Tuesday Night Live

4:40 AM [Nate]. Miller's leading is holding with about 71 percent of the vote reported -- but Alaska is apparently done counting until the morning. Speaking of which, I need to get to bed. Thank you immensely for your patronage of FiveThirtyEight over the past two-and-a-half years.

3:33 AM [Nate]. Miller retains the lead at 52-48 in Alaska with around half the vote counted, although the speculation is that Murkowski may recover as more vote comes in from the Alaskan wilderness, which benefits significantly from federal pork. Meanwhile, Ben Quayle was declared the winner in AZ-3 -- although with only 23 percent of the vote. The Democratic Gubernatorial primary in Vermont, meanwhile, remains much too close to call.

1:21 AM [Nate]. Tuned out there for a long while (my "dinner" of two Papaya Dogs and a Red Bull didn't give me as much staying power as I thought), but Lisa Murkowski -- surprisingly -- slightly trails Joe Miller with about a quarter of the vote in from Alaska.

11:33 PM [Ed]. Back in Vermont, AP finally got hold of the Burlington results a couple hours after the Burlington Free-Press reported them, and now with over 80% of the precincts reporting, Doug Racine leads Peter Shumlin by 199 votes, and Deb Markowitz by 545 votes. Regardless of who wins, admirers of the civil tone of this primary will be pleased that turnout seems to have considerably exceeded the pre-election estimates.

11:16 PM [Nate]. It's safe to assume that John McCain will be re-nominated.

11:13 PM [Ed]. While we were preoccupied with Florida and Vermont, the two GOP congressional runoffs in OK were decided, and neither was close. Of the two underfunded and little-known challengers to Dan Boren in OK-02, the older one, veterinarian Charles Thompson, defeated Daniel Edmonds by a 2-1 margin. Now we'll wait to see if the NRCC decides to make Thompson's campaign rich and famous.

In the higher-visibility OK-05 runoff for Mary Fallin's House seat, church camp director and political neophyte James Lankford beat Club for Growth endorsee Kevin Calvey by a surprising 65-35. Calvey got perhaps a bit too nasty against Lankford, and also strained credulity by trying to create an Oklahoma version of the Islamic/Shariah Law threat.

11:12 PM [Nate]. Ben Quayle's race is interesting, with four candidates between 16 and 22 percent of the vote. Quayle is on top for now though.

11:04 PM [Nate]. Good night so far for PPP, which unlike certain of its counterparts, had the temerity to poll actual elections.

11:02 PM [Nate]. McCain 63, Hayworth 26 in very early results.

10:59 PM [Nate]. Possible we'll get some quick calls in Arizona, which has been counting ballots for an hour, but has a state law preventing them from releasing the results until just about ... now.

10:55 PM [Nate]. The AP now has called it for Scott -- and for Boyd in FL-2.

10:43 PM [Ed]. AP hasn't called it for Scott yet, but 538 can, with two-thirds of Miami-Dade now in and Scott still up by more than 40,000.

10:38 PM [Nate]. Rasmussen -- which polled the McCain-Hayworth primary eight times in a race where there was some disagreement among pollsters -- was not willing to do so during the final four weeks of the campaign. Our pollster ratings are always becoming more sophisticated and we're going to be looking at appropriate ways to punish pollsters who dodge putting their necks on the line.

10:35 PM [Ed]. If Rick Scott does win, it's a good news/bad news scenario for Alex Sink and Florida Democrats. The good news is that most of the attack lines on Scott have already been aired, and only have to be reinforced; plus it really may take an effort to get Florida Republicans off their hands to help him. The bad news is that he's the East Coast Meg Whitman, and has about $175 million in net worth that's theoretically available to spend.

10:16 PM [Ed]. The McCollum-Scott race is all coming down to South Florida. With nearly three-fourths of the precincts reporting, Scott's lead is about 40,000 votes. Of 1946 precincts still out, 1597 are in just three counties: Miami-Dade, where McCollum's winning 63-30; Palm Beach, where he's winning 48-42; and Broward, where he's winning 48-46. It will definitely tighten up, but it's unclear whether there are enough votes out for McCollum to catch up.

10:13 PM [Nate]. There were some strong differences of opinion among pollsters in the Florida governor race, which Scott now looks increasingly likely to win.

9:54 PM [Nate]. Looks like Allen Boyd will hold on.

9:42 PM [Ed]. With a third of the precincts voting in VT, according to AP, Deb Markowitz leads Doug Racine by 14 votes, with Peter Shumlin back another 270 votes. That's with no votes in from Burlington or Chittendon County, which together normally cast about a fourth of the statewide Democratic vote.

But the Burlington Free Press is tweeting that Racine's won Burlington pretty handily, with Shumlin second and Markowitz third. So if that's right, Racine should soon pull into the strongest lead of the night.

9:36 PM [Nate]. We now have significantly more sophisticated methodology to handle three-candidate races in the Senate. Don't know that Kendrick Meek is likely to be terribly happy about the result that we'll show for him tomorrow. Even if he peels some votes off from Crist, it's going to be quite difficult for him to knock off both Crist and Rubio simultaneously. We assume super high variance in three-candidate races, but Meek's just not winning very many simulations.

9:09 PM [Nate]. Stata is almost done processing the Senate forecasting script. We're running "retro" forecasts every two weeks dating back to February 1st, so you can get a sense for how our model's sense of each race will have evolved over time.

9:04 PM [Ed]. With over half the precincts reporting in Florida, it looks to me like the thread Bill McCollum is holding onto in hoping for victory is the possibility that his buddy Jeb Bush will get him a huge win in Miami-Dade. Rick Scott has fought him to a draw in the Tampa-St. Pete area, beaten him in SW FL, and looks to be running even or better in the counties running from Melbourne down to Ft. Lauderdale. Scott is also winning Duval County handily. McCollum's Orlando base has largely already reported. There's not much in yet from the Panhandle, but Scott's winning Bay County (Panama City) easily.

