Heartache With Hard Work

The Book of Love– The Magnetic Fields

2004 was devastating.  It wasn’t enough that Kerry lost.  It’s that he lost in part because a series of anti-gay amendments helped turn out the far right vote.  It really shook my faith in things. I was still sure that equality would win in the long run, but ‘long’ suddenly felt desperately far away.

So now it’s 2012.

– The Democratic president, who officially endorsed gay marriage earlier this year, just won a fairly conclusive victory. During his first term, he finally made it possible for gays to serve openly in the military and refused to support DOMA in Court. Not only did his pro-gay stance not hurt him, it actually probably helped.  The Republican candidate desperately tried to avoid social issues at all, because he knew it would make him and his party look crazy.

– Tammy Baldwin was just elected as the first openly gay Senator.  It wasn’t even an issue in her campaign.  The House will have six queer members.

– Three states just voted to permit same-sex marriage.  Another state shot down a marriage equality ban.  After 32 consecutive losses trying to secure basic rights at the ballot box, we swept the tables last night.  And while there will surely be other losses down the road, the firewall has been broken.  And it will only be easier to vote in favor of equality the next time.

– Gay marriage was already legal in Iowa, but the results last night ensured that right won’t be rescinded.

– The Supreme Court is set to hear a case about DOMA soon, and I’m not completely terrified of what they might say.

– The Republican Party is facing the looming reality that they are not just on the wrong side of history, but are on the wrong side of an ever-growing electoral reality.  Even they aren’t dumb enough to keep this up forever.  And, if you’ll forgive the pun, once some prominent GOP leaders remove their fingers from the dike, the whole thing is going to burst.

A personal anecdote:

I grew up in a pretty conservative place: Island County, Washington.  It’s the home of the Whidbey Naval Base, with all the politics that you’d expect from that.  I did not know a single openly gay person the whole time I lived there.  In elementary school, kids played ‘Smear the Queer’ for fun.  And last night, Island County voted to affirm marriage equality.

It may be the proudest I’ve ever been of my hometown.

Well, that was quite a night.  Being a vaguely competent human adult, and a statistical nerd, I had very little doubt about the general outcome.  And still, there’s always some nervousness.  Add in a great deal of doubt about some really important state-level initiatives, and I had a lot to stress about.

And, at the end of the day, basically everything broke right.  The polls were spot-on for the presidential and Senate races.  Marijuana was legalized in two states.  California managed to pass a tax to prevent itself from collapsing AND finally gave the Democrats a super-majority.  Which means they could actually have just passed the tax anyways.  But still, having clear popular commitment to it is a big deal.

And gay marriage.  On November 5th, it had never been approved in a statewide vote of any kind.  That’s an 0-32 record.  But last night three states affirmed marriage equality, and Minnesota rejected a ban on it.  More thoughts coming about this later tonight, but suffice to say, this is a Big F-ing Deal.

The Democrats grabbed a couple extra Senate seats, and held onto some that looked DOA six months ago.  Thanks to a Republican Party that decided to pose the question: ‘rape…is it really that bad?’  But also thanks to Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota and Jon Tester in Montana.  Heitkamp in particular kind of blew me away.  I gave up on that one as soon as Conrad announced he was leaving and never really thought about it again.

Perhaps even more importantly, the Senate became a LOT more progressive. Again, I’ll have a full post about that up soon.  But, the short version is that Elizabeth Warren is in the chamber, and Joe Lieberman is not.

Of course, the House remains in Republican hands (despite the Dems actually getting more net-votes – yay gerrymandering! yay federalism!), which is a bummer.  And the initiative to eliminate the death penalty failed in California, but I wasn’t really expecting that to pass anyways.

Anyways, this wasn’t a ‘transformational’ election and the blue team didn’t win a ‘mandate.’  But even just preserving all the gains from Obama’s first term is a HUGE win for progressive values and human dignity.  Most prominently, universal health care is now safe, probably forever.

There’s a lot of reasons to be cynical about the current state of American liberalism.  But yesterday was a really good day.

Paul Ryan should dump $10 million bucks into the Allegheny River tonight. It will save him the effort of doing it 1450 days from now.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ll be live-tweeting the election results tonight.

@olneyce

See you on the other side!

A Minutes Decision – Hutch and Kathy

My initial response to this commentary about undecided voters was intense frustration.

These people are more articulate than the ones in the SNL skit. But honestly, not that much. They all give reasons for their undecided status. And yet, it’s hard to discern what actual reasoning process is going on.

The basic theme is that these voters don’t much like Romney, but are so concerned about the economy that they’re considering voting for him.

