This week, sparked by WH Press Secretary Robert Gibbs's "in play" comment on Meet the Press, chatter and speculation about a possible Republican takeover of the House rose to new heights. As it happens, I had been working on an invited piece for Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball site at the University of Virginia in which I examine regional differences between the Democrats' House majority heading into the 2010 midterms and the one they had on the eve of their epic, 1994 midterm catastrophe. That piece, entitled Republicans' Regional Recipe, ran yesterday, and I'll summarize the key parts of it first, and then share some addition reflections for which I didn't have space in the original analysis.
To begin, for comparative purposes it's eerily convenient that the Dems headed into their 1994 slaughter with the same number of seats they do today: 256.* Though same in number, the two Democratic coalitions are not the same geographically, as Table 1 shows. Compiling the data, I knew that the Democratic caucus today would be less southern, more northeastern, and more western than it was 16 years ago. But what amazed me was just how regionally uniform the Democratic majority was back in '94: Remarkably, in every region the Democrats controlled between 58 percent and 60 percent of the seats. That's hardly the case for Speaker Nancy Pelosi's coalition today, for which the Democratic share ranges from a southern low of 43 percent to a northeastern high of 82 percent. Obviously, there is more than one way to reach 256. (A number that itself freaks me out a bit because it is the square of 16, and thus also 2 raised to the eighth power.)
What I then did, using CB analyst Isaac Wood's current House race ratings, was compare what the House in a potential 112th Congress would look like under two scenarios: a "regular wave" scenario in which the Democrats hold or win all "likely" or "leaning" races, the GOP does the same, but the GOP wins all "toss-up" contests (net GOP gain: 36 seats); and another, "big wave" scenario in which the GOP wins all of the above plus swings any races presently ranked as "leaning Democrat" (net gain: 61). What's interesting about the two scenarios is the geographic distribution of the potential gains. Short story? In the latter, "big wave" scenario the Republicans double their pickups in the Northeast and Far West, giving them enough to build a majority, whereas they fall short in the regular wave scenario because southern and midwestern seats captured (or recaptured from 2006 or 2008) are insufficient to elevate John Boehner into the Speaker's office, as you can see in Table 2 below.
What I didn't have room for, and Isaac and Larry asked me not to bog the piece down with, was an examination of specific House contests. (There's just too many House seats to cover, and that would make the piece longer and noisier.) But with the benefit of a bit more follow-up space here, I wanted to examine just a handful of those "leaning Democratic" House seats that, in a big or at least big-enough-to-flip-the-chamber scenario, would be part of the new Republican majority for the 112th Congress.
Three of Wood's "leaning Democratic" seats in particular jumped right off the ranking sheet for me: Arizona 5, Michigan 9, and New Jersey 3. Why? Because all three have about the same white share of the population (roughly 80 percent), which means incumbents there are unlikely to be saved by an uptick in post-Obama, non-white voter turnout, or damaged by a midterm drop-off in non-white voters; and all three feature above-national-average household incomes. In other words, these are not working-class white districts more likely to fall because they bear more of the brunt of the economic recession, nor are they districts with significant non-white populations that may hold the line for the Democratic House candidates running there. If affluent, college-educated white voters of what Ron Brownstein calls the "Diploma Belt" variety turn against the Administration and the Democrats, you probably get Speaker Boehner; if not, you probably keep Speaker Pelosi.
To be sure, if control of the House is very narrowly decided come November, the result will be "overdetermined," in the sense that any one of a number of demographic or regional or economic splits can be cited as the reason the GOP did or did not swing enough seats, even though it's never that simple. Still, remember that the coalition Barack Obama assembled two years ago depended heavily upon non-white voters and affluent white voters. We can expect a drop-off of some, uncertain magnitude among non-white voters, especially those who turned out for the first time in 2008. What will be equally interesting, and perhaps pivotal, is what the rate of defection (or abstention) will be among affluent whites this year--and districts like AZ-5, MI-9, and NJ-3 this November will provide part of the answer.
*NB: For simplicity's sake, and to have the same 435-seat baseline, I simply counted any vacant seats, then or today, as belonging to the party that last held them.
Although the past year has been frustrating to liberals and libertarians on many levels, one exception is in the increasing willingness of governments around the world to recognize same-sex marriage, as Argentina determined to do yesterday. There are now about 250 million people worldwide living in jurisdictions which provide for marriage equity, as this colorful chart will help to demonstrate.
The big spike you see in 2008 is California recognizing gay marriage through the courts, and then un-recognizing it through the passage of Proposition 8. Right now, it's possible to marry your same-sex partner in Buenos Aires, in Mexico City, in Ames, Iowa, and in Pretoria, South Africa, but not in San Francisco. With countries like Argentina and Portugal now recognizing same-sex marriages, however, the global trajectory has returned to its slow-but-steady upward pace.
Sunday's bombing in Kampala, Uganda, dubbed the "World Cup" blasts by much of the media, killed at least 60 Ugandans and perhaps a dozen foreigners, including people from India, Ireland, Eritrea and the US. The incident has thrust the nation into an uncomfortable spotlight, with the international community quickly identifying links to Al Qaeda, militant radical Islam in the east Africa region in general, and alleged connections to the Somali rebel group Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahideen or "Al Shabab."
