Earlier today, Barack Obama gave a speech in which he said that: Congressional leaders from both parties are close to a deal to avert the so-called "fiscal cliff;" that deal has not yet been reached; it is the Republicans' fault that the deal is not being reached; and the Republicans are not going to get their preferred solution to this whole situation. Rumor has it that House Republicans have been seriously pissed off at this speech, and are basically refusing to vote on anything tonight because Obama said mean things about them. What I'm wondering is whether that sequence of events might've been deliberate on Obama's part. It's been obvious all along that the fundamental logic of the deal-making favors Democratic policy results if we go over the cliff into the new year: Obama can then say to Republicans, okay, here's the Obama tax cut, and in exchange for my letting you pass it, which will be giving me what I want anyway, I'll make you give me a bunch of other stuff that I want. Republicans would be in a very difficult position to resist that tactic. So it makes sense for Obama to want to go over the cliff for a day or two. But, as has been usual for the last two years, it's quite important for him to make sure people blame Republicans for it. So making a very public display of having been working on a deal until the last minute, and getting House Republicans to sabotage any potential deal because they felt personally offended by Obama, is arguably the best of all relevant worlds. People keep doubting that Obama is incorporating the craziness of the Republicans into his strategy, which he would typically have been doing by offering more in deals than he actually wanted to give up, secure in the knowledge that House Republicans can't take yes for an answer. But I think that this time, it might well be the truth: Obama had a big noisy press conference because he wanted to throw the House Republican caucus into a hissy-fit, delivering him a more advantageous tactical situation while squarely delivering them the blame.
Happy New Year?
Monday, December 31, 2012
Saturday, December 22, 2012
He did it!
The Doctor saved us!!!
(Okay, given my earlier post about time zones and all, maybe I have to wait another few hours before December 21st, 2012 has good and truly bitten the dust across all of planet earth. Whatever.)
(Okay, given my earlier post about time zones and all, maybe I have to wait another few hours before December 21st, 2012 has good and truly bitten the dust across all of planet earth. Whatever.)
Friday, December 21, 2012
It's Always the End of the World as We Know It
(NOTE: If you haven't seen through the end of Season 7, Part I of Doctor Who, it's possible you won't want to read this post. I think the quote I use isn't particularly spoilerish, but still.)
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Time Zones and Doomsday
I just got done reading this rather thorough take-down of the idea that this Friday, December 21st, will be a "doomsday" because a certain cycle of a certain Mayan calendar ends on it on Slate's new really cool astronomy blog. Accordingly, because I need some way of procrastinating on my constitutional-theory paper that's due, well, on doomsday itself, I thought I'd share a thought I recently had about doomsday predictions. If you forecast that the end will fall on a certain calendar date, which time zone do you mean that in? Is it December 21st, Eastern Standard Time? Or Greenwich Mean Time? (In Doctor Who it does tend to be London time, as far as I can tell, though it's usually only relevant for Christmas specials.) Tokyo time? What? Does it happen at the first instant that it's December 21st anywhere on earth, or at the one brief moment, twenty-four hours later, when it's December 21st everywhere on earth? Or just at some point during the day that's December 21st, 2012 for the location of the Mayan civilization? Whenever it happens, it'll be nighttime for half the planet, and while the day is a nice naturally-occurring measurement unit, the placement of the dividing-line between one day and the next is a wee bit arbitrary. Astronomers tend to consider a day as lasting from noon to noon, for instance.
Now, this is certainly not the biggest problem with doomsday prophesies by any stretch of the imagination. Still, worth keeping in mind that there isn't even a uniform date across the whole planet, let alone a uniform time. And if we're talking about a fated planet-wide Armageddon, you'd think it would have some slightly more eternal reference-frame than just the dating conventions of twenty-first century human civilization. Just a thought.
Now, this is certainly not the biggest problem with doomsday prophesies by any stretch of the imagination. Still, worth keeping in mind that there isn't even a uniform date across the whole planet, let alone a uniform time. And if we're talking about a fated planet-wide Armageddon, you'd think it would have some slightly more eternal reference-frame than just the dating conventions of twenty-first century human civilization. Just a thought.
Friday, December 14, 2012
The Fundamental Logic of Not Making Trades
Time to distract myself from national tragedy with... the probable impending trade of the New York Mets' best and most awesome player! ...oh well, it's something, at least.
