Is the Lib Dem Surge for Real (Part 4: The meltdown)

As part of our coverage of the UK general election we examined the surge in momentum and jump in national polling numbers for the Liberal Democrats that began with their leader, Nick Clegg, scoring big in the first ever leaders' debate of 15 April.

Several questions were outstanding. First, we wondered how would the UK's electoral system respond to the emergence of a legitimate third party competitor? It turned out that even with a significant bump in national numbers, only a handfull of target seats would come into play, due to the electoral structure of the country.

In addition, the Liberal Democrats -- among other third parties -- often win seats over the course of several elections, becoming a "plausible" option in a constituency in one election, then pulling a plurality in the next election. This extra step -- having first to achieve a threshold level of support before victory is likely -- meant that the Lib Dems were not likely to win any seats beyond the 15 to 20 or so where they had a foothold already.

Lastly, the source of the newfound Lib Dem strength was relatively unclear, except that some demographic crosstabs and anecdotal evidence indicated that young voters were moving strongly to the Liberal Democrats. With regard to specific seats, it was not clear whether the national polling numbers were being drawn from an increased competitiveness in marginal seats where the Lib Dems had a chance to prevail, or from greater support in seats where the Lib Dems were either already power or did not have a serious chance to win.

The second question was one of selection bias. Both telephone polls and internet polls have particular biases and house effects associated with them, with telephone polls tending to exclude younger and poorer voters and internet polls leaving out older and less educated voters. Though the polling firms always try to adjust for these biases by weighing results based on age or newspaper readership, there is no way to account for voter sub-groups that are fully excluded.

The third and final question -- one that we did not explicitly discuss ahead of time at FiveThirtyEight -- is whether there was a "loud but flakey Lib Dem" effect at play, similar to the "shy Tory" problem of the 1990s. As put by Nate earlier this week, this "may not be the pollsters' fault if voters changed or made up their mind while casting their ballots, as sometimes happens for third parties whose viability is questionable" (emphasis his).

We now have at least partial answers to these questions, which conspired to precipitate an election result where instead of seeing a long-awaited Lib Dem breakthrough we saw a rather demoralizing Lid Dem meltdown.

To begin with, the Liberal Democrats pulled 23.6 percent of the national vote, a mere 1.5 point increase over their 22.1 percent share from 2005. As we have learned from our projections, however, if those 450 thousand voters (1.5 percent of the total 2010 electorate) were gained in the right seats, they could flip perhaps 5 to 10 seats to the Liberals.

Unfortunately for Nick Clegg, there were too few new votes and they came in all the wrong places.


In these 10 key marginals, the Lib Dems lost in all but one -- including the loss of one of their own seats to Labour (Rochdale, which had notionally moved to Labour during boundary review).

They succeeded in picking up Eastbourne from the Tories, seeing a good 4 point swing. Beyond this, however, success was hard to find. In Oxford East, Islington South and Hampstead and Kilburn -- representative of seats across the country -- the Lib Dems lost ground to Labour. While this might have been expected in some Scottish seats, or places where the Lib Dems are weak, to see a loss of vote share in key target seats is indeed quite bad.

In Watford it was a bit different -- while the Liberal Democrats pulled a 4 percent swing against Labour, the Tories simply outstripped them, pulling out a 2 point victory.

Directly against the Conservatives, the Lib Dems again had a very rough time. Eastbourne was the only pickup from the Tories for the Lib Dems, while Cameron and co won grabbed 5 seats from the Lib Dems.

All told, the answers to our key questions seem to be as follows:

1. The electoral system did indeed hamper the Lib Dems, but not as much as their poor overall increase in votes. That said, the 2010 of 57 seats for 23.6 percent of the national vote is one of their worst in quite some time -- compared to 62 seats for 22.5 in 2005 for example.

2.Internet pollsters overstated the Liberal Democrat share by about 5 points, whereas telephone pollsters produced figures that put the Lib Dems about 3 points too high. This suggests that selection bias from internet polling related to younger voters may be worth around 2 percent. Similarly, internet pollsters (excluding the dubious OnePoll) put Conservatives about 2 points low, consistent with the selection bias concerns we had.

3. Lastly, given that younger voters are the most volatile of all age groups, it is likely that there was some group of younger, less committed voters who responded strongly to polling but did not show up to vote. Similarly, it is possible that there was some sort of a response bias near the end of the campaign, where Lib Dem voters (empowered and excited for the first time in a while) were more likely to respond to pollsters than on average.

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

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GOP Taps Tampa

By some combination of luck, planning or fate, the two major parties in 2008 exhibited a particular regard for regional politics. The Interior West and Southwest had been the most competitive parts of the country in the two previous presidential elections, and at their convention in Interior West the Democrats proceeded to nominate a candidate from the largest city in the Midwest, while a week later at their convention in the Midwest the Republicans nominated a candidate from the largest city in the Interior West. Six of the nine states that Barack Obama swung back from George Bush and the Republicans in 2004 were in the Midwest and Southwest.

This past week the Republicans announced they will hold their 2012 convention in Tampa. Tampa beat out Salt Lake City and Phoenix. It is the first time a major party will hold its quadrennial national convention in the Sunshine State since 1972, when both parties convened in Miami Beach.

From a personal comfort standpoint, it was a horrible choice: It should be sizzling hot when the GOP convenes on August 27, 2012. (Tradition dictates that the Republicans, the party out of the White House, goes first; the Democrats have announced they will convene the following week, starting September 3.) Sweaty brows notwithstanding, was Tampa a good choice for the Republicans strategically, symbolically?

Yes, it was.

Obviously, Florida is not just a swing state but the largest competitive state in the country. (Only California, Texas and New York have more electoral votes, and none of those three as of now can be expected to be competitive in 2012.) Not only that, Tampa—unlike, say, Miami and Jacksonville—is one pole of the Tampa-Orlando I-4 corridor that represents a key swing part of this swing state. From a purple demography standpoint, it’s hard to find another city in the country with this much potential swing capacity. Though a case might be made for Denver or Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, I think my colleagues John Judis and Ruy Teixeira would concur.

Of course, convening in a particular city or state doesn’t necessarily guarantee that the party or candidate will consequently win that state or even generate greater electoral support. (McCain/Palin and St. Paul in 2008 is just the most recent example.) But anyone who remembers the 2008 crowds in Denver for Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at Invesco Field in August and at another huge rally in late October would be hard pressed to make the case that picking Denver had no effect on Obama’s eventual, 9-point victory in Colorado.

Electoral College geography aside, the other and far more controversial storyline is the potential symbolism of Tampa from a race/ethnicity standpoint, particularly with the widening immigration fight between the parties. The New York Times' Jeff Zeleny raised the immigration angle in his story about the announcement:

Republican leaders dismissed the suggestion that immigration was a factor in Tampa’s selection over Phoenix.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” said Randall Pullen, chairman of the Arizona Republican Party. “Republicans from coast to coast stand with Arizonans as we fight to secure our border.”

Of course, it's not like Tampa is Fargo, or Florida is Vermont. The I-4 corridor is a growing destination for the Puerto Rican American community, and of course there's the huge Cuban population in South Florida and ample number of Mexicans (not to mention non-Latino) immigrants in the state. My point is that even if the GOP had selected Fargo, immigration will still be a controversial subject that week and throughout the 2012 presidential cycle. Though there would of course have been both pro- and anti-immigration demonstrations had Phoenix been chosen, I'm betting thing will still get tense in Tampa.

