Are Oklahoma Students Really This Dumb? Or Is Strategic Vision Really This Stupid?

Although the evidence continues to mount that there is something very funny about Strategic Vision's process, for the most part there has not been too much reason to question their results themselves, which have tended to play it safe and straight down the fairway. Strategic Vision was rated as a pollster of roughly average accuracy in our pollster rankings, which were based on results through the 2008 primaries.

As Tom Jensen at Public Policy Polling notes, however, it would not be that hard to manufacture the results of an election poll. Just look up the average at RCP or Pollster.com, or 538, tweak upward or downward a couple of points depending on your whim, and you're good to go. But once you venture outside of the bubble of electoral politics and into an area where you can't copy off your neighbor, there is potentially more room for a dishonest pollster to get themselves into trouble. Here, then, are a few oddities from a poll that Strategic Vision recently conducted for an educational thinktank.

The poll in question comes from the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (OCPA), a conservative-leaning thinktank that recently commissioned Strategic Vision, LLC to conduct a poll of 1,000 Oklahoma high school students. (A similar poll has previously been conducted by Strategic Vision, LLC in Arizona). The poll asked ten relatively basic political knowledge questions that were drawn the U.S. Citizenship Test, such as: "How many justices are on the Supreme Court".

Only 2.8 percent of Oklahoma's high school students passed the test, claim OCPA and Strategic Vision, which is defined by having gotten at least 6 of the 10 answers right. Moreover, the results to some particular questions were strikingly low. Ostensibly, only 23 percent of the students correctly identified George Washington as the first President, and only 43 percent correctly named the Democrats and Republicans as the two major political parties (11 percent of the students, COPA and Strategic Vision claim, provided the answer "Communist and Republican").

For me, some of these results don't pass the smell test. I agree that public schooling in the United States needs to be improved, particularly in the areas of government and citizenship. But only 23 percent of high school students in Oklahoma knew that George Washington was the first President? Really? I have difficulty accepting that claim at face value. In 2008, 68 percent of Oklahoma fifth graders passed the Oklahoma Core Curriculum Social Studies Test. You can read some of the questions on that test beginning on page 50 of this PDF; they're generally quite a bit more difficult than the ones that Strategic Vision asks. (For instance, "Which was the most profitable export of the Jamestown settlement?" and "Which group would most likely agree with ideas presented in Common Sense?"). So either those smart fifth graders were really forgetful by the time they got to high school, or there's something very wrong with this poll.

But let's put that aside for a moment and do an examination of the math. Here are the results of the poll, as taken from OCPA's website:



When I first saw these results a couple weeks ago, they really got my spidey sense tingling. Forget about the overall level of knowledge being low -- what I found strange was that there were no students, out of 1,000, who answered as many of eight out of the ten questions correctly. Isn't there some total nerd in Tulsa, some AP Honors student in Stillwater, who was able to answer at least eight of these ten very basic questions correctly? The distribution seems to be too compact.

Let's run a couple of simulations to test the robustness of these results. In the first simulation, I'll assume that:

(i) the student body is homogeneous -- everyone is as knowledgeable as everyone else, and
(ii) the questions are independent of one another; so knowing, say, who wrote the Declaration of Independence doesn't make you any more (or less) likely to know what the Bill of Rights is.

These are completely unrealistic assumptions, which, as you'll see, is the whole point.

But stay with me for a minute. To conduct the simulation, we'll create 50,000 "students", and they'll randomly get the questions right or wrong based on the percentages in Table 1. So, when we ask, for instance, who was the first President of the United States, they have a 23 percent chance of correctly guessing George Washington and a 77 percent chance of getting the question wrong. Then we'll add up the results for each student and see how they did.

When we do this, the results are strikingly close to the ones Strategic Vision produced in Table 2:



But, here's the problem: these are not realistic assumptions. Students in public high schools do not all have the same achievement levels. Moreover, the fact of having gotten one question right almost certainly does have some bearing on your odds of getting another right.

So, let's undertake a more realistic set of assumptions. To do, we'll divide our simulated students into thirds. First, there's a low-knowledge group; these students' chances of getting each question right are diminished by 50 percent. Then, there's a high-knowledge group; these students' chances are increased by 50 percent. Finally, there's a medium-knowledge group; these students' chances are exactly as listed in Table 1. So, for instance, for the question about correctly identifying the two major political parties, students in the low-knowledge group have a 22 percent chance of getting it right, the medium-knowledge group a 43 percent chance, and the high-knowledge group a 65 percent chance.

If we simulate the results again with our now more heterogeneous student body, here is what we get:



In this case, the results provided by Strategic Vision do not do a very good job of capturing the likely distribution of responses. The simulated distribution is more spread out, with more students getting 0's and 1's but also more getting 6's and 7's, etc. Meanwhile, the peak around 2-4 answers correct is less prominent.

A slightly more robust procedure might be to assume that students' aptitude is normally distributed. In this last simulation, we will assign a bonus or penalty to each student's chances of getting the questions right, where one standard deviation is equal to a bonus or penalty of +/- 40% on the chances of getting a particular question right (so a student one standard deviation above the norm would have a 32 percent chance of getting the "first President" question right, rather than a 23 percent chance). This produces a graph very much like the last one:



I'm not sure if there's any a priori way to know what the underlying distribution of responses "should" be. As a very rough guide, on the reading portion of the 2008 SAT, a single standard deviation corresponded to a difference of about 17 questions out of a 67 question test (ignoring the penalty for wrong answers), or about 25 percent of the total. The standard deviation implied by Strategic Vision on this citizenship test is only about half that -- 1.3 questions out of a 10 question test, or 13 percent. But the two tests, of course, are not directly comparable.

It seems quite strongly possible, nevertheless, that the students polled for this survey don't exist anywhere in Oklahoma but instead on a hard drive somewhere in Atlanta. This is a valuable exercise undertaken by the OCPA. But they owe it to the hardworking students of Oklahoma to make sure that their contractor, Strategic Vision, didn't flunk its own citizenship test.

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Comparison Study: Unusual Patterns in Strategic Vision Polling Data Remain Unexplained

The biggest complaint I received in response to yesterday's article, "Strategic Vision Polls Exhibit Unusual Patterns, Possibly Indicating Fraud", is that I had not provided for an adequate control group. Sure, perhaps Strategic Vision's polls exhibit apparently highly nonrandom behavior (this is almost irrefutably true, insofar as it goes). But perhaps this is true of all pollsters, rather than Strategic Vision specifically?

To provide for a more apples-to-applies comparison, I've decided to compare Strategic Vision against the Quinnipiac Poll. Why Quinnipiac?

