re: LeBron

I've gotten several e-mails asking me for some sort of cogent analysis on where LeBron James, who will announce the identity of his new employer tomorrow, might decide to devote his services. Unfortunately, I don't know if this problem is especially amenable to that.



The main issue is that I'm not sure that we really know exactly how good LeBron James is. Obviously, he's very, very, very good. But we perhaps need to be more precise than that. I've identified five different metrics that attempt to quantify the value of a player to his team in terms of regular-season wins, and they don't particularly agree with one another. Basketball-reference.com's Win Shares statistic, for instance, figures that James was worth 18.5 wins to the Cavaliers last year; Basketball Prospectus's Wins Produced number, on the other hand, says he was worth 39.6 wins:

Estimates of LeBron James Value, in Regular Season Wins
2009-10 Season

Basketball-reference.com -- Win Shares 18.5
Wages of Wins -- Wins Produced         24.8
Basketball Prospectus -- WARP          25.3
ESPN/Hollinger - Estimated Wins Added  30.5
Basketball Prospectus -- Wins Produced 39.6

This makes a huge amount of difference. If LeBron is "merely" a 18-win player, then he probably can't win a championship next year with a team like the Knicks, Nets or Clippers. Take the Knicks, for instance, who won 29 games last year. Even if you assume that Amare Stoudemire is an upgrade over David Lee (probably true, but you can argue the other way), that improvement from Danilo Gallinari will offset the small contributions they had received from the other players they renounced to clear up cap space (debatable), and that they can use LeBron's coattails to induce a couple of decent veterans, worth a couple of wins apiece, to sign for the league minimum or close to it (not unlikely), then you're probably talking about a 50- or 55-win team: good enough to make the playoffs, but probably not good enough to win the title unless they get rather lucky. On the other hand, if LeBron is a 30 or a 40 (!) win player, he and Stoudemire alone are the best "team" in the league or close to it, possibly excepting the Lakers and possibly excepting Chicago if both Chris Bosh and Dwayne Wade sign there.

I don't know nearly enough about fancy basketball statistics to adjudicate between the different methods; taking the average of the numbers above, which would be 28 wins, might be the most prudent idea. But this is an important question for LeBron James's advisors to have an answer to: exactly how valuable, in basketball terms, is their client?

Even the Knicks' own marketing materials suggest that the potential to win a championship is the key long-run value driver of the marketing deals that James would be able to pursue (a strange point to make, since it would not seem to favor the Knicks). I don't doubt that this is true. But it probably also matters how you win that championship. Suppose, for instance, that LeBron were to join the Lakers for the league minimum salary, as Tyler Cowen sarcastically (?) suggests. Unless someone got hurt, the Lakers would be completely unstoppable; they'd go about 75-7 and would almost certainly win the title, as likely as not in a sweep. But would this do much for the LeBron James brand? Probably not; he'd be seen as piggybacking on someone else's accomplishments.

In contrast, persevering in Cleveland and bringing a championship home would be a terrific story, one that could penetrate into Middle America. Conquering the high expectations associated with the moribund franchise that plays in Madison Square Garden would be a very good story. Winning one for the Bulls would be an okay story; James would become Michael Jordan the Second, which could work both for him and against him in different ways. On the other hand, I don't know that forming a "dream team" with Wade and Bosh in Miami would do that much for him; it would seem, as would the hypothetical of LeBron joining the Lakers, that he hadn't overcome that much of a challenge.

Basically, I suspect that LeBron's best economic decision is based on some function of the actual difficulty of winning a championship relative to the perceived one. I don't know exactly how you arbitrage that, but it probably depends a great deal on whether LeBron is in fact closer to the 20-win side of the spectrum or the 40-win side. My hunch is that LeBron will either stay in Cleveland or join the Knicks, and that Wade and Bosh will operate as a pair, either in Chicago or Miami.

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Does the RNC Have Structural Problems?

Following up my previous post about Michael Steele's problems, I see that Jay Cost wrote a column earlier today about the state of the Republican Party. Cost is not writing about what I presume tends to come to mind when one hears or read the phrase “state of the party”: notions about how competitive the party is, the quality of its leaders, what its candidate recruitment or fundraising totals are in a given cycle, and so on.

No, Cost means party status in the literal, organizational/functional apparatus sense of party. He wonders aloud about how it is that Steele is a problem and yet the party—because of its structure—can’t get rid of him.