Ugandan police have suggested that the actual attack maybe have been perpetrated by members of a Ugandan group, called the ADF (Allied Democratic Forces), who are based from nearby D.R. Congo.
The attacks are indicative of the complex, troubled and often contradictory state of affairs in the Great Lakes region, as well as broader East Africa (including Sudan). Each country in the region has pockets of discontent, rebellion and in some cases, outright war, ranging from the ethno-political battles of Sudan, Burundi and Rwanda to terroristic marauding by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, northern Uganda, and elsewhere.
1. Somalia. To begin with, it is not surprising to see Al Shabab claiming responsibility for the Uganda attacks, regardless of whether they carried out or supported them. Both the Ugandan and Burundian military have troops stationed (and occasionally fighting) in Mogadishu as the firepower that supports the African Union's AMISOM (AU Mission in Somalia). AMISOM, which has both an AU mandate and a UN Security Council mandate, was established in 2007 to support the interim Somalia government. Al Shabab, among other anti-government movements, opposed the deployment of peacekeepers, denouncing them as meddling intruders who would be attacked if they did not leave. Since 2007, over 50 AMISOM soldiers have been killed, and nearly 100 wounded.
That said, the AMISOM mandate was crafted almost exclusively to avoid a coup, rather than defeat any of the insurgent movements, pacify the country, or protect Somalia civilians (like the NATO mission in Afghanistan for example). The Ugandan and Burudian soldiers basically protect key installations, like the Airport and Presidential palace, from attack by rebels. With the Kampala attack, however, (US-backed) Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has promised to send more troops, and to expand the role of the peacekeeping force to an offensive one as well, with license to attack and destroy insurgents.
2. Uganda. Uganda's most famous and feared rebel group was actually not at all involved (as far as we know, at least) with Sunday's bombing. Called the Lord's Resistance Army, this group has wrecked havoc in the Great lakes region since the late 1980s, though operations by the Congolese army, the Ugandan military, and the United Nations peacekeeping force in DR Congo (MONUC) have landed blows against the group.
The LRA are a bizarre bunch. Basically, in the last 25 years they have wandered to raid, pillage, rape and kill from Uganda to eastern Central Africa Republic, northeast DR Congo and southern Sudan. Occasionally supported by the Khartoum government in Sudan as a retaliation to Museveni's support for the SPLA/M rebels in Southern Sudan (Juba, et al.), they began as an anti-government group in Uganda. Over time, however, it became clear that the LRA had almost no coherant ideological mooring, but instead existed as a group of brutal, terroristic and egotistical bandits that used child soldiers to commit shocking atrocities. To call them a band of psychotic thugs would be a compliment.
The second group, the Allied Democratic Forces, were previously more politically involved (in opposition to the Museveni regime), though had been driven by Ugandan and Congolese forces to near extinction. Mainly because they were linked to the Kampala bombings, DRC military operations began yesterday against what is left of the group in Northeastern DR Congo.
3. Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. With the so-called Second Congolese War ending in 2003, many hoped that peace consolidation and recovery would take place quickly and effectively. After decades of conflict in the region, including the Rwandan civil war (1990-1993) and 1994 genocide, the Burundian civil war (which did not officially end until 2005), the departure of many foreign soldiers, and a committment from regional governments to support the transitional government of now President Joseph Kabila (son of assassinated former President Laurent Kabila).
Unfortunately, cross border rebels from Rwanda and Burundi continue to operate in DRC, while the Rwandan government, under former Tutsi rebel leader Paul Kagame, continues to have designs on land and minerals in the eastern DRC. At the same time, instability continues to plague Burundi, with election violence threatening the ongoing election season in that country.
Other key things to consider in the region are the upcoming referendum on the status of Southern Sudan -- expected to vote to break off from the Sudan), tensions in northern Kenya among pastoralist groups and between pastoralists and settled communities, and the growing international understanding that high-value mineral resources are funding arms and armies in the region.
From a western perspective, it will be important, as we respond to the Kampala attack, to view the events and conditions in context. Any kneejerk reactions that paint the violence strictly in terms of religious conflict, ideological extremism, or even international political maneuvering, are likely to be off target.
It is true that, though, that Uganda under Museveni is viewed as a strong ally of US government, as the Americans have long supported his regime, providing weapons, monetary aid and political support. This, in addition to the expressed AMISOM reasoning for the attack, may explain broader connections to Al Qaeda's (et al.).
--- Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international affairs columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com
Saturday marks the 30th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's 1980 acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Detroit. I wrote about the speech this week in my Baltimore Sun column which, limited to 700 words, provides insufficient room to discuss fully the impact that Reagan's campaign and presidency had on the course of American politics during the three decades since.