Though only one precinct has reported in Miami-Dade, it looks like the early votes have been reported, and McCollum's winning better than two-to-one. He'll need that trend to continue.

8:59 PM [Nate]. Rubio's pretty good on the stump.

8:44 PM [Nate]. Blue Dog Allen Boyd and pretending-not-to-be-a-future-Blue-Dog Al Lawson locked in a tight battle in FL-2 so far. The vote is 51-49 so far, favoring Boyd, with Lawson having benefited from a strong vote in Leon County.

FL-24 is also looking very competitive on the Republican side.

8:30 PM [Ed]. AP called the Senate race for Meek because he was winning just about everywhere; better than 2-1 in Pinellas; 2-1 in Hillsboro and Sarasota; nearly 2-1 in Duval; 20 points in Brevard.

8:24 PM [Ed]. Very early returns from VT show expected close four-way race among Markowitz, Dunne, Shumlin and Racine. None of the larger towns or counties are in. Total turnout could fall under 40,000 votes.

8:22 PM. These next couple of weeks are going to be really important in the Florida general election campaign. Rubio is the one who has a good 30, 35 percent of the electorate locked away, where as Crist and Meek are probably in more direct competition for the center-left of the electorate. Crist can't afford to let Meek gain too much momentum after his convincing primary win tonight and I might expect some subtle movement toward his left. Or not-so-subtle, since Charlie Crist doesn't do subtle well.

8:17 PM. Wow, the AP has already called the race for Kendrick Meek. That was fast.

8:05 PM. No surprise based on late polling, but Kendrick Meek with a big lead over Jeff Greene, who may have had one of the more pointless candidacies this side of Fred Thompson.

8:00 PM. It's a busy night. We're just now spitting out the final run of our new-and-improved Senate model -- which will debut on NYTimes.com tomorrow. Meanwhile, I've got another 1,000 words or so to get into my editors, and we'll be at least trying to check in on the five states -- in literally every corner of the country -- which are holding some kind of primary election tonight.



We'll keep this slow-paced and sort of open-ended -- a necessity when polls don't close in Alaska until midnight. Perhaps later on in the evening, I can grab a tasty beverage and even take a few questions from the comments section. There's a lot of stuff that we're very excited to roll out for you over the next week or so.

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Money and Mud: A Preview of Florida's Two Big Statewide Primaries

Today's Florida primary features two marquee statewide races, one in each party, and a host of congressional contests. The overall atmosphere, however, is one of jaded cynicism and much-expressed contempt for the cost and negativity of this year's campaigns. Turnout may not reach 20%.

There's little doubt this mood is being driven by the Republican gubernatorial and Democratic senatorial races, both of which pit "establishment" candidates against wildly free-spending "outsiders" in campaigns dominated by bitterly personal attacks and counter-attacks. The "insiders," Republican Attorney General Bill McCollum and Democratic Rep. Kendrick Meek, are the best bet to win today, though McCollum's not a safe bet. Largely overshadowed by these slugfests, and by the general election rivalry between Republican Senate candidate Marco Rubio and incumbent Gov. Charlie Crist, running for the Senate as an independent, are many down-ballot races, which I will not get into in this post. But certainly House candidates have made a bid for attention; one's being called mentally ill by her opponents, while another was robbed at gunpoint while waiting to campaign at a church.


Without question, this election year in Florida was transformed by the late entry of Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott, a former hospital executive and anti-"ObamaCare" lobbyist, and Democratic Senate candidate Jeff Greene, the king of credit default swaps.

Scott has shattered every Florida campaign spending record by a sizable margin, spending $39 million of his own money and benefitting from a family trust that channeled another $11 million into a 527 organization that's bought ads attacking McCollum. Until Scott appeared, McCollum was slowly drifting towards the nomination after a long career of party service in Congress, as a two-time Senate candidate, and as Attorney General. Scott immediately ran ads calling McCollum a relic of politics-as-usual, and identified himself with the Tea Party movement. Overwhelmed by Scott's spending and facing political extinction, McCollum (with the backing of most of the state's GOP establishment, including former Gov. Jeb Bush, along with 2008 presidential rivals Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee) fought back with ads drawing attention to the huge Medicare fraud fines paid out by Scott's Columbia-HCA hospital chain. The back-and-forth has definitely eroded both candidates' approval ratings, to the tangible benefit of likely Democratic gubernatorial nominee Alex Sink, who's held a narrow lead in recent polls over both Republicans in a three-way match that also includes independent Bud Chiles.

Polls have shown Scott doing better than McCollum among self-identified conservatives, and among younger voters, so turnout patterns will matter, with a higher turnout probably benefitting the "outsider" in this closed primary. Overall, McCollum led by a 45-36 margin in the final pre-primary poll from Mason-Dixon; and by 39-35 in a Quinnipiac poll released about the same time. Scott led 47-40 in a late poll from PPP.

McCollum's regional base is in the Orlando area; Scott's a recent transplant to Florida, but lives on the Gulf Coast in Naples.

In the Democratic Senate race, Jeff Greene, who is reportedly a billionaire (mainly from profits made in successful anticipation of a housing market collapse), has spent $23 million of his own money, roughly four times the pre-primary budget of Meek, who, like McCollum, was the presumptive nominee in the early going. As with Scott, Greene's heavy spending initially vaulted him into a lead in the polls, but then counter-attacks from Meek, and bad publicity about his past in the news media, brought him back to earth. In the latter category, reports about his relationship with former boxing champ Mike Tyson, and Tyson's behavior during a long cruise on Greene's yacht, has been a perpetual headache, compounded by another report that the yacht had actually docked in Cuba (a definite no-no for someone running for office in Florida).

