutional political stances, but the faculty and students, as individuals, overwhelmingly lean to the left, but U.S. standards.) But what I'm saying here is something different. As Page and Jacobs note, it's not just that Peter Peterson is a fiscally conservative Republican, it's that his foundation is specifically focused on deficit reduction, which in turn is the topic of their study.

The right way to theink about the America Speaks forum, I think, is not as an attempt to measure public opinion but rather as an attempt to influence public opinion. As Jacobs and Shapiro write in Politicians Don't Pander, political actors often view public opinion not as a fixed constraint but instead as a tool that they can use to influence policy.

From this perspective, we can think of the Peterson Foundation forums as having three purposes:

- Getting publicity for the idea of cutting social spending for deficit reduction. The forums are big public events; just reporting them in the media can help keep the deficits issue on the front burner.

- Test-driving political messages. The organizers of the forum can see what messages seem to be effective in changing people's opinions, then they can later roll out revised versions of these messages in ads, campaign pitches, and so forth.

- Affecting opinion about public opinion. If this unrepresentative sample, primed to focus on the deficit, ends up supporting the views presented as centrist compromises by the Peterson Foundation, these results can be released to the news media and used by sympathetic politicians to emphasize the electoral viability of cuts in social spending.

I'm not saying that the Peterson Foundation is a bunch of sinister bad guys. Even if you view these forums as nothing but a publicity stunt--and they're clearly more than that--it's perfectly legitimate and expected for advocacy organizations to spend their resources in an attempt to influence policy. I just think it's more helpful to frame these forums in that way, rather than as a method (flawed or otherwise) to estimate public opinion.

P.S. Just to say this one more time: There's nothing secretive about this (at least, to the best of my knowledge). The Peterson Foundation is completely open about being an advocacy organization. I just worry that people might get distracted by the "deliberative forum" idea and forget where this is all coming from.

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Sen. Robert Byrd Dead at 92

Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia passed away early this morning; he was the longest-serving Senator in United States history, having first been elected to the Senate in 1959.



West Virgina Democratic governor Joe Manchin will appoint an interim successor for Byrd once a vacancy is declared. The question is what happens after November. Yesterday, we identified the relevant West Virginia statute, which stipulates that when a Senate vacancy occurs more than two years and sixth months prior to the end of a Senator's term, a special election will be held at the upcoming general election to select the candidate's successor. Because Byrd passed away this morning -- two years, six months and six days prior to the end of his current term on January 3, 2013 -- that would seem to imply the likelihood of an election later this year. Democrats might not be favored in such an election, although their odds would be buoyed if Manchin, a popular incumbent who will be term-limited in 2012, decided to run for the seat himself.

Although most other outlets, including the Associated Press and The Hill, have come to the same reading of West Virginia's succession laws as we have, a few others have come to a different conclusion; presumably this will become clearer over the course of the day.

Note also that a vacancy has not been declared yet. West Virginia's statutes for U.S. House seats actually provide the governor with a 10-day window to declare a vacancy -- however, it is not clear that the same procedure applies for U.S. Senate seats.

UPDATE: Commenter NRH points toward another possible ambiguity in the laws.

UPDATE x2: We are trying to contact Governor Manchin's office as well as the WV Secretary of State to do some actual reporting on this.

UPDATE x3: The Washington Post's Paul Kane points toward the same ambiguity that our commenter found. We pretty much need to hear from someone in Charleston before we can say definitively what's going on.

UPDATE x4: While I wait to see if phone calls and e-mails are returned, Hotline's Reid Wilson probably has the best take on this, concluding that a special election is unlikely because no candidates have, per state law, "filed a certificate of candidacy [and] been nominated at the primary election next following such timely filing". (West Virginia held its primaries in May). This provision seems marginally self-defeating -- how could someone file for a vacancy that didn't exist yet? -- but there is case law on the subject suggesting that Manchin would be well within his rights to wait until 2012 to hold the election.

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Senator Byrd is Ill; A Note on West Virginia's Vacancy Laws

The 92-year-old Senator Robert Byrd, the longest-serving senator in United States history, is seriously ill, according to his office.

Byrd has been hospitalized three times since 2009. If he were not to recover this time, or he decided to resign his office, his replacement would be named by West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin, a Democrat.

Byrd's current term expires on January 3, 2013. Under West Virginia state law on handling Senate vacancies, "if the vacancy occurs less than two years and six months before the end of the term, the Governor appoints someone to fill the unexpired term and there is no election". Otherwise, Manchin would appoint an interim replacement, and an special election would be held in November to determine who held the seat in 2011 and 2012.

In other words, we are within a week of the threshold established by West Virginia law. If a vacancy were to be declared on July 3rd or later, there would not be an election to replace Byrd until 2012. If it were to occur earlier, there could potentially be an election later this year, although there might be some ambiguities arising from precisely when and how the vacancy were declared.

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