-- Like Strategic Vision, Quinnipiac tends to concentrate on certain states and regions, rather than the entire country. In fact, they survey many of the exact same states as Strategic Vision. Quinnipiac regularly polls Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York, and somewhat less regularly, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Of these states, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Michigan and Wisconsin are all among those routinely polled by Strategic Vision. Strategic Vision does poll some states like Georgia that Quinnipiac doesn't, and Quinnipiac polls some states like Connecticut that Strategic Vision is not engaged in. But generally speaking, the overlap is quite strong.
-- Like Strategic Vision, Quinnipiac tends to produce somewhat long survey instruments that ask a variety of questions, not just "horse race" numbers but also approval ratings and questions on various dimensions of public policy.
-- Quinnipiac and Strategic Vision also tend to poll at broadly similar time scales, issuing new data in a region perhaps every month or every couple of months, which some acceleration in frequency as an election nears.

Quinnipiac and Strategic Vision, in other words, are asking many of the same questions of many of the same people. If there are unusual statistical patterns evident in Strategic Vision's polls, and these features are "normal" parts of the survey landscape, then they are likely to be replicated to a large degree by Quinnipiac.

For the comparison, I looked at all Quinnipiac polls conducted since the date of November 12, 2007. This cut-off point was selected because it yields 5,535 data points, almost exactly matching the 5,544 data points we got by looking at all Strategic Vision polls since 2005.

The ground rules are otherwise the same. There is no fancy math here really -- the exercise simply counts the trailing digits in the survey data (for example, if a certain poll is Obama 42, Clinton 38, the trailing digits are '2' and '8'). I do not include "non-response responses" like "other" or "undecided" in the count; categories like "about the same" (where the alternatives might be "better" or "worse") are also considered "non-responses". Nor did I include a tally for third-party candidates in races between the two major parties. I also excluded party primaries in which more than two candidates were listed, and approval and policy questions for which more than two affirmative choices were provided.

Quinnipac also conducts a small amount of polling at the city level (New York City, specifically), and at the national level. I exclude these; only the state-level polls are included. They also conduct a very small amount of polling on sports questions ("do you like the Red Sox or the Yankees?"). I exclude these polls too; only the questions on politics and policy questions are used.

Here, then, is the distribution of trailing digits for Quinnipiac:



These results appear to be slightly nonrandom. For example, there are a few too many 2's and 3's, and somewhat too few 7's and 9's. The worst discrepancies are about 2.4 standard deviations (σ) from what you'd expect from a truly random, uniform distribution.

There also appears to be some tendency for the smaller values (like 0, 1, 2, and 3) to occur more frequently than the larger ones (like 7, 8, and 9). This would be consistent with a distribution that at least partially observes Benford's Law, in which smaller digits are more likely to occur.

By contrast, here's what we had for Strategic Vision.



These differences from random are much, much larger. Whereas, for the Quinnipiac data, the gap between the smallest value (505, for the digit 9) and the largest (608, for the digit 2) is 20 percent, for Strategic Vision the gap (676 versus 431) is 57 percent.

In addition, the pattern of the discrepancies is different. Whereas, for Quinnipiac, the smaller digits may have been occurring somewhat more frequently -- something that would be consistent with a quasi-"Benfordian" distribution -- in Strategic Vision's case it's the largest digits that are associated with the highest frequencies. Although the mathematics here are actually fairly complex, there is no recognized mathematical process that I am aware of that would produce a distribution like Strategic Vision's.

Here is an alternate illustration of the same data, measured in terms of the deviation of the actual values from a uniform distribution, first in as raw numbers and then in terms of σ.





As I mentioned, the worst discrepancies for the Quinnipiac data are about 2.4 σ (standard deviations) from the norm, something that will occur through chance alone in about 1 out of every 60 cases, assuming a two-tailed probability. This is not the same as saying that the entire distribution has only a 1-in-60 odds of occurring by chance, since if you're looking at ten digits, you have ten opportunities to get unlucky and have an aberrant result. Still, the distribution is probably not completely random relative to an assumption of uniformity, although it appears potentially quite random relative to a more "Benfordian" distribution.

By contrast, the worst discrepancies in the Strategic Vision data are 5.7 and 5.3 standard deviations from the norm. Deviations of that magnitude will occur by chance alone only about once per 83,000,000 occasions, and once per 8,600,000 occasions, respectively.

***

To recap, it is not clear that the distribution of trailing digits in polling data is, or should be, entirely uniform or random. For a relatively heterogeneous set of polling data (many different questions from many different states), the most likely hypothesis seems to be that the distribution is somewhat uniform, and somewhat "Benfordian", with some concentration toward the lower digits.

For a more homogeneous set of data -- if we were looking only at McCain versus Obama polling in New Hampshire, for instance -- these assumptions very well might not hold at all. However, both the Quinnipiac and Strategic Vision data sets are in fact quite heterogenous. Moreover, they are about as heterogenous as one another, so if we saw deviations of a certain magnitude it one sample, we'd probably expect to see deviations of a broadly similar magnitude in the other.

But that's not what we see at all. The Strategic Vision data is much, much, much more nonrandom than the Quinnipiac data, as compared to a uniform distribution. If the comparison is to a fully or partially "Benfordian" distribution instead, then the discrepancy is even worse.

Bottom line: It is highly unlikely, in my opinion, that the distribution of the results from the Strategic Vision polls are reflective of any sort of ordinary and organic, mathematical process.

That does not necessarily mean that they simply made these numbers up.

As the brilliant Mark Grebner pointed out to me, for instance, some systematic deviations from uniformity could plausibly occur as a result of rounding. If Strategic Vision's standard polling sample were 750 people, for instance, and they followed any of the typical rounding procedures (i.e. rounding to the nearest whole number, always rounding down, or always rounding up), then the odd-numbered digits would occur about 14 percent more often than the even-numbered ones. However, Strategic Vision's samples all consist of exactly 600, 800 or 1,200 respondents. These particular values are divisible by 100, which means that should map uniformly upon rounding.

Another possibility is that these results are an artifact of Strategic Vision's weighting procedures. Maybe their weighting algorithm is oddly or poorly designed, and so these irregularities are introduced only after their raw data has been massaged. I don't think this is particularly likely. But perhaps if David Johnson at Strategic Vision could take the time to carefully explain his weighting procedures, we could explore this possibility.

***

Instead, Mr. Johnson has been busy telling reporters that he's going to sue me.

I am well aware of Strategic Vision's history of litigiousness. As a result, I have been fairly circumspect about exactly what I've said. There is a lot of "hearsay" and circumstantial evidence about Strategic Vision's practices that I could introduce, but I have not done so (although I absolutely assert the right to engage in responsible speculation at a later point in time). We are simply taking a good and honest look at the numbers -- reporting verifiable facts -- and providing a number of possible interpretations of them, all of which are entirely legally, morally, and statistically responsible.