While Greene's tried to shift attention to alleged corruption involving Meek and his mother, former congresswoman Carrie Meek--and more recently, accusing Meek of insufficient sympathy for Israel in a bid for South Florida Jewish voters--he's been sinking in recent polls. He trailed Meek 42-30 in an August 17-19 Mason-Dixon poll; 29-39 in a Quinnipiac survey this weekend; and 27-51 in the final PPP poll. PPP showed Meek leading Greene 70-9 among African-Americans and 47-37 among white voters. Contributing to Meek's popularity among "regular" Democrats has been endorsements from President Obama and former President Clinton.

Meek's next challenge, of course, is to convince Florida Democrats--not to mention wealthy donors and the party poohbahs in Washington--to support him rather than independent candidate Charlie Crist. Right now Meek is running a dangerously poor third in three-way polls. And he probably can't count on Marco Rubio or Charlie Crist helping him by hanging out with Mike Tyson on a yacht.

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Dog Days Diversion: A Preview of Tomorrow's Primaries in AZ, AK, VT, and OK

It's a bit hard to understand why multiple states would decide to call voters to the polls in the depths of the Dogs Days, but they are: Florida, Arizona, Alaska and Vermont are holding primaries tomorrow, while Oklahoma is staging a runoff for nominations not resolved in its July 27 primary.

We'll be covering Florida, which has attracted the most national attention lately, in a separate post tomorrow. In this roundup, we'll take a look at AZ, where there are several very competitive GOP House primaries; VT, where the Democratic gubernatorial contest is a multi-candidate scrum; AK, where a long-shot challenger to Sen. Lisa Murkowski will meet his fate; and OK, where two Republican House runoffs are occurring.

Not that long ago, national observers were licking their chops at AZ's statewide Republican primaries, with John McCain looking potentially vulnerable against former congressman and talk-show host J.D. Hayworth, and an unelected and little-known governor named Jan Brewer appearing poised for a return to obscurity.

That's all obviously changed. According to virtually all observers McCain is on the brink of a landslide win, benefitting from a huge financial advantage, some serious strategic respositioning to the Right on key issues, and several misteps by Hayworth. McCain will be a heavy favorite over the likely Democratic candidate, former Tucson city councilman Rodney Glassman. Meanwhile, the immigration issue has transformed Brewer from an accidental governor unpopular in her own party to a national conservative star whose endorsement is craved in other states, and a certain winner tomorrow. Brewer also has opened up a big lead in the polls over likely Democratic nominee, Attorney General Terry Goddard.

But AZ's crowded Republican House primaries feature three contests in districts where GOPers think they have a chance of beating incumbent Democrats, and one for an open Republican seat.

The race that's attracted the most national attention is probably in AZ-08, a Tucson-based district represented by two-term Democrat Gabby Giffords. A classic Establishment-Tea Party matchup involving former state senator Jonathan Paton, the early frontrunner, and Tea Party activist Jesse Kelley, is considered very close. Giffords is a veteran of two close races, and is building up her campaign treasury as Republicans squabble, but her opposition to the new AZ immigration law and votes for key Obama legislation have made her appear vulnerable.

In Phoenix-suburban AZ-03, where Republican John Shadegg is retiring, the early frontrunner was Ben Quayle, son of the former Veep from Indiana, but he is fighting to hold off self-funder Steve Moak. It's been a battle of self-inflicted wounds, with Quayle hurt by association with an off-color internet site (to which he occasionally made posts under a pseudonym inspired by a porn-star character in Boogie Nights), and Moak battling claims of conflicts of interest between non-profit and for-profit businesses.

In AZ-05, another Phoenix-area district, former Maricopa County Treasurer David Schweikert is so confident of victory that he's saving money for a general election against Democratic incumbent Harry Mitchell, but businessman Jim Ward remains financially competitive down the stretch.

And in the huge, largely rural AZ-01, dentist Paul Gosar is in a close race with 2008 nominee Sydney Hay for the right to take on freshman Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick. The incumbent beat Hay by a 56-40 margin two years ago.

Up in Alaska, the Republican Senate primary has drawn national attention as a surrogate grudge match between Sarah Palin and incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski, daughter (and appointee) of the incumbent whom Palin beat en route to becoming governor in 2006. Murkowski's actual opponent is former judge Joe Miller, something of a conservative protest candidate (he's been endorsed by anti-abortion groups and the Tea Party Express) against the incumbent. But Palin's gone after Murkowski avidly in the stretch run of the primary, not only attacking the incumbent in one of her famous Facebook posts, but recording robocalls for Miller. Murkowski has a vast financial advantage, and a loss would be a major upset.

At the other end of the country, in Vermont, no fewer than five viable candidates--four rated as even bets for a win, though there has been no public polling in this contest--are competing for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in this blue state where four-term (terms are still just two years in VT) Republican governor Jim Douglas is retiring. Early in the contest (before Douglas announced his retirement) the clear front-runners were former Lt. Gov. Doug Racine (who lost to Douglas back in 2002) and six-term Secretary of State Deb Markowitz, with Racine considered the more traditional liberal and Markowitz the moderate. Douglas' retirement drew other strong candidates into the race, including state senate president pro tem Peter Shumlin, credited with a key role in passage of Vermont's landmark gay marriage statute; former state senator Matt Dunne, a tech entrepreneur who also ran the national VISTA program; and state senator Susan Bartlett.