Following is an edited down excerpt that is long but worth reading because it captures the core of Cost’s argument:

Republicans should be troubled by…the fact that Steele has been able to acquire the power of the chairmanship, but also by the fact that apparently he cannot be gotten rid of.

This raises the question: is it time to reorganize the Republican party?...

So how is it that Michael Steele has been able to wreak all this havoc upon a party that won the support of nearly 60 million Americans in 2008? It goes like this: the state Republican parties elected their RNC members, who elected Michael Steele, who has embarrassed his party….

What's wrong with this? For starters, the role of the state parties should be of concern…

The reality is that the state party organizations used to be powerful entities that dispensed patronage to keep an iron grip on political power….Additionally, they are only tangentially related to Republicans in Congress, who - because they have to win primary battles - can at least claim to represent the millions of people who call themselves Republicans. And yet these members of Congress are powerless to do anything about Michael Steele.

So these state parties - even though most Republicans in most states have nothing to do with them - are empowered to elect the RNC. And the RNC has two jobs of significance. The first is to wield the imagery of Republicanism - "the Elephant" - to attract donations, which are then distributed strategically to state parties and candidates, again to exploit campaign finance law loopholes. They are also in charge of putting on the Republican National Convention, although for practical purposes the party's nominee gets to make all the important choices about the speakers, the message, the platform, and so on.

The question I would ask is this: is the organization of the RNC designed for the task of money laundering in a maximally effective way? I would say no. The big problem is the state party organizations, which are anachronistic holdovers from days long gone by. They lack broad popular mandates, in that Republican voters tend not to participate in their activities. They also are not directly involved in setting the national party agenda, which comes out of Congress and the White House. So why should their organization be entrusted with control of the party imagery and the job of raising tens of millions of dollars?

OK, first of all, it should be said that what’s true of the Republicans is also true of the Democrats, although to a lesser degree. After the 2004 election, when Howard Dean won the DNC chair, there was a distinct sense that many establishment Democrats were lamenting the same populist, state-based inputs that brought Dean to power.

One major reason it is a lesser problem is because of malapportionment, a which compounds the GOP's representational situation and which Cost forgot to mention. Indeed, much as the GOP tends to enjoy the one-state/one-vote rule that has historically and recently benefitted them in the US Senate—the Republican Senate majority prior to 2006 was comprised of Republicans who represented fewer Americans than the minority Democrats—every state gets three Republican National Committee members, each member casting an equal vote. And thus a big and Republican-leaning state like Texas had as much say in the selection of Steele as small and Democratic-leaning Vermont. This structural feature actually magnifies Cost’s critique.

Still, what would the alternative be? A national vote among registered Republicans? That might be more populist, but would likely draw very low turnout and that turnout would very likely be dominated by local and state party elites—the same folks whose preferences are transmitted by the state party members from their states. And that process could be quite unwieldy and costly, too. (Fittingly, elsewhere in his piece Cost cites sums spent reaching out to Republicans in far flung territories like Guam, to attract or maintain political support, as wasteful.)

The alternative Cost seems to lean toward at the end of his column is, at times when Democrats control the White House, for the Republican party leadership in Congress, whether in the minority or majority of each chamber, to choose the chair and otherwise steer the party from Washington.

Again drawing a comparison with the Democrats, too much grassroots or populist control and too little establishment control was the "problem" the Dems created so-called “superdelegates” to solve. On that note, how interesting indeed that at the very moment Cost is speculating about removing or at least reducing the share of power wielded by rank-and-file state party members, the Democrats have proposed new rules that would reduce the power wielded by party elites in their presidential selection rules.

It seems to me that the combined approach—power distributed across mostly Washington-oriented establishment party figures as well as state-level party locals—balances the competing interests of those with a more national and those with a more parochial focus, and thereby reduces the chances that the national party becomes too distant from or too close to its rank-and-file members.

Having said that, however, perhaps what Cost might really find satisfying--and which both parties might benefit from--is sort of recall mechanism or vote-of-confidence/no confidence moment halfway through a chair’s four-year term to either reaffirm or remove her/him.