In any case, pack your sunscreen and battery-operated personal fans--and maybe a Spanish-English dictionary--because it's gonna be hot, hot, and politically hotter in Tampa in 2012.

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Don't Take Polling Literally, Part #39916

Public Policy Polling found this interesting result in their national survey earlier this week:



That's right: 21 percent of respondents said the spill in the Gulf makes them more likely to support further offshore drilling efforts.

When I tweeted about this the other day, people assumed that I was making fun of the people who selected this response, or perhaps the pollster. But I'm not really doing either.

First, insofar as the pollster goes, this is actually the correct, Polling 101 way to frame the question. You want your questions to be neutral and balanced. You don't want to lead the respondent toward any particular response or make assumptions about which responses they might consider "reasonable". For instance, rather than ask "Do you think Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or not?", you're better off asking "Do you think Barack Obama was born in Kenya, in the United States, in Indonesia, or somewhere else?". That's a balanced question. Importance questions, e.g. "How important is the inclusion of a public option in the health care bill: Very important, somewhat important, or not at all important?", are hard to balance and should usually be avoided; they almost never tell you anything useful. So the pollster has committed no real fault here.

At the same time, if you do give people an "illogical" response, sometimes they're going to pick it! This question was immediately preceded by one about support for offshore drilling overall. It may be that some of the respondents had an instinct to dig in their heels and wanted to appear consistent, using the question to reaffirm the support for offshore drilling that they'd already expressed. That is, saying that the spill makes you more likely to support offshore drilling may not literally be true but instead may mean something more along the lines of "you're damned right I support offshore drilling!".

It may also be that some people were confused by the question, or were not paying much attention to it. A lot of people might have taken PPP's call while ironing their clothes, or watching TV, or getting their kids ready for soccer practice. They might have been zoning out, and heard blah-blah-blah-blah oil spill blah-blah-blah-blah more, and thought it was the choice used to express that they had become more concerned -- not more supportive -- of offshore drilling. There is arguably some evidence of this in that the percentage of people selecting this response feel a bit off and do not always track underlying opinions about offshore drilling. For instance, 17 percent of liberals picked the "more likely" response, even though only 33 percent of them supported offshore drilling to begin with, and 29 percent of African-Americans did, even though just 44 percent of them support offshore drilling.

These issue may be exacerbated by the fact that PPP uses automated polling technology; a human interviewer is more likely to command the full attention of the subject.

By the way, there's an interesting discussion to be had about whether the spill in the Gulf should make us more concerned about offshore drilling, or whether it was an essentially random event that should already have been priced into our assessments, in the same way that the risk of earthquakes is something you should already be thinking about when you're trying to decide whether to buy a home in San Francisco and so you shouldn't flee the city after one occurs. My personal take is that the fact that a spill occurred does not change the equation much, but the fact that it's been so hard to stop and to contain, and that the public may wind up bearing a lot of a private business's risks, possibly does.

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White House Case for Specter Support Unpersuasive

I don't believe in any Eleventh Commandment. I think the Democratic Party apparatus has every right to intervene in a primary battle when they expect to gain some strategic advantage from doing so. Sometimes (not always), cutting off a primary challenge at the pass is in the best interest of a party. Sometimes (not always) one of the candidates can do more to support the legislative agenda. Sometimes (not always) one of the candidates has a clear electability advantage. If you want to intervene under these circumstances, intervene away.

But it's hard to see what OFA and the White House are getting by intervening on behalf of Arlen Specter.

Look, I get it: Arlen Specter did the White House a huge favor. He switched parties, costing the Republicans about a dozen news cycles and possibly their ability to defeat health care. Earlier in Obama's term, while still a Republican, Specter had supported the stimulus package. And he's been a very reliable liberal vote since last summer (perhaps not coincidentally, when Sestak announced his challenge). You don't want to discourage anyone from moving in your direction; I was skeptical of Sestak's challenge for that reason. I'm also skeptical that, over the long-run, Sestak's going to wind up being any more liberal than the current reboot of Arlen Specter.

But the primary challenge has happened. In fact, it's coming to fruition next week. The cat's out of the bag. And we shouldn't forget the one clear advantage of a primary challenge: it provides a candidate with a dress rehearsal for November, and gives a party some option value in picking its candidate.

So far, Joe Sestak has made the most of that dress rehearsal. He's pulled into a near tie with presumed GOP nominee Pat Toomey in both Quinnipiac and Rasmussen polling, whereas Specter trails in the same polls by 7 and 12 points, respectively.

There's a good mechanism to explain the change: Sestak wasn't very well known before, but now he's becoming more so. We have to be a bit careful, though, because there's sometimes a bounce surrounding a primary battle than can later dissipate. (See also: Deeds, Creigh).

But if there's a bounce, why hasn't Specter received one? Instead, in the Quinnipiac poll, Specter's favorability ratings have dropped eight points among the November electorate.

Specter is not going to win very many votes among Republicans, the party which he deserted last year. Independents view him negatively: 30-58, in the Quinnipiac poll. The only way he's going to win (and it's a necessary rather than sufficient condition) is with monstrous, enthusiastic Democratic support.

So if that support is there, let's see it. Let's see him beat Joe Sestak, who is not an overwhelmingly brilliant candidate. Let's see if he can clear that hurdle. Democrats have benefited from his flip-flops -- in a clear and tangible way. If they're not going to get his back, then who do you think will?

And let him do it on his own. Let Pennsylvania decide. You've done enough to pay back the favor.

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Political Comebacks, Compliments of Las Malvinas

From 538's Tom Dollar

When Argentina went to war with the UK in 1982 over the Falkland Islands, Jorge Luis Borges likened it to "a fight between two bald men over a comb." Last February, British oil companies began to explore in Falklands waters. Argentina declared this was a violation of its sovereignty: it continues to claim the Falklands, called las Islas Malvinas in Spanish, as an integral part of its territory--even enshrining the claim in its Constitution.

For a few weeks it seemed as if these two bald men would fight another battle, though this time of words and not of weapons. Initial geological tests showed little petroleum, and tensions cooled down to their normal state of disagreement. A second test last week showed much bigger reserves, threatening to set things aflame once again (though the recent disaster in the Gulf of Mexico may make all parties less keen on deepwater drilling). Potential oil reserves aside, what is it about these treeless, windswept, South Atlantic islands that arouses such great passions?

Well for one thing, passion over the Malvinas rests almost entirely on the Argentine side. Understanding why requires a bit of political history. From hearing Argentina's stance (and this issue is one of few that unite left and right--more on that in a bit), you'd think that the Malvinas were the great spiritual homeland of the Argentine people--Kosovo times Jerusalem plus Mt. Ararat--and that the British takeover in 1833 must have resulted in the displacement of thousands, if not millions, of Argentines.

In truth, Argentina never maintained a permanent settlement on the islands. Prior to 1833 no one had; there is little evidence that even pre-Columbian peoples stayed there long-term. The islands had been alternately claimed by Spain, France, the UK and the US, which used the islands as a way-station for fishing, whaling and seal-hunting. Upon independence, Argentina (then the United Provinces of the River Plate) retained Spain's claim under the principle of uti possidetis juris, and briefly used the Falklands as a penal colony in the 1820s.

After the Royal Navy asserted control over the islands in 1833 (primarily to prevent Monroe-indoctrinated Americans from taking them), they were settled by Welsh and Scottish sheepherders. The Falklanders--who are culturally, ethnically and linguistically British and wish to remain so--have lived there continuously for over 170 years. They claim the right to self-determination under the UN Charter.