All five candidates have taken similar issue stands in a very civil primary with many debates. A key factor is that Vermont's well-established left-bent Progressive Party has decided against running its own candidate for governor, greatly improving the chances of the ultimate Democratic nominee. Though under-funded, Racine has the bulk of union endorsements, and appears to be splitting Progressive Party support with Shumlin. Markowitz has been in the race the longest, and has high name ID. Like Markowitz, Dunne is relatively well-funded. Shumlin is generally thought to have late momentum. And Bartlett will get enough votes to affect the outcome.

Perhaps the biggest X-factor in Vermont is turnout: this primary is in traditional vacation-time, and early voting levels have been very low. Vermont is an open primary state, with no party registration.

The winner will face Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie, a professional airline pilot with light official duties and a folksy, anodyne image as Douglas' deputy the last eight years. Dubie has positioned himself somewhat to the right of Douglas on cultural issues, opposing both gay marriage and abortion rights while disclaiming any interest in making such issues a priority as governor. In late June, Rasmussen showed Dubie holding a 47-40 lead over Markowitz, with much bigger, majority leads over the other four Democratic candidates.

Finally, in Oklahoma, there are two GOP congressional runoffs. The one with the most fireworks has been OK-05, for the seat of Republican gubernatorial nominee Mary Fallin. Political neophyte and church camp director James Lankford surprisingly led the primary, but former state legislator Kevin Calvey has been on the offensive in the runoff, trying to play off the national conservative focus on alleged domestic Islamic threats by attacking Lankford for saying he'd talk with representatives of CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations). Calvey enjoys backing from the Club for Growth, and has also significantly self-financed his campaign, but Lankford has strong evangelical Protestant support and has reportedly been very effective in the utilization of social media.

By contrast, the Republican runoff in OK-02, where Charles Thompson and Daniel Edmonds are competing for a shot at Blue Dog incumbent Dan Boren, has been pretty quiet with very low spending. Thompson ran ahead in the primary, but Edmonds seems to have a slight advantage among Oklahoma's "true conservative"/tea party activists, so it could go either way. The battle-hardened and well-financed Boren will be the favorite in November in a contest that will serve as a good test of the strength of any Republican "wave."

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Moving Day

It's pretty weird having a desk to go into in a big office building after having worked at home for the better part of six years, but here I am, trying to make sure that everything us up to speed for our upcoming launch at the New York Times, and that we'll have the highest possible probability of launching on schedule and with a fully functional site tomorrow. Thus, I can't promise that we'll have much in the way of substantive posts for you here at FiveThirtyEight.com today.

The work that my colleagues on the interactive team have done at nytimes.com is terrific and I hope that you'll be really impressed. I've also given the Senate model a relatively thorough statistical makeover and it will now be much more sophisticated in how it estimates the amount of error associated with each forecast (for instance, the more the polling tends to diverge in a given race, the higher the margin of error associated with the prediction), and in how it handles incumbent vis-à-vis open seat races. Plus, we should have our gubernatorial forecasts to launch for you later this week, and our House forecasts soon afterward.

In the meantime, suggestions on good lunch places near 40th & 8th are appreciated, because right now I'm projected to gain about 7 pound a month due to the recent opening of a Shake Shack near the office.

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What Does a Recession Look Like?

When I think of recessions, I tend to think that the only bad years are the ones within the recession dates. For example, if the NBER dates a recession as January 1 to December 31, I tend to think the only bad dates occur within those dates, and that the time before and after those dates are great times economically.

I decided to take that perception and put it to the test. Below are charts for the last five recessions, along with the preceding three to four quarters and the first three to four quarters after the recession ended. The dates for the recessions are from the National Bureau of Economic Research and the charts are from the St. Louis Federal Reserve. All the GDP data has been adjusted for inflation.



January 1980 - July 1980 and July 1981 - November 1982


I've included both of these periods in the same chart for convenience. First, notice the period of four quarters leading up to the first recession showed incredibly slow growth. The quarter to quarter rate of growth for this period (1Q79 to 4Q 79) was .7%, .4%, 2.9% 1.1%. respectively. This was followed by three quarters of recession, during which the first quarter showed positive growth. Then came the brief recovery where we saw two quarters of incredibly strong growth and a third quarter of contraction. This was followed by the second recession during which we had two quarters to non-sequential positive GDP growth. Coming out of the recession we had incredibly strong rates of growth beginning in the second quarter after the end of the second recession.

There are several points that need to be made about this period. First, there were four years of incredibly difficult times, during which we had two recession (or perhaps one long recession). Either way, this was an extended period of difficulty for the country. Secondly, the four quarters before the recession showed incredibly slow economic growth. Growth at this pace probably felt like a recession to the country. Third, there were quarters of growth during the recession, indicating not all the events during these periods were bad.

July 1990 - March 1991



Notice that in the four quarters that led up to the recession there were two quarters of weak growth with one below 1% and the second below 2%. The quarter that began the recession printed a 0% growth rate followed by two quarters of negative growth. However, the three quarters coming out of the recession had incredibly weak growth, with two quarters below 2%. Over a period of nine quarters, there were 8 (or two years) of incredibly weak growth.

March 2001-November 2001


As the chart shows, this was a very shallow and short recession, lasting less than a year during which there were two quarters of negative growth. The contraction was very mild, with the first quarter of 2001 contracting 1.3% and the third quarter contracting 1.1%. But notice the two preceding quarters were also very weak and the five quarters after the recession ended were also very weak. The above chart shows 10 quarters or two and a half years of very weak growth. In other words, the official recession dates cover some of the downturn, but certainly not all of it.

December 2007 - July 2009


First, the NBER has not officially dated the end of the last recession. However, the St. Louis Fred's system uses July 2009 as the end point, which would be the first quarter of positive growth after four quarters of contraction. This falls in line with general previous NBER methodology. In addition, the economy has had four quarters of positive GDP growth -- a statistic that has never been classified as a recession.