Trades are weird. You'd kind of think trades wouldn't happen People talk about two teams "agreeing" to a trade, but really, what happens in a trade is a disagreement. Team X thinks that Player Package A is superior to Player Package B, while Team Y thinks that B is superior to A. So they swap, and everyone's happy. Perforce, this involves either teams disagreeing on the "absolute" values, so to speak, of the players involved or teams giving different "relative" values to different types of player. The impending negotiations between the Mets and the Blue Jays regarding R.A. Dickey are a marvelous case study.
Trades are weird. You'd kind of think trades wouldn't happen People talk about two teams "agreeing" to a trade, but really, what happens in a trade is a disagreement. Team X thinks that Player Package A is superior to Player Package B, while Team Y thinks that B is superior to A. So they swap, and everyone's happy. Perforce, this involves either teams disagreeing on the "absolute" values, so to speak, of the players involved or teams giving different "relative" values to different types of player. The impending negotiations between the Mets and the Blue Jays regarding R.A. Dickey are a marvelous case study.
The Intent of a Gun is to Destroy
'Tis the season for arguing about guns, apparently, because some homicidal maniac decided to make it so.
One of the many, many arguments against meaningful gun control that really pisses me off is the idea that other things beside guns also kill people. This can take the form of, as in the really bizarre Fox News segment a few days ago that was featured, and annihilated, by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, coming up with all the other creative ways that someone who committed murder with a gun could've committed the same murder without a gun.* Or it can involve the simple observation that most people don't die from being shot with a gun, and not even most people who die the kind of death where you suffer some kind of violent physical trauma are killed with guns. Cars, for instance, kill lots of people, and knives can be very effective as an alternate means of murdering someone. But you don't see anyone proposing to ban cars or knives, do you?
This argument entirely misses what I would call the intentions of an object. The intention of a car, for instance, is to transport a person over a moderate distance at a moderately high speed. That's why cars exist, it's what they're meant to do. In the course of being used to do the thing they're intended to do, when they're used wrong, people sometimes get killed, but killing is not the intention. Likewise with, say, heavy-duty kitchen knives: their intention is to cut cooking ingredients. They can be used in a non-intended way, to cut living human flesh, but again, killing is not the intention of the object. To kill someone with a knife, a human needs to add intent to kill. For a car to kill someone, a human needs to use it wrongly, though not necessarily with any ill intent.
Now, admittedly, one might protest my fairly obvious next point by saying that the intention of a gun is not to kill either. Setting this question as phrased aside for the moment, I will simply assert that the intention of a gun is destruction. Knives and cars and baseball bats and airplanes, though they can all be turned into highly effective weapons, are first and foremost designed for creative uses: cooking and driving and playing and flying. There is, on the other hand, nothing creative that a gun wants to be used for. You can use a gun in a work of art, I suppose, but people don't make guns to make art with them. They make guns to efficiently destroy things. The intended target might be a piece of marked paper on a wall, or a helpless defensive animal in the woods, or a tyrannical Brit (think 1770s), or a home invader bent on rape and pillage, and these acts of destruction we might want to condone. Well, some of us might, anyway. But the simple fact remains that all a gun wants to do is destroy stuff. Guns will sometimes just kill people because they feel like killing people, as when they misfire during cleaning or whatever. A society with a lot of guns in it is a society filled with tiny little objects filled with malice for whatever lies in their sights, and no wish other than to destroy.
Not only does this make guns an inherently violent object in a way that baseball bats or cars or even knives are not, it speaks to the logic of eradicating them. What do we lose if we get rid of guns? We lose nothing creative, for guns are not creative objects. If we eradicate knives, we lose the ability to prepare food efficiently, and to open packages. If we eradicate cars, we lose the ability to transport people efficiently throughout society. If we eradicate guns? I contend that we lose nothing of value, nothing except destruction. As a society we must eternally struggle with the fact that knives and cars and baseball bats can become instruments of destruction, for we have substantial reason to desire the continued existence of these things. There is, however, no logic telling us that we must struggle with the innate desire of firearms to become instruments of destruction. We have simply chosen to tolerate it, because some of us enjoy destroying the right kind of thing.