I am beginning my next book, to be published by Yale University Press, about the fate of the Republican Party and the conservative movement in the 20 years following the end of Reagan's presidency--that is, from the start of the first Bush Administration to the end of the second. So I've been thinking a lot about Reagan, and specifically how Republicans following him dealt with his legacy. And I found myself reading that 1980 speech in full for the first time. (You can read it here, or watch the video above.) Reagan is still deified by most Republicans and conservatives, and it's not difficult to understand why. For whatever liberals may think of his policies, or however much selective memory may permit conservatives to remember Reagan's not-always-so-conservative record, this much is indisputable: He unified his party just six short years after it was in shambles--the RNC effectively shut down at one point soon after Watergate--and just four years after that produced a 49-state victory Republicans could publicly boast. (Obviously, Richard Nixon's 1972 victory cannot be touted as proudly.) So enduring is his mythical power that we heard almost every one of the 2008 Republican presidential aspirants attempt to either invoke Reagan's legacy or present himself as the one, true heir to that legacy. Rank-and-file Republicans can show their continuing devotion in a variety of ways, from "What Would Reagan Do?" t-shirts to Reagan-themed bumper stickers.
In any case, Reagan's "A New Beginning" speech--which came almost a year to the day after Jimmy Carter's so-called "Malaise speech" delivered 31 years ago today--sought to accomplish five things. In addition to the aforementioned unifying of his party, Reagan also issued a stinging indictment of the Carter Administration; set the tone for lowering taxes and reducing the government's size and regulatory reach; addressed the energy worries of the nation; and promised a more aggressive global posture for the United States in military and diplomatic matters. Here is a short but key section (which starts around 10:45 mark of video above, if you want to watch it) that hits upon the middle three of those five themes:
As your nominee, I pledge to restore to the federal government the capacity to do the people's work without dominating their lives. I pledge to you a government that will not only work well, but wisely; its ability to act tempered by prudence and its willingness to do good balanced by the knowledge that government is never more dangerous than when our desire to have it help us blinds us to its great power to harm us.
The first Republican president once said, "While the people retain their virtue and their vigilance, no administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can seriously injure the government in the short space of four years."
If Mr. Lincoln could see what's happened in these last three-and-a-half years, he might hedge a little on that statement. But, with the virtues that our legacy as a free people and with the vigilance that sustains liberty, we still have time to use our renewed compact to overcome the injuries that have been done to America these past three-and-a-half years.
First, we must overcome something the present administration has cooked up: a new and altogether indigestible economic stew, one part inflation, one part high unemployment, one part recession, one part runaway taxes, one party deficit spending and seasoned by an energy crisis. It's an economic stew that has turned the national stomach.
Ours are not problems of abstract economic theory. Those are problems of flesh and blood; problems that cause pain and destroy the moral fiber of real people who should not suffer the further indignity of being told by the government that it is all somehow their fault. We do not have inflation because -- as Mr. Carter says -- we have lived too well.
The head of a government which has utterly refused to live within its means and which has, in the last few days, told us that this year's deficit will be $60 billion, dares to point the finger of blame at business and labor, both of which have been engaged in a losing struggle just trying to stay even.
High taxes, we are told, are somehow good for us, as if, when government spends our money it isn't inflationary, but when we spend it, it is.
Those who preside over the worst energy shortage in our history tell us to use less, so that we will run out of oil, gasoline, and natural gas a little more slowly. Conservation is desirable, of course, for we must not waste energy. But conservation is not the sole answer to our energy needs.
America must get to work producing more energy. The Republican program for solving economic problems is based on growth and productivity.
Large amounts of oil and natural gas lay beneath our land and off our shores, untouched because the present administration seems to believe the American people would rather see more regulation, taxes and controls than more energy.
What's remarkable is how we still hear the same, core arguments about the role and functions of government--and how the policy-specific debates over matters like offshore drilling persist as well. And yet here we are, 30 years later, and the tax burden is at its lowest since 1950, the regulatory state has been cowed if not captured by the industries it is supposed to oversee, and America stands as the world's lone remaining superpower. The antipathy toward government Reagan popularized has, even if indirectly and merely in spirit, contributed to a governing approach that has led to everything from coal mine disasters to the BP oil spill. (Just to preempt comments, I'm not blaming Reagan for the BP spill; indeed, I too wonder "What Reagan Would Do" if he had cogently witnessed the de-regulatory behaviors of the previous administration. But anyone who thinks energy policy deregulation had nothing to do with the spill should read this first.) But because a lot of the goals Reagan set forth in his 1980 Detroit speech have been achieved, even if in part, it is tempting for Republicans and conservatives to conclude, "Hey, Reagan was right, so let's duplicate his model"--when, in fact, 2010 is not 1980, and a continued fixation on Reagan may be doing more to hamper than help the modern GOP.
Such are the puzzles I'll ponder in the book. For now, enjoy (re)reading or viewing Reagan's pivotal, 45-minute address--a speech that set the tone for American politics for the next 30 years. Among other things, take special note of Reagan's comments about the poor, minorities and those who live in the inner cities. Notice, too, how Reagan invokes Franklin Roosevelt, for whom he voted in his younger days as a Democrat. And don't miss the remarkable ending which, if you are not already familiar, is so good I won't dare spoil it.