Second, notice that the three quarters preceding the recession also showed slower growth. The contraction was at least as deep as the second recession in the early 1980s. Coming out of the recession, we see three quarters of growth, although the pace is quarter to quarter improvement is declining.

Conclusions:

1.) The double dip recession in the early 1980s was the last recession where the economy experienced strong post-recession momentum. The quarters after the 1990 and 2001 recession were weak and the current rate of growth -- while higher than the 1990s and 2001 rate of growth -- is not as strong as we'd like to see.

2.) The 1990/91, 2001 and current recessions saw 10 quarters of weak growth, indicating the official dates of the recession only tell part of the economy story.

3.) The current environment has more in common with the early 1980s and 1990s recessions. Like the early 1980s, the latest recession saw an extremely negative growth rate in the economy. Like the early 1990s recession, this recession was in part caused by negative development in the financial sector of the economy.

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Australian Elections Preview: An Uneventful Campaign Heads for an Eventful Finish

It’s election day in Australia, and all signs point to a close result, with a narrow national lead for the ruling Labor party. Nevertheless, the very narrowness of that lead is a testament to the limitations of an incumbent government campaigning not on its own achievements, but with the warning that its opponent is far worse.

When the election was called five weeks ago, it was widely expected that the new Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, would figuratively waltz to victory. Basking in the glow of a novelty honeymoon, Australia’s first female Prime Minister had outlined a series of tough policies on immigration, and massively scaled back the talk of a new carbon taxes on mining which had so damaged Rudd, effectively leaving little for the opposition to attack the government on policy-wise. Australia had largely escaped the effects of the economic downturn, and the government's record on the economy seemed solid. Perhaps equally importantly in a system where preference voting is vital to the outcome, Gillard achieved an unprecedented deal with the Greens to receive their preferences in virtually every seat. While Green preferences have traditionally gone to Labor at about a 70/3 clip, it was expected that this agreement would help maintain that level with a massive rise in Green support.

Expectations, however, were to be rapidly dashed. Some of this was an inevitable result of the contradictory impulses inherent in Labor’s campaign strategy. Faced with an opposition leader viewed as non-viable due to his far-right views, the Labor campaign plan seemed to be to actively move right, with Gillard going so far as to repeat Rudd’s position of delaying any action on climate change for the foreseeable future. Yet these impulses were contradictory with an effort to form a de facto coalition with the Greens, and when, in particularly serious case of bad timing, Labor announced its climate change priorities at the same time as the Green preference deal, an-all-out revolt broke out in the Green ranks, with more than dozen local parties refusing to recommend their voters  preference Labor second.

In itself this would not have been fatal. But Gillard and Labor more generally seemed to have no campaign theme, no proposals and no strategy for the campaign other than daring the public to vote for Coalition Leader Tony Abbott, and with Abbott denying the media his usual supply of gaffes, the campaign lacked a storyline. In its absence, Labor lost control of the campaign, as more damaging stories came to dominate. First was the spectacular collapse of the Green preference deal, which by drawing attention to the mutual dislike between Labor and the Greens likely did far more damage in terms of causing Green voters to consider voting Coalition “above the line” than if Labor had left well enough alone.

More damaging still was the fall-out from Rudd’s overthrow. A series of angry and speculative leaks dribbled out. On one hand, there were suggestions that Rudd would return in a new government as Foreign Minister, suggestions that were waved off by Gillard. That might have been the end of the story had it not been for senior Labor officials publicly accusing Rudd himself of leaking the rumors in desperation. A whole-scale feud of competing leaks soon broke out that dominated media coverage. And claims surfaced that Gillard lied to Rudd’s face only days before the coup, accepting a deal whereby he would stand down in the middle of the summer to allow her to take over before an October election, only for Gillard to overthrow him a few days later.

Weeks three and four seemed to bring a rally, where the race, which had turned into a narrow Coalition lead for a few days, swung back to Labor as the government’s campaign turned negative against Liberal leader Tony Abbott, arguing he would be among the most right-wing leaders ever elected in a Western democracy, and pointing to his denial of climate change, and suggestions that he felt “threatened” around gays. These attacks, and possibly the prospect of Abbott as Prime Minister, helped Labor regain a narrow lead, though its position remains precarious.

Labor seems to have seen the damage, and consequent swing, concentrated in Rudd’s home state of Queensland, and all important New South Wales, where a third of the seats are located. While the last two polls, a Roy Morgan and a Essential Research poll, both showing a 51-49 lead for Labor had a national swing of 1.7% from 2007, the swings in Queensland were 3.6% and 4.4% respectively. In New South Wales, the swings ranged from 3 to nearly 5 points. By contrast, Labor was actually recorded as gaining significant support in Victoria and South Australia, as much as a 5% swing in the latter, but the losses in Queensland and New South Wales were more than making up for it.

It is perhaps not surprising, however, that Labor’s losses have been concentrated in Queensland and New South Wales, because the hidden third rail of the campaign is the continued unpopularity of Labor state governments in both States. The Queensland government narrowly survived last year by less than a percentage point against a deeply flawed opposition, and the New South Wales Labor government is facing extermination in 2011 with recent polls showing a 61-39 lead on the two-party preferred vote.

As a consequence, the election is looking less national as the outcome looks to come down to whether the Coalition can gain enough to seats in Queensland and New South Wales to gain the majority, and whether the Labor party potentially gain enough seats in South Australia or Victoria to off-set those losses, with the added potential that 2-3 seats may change hands in Western Australia or Tasmania. In such an environment, national polls might not be the best guide, as there is a strong possibility that the party that wins the majority of the two-party vote will not win the majority. This is far from unheard of. It happened in both 1990 and 1998 at the federal level, and it happened again earlier this year in South Australia, where the Labor government survived a lopsided 53-47 result to hang onto office.