One of the many, many arguments against meaningful gun control that really pisses me off is the idea that other things beside guns also kill people. This can take the form of, as in the really bizarre Fox News segment a few days ago that was featured, and annihilated, by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, coming up with all the other creative ways that someone who committed murder with a gun could've committed the same murder without a gun.* Or it can involve the simple observation that most people don't die from being shot with a gun, and not even most people who die the kind of death where you suffer some kind of violent physical trauma are killed with guns. Cars, for instance, kill lots of people, and knives can be very effective as an alternate means of murdering someone. But you don't see anyone proposing to ban cars or knives, do you?
This argument entirely misses what I would call the intentions of an object. The intention of a car, for instance, is to transport a person over a moderate distance at a moderately high speed. That's why cars exist, it's what they're meant to do. In the course of being used to do the thing they're intended to do, when they're used wrong, people sometimes get killed, but killing is not the intention. Likewise with, say, heavy-duty kitchen knives: their intention is to cut cooking ingredients. They can be used in a non-intended way, to cut living human flesh, but again, killing is not the intention of the object. To kill someone with a knife, a human needs to add intent to kill. For a car to kill someone, a human needs to use it wrongly, though not necessarily with any ill intent.
Now, admittedly, one might protest my fairly obvious next point by saying that the intention of a gun is not to kill either. Setting this question as phrased aside for the moment, I will simply assert that the intention of a gun is destruction. Knives and cars and baseball bats and airplanes, though they can all be turned into highly effective weapons, are first and foremost designed for creative uses: cooking and driving and playing and flying. There is, on the other hand, nothing creative that a gun wants to be used for. You can use a gun in a work of art, I suppose, but people don't make guns to make art with them. They make guns to efficiently destroy things. The intended target might be a piece of marked paper on a wall, or a helpless defensive animal in the woods, or a tyrannical Brit (think 1770s), or a home invader bent on rape and pillage, and these acts of destruction we might want to condone. Well, some of us might, anyway. But the simple fact remains that all a gun wants to do is destroy stuff. Guns will sometimes just kill people because they feel like killing people, as when they misfire during cleaning or whatever. A society with a lot of guns in it is a society filled with tiny little objects filled with malice for whatever lies in their sights, and no wish other than to destroy.
Not only does this make guns an inherently violent object in a way that baseball bats or cars or even knives are not, it speaks to the logic of eradicating them. What do we lose if we get rid of guns? We lose nothing creative, for guns are not creative objects. If we eradicate knives, we lose the ability to prepare food efficiently, and to open packages. If we eradicate cars, we lose the ability to transport people efficiently throughout society. If we eradicate guns? I contend that we lose nothing of value, nothing except destruction. As a society we must eternally struggle with the fact that knives and cars and baseball bats can become instruments of destruction, for we have substantial reason to desire the continued existence of these things. There is, however, no logic telling us that we must struggle with the innate desire of firearms to become instruments of destruction. We have simply chosen to tolerate it, because some of us enjoy destroying the right kind of thing.
Why Today Is Not The Day For Gun Control
In the wake of yet another one of these stupid bloody mass shootings, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said this:
This is one of those subjects where there's just an absolute consensus that nothing will ever be done about it. Climate change is another, although I have somewhat more hope there that Republicans can be made to realize that a carbon tax is a sensible, market-based conservative solution to a genuine national problem. ("Somewhat more" does not mean "a lot," just "more than zero.") But the fact that this consensus is right as long as there are 218 Republicans in the House of Representatives only underscores the importance of making there not be 218 House Republicans anymore. Presidents are supposed to get slaughtered in their six-year midterms. It's very important that 2014 buck that trend. Today is just one more tragic reason why. Republican control of the House makes it impossible to get the national government to do anything to solve national problems, or to make the lives of the American polity better or to prevent tragedies. Republican control of the House must, therefore, end.
"There is, I am sure -- will be, rather -- a day for discussion of the usual Washington policy debates, but I do not think today is that day."A whole lot of people on the left are getting understandably pissed off about this. The rule that we can never discuss gun policy when the costs of America's absurd, wicked gun policy are most apparent is one that serves to eternally prejudice the debate in favor of the pro-gun side, and it legitimately sucks to hear a Democratic Administration endorsing it. But I think the reason why they keep saying this is readily apparent, and can be expressed in three words: Speaker John Boehner. Calls for Congress to pass new anti-gun legislation face an inescapable problem in the fact that Republicans control the House of Representatives, and that we can predict with pretty high certainty that any anti-gun measure will garner exactly 0 votes from House Republicans. Those two facts together make it absolutely impossible that Congress will enact any new legislation on the subject for the next two years. That sucks, but it's true, and there's very little anyone can do (except perhaps to shoot a bunch of Republican Congressmen, which, for the record, I am not advocating!) to make it stop being true. And, this being the case, I can understand why the White House feels that there's no point starting an argument that will only cost them political capital when there's absolutely zero potential to get anything out of it.