I don't think that a pollster needs to be like YouGov's Doug Rivers or Quinnipiac's Doug Schwartz and have a PhD in statistics in order to run a decent polling shop. But some minimum threshold of common sense would help. Did ARG's Dick Bennett really just write this on the front page of his firm's website?
July 14, 2010
Update: Not So Much Additional Error
A subscriber to our e-mails writes:
I believe that Mr. Silver's average error rates are overstated because he forgets that the error range is + or - when he calculates the average error for each pollster. It's a common mistake.
If you have a poll where the difference between Candidate A and Candidate B is 9 and the actual difference between the two when the votes are counted is 4, the error is +5. But if you have a poll where the difference between Candidate A and Candidate B is 4 and the actual difference when the votes are counted is 9, the error is -5, not +5.
If he says the average error for both polls is +5, his average error will be overstated by the actual average margin. You should be able to check this using his spreadsheet.
I did check and it is true. Nate has a column on his spreadsheet labeled "error" which is the absolute value of the error (all positive numbers). The median value of this "error" for our polls is 5.08. The median error for our polls calculated based on our polls minus the actual results, however, is -0.54. When the actual margin of 4.54 is subtracted from Nate's median "error" of 5.08, the result is -0.54 (the correct value for our polls).
If Nate used the absolute value in calculating his pollster error, it makes a mess of his ratings because his error rate for each pollster is incorrect.
Time for v4.1 of the ratings.
- Dick Bennett
I'm not sure I really need to spend much time explaining Bennett's mistake, but the error in a poll very much needs to be evaluated by what he calls the "absolute value" -- that is, the difference between the expected and actual result, which will necessarily be expressed as a nonnegative number. A simple example should explain why.
Suppose that we were evaluating the accuracy of a pollster based on four of its surveys: a poll of the Kerry-Bush presidential race in Arkansas in 2004, of the Ohio Republican presidential primary in 2008, of the Pennsylvania Senate Democratic primary in 2010, and of the Minnesota gubernatorial race in 1998. Let's say that the pollster did poorly in each of these races: they had Kerry winning by 10 points Arkansas when in fact Bush won by that margin; they had McCain winning by 9 points in Ohio when in fact he won by 29 points; they had Arlen Specter winning in Pennsylvania when in fact it went to Sestak, and they had Coleman winning in Minnesota when in fact Ventura did. On average, the pollster missed the final margin between the candidates by 15 points; this is what we would report as its average error:
This seems straightforward enough -- but apparently it isn't! Instead of the error being measured by the the difference the projected and actual margins between the candidates -- this will necessarily be a nonnegative number -- Bennett thinks it should sometimes be a negative number instead. Thus, the error in Arkansas might be designated as a +20, because we happened to list Kerry's name first in the spreadsheet. But the error in Ohio might be listed as a -20, because we happened to list John McCain's name first.
Bennett then claims that the +20 and the -20 should cancel one another out! Even though this pollster missed the margin by 20 points in both states, we should instead report their error as zero. Likewise, their +10 error in Pennsylvania is cancelled out by their -10 in Minnesota.
It's pretty easy to spot the semantic flaw here: if I'm firing a rifle, and miss the target by 7 feet to the left with my first bullet, and 7 feet to the right with the next one, that doesn't make me a good shot "on average". But, there's another reason that Bennett's method doesn't really work. Suppose that we simply flip the positions of McCain and Huckabee, and Ventura and Coleman, in our spreadsheet. We're changing nothing at all about the polls themselves, nor the results of the elections -- we're just changing which candidate happens to be designated as 'Candidate A' and which happens to be designated as 'Candidate B'. If we do this, all the errors revert back to positive numbers by Bennett's method, and the firm's average error is (positive) 15 points after all:
On the other hand, we could flip the positions of Bush and Kerry, and Sestak and Specter, instead. Then the firm's average "error", by Bennett's method, would be -15 points, rather than +15.
I'm not really sure what it means to have an error of -15 points. Is that better than zero? Worse than zero? It doesn't really work in a sentence: "According to Dick Bennett, firm XYZ's polls have missed by an average of negative 15 points." What does that mean?
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If I were being kinder to Bennett, I would point out that if we were measuring bias rather than accuracy -- how much a firm's polling missed toward one side or the other -- we very much would need to keep track of the positive and negative signs. If a firm's poll was 20 points too high on the Democratic candidate's margin of victory in Florida, but 20 points too low on the Democratic candidate's margin in Ohio, we could call the former a +20 and the latter a -20, and it would be proper to average them out to zero: the firm would be unbiased, although nevertheless horribly inaccurate. (Note that this also only really works if you have some meaningful dimension by which to differentiate the two sets of candidates, such as one being a Democrat and the other being a Republican; it wouldn't have any meaning in the case of nonpartisan elections, for instance.)
But I don't think we should trip all over to ourselves to be kind here: this is an incredibly elementary mistake for someone in a statistics-intensive profession to make. Bennett's polls have been cited 54 times by the New York Times since 1990; would the New York Times cite the work of a physicist who claimed that gravity didn't exist?
