Heartache With Hard Work

Here’s a sad irony: as the economy (fingers crossed) starts to improve significantly in the upcoming years, people will suddenly start to care a whole lot less about the deficit.  And yet, when the economy is booming is precisely when we ought to start paying attention to fixing the long-term deficit risks.  When credit is cheap, we should borrow to stimulate.  Once things start growing faster, the government can step out of the way and let the rising tide of the economy start to balance the budget for us, and devote its energy to reigning in the long-term mess.

It’s a funny thing, that.  Despite it being phrased in terms of ‘handing down these deficits to our children,’ the fever pitch of deficit-mongering always takes place during economic declines and fades away if things are going well.  It’s almost as if the average person doesn’t really understand the complex nature of the global economy and fixates on the deficit as an easy signal of Bad Economic Things.

I’m in a predicting mood, so here’s another one.  Obama is going to put some serious effort into resolving long-term deficit issues in his second term.  And the public, which ostensibly was terrified about the ‘record-breaking’ deficits of his first administration, will be really unhappy about it.  Sub-prediction: the vast majority of media outlets covering this issue will not notice the irony.

At about 8:15 Pacific time on Tuesday night I declared that the Democratic candidate was going to win in 2016.  By at least five points, too.

Here’s the thing: the economy is already recovering and it’s only going to pick up more.  The lost capacity over the past few years doesn’t represent some fundamental collapse of the American economy.  It’s all still latent there.  And once things pick back up for real, they’re likely to really take off.

If Obama was able to keep his approval right around 50% in the current economic climate, you can only imagine what things will look like in a genuine recovery.

All of which points to a big Democratic win.  After all, the demographic advantages possessed by the Democrats right now are substantial.  Which is not to say that they’re eternal.  But for at least the next few years, the Republicans have built a hole for themselves which is going to be very difficult to get out of.

Over the long term, it’s simply impossible to imagine a major political party isolating itself from an increasing-large share of the electorate.  Which means they’re going to have to re-calibrate their relationship with all the non-white, non-male portions of the country.  But for the near future, there’s not really any way to successfully do that.  The base of the Republican party right now is simply not going to accept the kind of changes that it would take to win over those votes.  At least not over the next few years.

Now, there’s always the possibility of strange occurrences which push things out of whack.  But if I were Marco Rubio or some of the other potential up-and-comers in the GOP, I would plan on laying low for the next cycle.

So, the Senate. As I mentioned yesterday, I think this is a really big deal. At the most basic level, it’s important simply that the Democrats held the majority. That seemed pretty unlikely earlier this year. But instead of losing things, they actually GAINED seats. That helps to secure the blue team against potential losses in the next two cycles. And it pushes the median vote in the Senate left.

That is particularly true given the specifics.

Because of the GOP’s incapacity to speak reasonably about abortion and rape, they’ve traded an inconsistent vote (in Richard Lugar) for a reasonably solid Democratic vote (in Joe Donnelly). And they’ve given up an almost certain lock on knocking McCaskill out of Missouri. Instead of taking that seat, they got blown out of the water by a double-digit margin.

Jon Tester in Montana, who was supposed to be a sitting duck, will be serving his second term. He’s a conservative Dem, but not wildly so. Or rather, he appears to primarily be interested in accomplishing specific moderate goals, rather than being a moderate fetishist who tacks to the center by instinct regardless of circumstance.

Speaking of which, it seemed like a disaster when Kent Conrad decided not to run, but he’s now been replaced by Heidi Heitkamp who will likely be less of a pain in the butt for progressives. And then there’s Connecticut, where Crazy Uncle Joe Lieberman is finally gone and has been replaced by a far more solid liberal vote in CHRIS Murphy. Those two are retentions that may end up mattering a lot because although the seats were already blue-ish, they’ve now been given a nice new coat of paint. Tim Kaine is no liberal, but he’s likely to be at least as good as Webb. Heinrich will be a bit more left than Bingaman

We lost the Nebraska seat, but of all the possible seats to lose, that’s probably the least painful. The Benator was a Democrat, sure, but god he was aggravating.

But the really important news is the addition of some genuine progressive voices. The new slate of Democratic Senators includes a number of folks who could be very big names for a very long time. The campaign against Scott Brown is likely the toughest one that Elizabeth Warren is going to have face for a long time. And Warren immediately becomes one of the most progressive voices in the chamber. A role she’ll share with Sherrod Brown, who ended up winning re-election fairly easily.

Angus King is an Independent, but will likely be in the most left-leaning quartile of the Senate. And he’s replacing the perpetually aggravating Snowe who was the most liberal of the Republicans but was still a Republican. And, importantly, King has highlighted filibuster reform a major issue.

Tammy Baldwin is going to do great in the Senate, and is a real improvement over Kohl. She’s not quite Feingold, but is much closer to that mold.

This sort of thing is really important. Building a back bench of strong liberal voices helps to promote the overall agenda, it raises the profile of the issues they care about, and it provides a range of future options to draw from for Cabinet positions or even the presidency.

For people that are disillusioned with the relatively centrist policy positions taken in the first Obama administration, one of the best possible antidotes is a more progressive Senate, which can drag him (and those that will follow him) leftward.

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.