But one thing that you will not see anywhere in that article is what precisely they think Romney will do to improve things. Even more, there really isn’t any coherent articulation of what the problem even is. Yes, ‘the economy’ isn’t doing well. But what does that actually mean? I don’t get the sense that anyone really knows.

Now, that’s not necessarily bad. I don’t expect people to have complicated theories about aggregate demand or QE3 and so forth. But it still drives me crazy to consistently hear people engage in this sort of self-analysis without any clear signal that they even grasp just how much they’re putting on faith.

If you’re going to vote on the economy, don’t you think it would be important to lay out precisely what the guy who is supposed to be better on the economy will do?  My sense is that this does not even occur to most as being a problem.  In their minds, the president has far more power than in reality.  So failure at the macro-level must therefore be evidence of some individual failing.  Starting from that premise, the decision process mostly involves grabbing ahold of whatever campaign narratives bolster your position.

Weirdly, I actually have a lot more sympathy for the people who give reasons that (in my opinion) are clearly incorrect or crazy. For instance, Melinda in Iowa says: “a lot of handouts to people that take advantage of the system. I am concerned Obamacare will just take my money so I can pay for others. Now, I do believe many people deserve assistance, but I wish that there would be more investigation into who actually is getting assistance and I feel that Obama has not done enough in regards to this.” Now that’s just silly (again, in my opinion). But at least it’s a demonstration of a broad ideology. The kind of person who would say something like that is the kind of person who is just not going to be on board with the Democratic economic agenda – and there’s no real need to articulate specific objections. The reason she is undecided is that she values cultural issues a lot. That makes sense. If economic times are good, that sort of person is going to prioritize the other stuff, but when things are bad and the person in charge has a different attitude toward economics, then you’re going to start doling out the blame.

Another theme is that they want to focus on the individual person over the party dynamics of that person.  Many of these people seem like folks who prefer Democrats to Republicans, but are contemplating holding their nose in hopes that Romney will be more moderate.   This isn’t a crazy idea, but it does often stem from a misunderstanding of just how party-dominated our system has become.  You aren’t voting for the individual; you’re voting for the party and there’s an individual who gets dragged along with it.

All that said, there’s something strangely wonderful about these undecided voters, and the intense work they do to communicate the reasons for their undecidedness. After all, there are a lot of ‘undecided’ voters who are undecided in the sense that they simply don’t care enough to make a decision. The undecideds that we’re talking about are the ones who believe it’s a significant civic duty to vote. And they take the obligation seriously.

As political scientists, we can tear our hair out about unreasonable expectations of these voters.  But we need to also remember that elections work perfectly well even if the only thing they do is reward/punish candidates for the general conditions under their watch.  And we can also diagnose what’s ‘really’ going on underneath the reasoning.  But that doesn’t make the perception of responsibility and care any less real.  These people are committed to American democracy and are putting a lot of work into fulfilling their role.

And you have to respect that.

Just a little bit about percentages.

There’s a big fight going on about Nate Silver and statistical modeling and such things. It’s all pretty understandable. People want to believe the best, and the nature of elections means that we don’t get any confirmed info until next Tuesday evening.

But a lot of the concerns I’ve heard are about the level of certainty in Silver’s model. It has put the percentage chance of an Obama victory in the upper 70s all week. Right now it’s sitting at 79.0%.

A couple things.

First, during the 2008 campaign I was ultimately more impressed with Sam Wang’s election model, which uses a lot fewer bells and whistles to achieve its conclusions. I find that to be a good thing. I really enjoy Silver’s detailed analysis of the many complex elements that go into election results. And his approach is fantastic for under-polled races. It’s no surprise that he rose to fame in the 08 Democratic primaries. But when there’s a wealth of polling information Wang’s approach, which makes no effort to fiddle, seems more appropriate.

Anyways, the point is that Wang put the race at well above 90%. So Silver is actually pretty conservative in his estimate. And since I’ve been telling my friends for months to prefer Wang, I don’t feel like I’m cherry-picking the result that favors my guy.

Second, I think a lot of people who are upset about the 79% certainty haven’t really thought through what 79% really means.

To use a baseball analogy, the following circumstance carries a 79% chance of victory. You’re the home team, it’s the top of the 8th, and you’re up by one run. Your opponents have one out, and runners on first and second. Now, that’s a good place to be, but it’s pretty obviously not a sure thing. Teams come back from situations like that all the time. Well, 21% of the time to be exact.

Or, how about another one. If you’re the home team and you’re up by one run going into the bottom half of the 7th, you’ve got a 79.4% chance of winning.