Come to think of it, it was just yesterday that the Times ran a profile of a physicist who thinks that gravity is some sort of elaborate illusion. Perhaps Bennett has also reached some deeper plane of understanding in which the rules of logic and mathematics as we ordinarily understand them no longer apply. Or perhaps he has no clue what he's talking about. We report, you decide!
Before leaving the Alabama runoffs behind, it's worth a quick look at the results to examine the oft-repeated claim by gubernatorial candidate Bradley Byrne that Democrats were going to steal the nomination for Dr. Robert Bentley. That warning was based on two factors: efforts by Byrne's nemesis, the Alabama Education Association, to encourage its members to vote against Byrne in the runoff; and the Alabama GOP's unusual rule allowing Democratic primary voters--whose own gubernatorial nomination was settled on June 1--to vote in Republican runoffs
Since Bentley did in fact win (by a 56-44 margin), is there any hard evidence that Democrats lifted him to victory? No, not really.
Keep in mind that this is a very difficult hypothesis to test, particularly without precinct-level data, and particularly in a state without party registration. There was gossip on election day that cut in both directions. And without question, a big crossover was theoretically possible. The drop-off in Democratic turnout between the primary and the runoff (using an apples-to-apples comparison of the Attorney General's race, the only statewide Democratic runoff) was 157,000 votes, and Bentley's margin over Byrne was 56,000 votes. Yes, the Republican gubernatorial turnout dropped by 6% between the primary and the runoff, but it's always possible it would have dropped much more without Democratic crossover votes.
When you look at county data, however, it's clear there's little or no relationship between Democratic and Republican turnout patterns, and thus little likelihood that the former determined the latter. Looking at some of the larger counties, Montgomery had a very high Democratic dropoff percentage of 82% (the statewide percentage was 57%), and Republican turnout dropped 6%, exactly the statewide average. Meanwhile, Jefferson County (Birmingham) had a relatively low Democratic dropoff percentage (31%), thanks to a number of local runoffs and the 7th district congressional runoff. But Republican turnout there dropped only 5%. Or look at Madison County (Huntsville), where there was one election-day media report of sizable crossover voting. The Democratic dropoff in Madison was a very high 90%. Yet Republican turnout dropped 17%, a lot more than the statewide average, and not what you'd expect if there was a big crossover vote. Byrne, BTW, carried all three of the counties we are talking about.
Another way to get at this issue is to look at what happened in heavily Republican counties. Check out St. Clair and Shelby Counties near Birmingham, both of which recently made the Daily Caller's "most conservative-friendly counties" list. In both, 89% of primary voters on June 1 chose to cast a Republican ballot (the statewide average was 61%). In St. Clair, Bentley's vote jumped by 2456 votes between the primary and the runoff (from 27% to 61%) The entire Democratic dropoff vote in the county was only 1165. So how did Bentley win? It certainly looks like he did a better job than Byrne in attracting the 52% of the primary vote that went to Tim James and Roy Moore. The same appears to be true in Shelby, where Bentley picked up 6185 votes and jumped from 27% to 52%. The entire Democratic dropoff vote was only 2803.
Looking at the converse situation, there's Macon County, where 92% of primary voters chose Democratic ballots. If there was some coordinated Democratic crossover effort, you'd think it would show up there. In fact, the Democratic dropoff was an unusually low 19%, but still amounted to 716 votes. But Republican turnout went up by a grand total of 16 votes, and Byrne boosted his percentage from 28 to 45.
So perhaps the crossover vote happened to some degree, and perhaps it helped Bentley on the margins. But the evidence suggests he won by taking a comfortable majority of the James and Moore voters; it's no accident that he won 57% of the vote in James' home county (Butler) and 71% in Moore's (Etowah). Had Democratic primary voters been banned from the GOP runoff, Bentley would have won anyway, it appears, and that's without factoring in whatever profit Byrne derived from his ability to attack Bentley for being the intended beneficiary of Democratic shenanigans.
Chris Paulse sends along this news article on a recent Bloomberg poll:
Just like the experts, Americans are torn about whether the federal government should focus on curbing spending or creating jobs, the poll conducted July 9-12 shows. Seven of 10 Americans say reducing unemployment is the priority. At the same time, the public is skeptical of the Obama administration’s stimulus program and wary of more spending, with more than half saying the deficit is “dangerously out of control.” . . . The only deficit-reduction measure that gets strong support in the poll is higher taxes on upper-income Americans. . . . Asked about a range of options to cut the budget deficit, the public is willing to consider removing the cap on earnings covered by the Social Security tax, currently set at just under $107,000, and eliminating tax cuts for the wealthy enacted under Bush. . . .
One thing that should be unsurprising to readers of the political science literature is that people are often pretty uninformed about the economy, even when it comes to well-publicized statistics or personal experiences:
The public gives the Obama administration little credit for its tax cuts, which according to the Washington-based Tax Policy Center lowered federal income taxes for 93 percent of filers. Asked to compare their federal income taxes to what they paid during George W. Bush’s presidency, only 7 percent say they are lower; 20 percent say their taxes are higher and 65 percent say they are about the same.