To Argentina, the Falklands are an illegal outpost of an alien power, a last vestige of European colonialism in South America. Argentina maintains that the right of self-determination does not apply to the Falklanders, because they are not the Islands' indigenous population. This position takes a fair amount of chutzpah coming from Argentina, which is itself a country of European settlers, and which expanded to its present borders through a series of wars, incursions and territorial aggrandizement.

As such, bringing up the Malvinas is the dog-wagging, Hail Mary pass, trump card for floundering politicians from the left and right. When Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri--leader of the military Junta then in power -- ordered the invasion in 1982, he meant it to distract the populace from an economic crisis and forced disappearances at home. It worked brilliantly, sparking an outpouring of patriotic fervor and massive pro-Junta demonstrations--until the UK unexpectedly (to Argentina) retaliated, took back the Falklands, and dealt the Junta a fatal blow.

Since the restoration of democracy in 1983, the Malvinas situation has provided a good font of political theater for Argentine presidents. Argentina will now refrain from invading the islands by force, as it is now clear that Britain would retaliate--and win. Nor will Britain ever negotiate the sovereignty of the Islands as long as the Falklanders express the overwhelming desire to remain British. (And the fact the Argentina invaded in 1982 only hardens this position.)

But there is also little incentive for Argentina to abandon its claim--and considerable intangible benefit to maintaining it. "Melting pot" nations, like Argentina and the United States, require invented instruments of social cohesion to make up for a lack of ethnic unity. These can be political and economic institutions (historically weak in Argentina), shared culture, and national mythology. Irredentism unites left and right in the common belief that "we wuz robbed," and allows diametrically (and violently) opposed factions to unite behind a common cause. Marxist student groups at the Universidad de Buenos Aires can believe in the same Malvinas myth as the old Junta did--amazing, given that 30 years ago the same Junta was torturing them and throwing them out of airplanes.

This left-right alliance brings us back to the current posturing by Peronist President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Fernández, like her husband and predecessor former President Néstor Kirchner, claims to inherit the social justice, economic populist legacy of Perón's first presidency--most associated with his wife Evita (Fernández has actively promoted her Nueva Evita image). Mr. Kirchner was elected president in 2003 on the heels of Argentina's economic meltdown.

La crisis, as it's known, was precipitated by the unsustainable policy of one-to-one peso-dollar convertibility that existed during the 90s (see analogy with Greece ). Convertibility was one component of the Washington Consensus policies of then-President Carlos Menem (also a Peronist--partisan identity is complicated in Argentina). Others included privatization of state industries, "carnal relations" with the United States and NATO, and a restoration of diplomatic relations with Britain. Though Argentina continued to claim the Falklands during this time, Foreign Minister Guido di Tella pursued a soft-pitch approach, sending every child on the Islands a toy once a year.

Kirchner took his election to be a rejection of all things Menem. He re-nationalized industries, broke with Washington in favor of closer ties with Venezuela and other Latin American countries, and played up his spread-the-wealth credentials. He also took a hard line against the former military dictatorship, reopening prosecutions against Junta officials fifteen years after they were pardoned by Menem. The Kirchners forced themselves to walk a fine line: placating their poor and working-class base, without frightening the Argentine business interests and foreign investors needed for recovery. This has not been an easy task, and in the last two years, President Fernández has stumbled from one mini-crisis to another.

Therefore, the Malvinas issue is an easy rallying cry--not only within Argentina, but to unite other Latin American countries behind it against European "colonialism." Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales have vociferously demanded that Britain turn the Falklands over to Argentina. Even more moderate leaders like President Lula of Brazil and President Calderón of Mexico have come to answer Fernández' call for unified Latin American support.

Even US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered to moderate discussions between the UK and Argentina over the Islands. This is a tactful and costless way to demonstrate that the United States under President Obama is a Good Neighbor to its fellow American nations. Presumably, Clinton understands full well that Britain will no more negotiate the sovereignty of the Falklands with Argentina than the US will negotiate the sovereignty of Hawaii with Japan or Morocco with the Western Sahara. The result is a perfect diplomatic charade -- everyone looks good, but no one has to do anything.

Still, Fernández has problems that can't be covered up by Malvinas posturing. Shortly after succeeding her husband in 2007, she pushed for a dramatic increase in export tariffs on beef. This infuriated the cattlemen's association, which shut down rural roads with protests. The Senate ultimately rejected the tariff increase after Vice President Julio César Cobos cast a tie-breaking vote against the president (as in the US, the president and vice president are elected on the same ticket). Inflation is over 20 percent, despite the statistics bureau's official estimates that place it under 10 percent. The government re-nationalized Aerolíneas Argentinas and took over the country's largest pension fund, which critics have called a cash-grab to meet debt obligations.

Despite calling early congressional elections last summer, a coalition of anti-Kirchner parties took over both houses of Congress. The vultures have begun to circle, and opponents are lining up for the 2011 presidential election--including Vice President Cobos. Still, this has not made the president any more conciliatory (conciliation is difficult when you see your opponents as "coup-plotters" -- in a country where coup-plotting means something). She fired Central Bank President Martín Redrado last January, jeopardizing the Bank's supposed autonomy. Her attempt to appoint a new president then appeared to be doomed in the Senate due to lack of a quorum. The appointment was saved only at the last minute by the miraculous appearance (and vote to abstain) of...Carlos Menem, now a senator from La Rioja province.

So with the writing on the wall, the Kirchners perhaps should be plotting their political resurrection in a few years' time. While in American politics, there are seldom second acts (for some reason we never saw Senator Nixon, Republican of California, nor Secretary of Agriculture Larry Craig of Idaho), in Argentina they are a way of life. While the political wave of the Malvinas is likely to raise the Cobos and Menem boats and lower the Kirchners', the next time around the rallying cry of the Falklands may sweep the Kirchners back from the political hinterlands.
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This article was authored by research assistant Thomas Dollar. Please send comments or suggestions to sexton538@gmail.com

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Kagan, New York, and "the Heartland"

One of the negative memes that floating around about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is that she's a lifelong New Yorker in a Court where Gotham is already overrepresented, and that this background suggests she has no understanding of the values and experience of most Americans, who hail from the "Heartland."

This argument was made very explicitly by Kathleen Parker in a Washington Post column today, which refers to Kagan's Big Apple background and yes, her Judaism, as indicating an entrenched cosmopolitan and liberal worldview that is "miles away from mainstream America."

Aside from the unsavory history of prejudice against New Yorkers and Jews--not to mention New York Jews--as representing an alien presence in America, Parker also seems to be channeling the recent conservative tendency to divide the country into "real American" areas and, well, those that are not so real or not so American. Indeed, you sometimes get the sense that the "heartland" is co-extensive with zip codes that vote Republican.

But is there any merit to the idea that Obama is loading the Court with too many New Yorkers whose entire life experience is in a liberal Democratic cocoon? Let's take a look at some history.


If Elena Kagan is confirmed, the Court will have three Justices--as it happens, all Democrats--who were residents of New York when nominated. (A fourth, Antonin Scalia, spent most of his formative years in New York City, but as the intellectual leader of the Court's conservative wing, he doesn't exactly illustrate the insulated-liberal-environment theory.)