While at the federal level this has favored both parties, there is reason to suspect that in a close result, it will favor the coalition.

Labor 2PP	Coalition 2PP	Labor Seats	Coalition Seats
53	47	90	57
52	48	81	66
51	49	75	72
50	50	69	78
49	51	68	79
48	52	61	86
47	53	59	88

As is demonstrated, there is a danger zone for Labor in the 51-49 zone, which unfortunately seems to be where they are headed.

Poll	Labor	Coalition
Roy Morgan August 18th – 19th	51%	49%
Essential Research August 13th-19th	51%	49%
Newspoll 17th – 18th August	50%	50%
Nielsen 17th -19th August	52%	48%

What’s missing here is the incumbency effect. Incumbency tends to matter more in Australia than in other parliamentary systems and its no coincidence that “minority vote victories” have always gone to incumbent governments. This time it will play to both sides, as the last seat redistribution moved six Coalition incumbents into seats that nominally voted for Labour in 2007, most of whom need swings of less than 1% to hang on. Otherwise incumbency should favor Labour, though state polarization will likely make things worse for the government here, with Labor supposedly writing off as many as ten seats in Queensland and New South Wales, with the expectation of three gains elseware.

That would give Labor 81 seats, at the high-end of estimates, which seem leaning towards the high seventies, but nevertheless a majority. It is still far too close for comfort for those who believed that Abbott’s reactionary social views would result in a blowout. Its worth noting however, that at this point in 2004, John Howard looked to be in a similar spot before rallying and winning his second greatest victory when his opponent proved too erratic for voters. It will ironically be to Howard’s example that Labor will be looking in the next eight hours in order to avoid being the first one-term government in over half a century

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How the Generic Ballot is Used to Estimate Votes and then Seats in Congressional Elections

In response to some comments by Brendan Nyhan and Alan Abramowitz, Nate writes about the generic congressional ballot, those surveys that ask randomly-sampled Americans a question like,

Looking ahead to the Congressional elections in November, which party do you plan to vote for if the election were being held today?

Nate's remarks are reasonable and I just wanted to add a bit of clarification.

The bottom line is that, yes, you can use generic congressional polling to predict the national election results. But you don't just take the generic ballot as is; you have to use it in stages, as part of a district-by-district forecast.

(1) Nate discusses the generic ballot (the percentage of survey respondents who say they would vote for the Democrat or the Republican) as a predictor of the actual ballot (the average share of the votes received by the two parties in the general election). I'd just like to emphasize that the prediction of actual from generic vote is done using a statistical model. For example, in October, 2006, Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezien wrote: "Based on the current average of the generic polls (57.7% Democratic, 42.3% Republican) the forecast from this equation is a 55% to 45% Democratic advantage in the popular vote." The shift from 57.7% to 55% came from a model that Bafumi et al. had fit to earlier congressional elections.

In particular, Bafumi et al. fit different models to predict the election outcome from generic ballot polls taken 300 days before the election, 240 days before the election, 180 days before the election, and so forth. One thing they found was that, when the incumbent president is a Democrat, the Democrats' vote in the off-year congressional elections tends to be much lower than the generic polls taken 200-300 days before the election. The generic poll taken hundreds of days before the election is a good predictor of the ultimate outcome--as long as the prediction is made using a fitted model rather than merely by taking that generic poll number as is.

Here's an example. In September, 2009, Chris Bowers wrote, "Republicans not in a position to retake the House (yet)," based on his observation that the Democrats had a 41-38 lead in generic House polling. But, having read Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezien, I knew that Bowers was wrong, and I said so right here on fivethirtyeight: given the generic polls at that time, the best forecast was a 53-47 popular vote win for the Republicans.

(2) Nate writes, "the national House popular vote is an imperfect predictor of the seat count" and illustrates with a seats vs. votes scatterplot. He's right, but this is less of a problem than you might think. The right way to do a congressional forecast is at a district-by-district level. The generic ballot (and other information) can allow you to predict the average district vote at the national level. And then, separately, you can predict the relative positions of the different districts (from most Democratic to most Republican), given district-level information (most simply, previous election results, corrected for incumbency, as in my papers with John Kastellec and Jamie Chandler from 2006 and 2008, or else maybe something more sophisticated using more up-to-date district-level information). Since Nate is doing district-by-district forecasting anyway, this isn't a problem.

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When Good Enough Isn't Good Enough: On House Forecasts and the Generic Ballot

Emory's Alan Abramowitz, by way of Pollster.com's Brendan Nyhan, has a reaction of sorts to our post from Tuesday in which I talked about some of the ambiguities of the generic Congressional ballot. Here's Abramowitz:

Nate provides a lot of excellent analysis. But there are two pretty silly statements here. First, the generic ballot is a pretty good predictor of both the national popular vote and the national seat results. Second, the national popular vote is a very good predictor of the overall seat results. It definitely is not "relatively irrelevant" to those results.

Let me warn you that some of the ensuing discussion boils down to semantics. What do we mean by a "pretty good" predictor and a "very good" predictor, for instance? There are a lot of times when a particular equation might have a reasonably high R-squared, for example, but would not be all that useful to us in terms of our ability to make predictions about the sort of questions that are most interesting to us, such as what the likelihood is of a Republican takeover of the House.

If we wanted to take the generic ballot today, August 19th, and use it to project out the number of seats that Republicans will gain (or lose, I suppose) in the House, there are basically three sorts of uncertainties that we face.

