Did LeBron James Just Cost Himself $150 Million?

The one thing I don't think you can say about LeBron James, who announced his intentions to play for the Miami Heat tonight, is that he was selfish. The dude may just have given up a ton of money.

I'm not talking about the small haircut that LeBron will take to keep Miami under the cap (something which is counteracted by Florida's lack of an income tax). Nor am I talking about the 6th guaranteed contract year that LeBron could have gotten by staying in Cleveland (he should still be a max player in 2016 anyway).

Rather, I'm talking about the hit that James may have taken to his reputation for what looks to be an extremely unpopular decision.

James earned $28 million from endorsements in 2009, behind only golfers Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. And James's 'Q' rating -- a measure of the number of people who both know him and view him favorably -- was a 34, placing him behind only quaterbacks Peyton Manning and Brett Favre, and Olympians Shaun White and Apolo Anton Ohno among active athletes.

No doubt there was an opportunity for James to improve upon these numbers. Take Michael Jordan, for instance, who was earning $47 million per year in endorsements by the late stages of his career. Adjusted for inflation, that's about $63 million -- more than twice what James now earns -- and Jordan remains by far the most popular athlete in the country today.

Much of Jordan's popularity, of course, stemmed from the fact that he was the ultimate winner, bringing home six titles to Chicago. And that's one thing that James will presumably find easier in Miami: winning championships. Even with their depleted roster, the Heat should go about 61-21, according to ESPN's John Hollinger. And that projection makes somewhat worst-case assumptions about the sorts of players that Miami will be able to surround James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh with. Especially two or three years into the James deal, the Heat will find a way to improve their roster though various types of mid-level exemptions, draft picks, and veterans willing to play for the league minimum to win a ring. If the pieces gel right, they might have a year or two when they win 70 games, and they're likely to bring home at least one title if not more.

Still, there are no guarantees, and Miami was hardly the only place that James could have gone to win a title. Cleveland lost in the conference finals in 2009 and then the conference semifinals in 2010 -- but they also won 66 and 61 games those years, and their luck might eventually have broken better. Chicago, having added Carlos Boozer to an up-and-coming young roster, would have been just as good as the Heat now figure to be had they added James. LeBron's task would have been harder in New York, but with Amare Stoudemire, some useful pieces that they picked up for David Lee, and a big contract coming off the books next year that could turn into Carmelo Anthony, the Knicks may not have been that far behind. Meanwhile, five years is a long time, and things could turn out badly in Miami if Bosh or Wade get hurt or the three stars can't get along.

And as I argued on Wednesday, it's not just winning championships that matters: it's how you do it. The narrative would write itself if James brought a championship home to Cleveland, or to a lesser extent to Chicago or New York. Miami, on the other hand, is already being branded as the 'easy way out', and the expectations that may rival those of the 1992 Dream Team. In the public's mind, James might need to win several titles there to equal what one could have done for him in Ohio.

In the meantime, there are signs that public opinion on James has soured significantly. In an unscientific poll conducted by SI.com, 81 percent of respondents now claim to have a negative opinion of James, whereas 78 percent had a positive opinion prior to free agency.

Some of the fans in the SI poll surely had a vested interest in the outcome -- particularly those who root for the Cavaliers, Bulls and Knicks, whom James spurned. According to commoncensus.org; the New York Knicks are the favorite team in 10 markets totaling 23.1 million people, the Chicago Bulls in 19 markets totaling 18.0 million people (the Bulls are popular in Missouri and Iowa, which have no NBA teams), and the Cavaliers in 14 markets totaling 11.8 million people. By contrast, the Heat's market is relatively small at 8.3 million people, and has a smaller percentage of African-Americans than do Chicago and New York. (Black Americans are two-and-half times more likely to be NBA fans than the population average, according to polling conducted by YouGov.)

But James may also have sullied his reputation among more neutral observers for the self-important and humorless way that he came to his decision, including a one-hour special on ESPN that was part newscast and part infomercial. Brett Favre saw his Q rating dip by 41 percent -- from 44 to 26 -- following his drawn out "retirement" process in 2008-09, which might be the most salient recent comparison.