This reminds me of Larry Bartels's finding from a survey that was conducted in 1988, at the end of Ronald Reagan’s second term, asking various questions about the government and economic conditions, including, “Would you say that compared to 1980, inflation has gotten better, stayed about the same, or gotten worse?” Amazingly, over half of the self-identified strong Democrats in the survey said that inflation had gotten worse and only 8% thought it had gotten much better, even though the actual inflation rate dropped from 13% to 4% during Reagan’s eight years in office.
Finally, here's an interesting twist on the recent controversy about the extent to which voters care about deficits:
Americans’ anxieties over the economy are reflected in the top issues they see facing the country: Unemployment and jobs, cited by 41 percent, and the federal deficit, cited by 26 percent, dwarfed other concerns. . . . The two big priorities are reversed among respondents who say they will definitely vote in November and say the election is exceptionally important. A 41 percent plurality name the deficit as the top issue, compared with 33 percent who pick jobs among those who say they are intensely interested in the November congressional elections.
All of this seems consistent with Nate's argument that economics and partisanship are driving voters' concerns.
Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics has a nice post up critiquing the notion that the perilous state that the Democrats and President Obama now find themselves in has entirely to do with the economy; instead, he thinks unpopular domestic initiatives like health care and cap-and-trade deserve a significant share of the blame.
You should go read Sean's article in full if you haven't yet; I'm entirely agreed with him that it's a bit too simple-minded to say "Economy, stupid!" and leave it at that. The relationships between the electorate and its Presidents are more complicated than that; so for that matter are the relationships between economic variables and measures like Presidential approval in the statistical record. But I think Trende is being somewhat too literal-minded in his counter-critique.
Sean cites the unpopularity of health care and cap-and-trade as being major contributing factors to the difficulties Obama is facing. We probably ought to remove cap-and-trade from the discussion: polls show that (i) nobody knows what it is; (ii) to the extent they think they know what it is, they actually kind of like it. And it was only passed through one chamber of Congress, and this happened more than a year ago. Perhaps at the margins there will be one or two congressional districts in the Midwest where a Democrat voting yea will lose his seat as a result, but if you think cap-and-trade ranks higher than about the 25th biggest problem that Democrats have, you're spending too much time watching The McLaughlin Group.
Health care, on the other hand, clearly deserves a major place in any narrative about the political climate. Technically speaking, it's merely somewhat unpopular, rather than wildly so -- but the passions it invokes are asymmetric in ways that cut against the Democrats.
The real question, however, ought to be this: why did health care became so unpopular? It didn't start out that way. Polls throughout 2008 showed the idea of health care to be quite popular, in fact, and Obama won a campaign in which a health care bill very much like the one that the Congress actually passed was a central piece of his agenda
But something very bad happened to perceptions of health care reform in the year or so that the Democrats were debating it. In spring 2009, before the health care debate had really begun, you had roughly speaking 40 percent of the country in favor of the bill, 25 percent opposed to it, and 35 percent undecided. We wound up, in March 2010 when the bill was passed, at about 40 percent in favor, 50 percent opposed, and 10 percent undecided. Essentially every single undecided voter wound up in the oppose column.
Why was this? Well, part of it is because the White House had a terrible meta-strategy, handing over both communication and tactical duties to a Democratic Congress that was never popular, except to the extent it was an alternative to the even-less-popular Republican Congress. But the other big reason was the economy, given the following specific sequence of events:
1. In October 2008, the Bush administration (with significant support from Democrats in Congress) passed a roughly $800 billion bailout bill, which it pitched as being necessary to avert a near-term economic catastrophe.
2. In February 2009, the Obama administration (with near-universal support from Democrats in Congress) passed a roughly $800 billion stimulus bill, which it pitched as being necessary to avert a near-term economic catastrophe.
3. Employment reports which came out between February 2009 and July 2009 showed the economy losing 3.7 million jobs, far worse than what most economists were anticipating: an economic catastrophe.
4. It was about at this point that the Democrats began their public push for another roughly $800 billion bill, this time in the form of health insurance reform, which they pitched as being necessary to avert a long-term economic catastrophe.
The combination of these four events was going to make it a tough slog for health care reform, to put it mildly. Even if (2) and (3) had occurred, but the bailout hadn't, the Democrats probably would have been OK. But if two $800B bills would have been a coincidence in the public's mind, the third one made for a pattern, and it was a pattern juxtaposed against the background of an economy which was getting worse rather than better.
Of course, the Democrats didn't have to push forward with health care reform last spring: it seems likely that their near-term electoral position would be better if they hadn't. It might nonetheless have been disastrous for Democrats to abandon health care after they'd chosen to undertake it.
Nevertheless, I don't think you can really do an adequate job of modeling the political climate over the past year or so by treating health care as some sort of exogenous negative shock which behaved independently from the economy. Under slightly different economic circumstances, such as if the February-July 2009 jobs numbers were surprises to the upside rather than the downside, it could very easily have been a positive for Democrats.