1. The generic ballot today is an imperfect predictor of the generic ballot on Election Day.

As I wrote on Tuesday, and as others like Columbia's Robert Erikson have found, this is not actually all that big a concern, as the generic ballot is relatively stable as compared with most political indicators. Still, this does produce some additional uncertainty. The generic ballot moved several points toward the Republicans by election day 2004 as compared how it was printing during the summer, and several points toward the Democrats in 2006.

But suppose that we ignore this, for now. Suppose that we take Pollster's current trendline estimate of the generic ballot, which has Republicans winning by 5.6 points, and assume that this is exactly the margin that will separate the two parties on Election Morning. There are still two additional problems that we face.

2. The Generic Ballot on Election Day is an imperfect predictor of the national House popular vote.

This is probably the most significant source of error. In addition to the normal ambiguities surrounding any poll -- the consensus of polls is often wrong in one or the other direction -- we also have the fact that with very rare exception, the generic ballot is framed as presenting "the Republican candidate in your District" against "the Democratic candidate", or some variation of this, rather than naming the candidates specifically. Some voters might react differently if they knew what the names of the candidates were. Also, some voters literally won't have the chance to vote for the candidate from their preferred party, because there are usually several dozen Congressional districts -- and there have been as many as 100 in some past election cycles -- in which one or the other major parties doesn't nominate a candidate. Finally, some states like Florida don't even bother to tally the results when a candidate runs uncontested, so their votes won't count toward the national popular vote at all.

For all these issues, the generic ballot certainly tells you something about the House popular vote, particularly if you make certain adjustments to it, like recognizing the difference between registered voter and likely voter polls. But this contributes a significant amount of uncertainty.

3. The national House popular vote is an imperfect predictor of the seat count.

It's true that if we knew exactly what the popular vote were, we could come up with a not-bad estimate of the seat count. From the chart that Abramowitz posted, it looks like the average error in projecting the seat count from the popular vote is something just a wee bit north of 10 seats, which would imply a 95 percent confidence interval of about X ± 20 or 25 seats. Again -- semantics! -- I would call that "pretty good" rather than "very good": saying, for example, that the Republicans will with 95 percent confidence gain somewhere between 25 and 65 seats, doesn't seem to impart all that knowledge. But even though the distribution of votes into seats is somewhat uneven -- for example, Democratic districts tend to have lower turnout, which somewhat contradicts the fact that the generic ballot tends to overestimate their standing in the national popular vote; but on the other hand, Democratic voters tend to be more concentrated into particular Congressional districts than Republican ones, usually in urban centers -- this is less problematic than Step #2.

But of course, we don't have any knowledge of what the popular vote is in advance -- instead, it has to be estimated from the generic ballot (and perhaps other factors). What happens in the real world where when we have to go directly from the generic ballot to projecting a seat count, processing steps #2 and #3 in one fell swoop? Well, we get a big mess. Here is the direct translation from the parties' generic ballot standing, as inferred from the trendlines that Charles Franklin has generated, into the number of Democratic-held seats in the House, for all elections since 1946.



The forecast misses on average by about 20 seats, which translates into a 95 percent confidence interval of about ±48 (!) seats. At a generic ballot reading of Republican +5.6, for example, where Pollster.com has it now, the regression line above projects a Republican gain of 41 seats -- which sounds reasonable, I suppose -- but the 95 percent confidence interval runs between a gain of 90 seats and a loss of 7 seats. Not very helpful! And of course, this assumes that we know what the standing of the generic ballot on Election Day, which we don't, since there are still 75 or so potentially volatile political days to occur before then.

(As an aside, if you were to apply the same technique only to data from 1994 onward, the regression equation would project Republican gains of between 36 and 107 seats; if you were to use data from 1980 onward, it would project somewhere between a 14 seat loss and a 104-seat gain.)

I don't mean to slam all macro-level attempts at Congressional forecasting: there are significantly more sophisticated versions of macro-level forecasts that political scientists like Abramowitz have worked on. But the generic ballot alone is a very blunt instrument. It basically tells us, "okay, things are probably going to be pretty bad for Democrats, and they could be really bad," something which any sentient observer of politics would already have known.

That's why we're going through the trouble of building a ground-up projection of the House, which attempts to predict the outcome of individual seats, while also understanding that the outcomes and uncertainties in different congressional districts are correlated. This has required collecting lots and lots of data: essentially, every district-level poll, every fundraising record, and every independent forecast since 1998. Although I'm not quite ready to tease at the results, it does seem reasonably clear that taking into account a multiplicity of indicators is helpful -- for example, the generic ballot does have some influence, even if you have lots of other information about the races you're attempting to forecast, but the same is true of each of the other indicators I just mentioned.

I'm sure that even a perfectly-constructed model (and ours won't be) would still be subject to a significant amount of error -- and anecdotally, I suspect that this is a very tricky election to forecast. But given that a lot of this data -- which granted, took weeks and weeks to compile and is not exactly sitting at our fingertips -- has essentially gone unexamined, I hope you'll appreciate my desire to demand a greater degree of precision.

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Palestinian Refugees Get Qualified Right to Work in Lebanon

he more than 425,000 Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon, who yesterday received a qualified right to work in the country, have a long and complicated history in the country. Unlike those in their neighbors Jordan or Syria, Palestinians in Lebanon have never obtained significant political or social rights, such as citizenship, rights to work, or the ability to own property.

While he bill passed by the Lebanese Parliament formalizes the legal status of Palestinian workers in a number of lower tier occupations, the larger issues of nationality, land and property, and access to Lebanese public social benefits and higher level professions remain unresolved.

Somewhat ironically, the leadership of the many politico-religious communities in Lebanon are in largely in harmony on one element this issue: everyone agrees that the registered Palestinians refugees in Lebanon should not be given Lebanese nationality, nor the trappings of permanent residence, such as the right to own land or major property. It is for very different reasons, however.