Suppose that, had he stayed in Cleveland, James could expect to continue to earn $28 million per year in endorsement revenues for the next 20 years (including significant money after retirement, as is common for superstar athletes). Discounted at a rate of 10 percent per year, that income stream has a present value of $366 million to James. If an athlete's endorsement earnings are proportional to his positive Q rating, and James suffers the same 41 percent penalty that Favre did between 2008 and 2009, he will have reduced his earning potential by $150 million.

Of course, James may able to redeem himself through athletic success; Favre's numbers recovered some following his solid play with Minnesota last year. But the rewards may not be as great as they would have been in Cleveland, New York, or Chicago, and the public's tolerance for failure may be much less.

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An Additional Point or Two about West Virginia

In a post that went up an hour ago I suggested that Governor Joe Manchin would be no sure thing to win Robert Byrd's Senate seat in West Virginia, and might not even be particularly favored to do so. This conclusion was based on part on a fairly simplistic regression model that we use to forecast Senate seats; the regression model in turn is based in large part on a state's Partisan Voting Index or PVI.

PVI is a pretty crude measure, which evaluates a state's performance based solely on its voting in Presidential elections. I've received a bunch of e-mails and tweets making the point that West Virginia has been comparatively more likely to vote for Democrats in statewide races.

It's a valid argument, and I've been working on developing alternatives to PVI. One thing that seems to be the case, for instance, is that wealthier states/districts tend to vote a little more Republican than their PVI would suggest in races for the Congress, and poorer states/districts (like West Virginia) tend to vote a little bit more Democratic. If that's the case, West Virginia would be a better state for Manchin than PVI lets on.

Some people have also made the point that I'm underestimating just how popular Manchin is. All that may be true -- and it may also be true that Democrats get more sympathy than usual in an election where they'd be succeeding Robert Byrd.

Nonetheless, most of this is based on supposition of some type or another, and not on hard evidence. Even Manchin's high approval ratings are a bit suspect, since those numbers are about a year out of date, and since something might be lost in translation as he moves from being a governor to a candidate for federal office. On the other hand, the one thing we "know" is that this isn't an easy political cycle for Democrats almost anywhere. It wasn't easy for them in Massachusetts in a special election under arguably similar circumstances. It doesn't look like it will be easy for them in Arkansas, Louisiana or Kentucky, other states which have some history of voting Democratic for statewide and Congressional races, but Republican for President.

If Manchin is intimidating enough to Republicans that they don't nominate a strong candidate against him, he could obviously win pretty easily. For that matter, since the Republicans have a thin bench in West Virginia, that's an outcome that could emerge more or less by default.

But against someone like a Shelley Moore Capito, Manchin could have a real race on his hands. Would Capito sacrifice a safe U.S. House seat to run for a Senate seat that she might have only, say, a 35-50 percent chance of winning, and which would have only a truncated two-year term? If I were advising Capito, I'd probably tell her not to. Even if the political environment is somewhat less favorable to Republicans in 2012 than in 2010, she would have a choice that year of running for a full six-year Senate term (presumably against Manchin, who could be sullied by his affiliation with Washington Democrats), or of running for governor (which one Republican strategist describes to me as a "no lose deal" for her). Theoretically, she could also wait two more years and run against Jay Rockefeller in 2014.

On the other hand, Capito has a lot of money in the bank, and is thought to be considering a special election run rather seriously.

In summary, I don't really have a nice, crunchy conclusion for you -- there are too many variables in play. But I'd also advise against being overly complacent about Manchin's chances; let's wait for some polling data, and let's wait to see who his opponent might be. For that matter, let's wait to see if there's a special election at all, and whether he chooses to make himself one of the candidates.

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Can Manchin Save West Virginia for Democrats?

It now appears that West Virginia governor Joe Manchin, under various types of political and legal pressure, is more likely than not to call for a special election to replace Robert Byrd in the Senate this year, rather than wait until 2012 as he had originally planned.