I would encourage other researchers, including the members of Strategic Vision's team, to critique, examine and replicate my studies. There are undoubtedly some assumptions I have made that can reasonably be debated or altered. In addition, there are almost certainly also some transcription errors, since all of this data was hand-coded. There are also a lot of people who are much more versed in probability theory than I am, and could probably place more precise estimates on the magntidue of the discrepancies.

However, I would emphasize that these appear to be extremely robust findings. I believe they would hold up, and would do so somewhat vigorously, even with fairly significant changes in assumptions or methods, and even if some errors were detected.

Mr. Johnson may be right that the implication that his data may have been forged could be difficult to categorically disprove. Had the statistical evidence been only marginally compelling, I would not have made it. With that said, I would also tend to treat -- and would encourage those in the media to treat -- "alternate hypotheses" raised by Strategic Vision with some greater-than-usual amount of sympathy. So far, Johnson has not offered any.

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Strategic Vision Polls Exhibit Unusual Patterns, Possibly Indicating Fraud

One of the things I learned while exploring the statistical proprieties of the Iranian election, the results of which were probably forged, is that human beings are really bad at randomization. Tell a human to come up with a set of random numbers, and they will be surprisingly inept at trying to do so. Most humans, for instance, when asked to flip an imaginary coin and record the results, will succumb to the Gambler's Fallacy and be more likely to record a toss of 'tails' if the last couple of tosses had been heads, or vice versa. This feels right to most of us -- but it isn't. We're actually introducing patterns into what is supposed to be random noise.

Sometimes, as is the case with certain applications of Benford's Law, this characteristic can be used as a fraud-detection mechanism. If, for example, one of your less-trustworthy employees is submitting a series of receipts, and an unusually high number end with the trailing digit '7' ($27, $107, $297, etc.), there is a decent chance that he is falsifying his expenses. The IRS uses techniques like this to detect tax fraud.

Yesterday, I posed several pointed questions to David E. Johnson, the founder of Strategic Vision, LLC, an Atlanta-based PR firm which also occasionally releases political polls. One of the questions, in light of Strategic Vision LLC's repeated failure to disclose even basic details about its polling methodology, is whether the firm is in fact conducting polling at all, or rather, is creating fake but plausible-looking results in order to increase traffic and attention to its core business as a PR and literary firm.

I posed that question largely as a hypothetical yesterday. But today, I pose it much more literally. Certain statistical properties of the results reported by Strategic Vision, LLC suggest, perhaps strongly, the possibility of fraud, although they certainly do not prove it and further investigation will be required.

The specific evidence in question is as follows. I looked at all polling results reported by Strategic Vision LLC since the beginning of 2005; results from 2008 onward are available at their website; other polls were recovered through archive.org. This is a lot of data -- well over 100 polls, each of which asked an average of about 15-20 questions.

For each question, I recorded the trailing digit for each candidate or line item. For instance, if Strategic Vision had Barack Obama beating John McCain 48-43 in a particular state, I'd record a tally in the 8 column and another in the 3 column. Or if they had voters opposing a particular policy 50-45, I'd record a tally in the 0 column (for 50) and another in the 5 column (for 45). I did not include "non-response responses" like "other" or "undecided", nor did I include a tally for third-party candidates in races beteween the two major parties. I also excluded party primaries in which more than two candidates were listed, and approval questions for which more than two choices were provided.

We might expect, as a default, the distribution of these trailing digits to be approximately random. Here, for instance, is what I get if I run the numbers for all Senate and Presidential polls -- more than 3,000 (!) of them -- in my 2008 database:



This data is arguably not perfectly random. There is a little bit of bunching around the middle values like 4 and 5, perhaps because most of the polling comes from swing states or national polls in which a typical figure might be something like Obama 46, McCain 45 (with 9 percent undecided). But it is close to random, and could fairly easily have occurred through chance alone.

By contrast, here's what we get if we run the same tally for the Strategic Vision polls:

This data is not random at all. For instance, the trailing digit was '8' on 676 occasions, almost 60 percent more often than the 431 times that it was '1'. Over a sample of more than 5,000 data points, such an outcome occurring by chance alone would be an incredible fluke -- millions to one against. Bad luck can essentially be ruled out as an explanation.

One of two things seems to have happened, then.

One possibility is that there is some intrinsic, mathematical reason that certain trailing digits are more likely to come up than others. This is certainly possible -- and in fact, it would be somewhat likely if the polling data that we were looking at were homogeneous -- McCain versus Obama polls in Ohio, for instance.

But Strategic Vision's polls cover a wide array of topics: Presidential horse race numbers in any of a dozen or so states, senate and gubernatorial polling, primary polling, approval ratings of various kinds, polling on issues like the war in Iraq, and more abstract questions such as whether voters think that 'experience' or 'change' is the more important quality in a Presidential candidate. No one type of question, in no one state, represents more than a relatively small fraction of the sample. Under those circumstances, I can't think of any reason why the trailing digit wouldn't approach being random -- although there absolutely might be reasons that I haven't thought of.

But this data is not random. It's not close to random. It's not close to close. Which brings up the other possibility: Strategic Vision is cooking the books. And whoever is doing so is doing a pretty sloppy job. They'd seem to have a strong, unconscious preference for numbers ending in '7', for instance, as opposed to those ending in '6'. They tend to go with round numbers that end in '5' or '0' slightly too often. And they much prefer numbers with high trailing digits like 49 and 38 to those with low ones like 51 and 42.

I haven't really seen anyone approach polling data like this before, and I certainly haven't done so myself. So, we cannot rule out the possibility that there is some mathematical rationale for this that I haven't thought of. But it looks really, really bad. There is a substantial possibility -- far from a certainty -- that much of Strategic Vision's polling over the past several years has been forged.

I recognize the gravity of this claim. I've accused pollsters -- deservedly I think in most cases -- of all and sundry types of incompetence and bias. But that is all garden-variety stuff, as compared against the possibility that a prominent polling firm is making up numbers whole cloth.

I would emphasize, however, that at this stage, all of this represents circumstantial evidence. We are discussing a possibility. If we're keeping score, it's a possibility that I would never have thought to look into if Strategic Vision had been more professional about their disclosure standards. And if we're being frank, it's a possibility that might actually be a probability. But it's only that. A possibility. An hypothesis -- as yet unproven.

In the meantime, I have a couple of relatively specific messages for people.