Is that an unprecedented dominance of the Court by New Yorkers? Actually, it's not. From 1932 to 1941, there were also three New Yorkers (as determined by residence at appointment) on the Court, one (Harlan Stone) appointed by Calvin Coolidge and the other two (Charles Evans Hughes--who once lived on the same block where Elena Kagan grew up--and Benjamin Cardozo) appointed by Herbert Hoover. Hughes was Chief Justice for eleven years (1930-1941), followed by Stone for another five years.

In all, fourteen New Yorkers have been appointed to the Supreme Court before the current batch arrived. If you recognize that New York has been generally considered the legal as well as the financial capital of the country for much of our history, these numbers aren't surprising.

More to the point, is it fair to suggest that Elena Kagan has spent her life in a virtual ghetto of liberal Democratic sentiments, isolated from broader political and social currents? That idea reflects a stereotype of the city and state of New York that's never been entirely accurate. Kagan was born in 1960. During the course of her lifetime, New York City has had Republican mayors for 21 of her 50 years. New York State has had Republican governors for 26 of her 50 years. As far as cosmopolitanism goes, Kagan's most important experience was in a federal administration headed by an Arkansan and a Tennessean.

But can anyone who grew up on the sidewalks of New York really understand an American "heartland" characterized by small towns and rural areas? Maybe not, but neither can the 80% of Americans who live in metropolitan areas. And this gets to the mythical nature of "the heartland," many of whose residents have more in common with middle-class New Yorkers than with the sturdy peasant stock of yore. In terms of this meme, it's revealing that Sarah Palin, who hails from Alaska, one of the two least typical American states (the other being Hawai'i) is reflexively considered a classic representative of "the heartland" and of "real Americans." That shows how artificial the construction really is.

The more you probe it, the "not from the heartland" criticism of Kagan is pretty far along the slippery slope that leads from stereotypes to bigotry. And in any event, the idea that demographic background is some sort of reliable indicator of judicial temperament or philsophy has always been dubious. The liveliest liberal of the twentieth-century Court, William O. Douglas, was hardly a big-city elitist; he was born in Minnesota and grew up in poverty in Yakima, Washington. The iconic leader of the Warren Court, Earl Warren, far from being a cosseted legal monk, was a very successful politician, and governor of California when the state was not that cosmopolitan. The first Amendment absolutist Hugo Black was an Alabama politician aligned with the Ku Klux Klan. The primary author of Roe v. Wade, Harry Blackmun, was a Minnesotan with a narrow background as legal counsel for the Mayo Clinic.

Conservatives are understandably frustrated by Kagan's lack of a "paper trail" with which to divine her specific position on constitutional issues, though her high-level work in two administrations and as Dean of Harvard Law School, and her close association with President Obama, makes her far less than a complete mystery. But they should probably steer clear of slurs on her background--and that would include innuendoes about her sexual orientation as well as her place of birth and religion-- that are not obviously germane, but are very obviously conducive to prejudice.

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Mollohan Loss Costly for Democrats, Scary for Incumbents

Fourteen-term incumbent Alan Mollohan was defeated in the Democratic primary in West Virginia's 1st Congressional District last night, losing 56-44 to state senator Mike Oliverio. Turnout was moderate -- about 66,000 voters; by way of comparison, about 111,000 voters turned out in WV-1 in 2008 when Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly defeated Barack Obama in the state's Presidential primary.

Although this race had frankly not been on our radar screen, Mollohan's defeat did not come out of the blue. Mollohan and Oliverio's camps had released dueling polls each showing themselves ahead in the primary, and around $1 million was spent between them -- a large sum for a House primary in a district with cheap television markets.

The causes for Mollohan's defeat are somewhat overdetermined. On the one hand, he has often been the subject of corruption allegations, which Oliverio emphasized. But Oliverio also ran to Mollohan's right on policy issues, criticizing him for his support of health care reform and for not opposing cap-and-trade fiercely enough (although Mollohan ultimately voted against it.)

In addition, obviously, there is significant anti-incumbent sentiment within the country which seems to cross all political boundaries. While Mollohan lost to a challenge from his right -- not incredibly shocking in a state where just 34 percent of the Democratic primary electorate describes itself as liberal -- incumbents of all kinds are having problems:

-- Republican Senator Bob Bennett was eliminated at Utah's nominating convention last week by Tea Party-supported candidates.

-- Also in Utah, Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson was forced into a primary after delegates gave 45 percent of their votes to Claudia Wright, a retired schoolteacher who ran sharply to his left.

-- Arlen Specter appears more likely than not to lose to Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania next week. Sestak has made a point of running to Specter's left, although polling indicates ambiguous patterns of preferences according to voter ideology. (In Rasmussen's cross-tabs [gated], Sestak leads 56-39 among liberal primary voters but also 51-38 among conservatives; Specter leads 46-37 among self-described moderates.)

-- Recent polling shows Democratic challengers closing on incumbent Senators Richard Burr in North Carolina and Chuck Grassley in Iowa.

-- John McCain, having released this strange ad, seems to be nervous about his position in Arizona, where J.D. Hayworth is challenging him and has been close in some polls.

We scarcely need to mention, of course, how many Democratic incumbents are liable to lose their general election bids.

Regardless of its national implications, this is a costly loss for Democrats. Although Mollohan voted against the Democrats on cap-and-trade -- a yea vote is nearly untenable in Coal Country -- and was a member of the Stupak Bloc, he voted with the Democrats on essentially all other key issues and rated as the 8th-most valuable Democrat overall, considering the conservativeness of his district. Oliverio, by contrast, seems opposed to the Democrats on nearly every issue, and has even hedged on whether or not he'd support Nancy Pelosi for Speaker. He is basically riding on the coattails of the Democratic brand, which is still powerful in West Virginia even though the state has long been conservative on social issues and is increasingly becoming so on economic ones. National Democrats have virtually no reason to support him in the general election, which should probably be regarded as a toss-up in the absence of polling.

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Con-Lib Pact Brings Cameron to PM's Chair

So after all the political battles, intrigues, polling vagaries and mistaken projection, it's out with Brown and in with a coalition government led by new Prime Minister David Cameron and deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.

The Lib Dems, after long negotiations and debates with both Labour and the Conservatives have gone in with the Tories to build a 363 seat governing majority, built on the Conservatives 306 seats and the Liberal Democrats 57. They are likely to pull the support of the 8 DUP MPs (the larger of the Unionist parties in Northern Ireland) on matters of government confidence and budget.

While the marriage of Lib and Con seems rather counterintuitive at first glance, given the Lib Dems self-proclaimed center-left stances, Liberal-Conservative coalitions are quite common in European politics. In Germany, the liberal "Free Democrats" joined with Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats to form the current center-right government. In France, Sarkozy's UMP includes the centrist-liberal "Democratic Movement" party. While by no means identical in their ideologies, both of these share the Lib Dems affiliation in the European Parliament with the "Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe" (ALDE).

Of course, the first question being asked is whether the coalition can survive beyond the first crisis of political difference. While the Liberal Democrats have extracted promises of electoral reform, raising of minimum taxes, and have picked up several key cabinet posts, they have had to concede to many Tory priorities on foreign policy and immigration. While there is some room for error in the case of a Liberal MP revolt on confidence or budget issues, Labour will be working hard to undermine the legitimacy of the government.

One element that will be curious to watch will be the strategy of Labour, as the party revamps and retools. Will they go the route of the Canadian Liberals and aim to keep a snap election from occurring, in order to give David Cameron and Nick Clegg the pleasure of taking credit for the inevitable public belt-tightening that will have to take place, the swoop in with avengence in 2 or 3 years. Or will they quickly name new leadership and set to work lobbying the leftist bloc of the Liberal Democrats, who may be less than pleased to be in cahoots with the Tories.