If Manchin decides to advance the date of the general election, this obviously creates another great opportunity for Republicans, as West Virginia has become a very red state. Whereas the Senate model that we ran last week gave Republicans only a 6 percent chance of flipping enough seats to take over the Senate, they were already set to benefit from some changes to the model, such as an adjustment we'll be incorporating to account for polls which are of registered rather than likely voters, as well as the removal of Research 2000 polling from the model. Those methodological changes should boost Republican chances to 10-15 percent.

With another seat in West Virginia now potentially in play, however, their chances figure to improve even further. One of the components of our Senate model, which serves as a compliment to the polling, is a regression analysis that seeks to forecast the outcome of each Senate race based on an incumbent's approval ratings, the state's PVI, and the relative experience levels of the two candidates. In a matchup between 'generic' Republican and Democrat candidates who have a roughly equal amount of experience, the regression model would expect the Republican to win by 13 points in this cycle in West Virginia, although there is a high degree of uncertainty on that estimate.

However, there is a chance -- a good chance -- that Manchin himself will decide to run, especially since it's more or less at his discretion to move the election date forward. Although there are no especially recent polls on Machin's approval, a PPP poll in May, 2009 put his numbers at 53 percent approving and 34 percent disapproving -- these are pretty decent numbers, especially since PPP, for whatever reason, has a fairly strong house effect toward low-ish approval ratings. Also, a Mark Blankenship Enterprises poll in August, 2009 put Manchin's numbers at just 78 percent approving and 18 percent disapproving.

If we treat Manchin as an incumbent, using an average of his PPP and Blankenship approval ratings, our model shows him as a favorite -- but only by a small margin: just 1 point over a Republican at the next-highest level of experience below Senator/Governor, such as a U.S. Representative or a statewide elected officeholder like an Attorney General. Against someone with fewer credentials, like a state senator, Manchin would be a 6-point favorite, and against an outsider with no experience in elected office, he'd be an 11-point favorite.

This seems like a fairly harsh treatment of Manchin, and we should note that this is an exceptionally simplistic model, which may not especially well designed to cope with the unusual situation of an apparently very popular Democratic politician running in a very red state in a very red cycle. On the other hand, the model is relying on fairly outdated approval ratings for Manchin -- his numbers may have slipped some, as they have for most Democrats and for most incumbents. And he might suffer a penalty of sorts from having switched from one office to the other (see also: Crist, Charlie), especially since his gubernatorial term is not yet expired.

If Manchin runs for Byrd's seat and the GOP manages to put up a competent opponent, I would not be surprised if polling showed him as anything from a fairly heavy favroite to a slight underdog. In the absence of that polling, the most prudent characterization is probably that West Virginia leans Democrat if Manchin runs and leans Republican if he doesn't.

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Sarkozy Has a Popularity Problem

Things have not been going particularly well of late for French President Nicolas Sarkozy. With approval ratings falling through the floorboards and scandals cropping up in all corners of his administration, what once looked like a telegenic center-right Presidency bound for reelection now seems imperiled.

Today, however, no less than three separate, yet interlinked, affaires on politics and money are currently rocking the French polical scene, with at least four ministers, as well as the President, linked to the dirt.

1. Campaign finance scandal. In short, Sarkozy and his Labor Minister Eric Woerth have been accused of illegally funneling 150,000 Euros from France's wealthiest woman, Liliane Bettencourt (heiress of the L'Oreal fortune) to his campaign accounts. While the details have been murky, with the accuser changing her story a few times, French state prosecutors have opened a case on the matter, threatening the political lives of Woerth and by extension Sarkozy.

The UMP claim the matter is fully political, accusing left wing operatives of trying to discredit Mr. Woerth as he tries to raise the nation's retirement age from 60 to 62 in order to balance the books -- a matter of no small importance to the union-driven left.

France's campaign finance laws restrict political contributions from individuals to 4,600 Euros per cycle, and do not allow donations by corporations, unions, PACs etc., instead using public funds for all eligible candidates. However, in contrast to US regulations, political donors may deduct a portion of their givings on their tax returns.

2. Bettencourt tax evasion. If things were not difficult for Liliane (aged 87), she has also been accused of massive tax evasion via offshore accounts in Switzerland, the Caymans, the Seychelles, and elsewhere. The case is built on, among other things, many hours of surreptitious recording of meetings between Bettencourt and her financial advisor, carried out by the butler.