Firstly, if you've been polled by Strategic Vision at any point in the past several years -- this probably means that you're in a state like Georgia, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Washington, Wisconsin or New Jersey that they tend to "poll" frequently -- now would be a good time to tell me about your experience. So click on the 'contact' button at the top of the page and do so. If you do, please provide as many details about the experience as possible. Please also provide reliable contact information, so that I could verify your identity if need be. I will not publish your name unless you specifically give me permission to do so -- but I do need to be able to confirm that you're not a sock puppet.

To the folks at Strategic Vision, LLC, the opposite holds. I don't care if you contact me by e-mail, by phone, by attorney, or by carrier pigeon. Whatever you tell me, whether the communication is solicited or not, whether you decide to play naughty or nice, it's on the record, and will almost certainly be revealed in full to the readers of this blog.

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A Few More Questions for a Sketchy Pollster

AAPOR, the American Association for Public Opinion Research, yesterday reprimanded Atlanta-based PR firm Strategic Vision, LLC for failing to disclose even basic information about their political polls:

For more than one year, AAPOR was unable to obtain the following basic information about Strategic Vision LLC’s polling in New Hampshire and Wisconsin: who sponsored the survey; who conducted it; a description of the underlying sampling frame; an accounting of how “likely voters” were identified and selected; response rates; and a description of any weighting or estimating procedures used.

This is a highly unusual step for AAPOR, which tends to be a conservative (lower-case 'c') organization that would not ordinarily be inclined to call out an individual pollster by name. But Strategic Vision brought the criticism entirely upon themselves, being the only one of 21 polling firms contacted by the organization that did not respond to the request, in spite of having literally months' worth of time to do so. As Mark Blumenthal notes, moreover, this is hardly an isolated incident: Strategic Vision has a long history of failing to disclose anything at all about their methodology, obfuscating around repeated requests from places like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Nor is Strategic Vision any better about disclosing such information to the general public. By contrast, they never provide any demographic detail, cross-tabulations, methodological disclosure, or other supporting evidence in conjunction with their polls.

So let me ask a few more questions of David E. Johnson, Strategic Vision's CEO. I don't purport to have answers to these questions, but I think they deserve to be asked.

1. Are you actually polling anyone at all? Or are you just throwing some numbers up on a webpage and hoping nobody calls you on it?

2. What is the location of your "offices" in Tallahassee, Madison and Dallas? Why is there no street address or phone number listed in association with them? How come none of the locations show up in a Yahoo! or Google search?

3. Why would you pick the name "Strategic Vision, LLC" for your company when the name "Strategic Vision, Inc." was already in use by an extremely well regarded, San Diego-based research firm that has been in business for more than 30 years? Are you deliberately trying to confuse your potential clients and leverage Strategic Vision, Inc.'s much stronger brand name?

I await a reply from Mr. Johnson. But quite honestly, I'm not really expecting one.

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Would Bigger House Favor Democrats?

Following up my previous post about the movement to increase the number of U.S. House seats, and after a long and very informative phone conversation with a smart and interesting reader named Mike Rosin, here I investigate the question: How would increasing the number of seats in the House of Representatives affect partisan competitiveness in the Electoral College?

Cutting to the chase, at least based on two-party competitiveness in the American states in recent presidential elections, expanding the House would almost certainly advantage the Democrats. "The bottom line on the Mississippi suit is that if this suit somehow succeeded it would not only increase the size of the House, it would also increase the size of the Electoral College," Rosin wrote to me by email. "This would make the Electoral College both more small-d democratic and more capital-D Democratic."



Rosin, a telecommunications engineer formerly at Bell Labs, is working on a book about the House as a tunable factor in the Electoral College. His work, in part, extends upon a recent paper by California State University-Northridge mathematicians Michael G. Neubauer and Joel Zeitlin that investigated the implications of House size on the Electoral College. (Rosin finds that the elections of 1876 and 1796 were critically depended on House size.)

To understand why expanding the House would favor the Democrats--and before getting to the chart above--let's start with a simple observation and a simple example.

The observation is that Republican presidential candidates of late fared better in smaller states than larger states. In 2000, Al Gore won six of the 11 biggest, but just 14 of the other 39, plus DC. Because every state gets two electors as a result of having two senators, the Senate bonus diminishes as the ratio between House seats and Senate seats grows; eight years later, Barack Obama won 9 of the 11 most-populous states--which alone contain (a little more than) a majority of electors--but won only 20 of the remaining 39 states, plus DC. As a simple example, imagine the House were to be suddenly doubled in size to 870 members. The Senate bonus would roughly diminish by half, and with it the exaggerated electoral power of small states.

Rosin points out that, as a general rule, whenever one candidate wins more of the Senate-based electors (i.e., wins more states) while another wins the House-based electors (i.e., wins states with a larger overall population), there is a possibility of altering the outcome by changing the House size.# Anyway, shifting from general effects to the specific, and given the recent Republican advantage in smaller states, expanding the House will tend to advantage Democrats. Were Democrats the better small-state performing party, or should they become that party in the future, the partisan effect of a larger House would, of course, be reversed.

Rosin was kind enough to game out the effect of the increase of House seats for 538's readers. Using the 2000 election, and thus the 1990 Census data upon which electors that year were still based, here's what he did: He added one seat at a time, assigned it to the state that would have received that next House seat based on the Huntington-Hill method used for (re)apportionment, and then updated the Electoral College result for the Bush-Gore 2000 election. That year is used because in a blowout election, the size of the House might alter the final tally but would be very, very unlikely to change who won. And just to be clear, state-by-state voting results are not manipulated; only the number of electoral votes cast by each state is. (Neubauer and Zeitlin produce a similar, expanded version here.)

Bush beat Gore 271-267* in the actual, 538-member Electoral College, a Bush margin of +4. As it happens, the next three states that would have each gained an elector were, in order, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey--all Gore-won states. So, if the House had been 438 members in 2000,+ Gore would have lost by just a single elector, 271-270. From there the added electors toggle between Gore-blue and Bush-red states. And, though it may be hard to see precisely from the figure above, when the House size hits 491 Gore is tied, and then takes his first lead at 492. The margin flips back and forth a bit, but once it reaches 598 Gore wins at every size up to and including 932--with the exception of another exact tie at 655. Overall, Bush's lead grows as high as 7 and Gore's to 14. But because Bush won by 4 with a 435-member House/538-member Electoral College, that means the largest net swing is +3 to Bush but +18 to Gore.

Hence, based on recent partisan trends in the states, a bigger House tends to yield a bigger advantage for a Democratic candidate, all else equal.

NOTES:
#In the analysis DC is treated as a "state" with two Senate-based electors and one House-based elector (at House size = 435), even though technically it is not a state and of course has neither two senators nor a voting House member. Hence, the Senate-based elector count for Gore in 2000 is 42, for the 20 states plus DC Gore carried.