When the Palestinians were initially forced from their land by the Israelis during and just after the 1948 war, about 126,000* of the 726,000 total refugees ended up in Lebanon, representing a little over 17 percent. Throughout the next decade, most Christian Palestinians, about 50,000 in total, received Lebanese citizenship. Following the conclusion of Lebanese Civil War in 1990, another group of Palestinians, almost all Shiites, along with a few remaining Christians, received Lebanese nationality, numbering about 60,000. This in concession to the vastly improved political position of the Shiites following the Taif Agreement, which changed the confessional distribution of power in the country.

The more than 400,000 refugees that remain today in Lebanon, in 12 official camps, among other places, are almost entirely Sunni Muslims, their Lebanese brethren being the confessional group that lost the most political power in the wake of the 1975-1990 civil war.

Polling numbers from 2007 shows a remarkable level of agreement about the Lebanese confessionals that an improvement in civil and political rights for the Palestinians, without full citizenship, is the appropriate way forward. That said, there is a definite split between the Christian and Muslim communities, with a significantly larger Muslim minority in favor of citizenship, as well as more vigorous support for improved civil and social rights.

Accordingly, it's unlikely in the foreseeable future that the Sunni Muslim Palestinians in Lebanon will gain citizenship, as they have in Jordon, or full civil rights and semi-nationality, as they have in Syria, in the years ahead. Across confessional groups, there is strong support for the right of return for the refugees to areas that is now part of the Israeli state -- among Christians to avoid upsetting the gentle confessional balance against them, while for Muslim Lebanese it is for reasons of Muslim/Arab solidarity. Giving nationality or full residential rights to the Palestinians, they argue, would admit defeat in this effort, regardless of how fruitless it may seem.

From the outside, of course, it looks far more like political expediency: excluding an unwanted and marginalized community from the benefits that the majority enjoy, regardless of the rhetoric that underpins it.

---
Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international affairs columnist. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

* 1950 figure from UNRWA

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Hatred of Congress

Americans hate their Congress. They hate the long-winded, blowhard speeches, and the parochialism, and the pork-barreling--except, of course, when they like it. As political scientist Richard Fenno once noted, that hatred helps explain why so many candidates--initially as challengers, but even as incumbents--run for Congress by running against it.

As for how this hatred translates into seat losses or gains this November, or any other year, we have been hearing a lot of talking points about how general congressional approval is falling. True. And how the approval of Democrats in Congress is falling. Also true. And how the approval of congressional Republicans isn't much better. True yet again.

Let's take each of these in order to see what we might reasonably infer about the implications for November 2.

First, and without muddying the post with two many pre-existing charts, you can see here that, according to Gallup numbers dating back to 1973, as it has for a long time Congress ranks last in terms of citizen confidence in institutions. (Citizen confidence is not identical to approval, of course, but is very similar.) Looking more closely at approval during the past year, you can see here that, again according to Gallup, the congressional approval has been hovering around the abysmal level of 20 percent throughout 2010.

Not so good.

Turning next to approval of the respective parties, the chart I presented at the top of this post above shows the approval and disapproval ratings for each party since President Obama took office, as reported by the Pew Research/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll and tracked by PollingReport.com for the Democrats and Republicans. It confirms that, indeed, the Democrats in just 18 months have blown a net +10 congressional approval rating, turning it into roughly a 20-point net disapproval rating. The key moment of inversion came in late spring 2009, in the wake of the passage of the stimulus bill and at the outset of sometimes nasty debates on Capitol Hill (and back home in those town halls) about health care reform. The only good news for Democrats is that they've fallen to the depths Republicans have been wallowing at for some time--again, with about net 20-point disapproval score.

So, we can reasonably conclude that the early 2009 high hopes for Congress, no doubt boosted by the high approval ratings and excitement or hope that attended the start of the Obama presidency, have been dashed. Overall congressional approval has turned south, largely because voters now feel about as positively (or rather, negatively) as they do the Republicans. To Americans, the nation's least trusted and least liked political institution has returned to its earthly, dismal levels of scorn and disappointment.

What does all this mean for November? There are (at least) three possibilities to consider:

1. The Democrats are in serious trouble. This is the conventional wisdom, and there is ample reason to subscribe to it. Yes, the GOP's approval numbers stink, but hey, they're not in charge of anything. Their low approval means nothing because the Dems are running the show and their heads are on the electoral chopping block this autumn.

2. The Democrats are in some trouble, sure--but less than people think. Here the logic goes something like this: "The voters are disgusted with the Democrats, but that doesn't mean they like or trust the GOP to do any better. This wasn't the change they were looking for, but they know the change back to what came before is definitely not what they are looking to return to." This is the current political meme being spread by the White House and other national Democrats, a more sophisticated version of saying, "Yup, we suck but they really suck."

3. These congressional approval numbers are meaningless. One can reach this conclusion not only because both parties are suffering the same, 20-point net negative approval, but simply because approval for the Congress is distended from how people will vote on a district-by-district, state-by-state basis. The strongest piece of evidence here is this: If you think the public's view of Congress as a whole is bad now, according to Gallup it was basically the same this time in 2008 when Democrats also controlled both chambers and still picked up seats, not to mention it was higher still in 2006 right before the Republicans had their majorities erased by voters. The counter argument to this is that Democrats, though running Congress two years ago, still had George W. Bush to contend with, so they were not being held responsible for governmental failures then in the way they are now...which more or less brings us back to point #1.

I'm not a polling expert (would love to hear Nate weigh in on this), but I suspect that in this postmodern era of hyper-partisanship these approval numbers, collectively for Congress as an institution or separately for each party, matter less than how voters feel about the president--and how they then express their pleasure or displeasure during midterms toward the one set of national elites they have available to reward or punish via the ballot: members of Congress.

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