Here is where things get fishy once again. Before becoming Labor minister in March of this year, Eric Woerth was Sarkozy's Finance Minister, making his name on a programme of aggressive pursuit of offshore tax evaders, of which apparently Mrs. Bettencourt was one. However, it turns out that Woerth's wife, Florence, worked for the company of Bettencourt's financial advisor, and was involved with the management of some of her accounts, though it is unclear whether the accounts fingered in the offshore tax scheme. The media and political left have leapt upon the possible conflict of interest and called for Woerth's resignation, which he has refused.

On the sidelines, of course, the estranged daughter of Bettencourt is in an ongoing legal battle with her mother and a famous photographer friend over parts of the family's fortune.

3. Expenses Scandal among two junior ministers. Compounding the other financial problems, two junior ministers, Alain Joyandet, state secretary for overseas development, and Christian Blanc, state secretary for Paris, were forced to resign after massive inappropriate public expenditures were discovered.

Sarkozy took the Presidency back in May 2007 with a convincing 53-47 second round result over the Socialist Party's Ségolène Royal (Barack Obama prevailed over John McCain by a similar margin, 52.9 percent to 45.7 percent). Then a month later, Sarkozy's UMP party (Union pour un mouvement populaire, or Union for a Populist Movement) won a big majority in the National Assembly, earning 345 deputies (about 60 percent of the MPs) as compared to the 227 earned by the left-side opposition.

While his political position deteriorated fairly quickly -- he had a negative net approval rating before the end of his first year in office -- the center-right coalition held on to a majority in the French Senate in 2008 elections, and trounced the Socialists in the 2009 European Parliament elections (gain of 12 MEPs for the UMP, loss of 17 for Socialists, gain of 8 for the Greens).

However, the slow decline turned into a major slide this year, as the Regional elections in March confirmed that many voters a very skeptical of the right's agenda. Of the 22 régions of metropolitan France, the left prevailed in 21, leaving only the eastern frontier region of Alsace (bordering Germany) under UMP governorship.*

Using numbers from the pollster and market research firm CSA (who do monthly approval ratings polling for various French newspapers), one can see the slow but steady descent in Sarko's approval rating. One interesting side point is that while British and American firms ask respondents whether they "approve of" a person and/or the job they have been doing, each French survey I have seen asks instead whether the respondent "has confidence in" the target person or not (often with just two options, as above).

Sarkozy's best numbers, naturally, came just after the landslide victory of the UMP coalition in the 2007 Parliamentary election, with his net approval rating peaking in July 2007 at plus 36. Though many in France viewed his election as President in relative terms -- a left-leaning French friend explained that most centrist voters saw Sarkozy as the "least worst option," as opposed to the "clueless" Ségolène Royal -- most were willing to give him a shot, notwithstanding his mixed records as Minister of Interior and Minister of Finance.

His carefree style and aggressive programme (e.g. lowering taxes on the upper middle class and removal of inheritance taxes) quickly drove away any conciliators on the center-left, however. At the same, personal issues like his high-profile divorce in October 2007 and subsequent rapid courtship of Italian superstar Carla Bruni (they married February 2008) distracted the front pages for several months, a growing sense of distrust was manifesting.

An additional underlying factor was that Sarko's reputation of cavorting with his friends and supporters among the extremely wealthy left an impression of privilege and disconnect on many centrists and even some in the center-right. It is within this paradigm that the recent accusations and revelations begin to have cumulative effects on his Presidency.

All things point to a wide open April 2012 Presidential campaign, where Sarkozy will have rivals on both the right, with former Chirac Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin having established his own center-right party, and the left (with a new leader, Martine Aubry, since November 2008). In the meantime, Sarko has less than two years to resurrect his image, or he will find himself being the first French President to serve just one term since d'Estaing in the 1970s.

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

*The left won 20 of 22 in the last regional elections, in 2004, as well, with only Corsica switching in 2010. This reversed what was almost total domination of the regions by the right from the 1980s until 2004.

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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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