This is one of those subjects where there's just an absolute consensus that nothing will ever be done about it. Climate change is another, although I have somewhat more hope there that Republicans can be made to realize that a carbon tax is a sensible, market-based conservative solution to a genuine national problem. ("Somewhat more" does not mean "a lot," just "more than zero.") But the fact that this consensus is right as long as there are 218 Republicans in the House of Representatives only underscores the importance of making there not be 218 House Republicans anymore. Presidents are supposed to get slaughtered in their six-year midterms. It's very important that 2014 buck that trend. Today is just one more tragic reason why. Republican control of the House makes it impossible to get the national government to do anything to solve national problems, or to make the lives of the American polity better or to prevent tragedies. Republican control of the House must, therefore, end.
Congress Can Criminalize a Romantic Weekend Across State Lines
In 1910, the United States Congress passed the White-Slave Traffic Act, better known as the Mann Act, prohibiting the transport of women across state lines for "immoral purposes." The intention behind the law was to strike at interstate prostitution networks and human trafficking. This is a fairly ambitious use of Congress' Commerce Power to begin with, but what happened next was even more striking. The "immoral purposes" phrasing is absurdly ambiguous, after all, so it's no surprise that prosecutors started bringing charges against people who crossed a state line merely to have sex. Consensual sex. With no money involved.
Some time in the three years after the Mann Act was passed, Farley Drew Caminetti, a married man, traveled from Sacramento, California, to Reno, Nevada with his mistress. A friend of his did the same. Their intent was very much to have sex with their mistresses in Reno. Their wives alerted the police, and Caminetti and his friend were arrested. They were then found guilty of violating the Mann Act, despite the fact that there was no prostitution involves. Extramarital affairs, after all, are considered immoral by plenty of people, and in 1913 by just about everyone. They then appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which, in 1917, upheld the conviction. The case was mainly concerned with statutory interpretation, i.e. did the Mann Act mean to encompass non-commercial sex in its "immoral purposes" framework, but implicitly there's a constitutional question lurking here as well. After all, two people having sex is not particularly commercial in nature, unless it's prostitution, which this case wasn't. Some readings of the Commerce Clause power might say that, while interstate crossings for commercial sex may be prohibited through that power, interstate crossings for free, consensual sex cannot be. The Court didn't read it that way, though. That's not really surprising, given that it had already upheld the Mann Act and that it has never embraced the view that "commerce" only means the narrow, economic sense of exchange of goods for other goods and/or money.
Still, I think it's kind of remarkable that Congress could, if it so chose, prohibit a young unmarried couple traveling across state lines to some resort place or whatever for a romantic weekend together. Now, perhaps these days the Court would wheel in the various individual rights provisions to limit this apparent power. Nothing in the alterations of Commerce Clause doctrine would preclude such a result, however: this is a state line crossing we're talking about, and no case has yet backed down from the notion that Congress can hit anyone or anything that crosses a state line with as much force as it wants for whatever reason it wants. Pretty striking.
(In case you're asking yourself why I just wrote a blog post that seems to bemoan the limitless scope of Congress' powers, I'm beginning to work on a paper for school in which I plan on arguing that Congress' enumerated powers should be limited even in their most concrete applications by various structural principles and through relation to individual-rights provisions.)
Some time in the three years after the Mann Act was passed, Farley Drew Caminetti, a married man, traveled from Sacramento, California, to Reno, Nevada with his mistress. A friend of his did the same. Their intent was very much to have sex with their mistresses in Reno. Their wives alerted the police, and Caminetti and his friend were arrested. They were then found guilty of violating the Mann Act, despite the fact that there was no prostitution involves. Extramarital affairs, after all, are considered immoral by plenty of people, and in 1913 by just about everyone. They then appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which, in 1917, upheld the conviction. The case was mainly concerned with statutory interpretation, i.e. did the Mann Act mean to encompass non-commercial sex in its "immoral purposes" framework, but implicitly there's a constitutional question lurking here as well. After all, two people having sex is not particularly commercial in nature, unless it's prostitution, which this case wasn't. Some readings of the Commerce Clause power might say that, while interstate crossings for commercial sex may be prohibited through that power, interstate crossings for free, consensual sex cannot be. The Court didn't read it that way, though. That's not really surprising, given that it had already upheld the Mann Act and that it has never embraced the view that "commerce" only means the narrow, economic sense of exchange of goods for other goods and/or money.