*Yes, I know that one Democratic elector did not vote, so the official total is actually 271-266. And yes, I'm also aware of the fact that the state populations by 2000 actually "cost" Bush 7 electors because, were the Electoral College state apportionments based on 2000 Census data (already by then collected), instead of the 1990 decade, Bush's total would have been 278, not 271--but this is a separate issue.

+There is a proposal to give DC a voting House member and also add one seat to Utah's delegation--a political decision to adjust House seat totals, but not one in conformity with the Huntington-Hill's natural adjustment to add new states. So when I speculate on a 438-member House, I do not mean one that would result from some political bargain to add seats to specific states, like the DC/UT proposal, but the automatic application of H-H.

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Generic House Polling Suggests the Republicans Could Regain the House in 2010

Under the heading, "Republicans not in a position to retake the House (yet)," Chris Bowers estimates that the Democrats have a 41.2%-37.7% lead in recent generic House polling. Bowers writes, "Democrats are, after all, still winning."

But it's not so simple. In research published a couple years ago, Joe Bafumi, Bob Erikson, and Chris Wlezien found that, yes, generic party ballots are highly predictive of House voting--especially in the month or two before the election-but that early polling can be improved by adjusting for political conditions. In particular, the out-party consistently outperforms the generic polls.



The paper accompanying this graph was among the first public predictions of a Democratic takeover in 2006.

Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezien's analysis doesn't go back before 300 days before the election, but if we take the liberty of extrapolating . . . The current state of the generic polls gives the Democrats .412/(.412+.377) = 52% of the two-party vote. Going to the graph, we see, first, that 52% for the Democrats is near historic lows (comparable to 1946, 1994, and 1998) and that the expected Democratic vote--given that their party holds the White House--is around -3%, or a 53-47 popular vote win for the Republicans.

Would 53% of the popular vote be enough for the Republicans to win a House majority? A quick look, based on my analysis with John Kastellec and Jamie Chandler of seats and votes in Congress, suggests yes.

It's still early--and there's a lot of scatter in those scatterplots--but if the generic polls remain this close, the Republican Party looks to be in good shape in the 2010.

P.S. Is there any hope for the Democrats? Sure. Beyond the general uncertainty in prediction, there is the general unpopularity of Republicans; also, it will be year 2 of the presidential term, not year 6 which is historically the really bad year for the incumbent party. Still and all, the numbers now definitely do not look good for the Democrats.

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Teddy's Seat May Be Filled Today

With the 24-16 vote by the Massachusetts State Senate--following the MA House's earlier approval--the path is now cleared for Gov. Deval Patrick to appoint a temporary custodian to occupy the late Ted Kennedy's vacated Senate seat until a January special election is held.

Rumored possibilities include former governor and 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis; former Democratic National Committee chair Paul Kirk; former Lt. Gov. Evelyn Murphy; and Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree. Bloomberg seems to imply that Kirk is the favorite, and the Boston Globe notes that Kennedy's nephew and son--former MA Rep. Joe Kennedy and current Rhode Island Rep. Patrick Kennedy--have let the governor know they favor Kirk, a close family friend who lives on Cape Cod. The New York Times also strongly suggests that Kirk, who chairs the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston, is the frontrunner.

Presuming Kirk is tapped, only the timing seems in dispute. Bloomberg says it could happen as early as today; the Globe saying as early as tomorrow.

Regardless of the who and the when, as I previously argued here at 538, changing the vacancy appointment rules depending on the political situation:

Several state senators changed their votes from the last time the issue came up in 2004, when the Legislature, controlled by Democrats, changed the law to provide for a special election process to prevent Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, from appointing a successor to US Senator John F. Kerry if Kerry had won the presidency.

“I think I made a mistake then,’’ said state Senator Steven A. Tolman, a Brighton Democrat. “This is politics, right? Sure it’s politics.’’

And state Senator Karen E. Spilka, an Ashland Democrat, said, “We should have done this then. . . . This to me is not a Democrat issue at this point. It’s not a Republican issue. It’s a Massachusetts issue.’’

Eleven Democrats joined all five Republicans in voting against the measure.

“It’s wrong to change the rules depending on who’s in power,’’ said state Senator Brian A. Joyce, a Milton Democrat who was a key architect of the legislation to establish special elections to fill Senate vacancies in 2004. “We shouldn’t change the rules by which we govern our democracy depending upon who the governor is.’’

With 91-year-old West Virginia's Robert Byrd's health failing and thus talk already underway about succession politics in that state--in WV, the governor appoints a successor, who then holds the seat until the next general election--it remains a very ripe moment for a national conversation, and perhaps a recommendation from a panel specially-appointed by the Senate itself, standardizing the procedures for filling Senate appointments.

So here's an idea: Presuming Deval picks Kirk, why not have him and Roland Burris co-chair a temporary panel on Senate succession? They can summon state and national constitutional experts and historians to testify and then produce a report offering recommendations to the states about their succession rules, including analysis and discussion of the following:

*The timing of special elections to fill vacancies, particularly as they relate to the time lag between the start of the vacancy and the next general election. (A retiring senator who dies two days before the regular November election already scheduled to replace him creates far less urgency than a newly-elected senator who dies two days after his January swearing-in.)

*In cases where there will be long period before the next scheduled general election, guidelines for both the timing of temporary appointments and the scheduling of interim special elections.

*Recommendations as to the partisanship of the appointee, specifically whether the replacement must be of the same party of the vacating senator, and how lists of potential nominees should be assembled in cases where the governor and the vacating senator are from different parties.

*Recommendation as to whether the governor should be able to appoint herself to the vacancy.

States may choose to do nothing in response to the report, of course; federalism entitles them to do as they please. But maybe many states would agree to change their succession rules in order to make them more uniform, so we can avoid in the future some of the political jockeying and partisan shenanigans we witnessed in Massachusetts. And Kirk and Burris can leave the Senate knowing that they bequeathed some small, notable legacy beyond serving as placeholders who filled in temporarily for men who made a more lasting impact on national politics than they did.

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Glenn Beck, Post-Modern Conservative

Buried in the cross-tabs of the new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll is a question that takes a temperature reading of Glenn Beck. Beck actually makes out pretty well. While just 24 percent of Americans have a favorable view of him (13 percent strongly so), only 19 percent have an unfavorable one (14 percent strongly). That leaves 57 percent who either don't know Beck or are indifferent toward him.

This compares quite favorably to, for example, Rush Limbaugh, who was the subject of a similar question in the NBC/WSJ poll in June. Limbaugh was regarded favorably by 23 percent of Americans, but unfavorably by 50 percent -- including 37 percent who held a strongly negative view. This is not a new problem for Limbaugh, incidentally, who has been roughly this unpopular since at least 1995.