Or you can believe, as Michael Barone and a lot of other conservative commentators do, that the public had some kind of spontaneous Jeffersonian awakening, casting off the chains of the welfare state and achieving enlightenment in the auspices of a tea-party rally. The tea party needs to be a part of this story; it did the Republicans an enormous favor, which was allowing the conservative brand (which has never gone out of style) to shed its Republican skin. Even if the tea party might also cost the Republicans a seat or three in places like Kentucky and Nevada, that's a trade they'd take many times over.
But tea party itself emerged in April 2009, largely as a reaction to the state of the economy -- and moreover, to the state of the economy as it had been set in motion long before Obama took office. This is not to say that the tea party wasn't buoyed by the health care debate, which suited its purposes well enough and expanded its ranks. But in going mainstream, the tea party lost whatever claim it might have had to articulating a particularly novel or self-consistent political philosophy -- indeed, this is precisely what it didn't do -- its platform having become essentially indistinguishable from a weighted average of Goldwater, Reagan and Bush 43.
Where do we go from here? Whether or not it was a gamble of their own volition, the Democrats were caught playing a very high-stakes poker hand. Not because of any Jeffersonian awakening, but because the public are not econometricians trained to distinguish causation from correlation, a great deal was going to depend on what the state of the economy happened to be at the time the Democrats began to be held accountable for the steps they had taken to try to ameliorate the recession. If you believe this Rasmussen poll, we're nearing that point now -- about as many voters hold Obama responsible for the state of the economy as do Bush -- and this is coming at a time when the economic data is printing negatively and another recession is quite possible. So, there's a real possibility that Democrats will lose their shirts; the question we might be debating years from now is whether they played their hand poorly or took a bad beat from the economy.
With most of the vote counted in most of the state, the three nationally significant Alabama runoff contests have been decided.
In the Republican gubernatorial contest, Dr. Robert Bentley has defeated Bradley Byrne; he's currently up 56-44 with about 80% of the vote in. I'll have more to say about this later, but it appears that Bentley won not so much because of Democratic crossover votes, but because he won most of the Republican votes that went to Tim James and Roy Moore in the primary.
In the Republican 2d congressional district race, Martha Robey has beaten Tea Party activist and viral ad impresario Rick Barber by a 60-40 margin, with a 72-28 win in Montgomery County sealing the deal.
And in the Democratic 7th congressional district race, Terri Sewell defeated Shelia Smoot, leading 56-44 with almost 90% of the precincts reporting. Sewell won Jefferson County, where both candidates live, 54-46, and rolled up an 83-17 landslide in her own home county, Dallas (Selma).
Today's Alabama primary runoffs feature three nationally significant contests, including one key Democratic and one key Republican congressional nomination battle.
But the marquee match, the GOP gubernatorial runoff between former state senator and two-year college chancellor Bradley Byrne and state representative Dr. Robert Bentley, has turned into a fascinating and unpredictable contest involving unusual alliances, a possible Democratic crossover vote, and some real questions about the priorities of conservatives in one of the country's most conservative states.
During the first primary round on June 1, Byrne led the field, as expected, with 28% of the vote. But Bentley surprised nearly all observers by edging the well-financed favorite of Tea Party activists, Tim James, by a mere 167 votes (finishing a disappointingly poor fourth was Christian Right icon Judge Roy Moore). Both candidates scored 25%. After a recount requested (and paid for) by James, Bentley's lead rose to 271 votes, and James conceded.
The recount delayed the beginning of the runoff campaign, but Byrne continued his efforts to make his longstanding battle with the Alabama Education Association (the NEA affiliate in Alabama, which represents the vast majority of teachers in the state, but does not have collective bargaining rights) the centerpiece of the contest.
Byrne had earlier tried to link James to a shadowy organization called the True Republican PAC, which actually received most of its funding from the AEA under Alabama's exceptionally loose campaign finance rules (which allow PAC-to-PAC transfers), and which ran a series of anti-Byrne ads calling him a "liberal trial lawyer" and questioning his allegedly heterodox views on biblical inerrancy. In the runoff, Byrne has essentially accused Bentley of being an agent of the AEA, whose top two officials are vice-chairmen of the state Democratic Party. Bentley did receive a small contribution from AEA, and has not only refused to join Byrne in demonizing the organization, but has none-too-subtly appealed for its members' votes. Complicating the campaign immensely has been the Alabama GOP's unusual practice of allowing Democratic primary voters to cross over and vote in the Republican runoff. With the Democratic gubernatorial primary being resolved on June 1, there's a definite pool of engaged Democratic voters who could participate in the runoff, along with some precedent (notably in 1998) of Democratic crossover voters having a decisive impact in a GOP runoff.