Still, I think it's kind of remarkable that Congress could, if it so chose, prohibit a young unmarried couple traveling across state lines to some resort place or whatever for a romantic weekend together. Now, perhaps these days the Court would wheel in the various individual rights provisions to limit this apparent power. Nothing in the alterations of Commerce Clause doctrine would preclude such a result, however: this is a state line crossing we're talking about, and no case has yet backed down from the notion that Congress can hit anyone or anything that crosses a state line with as much force as it wants for whatever reason it wants. Pretty striking.
(In case you're asking yourself why I just wrote a blog post that seems to bemoan the limitless scope of Congress' powers, I'm beginning to work on a paper for school in which I plan on arguing that Congress' enumerated powers should be limited even in their most concrete applications by various structural principles and through relation to individual-rights provisions.)
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Analyzing Peter Bourjos
(This is all in light of my previous post.)
Apparently people are speculating that a trade centered around Peter Bourjos moving from the Angels to the Mets and R.A. Dickey moving from the Mets to the Angels. That's a horrible idea; Bourjos is not worth R.A. Dickey. He's not worth Jon Niese. But is he worth having at all?
One might be given pause by the fact that he hit .220/.291/.315 last year in limited usage as a reserve outfielder (195 PA), accumulating just a 73 wRC+ and having been on pace for about -24 runs above average from batting over a full season. He's a spectacular enough defender that he was still worth 1.9 fWAR and 1.1 bWAR last year, but still, the awful hitting gives one pause. Moreover, his genuinely good season of hitting in 2011, when he hit .271/.327/.438 with 12 home runs, 11 triples, and 22 steals, en route to a roughly 4.5 WAR season (when combined with his being a brilliant center fielder) was sustained in large part by a .338 BAbip, which looks unsustainable given his low line drive percentage (14.5% over the course of his career, worst in the majors over that period).
Except... when I plug his numbers into an xBAbip calculator, which projects a batting average on balls in play by the nature of those balls in play, I find that Bourjos if anything under-performs his expectations on balls in play. Using 2012 numbers, in which offense (including BAbip) was way down, his 2012 season should've produced a .300 BAbip, instead of the .274 it did produce. In 2011, sure, he was outperforming slightly; that year should've been a .331 instead of a .338 by 2011 numbers, and would've been just .321 in 2012. Meanwhile, in 2010, his rookie season, Bourjos had just a .228 BAbip but his batted balls should've resulted in more like a .285. So over the course of his young career, Bourjos has had some genuinely bad luck on his balls in play, even considering the trajectories on which he's hit those balls. Why is this true, despite his woeful lack of line drives? Probably because he hits quite few fly balls, which have the worst BAbip of anything; for someone who doesn't hit many home runs, this is a sensible approach.
I think, therefore, that Bourjos would be worth picking up, for a low enough price. (I.e., not for Dickey or Niese!) Even when he's been a lousy hitter, he's been a valuable player because of his speed and defense, and there's reason to think that his offensive results so far have been a floor rather than a ceiling. He'd fill exactly the Mets biggest hole, and with a bit of coaching from Dan Hudgens, might even be able to improve his offensive approach a bit. And when he's good, Bourjos has shown that he's not just good, he's really good, like 4+ WAR good.
The Murphy + McHugh for Bourjos trade I outlined in my previous post would leave the Mets with an offensive cadre of Josh Thole (C), Anthony Recker (C), Ike Davis (1B), Jordany Valdespin (2B), Ruben Tejada (SS), David Wright (3B), Lucas Duda (LF), Peter Bourjos (CF), Kirk Nieuwenhuis (RF), Justin Turner (IF), Zach Lutz (IF), Mike Baxter (OF), and, well, someone else. Not sure who. If they were then to sign Scott Hairston and, perhaps, trade Duda and another one of their non-top-flight pitching prospects to some AL team in exchange for, maybe, a better backup catcher type, that would be a good offensive core. Maybe toss in a backup middle infielder type to make up for the fact that they'd have a Valdespin/Turner combo manning second base. You'd have a lineup that could be Bourjos/Tejada/Wright/Davis/Hairston/Kirk/Turner/Catcher against lefties, and Bourjos/Valdespin/Wright/Davis/Kirk/Baxter/Tejada/Thole against righties, or something.