The difference between Beck and Limbaugh is that Beck is much more of an anti-establishment figure. I have posited before that running perpendicular to the traditional liberal-conservative spectrum is an establishment/anti-establishment spectrum; Beck is conservative but anti-establishment. And that may be working out pretty well for him, since the country seems to be becoming more anti-establishment too.

Of course, as Glenn Greenwald points out, Beck's philosophy is neither particularly self-consistent nor particularly intellectually coherent. But since when, exactly, did that matter in American politics? Most voters, whether they consider themselves liberal or conservative, have a haphazard, inconsistent, and somewhat fluid set of views, which are not so easy to reconcile with the tenets of political orthodoxy. Nor is it so clear that traditional (circa 1980-2006) American conservativism is particularly more self-consistent -- why, for instance, does it tolerate government intervention in the bedroom, if it considers it so imperative that government stay out of the boardroom?

Beck is a PoMoCon -- a post-modern conservative. And his philosophy is not all that difficult to articulate. It borrows a couple of things from traditional American conservatism:

-- It shares an extreme distrust for government, particularly the Federal Government.
-- It shares the notion that American society is in some sort of state of existential decline.

On the other hand, it also features some important differences:

-- It is much more distrustful of non-governmental institutions, such as labor unions, corporations, political parties, community groups, the media, and scientific institutions.
-- It is largely indifferent toward 'social issues'.
-- It is much less explicitly aligned with the Republican Party.
-- It has much less use for elites, which it also distrusts.

The PoMoCons are not so much less self-consistent as they are less concerned with consistency, as compared with traditional conservatives. Theirs is a bric-a-brac, skeptical (sometimes to the point of paranoid), play-it-by-ear, relatively spontaneous reaction to the here-and-now -- not something cooked up by a K Street thinktank. There is no future, no past -- there is only today. And today is a pretty good day to be Glenn Beck.

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German Elections: Afghanistan Issue on the Rise

After a spring and summer dominated by domestic issues, namely the implosion of German high-tech exports, foreign policy is rapidly becoming a hot-button issue for the German Federal Elections. Following the controversial air strike called in by a German commander, the growing general discontent with the war has accelerated. Indeed, Germany's contribution of more than 4,000 personnel to the NATO-led international security force is by far the nation's single largest military commitment abroad. The question of Germany's continued participation in the mission prompted Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is running in an increasingly competitive re-election campaign, to call for an international conference on Afghanistan strategy in order to show progress on the issue.

The voting for the Bundestag-- considerately scheduled for a Sunday, rather than during the work week -- will take place this coming weekend, with more than 60 million eligible voters.

Currently, Germany has a ruling "grand coalition," where the two largest parties join together to form a government, often with additional smaller coalition partners. Chancellor Merkel's center-right Christian Democrats (with sister CSU from Bavaria) lead the coalition, along with center-left Social Democrats. The free market ("European liberal") Free Democrats, the normal coalition partner of the Christian Democrats, are currently the largest opposition party, followed by "The Left," and the Green Party.

The German election system is called the "mixed member proportional," where voters cast a ballot for a deputy in a fixed constituency as well as for a party list, which is organized by state (Lander). If a party receives 10 percent of the national vote, they are guaranteed 10 percent of the members of parliament, with the party list "topping up" the number of single districts the party won. There are a total of 299 districts and at least 598 total members, which can be exceeded if there are individual constituencies won by a party that were not reflected in the overall proportion taken in the Lander. There are 13 such seats currently, bringing the Bundestag up to 611.

Polling over the last few months has indicated a fairly entrenched electorate in Germany. Six well known pollsters in Germany have polls out from the last week that are quite consistent between one another, and show only minor changes over the course of 2009.

The bottom line question will be if Merkel's Christian Democrats and traditional partner Free Democrats can together garner enough seats in the Bundestag to create a coalition that excludes the Social Democrats, Left and the Greens. Similarly, the Social Democrats are looking for a way to remain in power (with the current grand coalition they hold 8 of 16 cabinet ministries), while the Greens, coming of some success in the European Parliament elections, have been mentioned as a possible partner with the Christian Democrats and Free Dems.

Allenbach polling (strongest numbers for Christian Dems), shows a situation where the Christian Dems, Free Dems coalition will be flirting with the 50% mark, which would be enough to make a center-right coalition.

The Infratest Dimap polling has through the year shown stronger number for the Social Dems than the Allenbach polling, which is supposedly a bit more conservative. However, this set of numbers indicates a relatively good chance for the Free Democrats to break 15 percent, which would give the center-right coalition the votes they need even if the Christian Democrats do no better than 35 percent.

Both sets of polling show a weakening of the major parties through the summer and small uptick for the three small parties, indicating the well-reported public fatigue with economic and foreign policy decisions by grand coalition government.

Finally, there is an interesting and important regional component to German politics, particularly at the Federal level. Above we have disaggregated the last Infratest Dimap poll for September into West and East Germany (former GDR). The Christian Democrats are 10 points stronger in the Western portion (37 percent to 27 percent), while the Left party is nearly four times higher in the East (7 percent to 27 percent). The Social Democrats, however, take a similar share in both regions, as do the Greens and Free Democrats.

Given the small margin for error for Angela Merkel and the leading Christian Democrats, burying the Afghanistan issue and trumpeting the (slow) recovery of German exports will be the main strategy of this week. The final push will likely not raise any new major issues, but additional polling at the end of the week will give an indication of whether the left-side small parties have cut into the major party shares any further. Merkel is likely to emerge as chancellor again either way, but whether she has to again build a grand coalition rather than the preferred center-right government is the key question.
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Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

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Health Care Is Hazardous to Poll Numbers for Grassley, Other Senators

One of the things about the so-called Gang of Six -- the group of Senators to which Max Baucus issued an exclusive invitation to participate in health care negotiations -- is that each one started out the year in a place of seeming electoral invincibility. Baucus, Kent Conrad, Jeff Bingaman, Olympia Snowe, Chuck Grassley and Mike Enzi won re-election with an average of 72 percent of the vote as of their last election, and none had a challenger that came closer than 39 points.

It now appears that, for some of these Senators, it's a good thing that they managed to bank some goodwill with the voters.

Grassley is the most obvious case. His approval rating in Iowa is down to 57 percent, according to the latest Selzer / Des Moines Register poll. That's not a bad result -- a lot of Senators would kill for that number -- but it's much worse than Grassley is used to, and reflects an 18-point decline since the start of the year:



It's no big secret where the decline is coming from:

Grassley’s approval among Iowa Republicans has risen 10 percentage points, although he took big hits from Democrats, whose approval dropped 24 percentage points since April, and independents, whose approval fell by 11 percentage points in the same span.