All told, however, if the coalition manages to stay in place for some time and electoral reform empowers minor parties for future elections, many more coalition agreements and governments may be in the cards for Britain. Of course, balancing representation of public opinion and stability of government is always a tricky subject for a society to navigate. As such, it seems that the results of May 6th are not the conclusion to the story, but just the introduction to a political battle for the next few years.
---
Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international affairs columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

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Value Over Replacement Justice

Not that you should care what this number-cruncher thinks, but I'm having trouble formulating an opinion over Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court. On the one hand, the case for her does not jump off the page. For someone who's essentially billed as a legal scholar -- and I think we should have some people like that on the Court, just as we have some who come from more applied backgrounds -- her scholarly record is not overwhelming. It's also not underwhelming, as Eugene Volokh makes clear -- in fact, judging by the number of citations her articles have received, it's rather impressive in context. But she hasn't crossed the Rubicon to become an intellectual heavyweight in the way that, say, a Cass Sunstein or a Larry Lessig has -- not that it would help her chances of nomination if she had.

On the other hand, the case against her is also a bit bric-à-brac. In particular, the insinuation that she might not be a fairly reliable liberal Justice -- if one cares about such things -- is a bit naive. Everything from Kagan's background to her service on behalf of two Democratic administrations to the testimony of many, many of her colleagues and associates suggests that her basic worldview is that of a liberal, if one who does not see herself as a party to any grand project or movement.

The most tangible thing that we know about Kagan is her age: she's 50. That's relatively young for a Supreme Court justice, younger than six current members of the court at the time of their nomination and tied with two others (Roberts and Scalia). It's especially young for a woman, as women have longer life expectancy. By contrast, the next-most-likely choice, Seventh Circuit Judge Diane Wood, is 59.

Suppose that Wood, who indeed has a longer and more transparent record of liberal jurisprudence, could be counted on to vote with the liberals on the Court essentially always, or at least always on votes where her position would make the difference in the outcome of a case. Suppose that, on the other hand, there is a 10 percent chance that Kagan would swing the vote to a conservative decision on any particular issue. If your goal is to maximize the liberalness of the Court over the long-run (not that it necessarily should be), how much does Kagan's age make up for this?

According to standard actuarial tables, a 59-year-old woman can be expected to live for another 24 years, and a 50-year old woman 32. That's quite a large difference: we might expect Kagan to serve on the court about one-third longer than Wood, all else being equal.

What we can essentially do is calculate each woman's VORJ -- Value Over Replacement Justice. (The reference comes a statistic called VORP -- Value Over Replacement Player -- that was developed by my colleagues at Baseball Prospectus.) We'll assume that, were Kagan or Wood to die, they'd be replaced by a justice who was equally likely to be liberal or conservative, and would have a 50 percent chance of siding with the liberals on any particular case.

Wood's VORJ, we'll assume, begins at 50, since we're supposing that she'll side with the liberals 100 percent of the time rather than 50 percent for her replacement. Kagan's starts at 40: the 90 percent of the time we've supposed she'd vote with the liberals, less the 50 percent baseline.

As we go out into the future, however, the Justices become less valuable as they are less likely to survive. For instance, Wood has about an 18 percent chance of no longer being with us 15 years hence, so we'd have to subtract that fraction from her VORJ.

After about 20 years, Kagan overtakes Wood even though she's less liberal, because she's more likely to have survived. She continues to provide excess value over Kagan from that point forward, until we reach a period 40+ years out where both women are almost certain to be dead. On balance, Kagan's lifetime expected VORJ is actually higher than that of Kagan's (1,280 rather than 1,206, if you care), assuming that she'll defect from the liberals 10 percent of the time whereas Wood never will.



On the other hand, perhaps it's appropriate to apply a discount factor, since we arguably should care more about what happens now than what happens 30 or 40 years hence. In addition to the usual reasons for applying a discount factor (we're alive now and allowed to be a bit selfish -- and besides, who knows when that asteroid is going to hit and render the Supreme Court moot), there might be some especially good reasons to do so in this instance as we know the Court is about evenly divided now on many issues and as assumptions about judicial philosophy become less reliable as we go out in time. If we apply a discount rate of 5 percent, the present value of Wood's VORJ is somewhat higher: 685 rather than 632 for Kagan. (In fact, Wood's score exceeds Kagan's for any discount rate of 1.7 percent or higher).



The numbers we've looked at here are trivial to calculate, and arbitrary to the point of meaninglessness. The point is simply that (i) Kagan's relative youth is of some quite tangible value and goes a long way toward mitigating any concern that liberals might have about her judicial philosophy; and (ii) the precise extent to which it has value depends on how much we weight the near-term future of the Court versus the longer-term one. These things, of course, ought to be reasonably obvious, but sometimes they get lost in the pitched and abstract discourse over Court appointments.

EDIT: Obviously an area that I didn't get into here is the relative health of the two women. I feel a little uncomfortable speculating about that -- so I won't.

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UK Forecasting Retrospective

Our UK forecasting model, which tried to improve upon the deficiencies inherent in uniform swing, performed underwhelmingly. We went out on something of a limb here, and sometimes when you do that, the limb breaks! But let me distract you with some pretty pictures.

This is a comparison of Labour's vote in 2005 to their vote in 2010 in each individual constituency. English and Welsh seats are indicated in red, and Scottish seats in blue. Constituencies in Northern Ireland are not graphed all. Nor is Thirsk & Malton, where the vote was postponed because of the death of the UKIP candidate, nor the consistencies of Buckingham or Glasgow North East, where the current and former Speakers reside and where the election is essentially nonpartisan.



Was the swing against Labour uniform? In one sense it was, in that in the aggregate it was fairly linear. On the other hand, there was quite a bit of variance from constituency to constituency. Scotland -- where Labour in fact improved their share of the vote -- is the most obvious example of this, but even within England and Wales, the vote was not especially neatly distributed and it was fairly commonplace for Labour to perform 5 or more points better, or 5 or more points worse, than uniform swing would have predicted.

The Conservatives' swing, on the other hand, was quite uniform and quite well behaved:



But for the Liberal Democrats, it was quite erratic. Although they received about the same share of the vote overall, they did much better in some constituencies and much worse in others, in comparison with last time around. Moreover, these variances tended to be largest in seats where the Liberal Democrats began with enough of the vote to be competitive.



In comparison to other recent elections, the distribution of votes was somewhat less well predicted by the outcome of the previous one, particularly for Labour, as there was more variance according to geography and demography. (Perhaps the UK's electorate is gradually becoming more like ours in the United States). As a result of this, the root mean square error (RMSE) associated with uniform swing was higher than in previous elections.



So, did our fancy, non-uniform model do any better than uniform swing? Nope. Although, it also did not do any worse. It was somewhat better than uniform swing at forecasting Labour's vote, but worse for Conservatives. It was about equal in predicting the vote for the Liberal Democrats, as well as the Labour-to-Conservative swing.

(Note: the statistics below reflect the performance of the models now that we know the distribution of the nationwide vote. Neither uniform swing nor the 538 model are designed to forecast the national vote; instead they translate it into individual constituencies, such as to forecast a seat count.)



Keep in mind, however, that our model did apply a regional adjustment, whereas a naive version of uniform swing does not. Thus, most of the skill that it demonstrated stemmed from its ability to account for the non-uniform voting patterns in Scotland and some other regions. Ignoring Scotland, the model performed about the same as uniform swing on Labour's vote and somewhat worse for the other two parties. A uniform swing approach with a regional adjustment -- like the ones used by our friends/rivals at PoliticsHome -- would have outperformed both models and done fairly well.