I don’t have the numbers, but off the top of my head I’d guess that being up by just a point with five minutes left in a football games gives you the same percentage. Being up by three with five minutes to go in basketball. Being up by one goal at halftime in a soccer game. And so on.

In a game pitting two basically even opponents, even small leads provide huge percentages. Because you’d predict that almost half the time, the leading team will pull further ahead. And since they’re fairly even, most of the rest of the results will clump around simply preserving the status quo. However, these are general truths. Obviously in any given case, a team can go on a 10-0 run. Or Raul Freaking Ibanez can hit a homerun. Or Arsenal can score four unanswered goals (argh).

In the end, we just have to wait a week and we’ll find out for real.

Edit: I see that Silver’s most recent post also uses a sports analogy.  He says 79 percent is equivalent to being down by a field goal with three minutes to go.

Today, I’m going to read the front page of The National Review.  I try to do this fairly regularly because A) it’s nice to see what the other side thinks, just as an occasional reality check, and B) it’s nice to see what the other side thinks is the Most Important Thing in the World, which you have totally failed to notice because you don’t live in crazytown.

Category A helps to remind me that I live in an information bubble, and I’m just as subject to motivated reasoning as anyone else.  While I obviously don’t agree with much they have to say there, I find the National Review to represent genuine conservative/Republican talking points without making my blood boil too much.

That said, there’s enough there to fill up category B. That’s the one that helps to remind me why I’m on the team I’m on.

And, I have to admit, today there is a third motivating factor: C) as the election gets closer and all the numbers seem to point to a solid but small Obama lead, I grow nervouser and nervouser.  So I wanted to check in to see how the other side is taking the news that they are trailing – mostly to confirm for myself that as nervous as I feel, at least my guy is ahead. It’s not quite schadenfreude, but it’s not not that, either.

So let’s see what we have (with my quick categorization of the story):

1) A post making fun of Oliver Stone’s comment about the hurricane (C)
2) An apology for Christie appearing with (and lauding) the president (C, because of the tone, which communicates that it was perfectly reasonable for Christine to make this decision.  But also A because it’s a pretty reasonable argument)
3) A Fox News report about Benghazi (B)
4) Romney super PAC is running some ads in states he’s definitely going to lose (C)
5) Report about the OH Senate race, with some serious motivated reasoning about how Brown is going to lose (C)
6) Same as #5.  This one references Mandel’s ‘momentum’ – and links to the RCP polling average which puts Brown up by 5.5%.  So, yeah, not close. (C)
7) More on Benghazi (B)
8) Something about a weirdo who is running for Michigan’s 11th District (A, I guess)
9) Something making fun of Planned Parenthood for releasing a music video (B, because the implication is basically: lolz, birth control)
10) Poll in Ohio says Obama is ahead (not news)
11) Post explaining that, unlike a bunch of other ridiculous firestorms cultivated by the conservative media, this Benghazi thing REALLY IS A BIG DEAL.  (B and C)
12) Missouri Senate race tightens.  See #5-6 above.  This piece cites the poll which is most favorable to Akin, implies that this indicates movement, etc.  McCaskill is up by 5%. (C)
13) Neutral article about Christie (A)
14) reference to a Gallup poll which suggests that Romney is ahead in early voting.  This is actually interesting.  I was assuming that Obama was ahead there, but this shows it’s probably closer to a draw.  It comes with the normal caveat that Gallup’s numbers are pretty divergent from everyone else. And it also appears from looking at the numbers that the sample tilts pretty heavily Republican. But I’m not great at reading polls, so I might be missing something.  Regardless, interesting.  (Good example of A, since I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere in my normal circle)
15) Obama and Romney are tied – link to poll which says they’re tied (meh)
16) Dig at Biden for a totally milquetoast comment (B, I guess, but also meh)
17) Wildly misleading statement about a Virginia House race, that relies on people not actually watching the video (B)

So what is the result of my little unscientific bit of media analysis:

Things don’t look good from their perspective, I can tell you that.  Most of the things I categorized as C look like desperate attempts to put Humpty-Dumpty back together.  When the best you can do to persuade people that you’re in good shape is to reference Senate campaigns where you trail by 5 points with 5 days to go…

Things I expected to see, but did not: defenses of Romney’s ads about the auto companies and China, reference to any poll that shows Romney leading anything, someone really angry at the idea that we shouldn’t be allowed to ‘politicize’ Sandy (which I would actually agree with BTW – it’s a political matter).  Which is to say: it’s pretty low-key over there right now.

They’re still beating that Benghazi drum, though.  So that’s something.