Iowa, true to its swing state reputation, is split almost exactly evenly between Democrats (34%), Republicans (33%) and independents (33%). A senator there will get himself in trouble if he pisses off two Democrats for every Republican he wins over -- especially if he's losing support from independents in the process.

Indeed, it's always been something of a mystery why Grassley is as popular as he's been. I recognize that there are other dimensions besides ideology that are relevant to evaluating a senator -- constituent services, effectiveness in delivering pork, charisma and personal appeal, etc. But Grassley is no moderate -- he's rated, in fact, as the 11th most conservative Republican thus far this year, a position that is fairly typical for him. In any event, his efforts at "bipartisanship" -- I'll go ahead and use the scare quotes because his sincerity can be called into question -- have in fact begin to polarize his support.

Grassley is not the only Senator so affected. Snowe's favorability is down to 54 percent in the latest R2K/Daily Kos poll -- a marginal result for a senator used to polling in the 60s and 70s. Baucus's favorability is now just 50 percent, according to the same poll.

Bingaman, the quietest of the Group of Six, has not seen his numbers much impacted. There is no polling on Enzi and Conrad, although I'd be surprised if the latter hadn't taken a fairly big hit.

2010, more likely than not, will be a year of some political upheaval. The question is whether that upheaval will be directed at Democrats alone, or rather, incumbents of all stripes. If the former, then Democrats are in for a world of hurt. If the latter, Democrats will still almost certainly lose seats, simply because they have more incumbents running (at least in the House; this is less so in the Senate). But they might be able to knock off a Richard Burr in North Carolina, maybe a Grassley in Iowa (although I wouldn't place money on that one), possibly someone like a Thad McCotter in MI-11, or maybe a Michelle Bachman or Joe Wilson. There are also an unusually high number of cases in which the Democrats would arguably be better off if the incumbent retired: this is almost certianly true, for instance, for Chris Dodd in Virginia and Jon Corzine in New Jersey, and is arguably so for Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania and Harry Reid in Nevada. The rash of Republican retirements in the Senate, conversely, may prove to be as much a blessing as a curse, although they are undermined by nominating such insider-y, party line candidates as Roy Blunt (the former Majority Whip) in Missouri and Rob Portman (Bush's former OMB director) in Ohio.

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Don't Count Health Care Chickens Yet

The smart, insider take these days seems to be that health care reform will almost certainly pass the Congress. Different encapsulations of this can be found from Ezra Klein ("that's where we sit: incredibly, incredibly close to the finish line") and Megan McArdle ("I now put the chances of a substantial health care bill passing at 75%").

Actually, Megan's number seems about right. If I had to attach a probability estimate to health care passing, it would be that one: 75 percent. But I don't think it's as high as, say, 90 or 95 percent, and my sense is that there are lot of informed observers who do.

My encapsulation last week was that public opinion on health care is now more or less fully formed, and that Democrats managed to snatch a draw from the jaws of defeat. Hardly what they'd want under ideal circumstances. But probably good enough, given that the memory of the impact of the failure to pass health care reform in 1993-94 looms large in the Democratic consioussness.

But it's one thing for some combination of the 59 Senate Democrats, plus Olympia Snowe, plus Ted Kennedy's replacement in Massachusetts, plus perhaps one or two retiring Republicans like George Voinovich, to have the intention of passing health care reform. It's another thing to actually do it. And the process itself is rather complicated, for several reasons.

1) The process will be loooooooong. There are more than 500 amendments to Senator Baucus's mark-up, some of which are dilatory or trivial, but many of which -- especially those offered by Sens. Snowe, Wyden are Rockefeller -- are substantive. Essentially every aspect of the health care debate will be revisited? The public option? There's an amendment for that. More generous subsidies for the middle class? There's an amendment for that. Some random crap about ACORN? There's an amendment for that too. (Personally, I'm surprised that no Senator has yet taken the opportunity to insert an amendment ensuring that no Al Qaeda members will be covered by the health care bill.)

A lot of these amendments, presumably, won't make it to the Senate floor. But many will. And some of them may not only be voted on -- they may also be filibustered, which could eat up days at a time.

And that's still only one-third of the process. The House still has to pass its bill, and that vote is likely to be close. And then there's the conference committee report that would merge the Senate and House versions. A lot of hurdles still have to be cleared.

2. There's opposition from both the left and the right. I remain somewhat agnostic about the idea of issuing an ultimatum on the public option -- both whether it's the correct tactic, and whether the threat is credible. But certainly, this is different from how it usually goes in Washington. Either a public option will have to be inserted -- or a lot of progressives will lose face. Neither of those things will be pretty, but one of them has to happen. It is a multi-way negotiation, and multi-way negotiations are exponentially more complex than two-way negoitations. It is not necessarily obvious that the window for a health care bill that is neither too far to the right nor too far to the left is large enough to accommodate 60 senators and 218 representatives.

3. The opposition is multi-dimensional. As we described last week, there are a lot of objections to the Baucus bill -- and, moreover, there are a lot of different kinds of objections. A particular problem seems to be the funding mechanisms. Pro-labor Democrats object to the tax on expensive health care policies; people like John Kerry have parochial objections to the tax burden placed on various industries that may be abundant in their states; governors object to what they see as a heavier load that the states will have to carry on Medicare. We can expect to hear from the booze, cigarette, and Slurpee if the various sin taxes are reintroduced. And the Senate seems anathema to inserting a broad surtax on high-income earners, as the House bill deigns to do. If the negotiations break down, it will most likely be over the funding mechanism -- not because of coverage-related issues like the public option, where the objections are less orthogonal.

4. Reconciliation is, at best, a last resort. For months now, there's been debate over the Democrats could plausibly use reconciliation -- a tactic that would allow them to circumvent the filibuster and pass health care reform with 50 + 1 votes. I'm not an expert in Senate procedure, but I've found the "anti"-reconciliation arguments more persuasive. The pro-reconciliation folks seem to be saying: there's nothing really stopping Democrats from doing this, except political willpower. But political willpower is the whole rub: it's not clear there's enough of it to get it done. If the bill goes through reconcilation, a lot of process hawks will drop out. To name names, I'm thinking of Senators Snowe, (Ben) Nelson, Lieberman, Byrd, and Conrad, probably among others -- I can imagine Russ Feingold objecting, for instance. It is also likely to be a strange duck of a bill if it goes through reconcilaition, and so you might also have people dropping their support for more substantive reasons.