At the same time, it's a bit of a stretch to chalk this election up as a success for uniform swing. On a constituency-by-constituency basis, uniform swing was less accurate than in previous elections and wasn't able to capture the odd dynamics that governed the performance of the Liberal Democrats. Had the LibDem surge held, it might have done rather poorly in projecting the seat count.

On the other hand, there isn't an especially obvious replacement for it. Making alternate assumptions (like proportional swing) about the governing function that dictates the shift in the votes from one election to the next did not improve upon uniform swing this year and have been either marginally worse or marginally better in previous elections.

Ultimately, we are suffering from a real paucity of data. A fundamental problem of psephology is that elections occur only so often and so the sample sizes are not large. But at least in the United States, we have a real abundance of data associated with each election cycle, such as extremely robust polling both before and after elections, which provides much more information on preferences by locality and demographic group. To the extent that swings in electoral preferences are non-uniform, it is almost always possible to explain them robustly after the fact (e.g. "Reagan did especially well with working-class whites"), and quite often possible to anticipate them ahead of time.

At a bare minimum, it is disappointing that the BBC and other organizations do not do American-style exit polling, with detail on voting patterns by racial, religious, gender and economic class. Such exit polling would allow the pollsters to weight and calibrate their surveys more effectively, while also making additional tools available to forecasters. If we'd known, for instance, that Labour would lose relatively little of their vote among religious minorities and working-class city dwellers, but more among middle-class suburban whites, we could probably have done a relatively good job of forecasting the election, even without local-level data. Indeed, in an American context, these effects would be discussed and analyzed ad nauseum.

We'll never know for sure, but my sense is that all the macro-type forecasting models may have narrowly averted a disaster here, not because of any fault of the forecasters (although clearly our approach was overambitious) but because there's only so much one can do with such limited evidence. Even if the underlying behavior of voters is complex (as it surely is), relatively more complex models of their behavior usually require more data than is available here in order to have much chance of bettering simpler ones.

At the same time, I'm happy that we did this. Not that it wasn't disappointing -- it's always fun to be right! -- but were pretty explicit about disclaiming that it was a thought-experiment framed as a forecasting model, and it provoked a really good discussion. One of the flaws of academia is that incuriosity or laziness often masquerades as prudence; one of the flaws of punditry is that self-assuredness is often mistaken for actual insight. We try to walk a fine line between those extremes by being bold but showing our work and placing it into context. Kudos to the forecasters -- like the folks at PoliticsHome -- who made the best of the situation.

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The Protestant-Free Court

The religious, as opposed to ideological, composition of the U.S. Supreme Court has become less important to most people in recent decades. But it’s still being noticed that the proposed nomination of Elena Kagan to replace John Paul Stevens would create, for the first time, a Supreme Court with no professed Protestant Christians—instead, six Roman Catholics and three Jews.

When the burgeoning Catholic majority on the Court became an issue during the Sotomayor nomination debate, Andrew Gelman did a quick analysis here of the Court’s religious composition over the centuries, noting that Protestants were a long way from suffering any overall under-representation. It's a good time to look a little deeper at religious representation on the Court.

The Court has never been particularly representative of the public as a whole when it comes to religious diversity. The Catholic population of the US reached 12 million (or sixteen percent of the total population) by the beginning of the twentieth century, and has gradually increased ever since to well over seventy million (or one-fourth of the population). Yet today's six Catholics account for exactly half of the Catholic Supreme Justices ever appointed, out of 109 total (according to the most commonly cited source for this subject). That's compared to 35 Episcopalians, representing a denomination which has never numbered more than 3.4 million. Presbyterians (19 Justices) and Unitarians (10) are other grossly over-represented faith communities, while Baptists (3 Justices), Mormons (zero) and of course, the irreligious, are all under-represented.

It's interesting to compare the Supreme Court to the institution that reviews Court appointments, the U.S. Senate. In that body, Catholics (25) and Methodists (8) are almost perfectly represented as percentages of the population. As is the case historically with the Supreme Court, Presbyterians (14) and Episcopalians(7) are notably over-represented, but so too are Mormons (6), while Baptists (8) and the non-affiliated (none) are under-represented. There are also 13 Jews, with the most interesting historical factor being that none of them, for the first time since Jacob Javits was elected to the Senate in 1956, is a Republican.

If there is a lesson, it's that this is no longer a Protestant Nation, and that "fair" representation of religious communities in major national institutions takes some time. And since the unaffiliated are the least well-represented in public professions, it should be noted that they are undoubtedly well-represented in private practice. I'm reminded of the time when the wife of Sen. Bob Taft, then the leader of the conservative wing of the GOP, and the son of a Unitarian president and Chief Justice, was asked where her husband worshipped on Sunday mornings. "Burning Tree," she blurted out, referring to the congressional golf course. Such honesty is hard to imagine today.

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Sestakular!

I've gotten a couple of e-mails asking for comment on next week's Pennsylvania Senate primary, in which Joe Sestak appears to be surging against Arlen Specter and has overtaken him in new Rasmussen and Muhlenberg polling.



This is one of those times where the obvious answer seems to be the right one: the surge is probably real, and Arlen Specter may be in a great deal of trouble.

Yes, Muhlenberg's sample sizes are a bit small, and Rasmussen's polling has been a little weird this year. But there are no polls -- yet -- that contradict them (there are plenty of other polls, but they're out of date). In primary elections, late movement is often the rule rather than the exception, and that may be especially so in a race where one of the candidates (Sestak) started out with a substantial name recognition deficit, where a lot of voters had waited to make up their minds, and where one of the candidates (Sestak, again) had a spending strategy predicated on peaking at the right time.

Plus, it's not as though the minds of Pennsylvania Democrats are hard to read. Specter, although he's compiled a reliably liberal voting record since Sestak's challenge began, seems to be motivated primarily by political expediency. Sestak, for that matter, has been a bit opportunistic himself -- posing as a hardened progressive when his voting record is significantly more moderate -- but he's basically a Generic Democrat running somewhat to his left in the primary, as Generic Democrats usually do. His chances of winning the general election appear to be about even with Specter's from a statistical perspective, and are perhaps better going-forward as he has considerably less baggage. He ought to be a fairly comfortable choice for primary voters.

Bear in mind that primary polling in general is pretty bad, and that when it misses, it often misses in the same direction. So even if all the polls show Sestak with a 5-point lead in advance of Tuesday's voting, there'll still be a decent shot that he could lose. But the election now appears to favor him.

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On Kagan's Minority Hiring Record

Solicitor General Elena Kagan, whom Barack Obama is expected to announce as his nomination to the Supreme Court later today, is not without her critics. Among other things, questions have been raised -- in this case, by law professors Guy-Uriel Charles, Anupam Chandler, Luis Fuentes-Rowher, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig -- over Kagan's minority hiring record while she was Dean of Harvard Law School:

[Kagan] hired 32 tenured and tenure-track academic faculty members (non-clinical, non-practice). But when we sat down to review the actual record, we were frankly shocked. Not only were there shockingly few people of color, there were very few women. Where were the people of color? Where were the women? Of these 32 tenured and tenure-track academic hires, only one was a minority. Of these 32, only seven were women.