Yesterday I went through a laundry list of supposed advantages to the Electoral College. One that I forgot to cover (astutely noted by friend-of-the-blog, Brian) goes as follows:

The Electoral College provides a more manageable mechanism to resolve election disputes, and reduces some of the problems of election monitoring. For example, in a razor-thin election you only have to do a recount in a couple states rather than the whole nation, which would be a much larger bureaucratic issue to manage.

In addition, the Electoral College reduces incentives to conduct electoral shenanigans in the states where it is easiest to manage (ones on the extreme edge of the spectrums which are therefore more likely to be dominated by one party). Right now there is no benefit to running up the score in Massachusetts or Illinois or Oklahoma or Texas. But once every vote counts, that would change.

This argument, while reasonable, has both uniqueness and impact problems. Most of these problems already exist. Witness Florida in 2000 for a bureaucratic nightmare of a recount. And while there’s no incentive to run up the score in the presidential election, there is very much an incentive for statewide offices. In Massachusetts, for example, whatever party factors might incentivize election-rigging efforts should already be triggered by the Brown-Warren race. The spate of voter ID laws being pushed around the country suggest that Republicans are very much willing to use state-level power to manage election turnout. And so on.

In fact, it seems pretty likely to me that a national popular vote for presidency would incentivize the federal government to actually institute some meaningful comprehensive election laws. Which might very well produce a net-positive result in terms of election shenanigans.

If you instinctively distrust the federal government and its ability to manage things, you might not buy that argument. But it sure seems to me like nationalizing regulation of fundamental rights tends to work a lot better than leaving them to states.

Another point made by Brian, which I had never considered, is that a national popular vote would strongly encourage states to facilitate maximum voter participation. It would probably be better for you (as, say, an Oklahoma state legislator) to simply get as many Oklahomans to the polls as possible and let the conservative tilt of your state do the magic, rather than screwing around with illegal vote management schemes.

A final point on all this: my preferred solution is just a constitutional amendment. But the National Popular Vote state compact is a pretty solid example of how easily we could find a constitutional workaround. The basic idea is that states commit to send their Electoral Votes to the national popular vote winner – but only once enough states have signed onto the compact to control the election. That is: once you get 270 Electoral Votes worth of states, the compact enters into force.

It would produce some screwy results in terms of the final numbers. But it would certainly work.

Unsurprisingly, all of the states that have signed on so far are Blue. Which is a shame because there really is no strong reason this should be a partisan issue.

The Electoral College should be abolished. To me this is pretty uncontroversial, but given the nature of our Constitutional structure it is tremendously difficult to make even obvious changes.

My previous post discussed the possibility that 2012 could become another example of an Electoral/popular split. If it did, it would of course be the second time out of the last four cycles. To me, the fact that this is even a possibility absolutely demolishes the single best argument in favor of keeping the Electoral College: that it is unlikely to ever make much difference.

Obviously, the primary argument against the Electoral College is that it is undemocratic. In this system, a relatively small number of voters have massively disproportionate effect. Anyone who lives in a ‘safe’ state in a given election is basically casting a meaningless ballot. While I am by no means a democracy-absolutist, and favor plenty of restrictions or limitations on the absolute spirit of democracy, those restrictions need to have a good reason to exist. And they should have a somewhat limited effect.

With the Electoral College, you end up with the vast majority of the population feeling no compelling reason to value their votes on the most prominent political question of the day. Which is damaging not just because it undercounts those votes, but also because it structures their broader political participation.

Which brings me to the supposed benefits of the system. Let’s go through them:

Geographic diversity

Supposedly, this system is better because it encourages campaigns that cover the whole of the country, rather than just the high-population coasts. For example:

the Electoral College serves to make Presidential elections truly national, requiring candidates to register support not just in the high population areas on the East and West Coasts but also in the interior of the nation where interests vastly different from those of the Boston-New York-Washington corridor and the San Francisco-Los Angeles-San Diego corridor motivate voters.

First, this is a great example of the vagueness in such claims. WHY precisely is geographic diversity a value? It can only be if the policy-focus it produces is better than you’d get with a ‘national’ campaign. Well, what happens when candidates focus narrowly on swing states? You get insane subsidies for ethanol thanks to Iowa. Virulent China-bashing for Ohio voters. The stupidest policy in the world (TM), our Cuba embargo, which has survived solely because Florida is a swing state. Excessive support for coal. And so on. Which of these reflect the value of geographic diversity?

Second, and building off of this, the Electoral College system doesn’t really enhance ‘geographic diversity’ in elections. It empowers a certain set of states – virtually none of which represent some of the most populated geographic regions of the US. Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Nevada. What do you notice about these states? None of them represent the densely-populated states of the Northeast, the Pacific coast, or the South.