For his part, Bentley's runoff campaign continued the upbeat, above-the-fray approach that benefitted him in the primary among voters apparently tired of the attacks and counter-attacks between Byrne and James that dominated the airwaves and media coverage. But he also stressed his strongly conservative views on issues ranging from taxes to abortion to gambling, and while most of the state's leading GOP elected officials (including Gov. Bob Riley) lined up behind Byrne, Bentley was endorsed by Mike Huckabee (whose presidential candidacy he backed in 2008, and from whom he borrowed key campaign staff after dismissing several of his original operatives). Perhaps more significantly, Bentley was endorsed by the campaign managers for James and Moore.
Byrne has significantly outspent Bentley (who has largely self-financed his campaign) in the runoff, but has also had to contend with another batch of negative ads by a previously unknown "independent" group called the Conservative Coalition for Alabama (suspected but by no means proved to be another AEA project).
The only public poll on the runoff, released on July 7 by the Alabama firm Public Strategy Associates, showed Bentley winning by a decisive 53-33 margin. Byrne has disputed the independence of PSA, and claims his internal polling shows him up by 4 points. Most observers privately predict a close race, with Byrne perhaps building some momentum from his efforts to make the entire campaign pivot on his battles with AEA. But the reality is that turnout will likely determine the outcome. If this is a classic low-turnout runoff with little Democratic crossover vote, Byrne's strong primary performance in the urban counties along I-65 where most regular Republican live (e.g., Madison, Jefferson, and Montgomery, along with Baldwin and Mobile in his southwest Alabama base) augers well for his chances. If, however, Bentley and/or AEA succeed in stimulating a large crossover vote, Bentley's fairly balanced statewide appeal (along with a huge margin in his home town of Tuscaloosa) could make him very hard to beat.
The key intangible is probably how Republican voters who earlier supported Tim James or Roy Moore react to Byrne's attacks on Bentley for a too cozy relationship with AEA. That could turn out to be a masterstroke, making the longtime establishment figure Byrne the perceived "true conservative" candidate, or could backfire by reinforcing Bentley's sunnier and folksier message while boosting the crossover vote.
The other big Republican runoff is in the 2d congressional district in southeast Alabama, where Montgomery city council member Martha Roby, who won 48% in the primary, faces Tea Party activist and pool hall owner Rick Barber, who won 28%, for the right to face vulnerable freshman Democrat Bobby Bright.
Barber, of course, is nationally famous for Alabama's latest entry in the annals of right-wing viral internet ads, a number entitled "Gather Your Armies," which seems to suggest the Founding Fathers would favor a second American Revolution to topple the Obama administration. But as with prior viral ad icon Dale Peterson (who finished well back from the lead for the GOP nomination for Agriculture Commissioner), it's not clear this notoriety translates into votes in Alabama. Roby is conventionally conservative enough, and was close enough to a majority in the primary, to be the favorite in this runoff.
Meanwhile, Democrats have a highly competitive runoff between two African-American women in the 7th congressional district (vacated by unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate Artur Davis), where the nomination is tantamount to election. Both candidates, bond lawyer Terri Sewell (37% in the primary) and former TV news reporter and Jefferson County council member Shelia Smoot (29% in the primary) are from Birmingham, where the bulk of the vote, thanks to several runoffs for local offices, is likely to be cast. Turnout patterns could reduce the advantage Sewell had in the primary in the southern part of the district (she was born in Selma, where her mother served on the city council).
But Sewell also has enjoyed an big financial advantage, with significant out-of-state backing, including an EMILY's List endorsement. The candidates split endorsements from major Alabama African-American groups, with Sewell getting the nod from the New South Coalition (which endorsed third-place finisher Earl Hilliard, Jr., in the primary) and Smoot receiving support from the Alabama Democratic Conference. Smoot has also been endorsed by AEA. But Sewell's money advantage and broader base of support, along with some backlash against Smoot's involvement in the fiscally troubled Jefferson County government, should give her the edge.
Whatever happens today will in fact happen today: Alabama has no in-person early voting, and requires an affadavit with witnesses for absentee ballots. Polls will close at 7:00 p.m. CDT, and the count should be much faster than in the primary.
To begin, for comparative purposes it's eerily convenient that the Dems headed into their 1994 slaughter with the same number of seats they do today: 256.* Though same in number, the two Democratic coalitions are not the same geographically, as Table 1 shows. Compiling the data, I knew that the Democratic caucus today would be less southern, more northeastern, and more western than it was 16 years ago. But what amazed me was just how regionally uniform the Democratic majority was back in '94: Remarkably, in every region the Democrats controlled between 58 percent and 60 percent of the seats. That's hardly the case for Speaker Nancy Pelosi's coalition today, for which the Democratic share ranges from a southern low of 43 percent to a northeastern high of 82 percent. Obviously, there is more than one way to reach 256. (A number that itself freaks me out a bit because it is the square of 16, and thus also 2 raised to the eighth power.)
What I didn't have room for, and Isaac and Larry asked me not to bog the piece down with, was an examination of specific House contests. (There's just too many House seats to cover, and that would make the piece longer and noisier.) But with the benefit of a bit more follow-up space here, I wanted to examine just a handful of those "leaning Democratic" House seats that, in a big or at least big-enough-to-flip-the-chamber scenario, would be part of the new Republican majority for the 112th Congress.
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