Although the critique by Charles, et. al. raises a number of interesting and perhaps uncomfortable questions, it is not beyond the realm of statistical analysis. How remarkable is it, for instance, that Kagan hired just one minority out of 32 faculty brought into tenure-track positions?

One place to start is the current composition of the faculty at the other Top 5 law programs (these are Stanford, Chicago, Columbia, and Yale). I went to the faculty directories for each school and identified (to the best of my ability) the women and racial minorities. It turns out that there are a lot of white men on the faculty at these programs:



Between the four schools, just 27 percent of the faculty are women and 12 percent are racial minorities. Harvard -- counting Kagan's hires as well as those made by others -- tracks these numbers almost exactly.

Obviously, these are rather low numbers, and there are many good questions that one might raise about that. But, let's put those aside for a moment and pose a strictly mathematical question. Suppose that, over the long-run, there was a 11.6 percent chance that each hire Kagan made was a minority. What are the odds that, over the short-run, just 1 of 32 hires would be?

They're actually fairly high. Assuming that there was an 11.6 percent chance that each hire she made was a minority, and that each hire was made independently of the previous one (that is, Kagan wouldn't be more inclined to offer her next job to a minority after giving the previous one to a white person, or vice versa), there is about a 10 percent chance (according to a binomial distribution) that she'd end up with either one or zero minorities after 32 hires.

Let me be very careful about this. I'm not endorsing the extreme whiteness of the faculty at elite law schools. It seems to me to be problematic. I'm just saying that it gives Kagan a very low bar to clear. If you had a basketball team -- let's call them the New Jersey Nets -- that won only about 12 percent of its games, it would not be that remarkable if they had a stretch where they won just once out of 32 tries.

However, there are two important facts that cut against this conclusion, one of which makes Kagan's record look better and the other of which makes it look worse.

On the one hand, many of these faculty have been around for years, and law school faculties are (quite gradually, evidently) becoming more diverse. That only 12 percent of the current faculty at these schools are minorities doesn't mean that just 12 percent of new hires will be.

I don't have statistics on the racial composition of recent hires at these schools. As of 2005, however, about 22 percent of those in the candidate pool at all law schools were minorities. If the benchmark were not 12 percent minority hires but 22 percent, Kagan's track record would be more damning. There is only about a 1 in 280 chance that someone who was trying to hire a minority 22 percent of the time would only do so only 1 time out of 32 on account of chance alone, according to the binomial distribution.

On the other hand, Harvard (likewise Yale, Chicago, etc.) is the sort of place where you go to end your career, and not necessarily to begin it. I imagine that they hire relatively few people straight out of school, instead waiting for them to build a track record of legal scholarship somewhere else. If these elite schools are hiring older faculty, on average, that might explain why they lag behind their peers (as they in fact do) when it comes to minority hiring. Effectively, they may be drawing from (say) 1997's hiring pool, when the percentage of minorities was lower. As about 30 percent of the students currently matriculating from Harvard Law are now minorities, these numbers will surely improve over time as the talented new graduates work their way through the system. But they'll take longer to boomerang back to Harvard than they will to other places.

Also, the comparisons we've been making are not quite apples-to-applies. Charles, et. al. looked only at tenure-track faculty, whereas the statistics above pertain to all permanent faculty whether tenure track or not. According to a response circulated by the White House, three of the 12 clinical law professors that Kagan were minorities, which would bring her overall batting average up to 4-in-44, or about 9 percent. That would be a very normal number of minority hires if the target were 12 percent (the fraction of minorities currently on the faculty at Top 5 schools), though still somewhat lagging if it were 22 percent (the percentage of minorities in the hiring pool) instead.

In sum, this would be very weak evidence on which to convict Kagan of an active attempt to discriminate (and accusation which nobody has in fact made). At the same time, she certainly does not appear to have made an active effort to increase the share of minorities on Harvard's faculty.

But in fact, there are two separate questions here: whether Kagan should have been concerned about minority hiring at Harvard Law, and whether she should have been concerned about the appearances thereof. They perhaps require two separate answers.

I think a lot of people in Kagan's position -- whether or not they held an affirmative goal of increasing the diversity of the faculty -- would tend to become self-conscious about their low number of minority hires after some time. After they'd hired 12 or 13 white people in a row -- some point at which the trend had become conspicuous -- they'd bend over backward to hire a minority candidate or two, perhaps bypassing more qualified candidates in the process. Then, after having "checked the box", they'd feel less pressure, and perhaps would be less likely than usual to hire a minority candidate for some period of time. In other words, I doubt that very many people, especially in academia, would truly make their hiring decisions independently of one another.

This evidently wasn't a problem for Kagan -- and unless you do want to accuse her of discrimination, it arguably speaks to certain kind of fair-mindedness. That is, she was treating every decision that came before her on a case-by-case basis, rather than behaving like the bad referee who calls a penalty on the next play to make up for a miscall on the previous one. To me, that potentially speaks to someone who has a strong ability to evaluate the evidence objectively and without regard to politics -- qualities I'd generally find desirable in a candidate for the Supreme Court.

At same time, it might also speak to someone who is independent-minded, perhaps to an extent that many of us would regard as stubborn in other realms of life. If this were the only window we had into Kagan's potential jurisprudence, it might suggest that she was more likely than usual to break from the liberal orthodoxy on some of the more idiosyncratic or implicitly political questions before the Supreme Court.

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Why Southern Republicans Are "Raising Arizona"

While Arizona has sparked the latest national furor over immigration policy, and Western Republican pols are dancing around the issue like it’s a bonfire (which, politically, it is), some of the most impressive and immediate repercussions have been in the Deep South, where conservatives are stampeding to express solidarity with the Arizona governor and legislature, and, in one case, to revive the English-Only chesnut. Why is that?

I’d suggest there are four inter-related factors: (1) newly visible and culturally threatening Hispanic populations, that (2) aren’t large or engaged enough to represent a significant voting presence; (3) red-hot Republican primaries; and (4) the difficulty of finding ways for Republican candidates to distinguish themselves in an atmosphere of monolithic conservatism on most issues.

It’s reasonably well understood that Hispanic immigration to the Deep South took off during the last decade. If you rank the states by the percentage increase in Hispanic population from 2000-2008, five of the top seven are in the South, with South Carolina (88.1%) ranked first, Arkansas fourth (82.1%), North Carolina fifth (79.8%), Georgia sixth (79.7%) and Kentucky seventh (76.3%). And in some states, the sheer number of Hispanics is reaching impressive heights, particularly for places with little or no prior diversity aside from African-Americans. Census estimates tell us there are now 777,000 Hispanics in Georgia, 685,000 in North Carolina, and 531,000 in Virginia.

While Hispanics are not distributed evenly in such states, nor are they disproportionately “hidden” in the anonymity of big cities. In my own home state of Georgia, it’s a rare small town that during the last decade hasn’t suddenly acquired an authentic family-owned Mexican restaurant or two, begun selling a few votive candles in convenience stores, or displayed signs and school instructional materials in Spanish. This has all happened very fast. In 1990, when visiting the north Georgia town of Gainesville, which bills itself as “The Poultry Capital of the World,” I was a bit surprised to spot a large sign at a used car dealer that simply said: Financiamos. Today Gainesville’s population is one-third Hispanic.