Florida is kind of in the South, but not really. Colorado or New Mexico are in the southwest, but I bet the people of Texas don’t consider them to be perfect representatives of Texan interests. New Hampshire is in the New England but gets comparatively little ad spending precisely because it’s so expensive to pay for the media markets around it, which are not in play. Washington and Oregon used to be swing states, but are tipping further left these days. And the tens of millions of people in California probably feel like they have some different interests, anyways.

A system of one-person, one-vote has the advantage of improving geographic diversity via the simple process of making every single vote count. As an electoral strategy in such a system, trying to vulture votes merely from big cities on the coasts wouldn’t be tremendously viable. There are, after all, almost two hundred million people living in the Midwest and South.

Third, ‘geographic diversity’ is often a stand-in for a larger dismissiveness about certain kinds of people, which I find distasteful. We are a nation of people, not a nation of territory. The agents of our political system are people, not parcels of land. Those people shouldn’t have less political power simply because they happen to be bunched together in cities. More on that in a second.

Founder worship

The founders designed this system, so who are we to challenge it? Longtime readers of the blog will be well aware of how I feel about this argument.

I have a modest Burkean impulse to approve of existing institutions and the ennobling spirit of our history. But this is tempered by a desire to have institutions that, well, make sense. Some sort of reverence for the Founders can be useful if it’s serving the purpose of helping to bind together an existing political community. But treating them as infallible serves precisely the opposite purpose.

Further, it’s not like ‘the Electoral College’ looks anything like the Founders actually intended. And it hasn’t for almost 200 years. The original process for most state legislatures to directly select Electors. In the early 19th century, states started to turn to popular votes, which became a basically universal practice in 1828.

So: if you value the opinion of the Founders, you really should be pressing for states to take away the designation of Electors based on popular votes.

Status quo bias

This arguments says constitutional amendments are a big deal so we should be really skeptical about having them.  See above.  Preserving a stupid status quo is stupid.  It would not be at all complex to do this, and it is inconceivable that we would employ this system if inventing a new Constitution today.

Madisonian bottlenecks

For an example of this argument, see Jonathan Bernstein. I enjoy his perspective a lot on most things, but his fascination with Madisonianism is a bit too much for me in normal cases. And the Electoral College is not even a normal case.

The problem with this argument is twofold. First, I generally believe that the nature of checks and balances has changed a lot in the past 225 years.  The more radical claim is simply that the Madisonian system is a relic, designed for a time of limited communication and long distances.  The more moderate variant is: even if you love want to preserve the goal of competitive factions, we simply have other ways of doing it now.

Which is to say: given the nature of political legitimacy and effective government in the 21st century, I don’t see ‘too much unity’ as a particularly pressing problem.  Which means that embracing complexity for its own sake isn’t a great idea.

This is especially the case when the Electoral College double-counts a particular form of complexity.  It just models the same over-representation of rural citizens that we already have in the apportionment of the Senate.  I can’t think of any good reason why we need an additional layer of complexity in the selection-process for the executive.  The states are already represented in the legislature. What is the value of representing them again via the vote for the presidency?

Which brings back to the casual dismissal of huge chunks of the country.  When you favor the existing system, you are saying that this is a nation built of states, not of people.  And you are saying that if you make the mistake of sharing a geographic territory with too many like-minded people, you don’t really matter.

There should be very good for deciding that two different people should have disproportionate influence in an election where they are considering the precise same question.  The Electoral College does not come close, in my mind, to passing that test.

With a reasonable (although not especially high) chance of an Electoral split again this year, I just wanted to stake out my position before the dust settles.

The Electoral College is a silly system, which produces undemocratic results, and structures campaigns in ways that prevent us from ever achieving even the possibility of a ‘real’ result. It is, however, the system that currently controls our elections – and is not so terrible that it is fundamentally unjust.

Which is to say: I strongly support reform and will do so regardless of the specific results of this election. But I consider the results produced by the Electoral College to be legitimate enough. Just like I did in 2000.

The travesty that was 2000 was partially the fact that Gore lost despite getting more votes. That was a generalized problem. But I want to also stress that most people on the left who were really upset were focused on Florida, and the halting of vote-counting there. The Electoral College is a larger injustice of the system, but it does produce valid results. The Florida stuff was about changing the rules of the game in mid-stream.

I obviously don’t want another Electoral split, but if it does occur (in Obama’s favor), I hope that it helps to unite everyone in annoyance at the stupidity of our current system. I’m sure Republicans would be unhappy about it, and I don’t expect that Democrats would radically shift their position either, so it’s at least a theoretical possibility.