I can't stress enough how much the Mets shouldn't give up either Dickey or Niese for Bourjos, or even for a package centered around him. But Bourjos for Murphy and McHugh, or something similar on our end, strikes me as eminently fair, and a deal that would improve both teams.
Apparently people are speculating that a trade centered around Peter Bourjos moving from the Angels to the Mets and R.A. Dickey moving from the Mets to the Angels. That's a horrible idea; Bourjos is not worth R.A. Dickey. He's not worth Jon Niese. But is he worth having at all?
One might be given pause by the fact that he hit .220/.291/.315 last year in limited usage as a reserve outfielder (195 PA), accumulating just a 73 wRC+ and having been on pace for about -24 runs above average from batting over a full season. He's a spectacular enough defender that he was still worth 1.9 fWAR and 1.1 bWAR last year, but still, the awful hitting gives one pause. Moreover, his genuinely good season of hitting in 2011, when he hit .271/.327/.438 with 12 home runs, 11 triples, and 22 steals, en route to a roughly 4.5 WAR season (when combined with his being a brilliant center fielder) was sustained in large part by a .338 BAbip, which looks unsustainable given his low line drive percentage (14.5% over the course of his career, worst in the majors over that period).
Except... when I plug his numbers into an xBAbip calculator, which projects a batting average on balls in play by the nature of those balls in play, I find that Bourjos if anything under-performs his expectations on balls in play. Using 2012 numbers, in which offense (including BAbip) was way down, his 2012 season should've produced a .300 BAbip, instead of the .274 it did produce. In 2011, sure, he was outperforming slightly; that year should've been a .331 instead of a .338 by 2011 numbers, and would've been just .321 in 2012. Meanwhile, in 2010, his rookie season, Bourjos had just a .228 BAbip but his batted balls should've resulted in more like a .285. So over the course of his young career, Bourjos has had some genuinely bad luck on his balls in play, even considering the trajectories on which he's hit those balls. Why is this true, despite his woeful lack of line drives? Probably because he hits quite few fly balls, which have the worst BAbip of anything; for someone who doesn't hit many home runs, this is a sensible approach.
I think, therefore, that Bourjos would be worth picking up, for a low enough price. (I.e., not for Dickey or Niese!) Even when he's been a lousy hitter, he's been a valuable player because of his speed and defense, and there's reason to think that his offensive results so far have been a floor rather than a ceiling. He'd fill exactly the Mets biggest hole, and with a bit of coaching from Dan Hudgens, might even be able to improve his offensive approach a bit. And when he's good, Bourjos has shown that he's not just good, he's really good, like 4+ WAR good.
The Murphy + McHugh for Bourjos trade I outlined in my previous post would leave the Mets with an offensive cadre of Josh Thole (C), Anthony Recker (C), Ike Davis (1B), Jordany Valdespin (2B), Ruben Tejada (SS), David Wright (3B), Lucas Duda (LF), Peter Bourjos (CF), Kirk Nieuwenhuis (RF), Justin Turner (IF), Zach Lutz (IF), Mike Baxter (OF), and, well, someone else. Not sure who. If they were then to sign Scott Hairston and, perhaps, trade Duda and another one of their non-top-flight pitching prospects to some AL team in exchange for, maybe, a better backup catcher type, that would be a good offensive core. Maybe toss in a backup middle infielder type to make up for the fact that they'd have a Valdespin/Turner combo manning second base. You'd have a lineup that could be Bourjos/Tejada/Wright/Davis/Hairston/Kirk/Turner/Catcher against lefties, and Bourjos/Valdespin/Wright/Davis/Kirk/Baxter/Tejada/Thole against righties, or something.
I can't stress enough how much the Mets shouldn't give up either Dickey or Niese for Bourjos, or even for a package centered around him. But Bourjos for Murphy and McHugh, or something similar on our end, strikes me as eminently fair, and a deal that would improve both teams.