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A Note to John Zogby

Dear John,

I don't really have the time or the energy to get involved in another Big Fight right now, so I'm not going to respond in great detail to your long note to me at Huffington Post, other than to say that some parts would have benefited from a fact-check. But it was really only the first and most benign-sounding point that bothered me:

Don't Create Standards You Will Find Hard to Maintain Yourself. You are hot right now - using an aggregate of other people's work, you got 49 of 50 states right in 2008. I know how it is to feel exhilarated. I get the states right a lot too. But remember that you are one election away from being a mere mortal like the rest of us. We very good pollsters have missed some. They tell me you blew the Academy Awards and your projections in the 2010 U.K. elections were a tad squidgy. So be humble and continue to hone your craft. Be aware that some of your legions who adore you today and hang on your every word will turn their guns on you in a minute. Hey, I have been right within a few tenths of a percent - but you are a probabilities guy and even a 95% confidence level and a margin of sampling error are not enough for some.

Mr. Zogby, I think you may be mistaking me for my Wikipedia page. I don't really spend a lot of time touting my accomplishments or resting on my laurels -- there are no marketing materials of any kind on this site. I'm a process-oriented guy, not a results-oriented guy, because as you mention, there's a tremendous amount of luck involved in making any sort of predictions. In the long run, if an unskilled forecaster gets something right 50 percent of the time, a skilled forecaster might get something right 55 or 60 percent of the time. There are very, very few exceptions to that, in politics or in any other discipline. So when we get something right, we usually just move on with our lives rather than brag about it. And when we get something wrong, we'll usually do a post-mortem and try to figure out if we were unlucky or stupid, but not wallow in self-pity.

Now, I'm certainly not going to pretend that we take an attitude of austere academic humility toward everything that we do. We're happy to engage both our friends and our critics in lively arguments, and we can be sarcastic and combative at times. I have a background in competitive, adrenaline-intensive disciplines like poker, policy debate, and sportswriting, and that attitude has become hardwired by now.

The only thing that I knowingly am a bit conceited about is the only thing that I have complete control over: the amount of effort that I put into FiveThirtyEight and my other projects. I work my butt off -- 80-100 hour weeks have been the norm for about two years here. When we think something's wrong, we'll fix it; when we think the approaches that others are taking to a problem are inadequate, we'll tackle it ourselves. I'm not an 80/20 guy: most people, when presented with a choice of two approaches to a problem, will take the easy road, the one that can get them 80 percent of the way to where they want to be for 20 percent of the effort. I don't share in that philosophy at all. In our flat and interconnected world, differentiation is key, and we want to do something right (or failing that, differently and interestingly) if we're going to do it at all.

Along those lines, I think you need to examine the thought process behind your interactive (Internet) polling, which any objective attempt at analysis will demonstrate has achieved vastly inferior results, beyond any shadow of a doubt. They don't do justice to the years of solid work embodied in your live-operator polls.

Beyond that, I can't speak to how you run your business, because I won't presume to know very much about it: how you arrive at the decisions that you do, how strong your desire is to use the right means rather than merely hoping to achieve the right ends. With some pollsters dropping like flies, and others flooding the zone with cheap, high-volume polling, it is imperative that we have a diversity of opinions, and I hope that Zogby International will continue to be a major part of that.

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Best GOP Gubernatorial Year Since 1920?

As reported in Taegan Goddard's Political Wire, a University of Minnesota site called Smart Politics has done an analysis suggesting that Republicans are "Poised To Win Most Gubernatorial Seats in 90 Years." A subtitle suggests the "GOP could challenge 100+ year Party mark of 29 seats won in 1920."

A closer look at this eye-catching claim indicates that the "most gubernatorial seats" projection is technically correct, but a bit misleading, since Republicans are very unlikely to have a better gubernatorial year than in 1994, when they gained ten net seats; the higher level of wins, if it happens, will be attributable to the higher level of current GOP governorships going into this cycle. And the idea that Republicans could win 29 governorships, while possible, depends on placing a lot of credence in the Rasmussen surveys that dominate current gubernatorial polling.


Smart Politics gets to its predictions via Larry Sabato's current projections of gubernatorial races, which show Republicans ahead (if in some cases only by a "lean") in 19 of the 37 states up this year, with Dems ahead in 5 and indies in 1, leaving 12 toss-ups. Thus, it is reasonably suggested, if GOPers just pick up half the toss-ups, they'd win 25 governorships, the best performance since 1920.