Again, the point of this is not to frighten anyone. I've thought the chances of a health care bill passing have always been at least 50 percent, and are higher now than they have been in some time. But the Democrats still have a couple of first downs to achieve before it's goal to go.

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Players in the Afghanistan Sandbox

While reports are varied regarding the implications of the Afghan election recount, and the chance of a coalition government in the meantime seems slim, the coming week will likely include some hard-spun rhetoric and policy debate, particularly from the international players in Afghanistan.

The upcoming German Federal elections (27 September) are the most pressing political deadline for the major NATO partners, which have been thrown into turmoil over the controversial air strike on 4 September. At the same time, the top US commander in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, has given a frank assessment of the US strategy in the country, assigning failing marks to both the NATO forces and the Afghan government. He contends that "without more forces and the rapid implementation of a genuine counterinsurgency strategy, defeat is likely," says the Washington Post.

British fatigue with the Afghanistan conflict has been long-standing, enough to prompt US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other senior US military officials to question the UK's "political will" on the subject last December.

The summer's infamous "helicopter row" further politicized the British engagement, with the Tory opposition calling Gordon Brown to the mat over alleged reductions to helicopter production budgets in the early 2000s. Representative of broader claims that British troops are poorly equipped and vulnerable as a result, the Conservatives used the issue to challenge Labour's overall progress in conduct of the war. With the foreign policy legacy of the Blair and Brown "New Labour" governments strongly linked to success in Afghanistan, and David Cameron's insistence that the Conservatives would also pursue an aggressive Afghistan policy (albeit a "smarter" strategy), however, it is unlikely that the UK would entertain a serious reduction or pull-out in the coming several years.

The same cannot be said for several other NATO allies of the international forces. Following a car bomb attack that killed six Italian soldiers, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi responded that Italy would be pulling its troops out as quickly as possible, though not immediately. "We are all convinced that the best for everyone is to get out soon," he emphasized. The Sarkozy administration in France has joined with the British and German governments in calling for an international conference in the coming months that sets solid timetables for withdrawal. Canadian threats for a pull-out have occurred several times over the last eight years, mostly in protest of perceived poor support from other allies. Canadian officials vowed last year to remove all of its troops by 2011, withstanding pressure from US and other NATO allies.

As the pieces begin to sort out, this week could see a final announcement regarding the international strategy conference on Afghanistan, which the US and UN have reportedly agreed to holding along with France, Germany and the UK. At the same time, a concrete timeline for the final results of the Presidential election is forthcoming. Given the instability in the country and the month that has already passed since the 20 August balloting, additional delays in the formation of a new government could be quite damaging to efforts to build support for the national authorities.

In summary, instability marks not just the Afghan security and political scene, but international support as well. Many national governments and their publics, including major players like the US, Germany and the UK, are questioning the national interest of continued expenditure and loss of life in the country, particularly as opposition pressure mounts. While military and financial commitments are likely to hold for several years, it is clearer than ever than national interests and security, rather than international commitments to democracy or human rights, lead the calculus.

Moving forward, as the news trickles over the coming months, a few major stakeholders will play key roles. We will continue to follow them here at FiveThirtyEight.

1. Electoral Complaints Commission: Established in 2004 following accusations and evidence of severe fraud in the previous Presidential election, the ECC is by a powerful institution. As discussed last week, the ECC can delay or prevent the finalization of the election results, as well as issuing fines and sanctions. The decisions of this institution, which ordered the current recount after fielding thousands of electoral complaints, will largely determine the outcome of this election. The UN-supported ECC is made up of three international and two Afghan commissioners.

2. Independent Electoral Commission: The IEC is led by seven Afghan commissioners and is meant to operate as a neutral, technical overseer of elections in the country. However, the IEC's apparent inability to prevent electoral graft and intimidation has called the official vote totals into question. At the end of the day, the IEC is subject to the type of corruption and political manipulation that is endemic in elections held in poor, insecure locations around the world. Though this institution has received a great deal of criticism, the expectations for the IEC has been raised to unrealistic and unfair levels, given the insecurity and corruption.

3. UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA): Led by Kai Eide, a senior diplomat from Norway, UNAMA has been in-country since its establishment by the UN Security Council in 2002. The mission's mandate is focused in two parts, first political stability, good governance and "constitutional democracy" and second, recovery and reconstruction. A great deal of the international community's aid to Afghanistan has been implemented through UN agencies, which are coordinated, but not actually implemented, by UNAMA.

4. International Security Assistance Force (ISAF): The NATO-led international force, which currently has an official strength of 64,500, also includes troops from 12 non-NATO countries, such as Jordan, Singapore, and Bosnia --though they are largely symbolic forces of between 2 and 25 soldiers.

5. United States Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A): US Forces in Afghanistan, led by General McChrystal, are focused in the volatile southern and eastern portions of the country, where Taliban elements are located. The current strategy includes a mix of counter-insurgency, training and reconstruction activities.

6. Afghanistan National Army: With an estimated current strength of around 100,000, the effective operation of the ANA, including policing duties, is a key goal for the international forces in Afghanistan. The US government has funded and provided most recruitment and equipment for the forces, while training as has been done by all allies. The ANA has had combat success, such as in "Operation Achilles" against Taliban forces, but is widely considered to be ineffective.
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Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

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Gay Marriage Is Fading as 'Values' Focal Point

It's Mike Huckabee's win in the presidential straw poll at this past week's Value Voters' summit that's drawing the headlines. But this is every bit as interesting:

Abortion ranked first among issues of concern to straw-poll voters, getting 41 percent of the vote, with protection of religious liberty second with 18 percent.

Opposition to same-sex marriage was third at 7 percent.

Emphasis is mine. These are not the tea-partiers, who have a libertarian bent. This is a forum, rather, sponsored by the Family Research Council, an organization which continues to insist that homosexuality is curable and to link it to pedophilia. But the actual attendees at the forum -- religious conservative activists from around the country -- just don't seem to be all that riled up about the prospect of two men getting married.

This is not to suggest that these voters have become pro-gay marriage. If any of them was spotted in leather chaps at Remington's after the event -- it was not, I assure you, to show solidarity for their gay brothers and sisters. But the last time this poll was conducted, in October 2007, gay marriage was the top choice of 20 percent of the attendees. That's quite a decline, particularly given that gay marriage has been more in the news than abortion for the past couple of years.

Public opinion is moving toward acceptance of gay marriage. But it is doing so very slowly, at a rate of perhaps a point or two per year, and has at least a few years to go before it is the majority opinion. In the near term, the more relevant dimension may be 'passion', or depth of feeling. It used to be that the conservatives were ahead on passion -- they were strongly opposed to gay marriage, whereas liberals were, at best, lukewarmly in favor of it. Increasingly, that dynamic seems to be reversing.

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