Hot Damn, Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim
The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim appear to be planning on signing free agent outfielder Josh Hamilton. If true, that would leave the Angels with a seriously stacked top of the batting order, with Hamilton, Albert Pujols, Mark Trumbo, and Mike Trout. It also would give them a surplus of outfielders, with Hamilton, Trout, Trumbo, and Peter Bourjos. Bourjos, in particular, looks a bit redundant; he's like Mike Trout only not as good at baseball. In fairness not many are as good at baseball as Mike Trout is; the point is really that he's a similar style—gifted defensive outfielder, speedy leadoff-type hitter, right-handed outfielder. What the Angels, assuming they do sign Hamilton, are lacking is infielders: they currently project to play Howie Kendrick at second base, Erick Aybar at shortstop, and Albert Callaspo at third. Those players were all quite good in 2012, totaling around 10 bWAR, but none of them were exactly whizzes at the plate, with Callaspo's .331 OBP leading the group and that coming with just a .361 SLG attached to it. The team is also rather top-heavy when it comes to pitching: they've got C.J. Wilson and Jered Weaver to lead their rotation, and a solid core of Ernesto Frieri, Ryan Madson, and Sean Burnett in their bullpen, but not a lot beyond those guys. The rotation currently projects to fill out with Tommy Hanson, on whom the Braves just gave up, Joe Blanton, who, c'mon, is Joe Blanton, and Jerome Williams, who spent half of last year in the Angels' rotation and then the half of it after they acquired Zack Greinke in the bullpen, with a combined 4.58 ERA between the two roles.
What I'm getting at, in case it wasn't clear, is that I think there's a trade to be had between the Angels and the Mets. The Mets' major need right now is for a right-handed outfielder, preferably a defensively gifted center fielder, and also preferably someone who would provide either power or speed. That describes Peter Bourjos perfectly, and, oh look, he's redundant on the Angels! The Mets, meanwhile, have a boatload of young or young-ish pitchers any one of whom could be a solid back-of-the-rotation Major League starter: guys like Dillon Gee or Collin McHugh in particular, but also Chris Schwinden and Jeremy Hefner. We also have Daniel Murphy, who on our team gets forced into an awkward position at second base because his natural position, third base, is, well, blocked until 2020. Murphy and McHugh to the Angels for Bourjos strikes me as fair for both teams. The Mets would be able to slot Bourjos into center field and the leadoff spot, while putting someone, probably Jordany Valdespin to start with, at second base, and perhaps complementing him at some point in the season with Wilmer Flores. The Angels could make Murphy their everyday third baseman, a position at which he's pretty good defensively, have Callaspo as a utility infielder, and slot McHugh into the rotation, probably in the #5 slot. I think that would improve both teams, and I think it's something both teams could easily agree to. Now, I do not think that Bourjos is worth trading either of the Mets' top potential pitching trade chips, R.A. Dickey and Jon Niese, but Murphy plus McHugh seems eminently fair.
The Angels have just pulled off a stunning coup, if this report is true, and one that leaves them with an imbalance of resources. The Mets just happen to have a neatly complementary resource imbalance. The signing of Josh Hamilton, in addition to improving the Angels, might be able to improve the Mets as well.
No, Conservatism Is Not Individualistic
A number of discussions I've had recently have featured my interlocutor blandly asserting that the Republican Party, and conservative ideology, is individualistic. I would, therefore, just like to take a moment to point out that this is wrong. So that I'm not just making stuff up, I'll even link to a blog post of Kevin Drum's that quotes from a scientific(ish) study about the moral attitudes of liberals and conservatives. (That post is actually about misperceptions of the moral attitudes of ideological groups, but my focus is just on the evidence about the actual attitudes.) The money quote:
So the next time you hear someone say that the Republicans are the party of individuals, don't believe them. It's not true.