But even as Hispanics have become a regular (and to some, a disturbing) feature of Deep South life, they have not yet become a voting bloc significant enough to matter in all but scattered local elections. For a variety of reasons, including legal status, age, recent arrival and mobility, the percentage of southern Hispanics eligible to vote is very low. In fact, in the states of the Old Confederacy (excluding Florida and Texas), there were only two states as of 2006 in which Hispanics represented as much as 2% of eligible voters: Virginia at 2.8%, and Georgia at 2.3%. The Hispanic percentage of the population in these states in 2006 was, respectively, 6.8% and 7.4%.

So whereas in states with larger and more established Hispanic populations politicians considering anti-immigrant messages have to think seriously about blowback, there are no real negative consequences in the Deep South to offset the incentives for such rhetoric.

And not surprisingly, at least among Republicans, they are succumbing to the temptation to raise immigration as an issue in this year’s highly competitive Deep South primaries. Most notorious, so far, has been Alabama’s Tim James, for whom the pioneer of viral video, Fred Davis, prepared an ad in which the taciturn Christian Right businessman, who has been struggling to overcome Judge Roy Moore’s strength among his targeted constituency in a multi-candidate gubernatorial field, demands that driver’s tests be conducted only in English. “This is Alabama,” he says. “We speak English. If you want to live here, learn it.” The ad has earned James priceless attention, and so far, his rivals have criticized him only for failing to focus on illegal immigrants rather than foreign-language-speakers generally.

At about the same time as James’ ad, another struggling Deep South gubernatorial candidate, former congressman Nathan Deal, was making support for an Arizona-style law in Georgia his signature issue. Deal is mired in third place in most polls, and is battling the bad aroma of ethics charges that helped speed his resignation from Congress earlier this year. His base region is the highly immigrant-sensitive North Georgia mountain area (which includes the aforementioned chicken-processing town of Gainesville, along with the heavily-Hispanic-staffed carpet industry), which also happens to be the most heavily Republican part of Georgia.

Deal’s gambit hasn’t spurred his rivals to follow suit just yet, but it’s likely. Secretary of State Karen Handel, who’s running just ahead of Deal in most assessments of the race, is famous for championing a tough, controversial voter ID law that was generally understood in Georgia to be aimed more at Hispanics than at the traditional target of Republican "voter fraud" alarms, African-Americans. With the entire field sounding monotonously similar on most national issues, and equally prone to indulge in Tea Party rhetoric about state sovereignty and even nullification, it’s unlikely that Deal’s opponents will give him a monopoly on the immigration issue.

Arizona Fever has spread much more rapidly in South Carolina, where at the first GOP gubernatorial candidates’ forum after the Arizona law was enacted, all four candidates called for adoption of a similar law. The most distinctive note was sounded by Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, the man who created a national stir earlier this year for comparing beneficiaries of subsidized school lunches to “stray animals” who shouldn’t be encouraged to eat (he later apologized for the “metaphor,” but not for the sentiment). Bauer took the opportunity to suggest that South Carolina wouldn’t be a magnet for illegal immigrants if lazy welfare recipients were willing to work.

Legislation modeled on Arizona’s has already been introduced in Georgia and South Carolina, where Republican legislative control makes passage realistic (though not this year, since Georgia’s legislature has already adjourned and South Carolina’s is near adjournment), and will reportedly be introduced soon in North Carolina, where the GOP is battling to gain control of the legislature. What’s entirely lacking among Republicans in any of these states is a sense of restraint in dealing with the issue.

The Alabama gubernatorial primary is on June 1; South Carolina’s is on June 8; and Georgia follows on July 20. All three states have runoff systems requiring a majority of the vote for victory in a primary, and runoffs are certain in all three Republican contests. I’d be shocked if immigration didn’t become a key issue in Alabama and Georgia (unless, as in SC, every candidate marches in lockstep in favor of a clone of the Arizona law or something even more extreme), and it could spread to the highly competitive GOP gubernatorial primary in Tennessee. And that’s not even mentioning the general election, where GOP candidates in competitive races for both federal and state office around the Deep South may well choose immigration as a classic “wedge issue.”

Does this matter nationally? I’d say so, since the identification of the GOP with crackdowns on and deportation of undocumented workers, particularly if they are accompanied by fears of large-scale ethnic profiling by law enforcement officers, could matter a great deal with Hispanic voters. As the Prop 187 experience in California showed back in the 90s, party identification with nativist impulses doesn’t always stop at state lines--and that was back before the internet made every political utterance much more fungible. Moreover, the Arizona law is arguably a lot more controversial than Prop 187, which simply sought to eliminate public benefits for undocumented workers, not herd them onto buses in leg irons for immediate deportation. Behind the scenes, GOP strategists are said to be urging their candidates not to go there.

But candidates like Tim James, Nathan Deal and Andre Bauer are probably not very worried about the possibility of the national GOP alienating Hispanic voters for years to come; they are trying desperately to win primary elections in an atmosphere of great conservative enthusiasm where it’s tough to stand out from the Obama-hating, states-rights-loving crowd. The Arizona furor gives them a weapon to use, and they’ll use it, with any negative consequences for their party elsewhere or down the road being so minor a consideration that it may not even occur to them.

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Unemployment and Educational Achievement

Friday, the BLS released the latest employment report. As I noted on my blog, this was a blow-out report. However, there were several points which raise concern, the most obvious being the increase in U-6 from 16.9% to 17.1. The measure includes the unemployed along with other classifications of people such as those "marginally attached" to the labor force and those employed part-time for economic reasons. However, as the data below demonstrates, long-term unemployment is largely a function of educational achievement and industry.


Consider the following charts, which show the unemployment rate and median usual weekly earnings for various groups based on educational achievement:

For high school drop-outs, the unemployment rate never reaches 5% -- a statistical level economists argue is "full employment. Even during periods of economic expansion the rate of unemployment is high. Simply put, high school drop-outs face a difficult time even in good times. When bad times come, this demographic group experiences extreme difficulty.

Let's take a look at weekly wages for high school drop-outs:

The "median usual weekly earnings" of high school drop outs is currently $450, or $23,400/year -- not much money.

The unemployment rate for high school graduates does hit full employment, but only after the expansion is underway. They did fairly well during the 2001 recession, with unemployment rates barely above 5%. But they have been hit hard by the latest recession with unemployment rates of ~10%


The "median usualy weekly earnings" of this group is right around $625, or $32,500/year. This is OK, but still places them at or near the "one bad week and they're in serious economic trouble" camp.

The "some college or associates degree" had done well until this recession. Notice this group has always been near "full employment" of 5% until 2009 when their unemployment rate hit 8%.

The median usual weekly age for this group is around $725, giving them an median usual annual income of $37,700.

The unemployment rate for people who have college degrees and higher has always been below full employment. Even during the Great Recession this number has maxed out at 5% -- full employment.


Finally, this group has better earning power, with median usual weekly earnings (second quintile) of about $1025, or a median usual annual income of $53,300.

The data's results are very clear.

1.) Lower levels of educational achievement mean a higher rate of unemployment even in good economic times, and low earning potential.

2.) The higher the educational achievement, the less susceptible to economic events one becomes.

3.) Higher educational achievement means higher earnings.

Let's look a bit deeper into the job loss data. Below are two charts -- the first is total construction employment and the second is total manufacturing employment.


Both of these areas -- which typically attract lower educational attainment employees -- have been hit very hard in the latest recession. Construction has lost ~2 million employees and manufacturing has lost ~ 2.5 million. Neither of these areas is coming back soon. The US is very overbuilt and manufacturing is moving towards higher and higher rates of automation. This means the US has two choices: educate the unemployed so they can find better paying jobs or create jobs that these people can fill (or a combination of both).

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