First of all, it's useful to compare Sabato's projections with those of another, and more cautious, leading authority, Cook Political Report's Jennifer Duffy, who shows Republicans leading in 12 contests (four of them "leans"), Democrats in seven (four of them "leans") with 18 toss-ups. Using the same method but applying them to Duffy's ratings, Smart Politics would have shown Republicans likely to win 21 seats, not 25, which would fall well short of the seats won in 1994 and 1966--a fine year, no doubt, but not exactly a record dating back 90 years.

But the bigger question is whether performance in gubernatorial races should be measures by total seats won, or net gains. By the latter standard, and using the Sabato projections, while splitting the toss-ups, the results would show Republicans with a net gain of seven seats--not that much different than the net Democratic gain of six seats just four years ago, and considerably less than the 10-seat gain in 1994. Using the Cook projections, and again, splitting the toss-ups, we'd be looking at a net gain of just three seats, which is hardly historic at all.

As for the tantalizing idea of a 30-seat year that would shatter the 1920 record, Smart Politics throws that possibility out based on analyzing Sabato's 12 toss-up races using the latest polling. Turns out Republicans are ahead, if in some cases just barely, in nine of them. But naturally, eight of those nine are in states where the latest polling is from Rasmussen, in whose world this has always been a huge GOP landslide year in the making. Even by that measure, Republicans would only be "poised" to win 28 seats, not 29 or 30, but we're obviously into the realm of wave theory and not hard projections. And in the remote contingency of Republicans winning 28 of 37 contests, their net gain would be 10, equalling, but not exceeding, the 1994 harvest.

The bottom line is that there are a lot of close gubernatorial races, and while Republicans are in very good shape in this arena, it's a bit too early to talk about 90-year records.

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Arizona's Long Reach

Back in May I did a post predicting that the anti-immigrant (or anti-amnesty, or whatever you choose to call it) uprising begun in Arizona would get the most traction among southern Republicans, particularly in competitive primaries, thanks to a combination of new and highly visible Hispanic populations and very low levels of Hispanic voting. And sure enough, the issue has become significant in GOP gubernatorial primaries in Alabama and South Carolina, and most recently in Georgia, whose primary is on July 20.

I certainly didn't anticipate that Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, hardly a political dynamo in her own state until recently, would become a factor in southern Republican primaries. But that's what happened when a Georgia gubernatorial candidate, former Secretary of State Karen Handel, made a Brewer endorsement a major talking point of her campaign.


The endorsement itself wasn't surprising; until Janet Napolitano's appointment to the Obama Cabinet elevated Brewer to the governorship, she was Secretary of State of Arizona and thus probably met Handel at association meetings. What's more interesting is that the endorsement would even matter. Here's how Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts put it:

Two years ago, many in Arizona's political establishment rolled their eyes at the idea of Jan Brewer ever becoming governor.

Last year, when then-Gov. Janet Napolitano abandoned this sinking ship to hit the national scene, many in the state’s political establishment gave Brewer virtually no chance of getting elected governor in her own right.

These days, thanks to illegal immigrants, Brewer’s a rock star to the right.

It's not as though Handel supports Arizona's law and her primary opponents don't; the only real controversy among Georgia GOP gubernatorial rivals is about exactly how aggressive state agencies should be in taking over enforcement of federal immigration laws:

Georgia’s Republican gubernatorial candidates all favor a crackdown on illegal immigration, but they can’t agree on how far to take it....

Eric Johnson, Georgia’s state senate pro tempore and one of the seven GOP candidates qualified to run for the state’s top executive position, rolled out his plan for enforcing illegal immigration laws on Friday. Johnson’s plan takes enforcement further than that of any other candidate, mandating the collection of citizenship data from K-12 schools and hospital emergency rooms.

In this atmosphere, a Brewer endorsement, while not quite as powerful as being designated a "Mama Grizzly" by Sarah Palin, is worth a lot to Karen Handel, who is fighting for a runoff spot deploying a true-conservative-versus-the-good-old-boys message highly reminiscent of Nikki Haley's successful campaign next door in South Carolina (like Haley, Handel is a favorite of conservative bloggers like RedState's Erick Erickson). If she does manage to win the nomination (and a new Insider Advantage poll, in sharp contrast with prior surveys, shows her suddenly tied with long-time front-runner John Oxendine), the long reach of Arizona immigration politics will receive some of the credit.

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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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