"Liberals endorse the individual-focused moral concerns of compassion and fairness more than conservatives do, and conservatives endorse the group-focused moral concerns of ingroup loyalty, respect for authorities and traditions, and physical/spiritual purity more than liberals do."The way I'd put it is that liberals value individuals, and therefore, among other things, want group structures to benefit individuals. We want the community to help and take care of the individuals in that community, and the reason we want this is that we care about the individuals. We also want, insofar as it's consistent with the above goal and the welfare of other individuals, to let individuals do whatever they individually want to do. Conservatives, on the other hand, are opposed to the community-helping-individuals thing, at least if the helping is organized through a collective public entity (i.e. the government) rather than through individual private acts (i.e. charity). Basically (and this is painting with a bit of a broad brush) conservatives are okay with individuals helping themselves and individuals helping other individuals (if they want to), but they particularly care about individuals helping the group entity, for the sake of that group entity. Liberals want the group/individual relationship to run the other way. Which of these is more individualistic, do you think? Individuals pressed into service for the good of the group, or group structures created and maintained for the good of individuals? A mix of on-your-own-ism and patriotic-loyalty-ism is not individualism. One might almost call it anti-individualism, since there's very little interest in having public policy concern itself with the interests of the individuals who make up the polity. Or one might just call it conservatism, and admit that that word refers to a philosophy that opposes publicly-coordinated efforts to improve the lives of individuals (poor ones, at least) and favors the firm imposition of community norms and values upon individuals who might like to dissent from those norms.
So the next time you hear someone say that the Republicans are the party of individuals, don't believe them. It's not true.
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Robots and Communism
There have been a bunch of blog posts from the liberal bloggers I frequent recently about robots. Specifically, the apparently-growing trend toward replacing human workers with robots. Matt Yglesias, in particular, thinks that this is a good thing, that will allow society to shift human resources into other sectors like health care and education, where actually having people in the room matters, without losing material plenty. Kevin Drum, who started this particular debate, and Paul Krugman, who just added his two cents to it, focus more on the negative disruptive aspects. I'm going to focus on one particular little throw-away line at the end of Krugman's post, where he mentions that the capital/labor dimension of inequality has "echoes of old-fashion Marxism" as one reason why it hasn't gotten much attention from mainstream economists.
Friday, December 7, 2012
The Extremely Odd Career Path of R.A. Dickey
Perusing R.A. Dickey's baseball-reference.com page a few minutes ago, I noticed the massive oddness in his "similar players" section. The baseball-reference similarity scores judge players based on their career totals, and does not distinguish timing, although one can deduce timing from the changes in "most similar players at age X" over time. But because Dickey's career had such an odd path, the "most similar players" aren't remotely like him. Specifically, over the last three years, during his age 35, 36, and 37 seasons, Dickey posted 12.1 bWAR, while having accumulated only 0.2 bWAR during his entire prior career. That's weird!
Friday, November 30, 2012
Chris Christie: Actually That Popular, Or Running the George Bush Play?
No, not that George Bush. His father. The point is this PublicPolicyPolling survey, which shows Christie creaming anyone the Democrats could run against him, including Newark Mayor Cory Booker. Booker trails by 14 points, while Richard Codey, Steve Sweeney, and Barbara Buono, of whom I've never heard, trail by 22, 27, and 40 points. Bruce Springsteen even trails by 36 points, despite himself being quite popular. The reason is that Christie himself is very popular, with a 67%/25% approval rating, including a 56%/32% approval rating among, uh, Democrats. So it looks like I'm stuck with my odious Governor for another four years, right? (Yeah, I'm in the 25% of disapprovers.)
That's probably correct. However, there's a real chance, I think, that Christie's current popularity is basically a bump from the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and that it could fade substantially over the next year. New Jersey is, after all, a blue state, and during a campaign it should be pretty hard for Christie to retain his popularity with Democrats. If, that is, a strong candidate could be found to run against him. That's why I invoke George H.W. Bush as a model: during 1991, his approval ratings were so strong that no prominent Democrat wanted to challenge him, but when diamond-in-the-rough Bill Clinton actually ran the campaign, he found Bush's strength dissipating and the incumbent highly vulnerable. I sort of think the 1992 campaign should stand as a cautionary tale to ambitious politicians, telling them not to let outlandish popularity numbers for the incumbent in the wake of some Event from which they've received substantial good press scare them away.
But, in this case, I imagine the relevant parties won't listen. With the presumptively-going-to-open-up Senate seat in 2014, it just doesn't make sense as the place to direct your efforts, if you're a Democratic prospect looking for higher office. Which means that we'll probably end up having to nominate some sacrificial lamb-type candidate, who'll run a bit of a mediocre campaign and get slaughtered. Oh well.
That's probably correct. However, there's a real chance, I think, that Christie's current popularity is basically a bump from the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and that it could fade substantially over the next year. New Jersey is, after all, a blue state, and during a campaign it should be pretty hard for Christie to retain his popularity with Democrats. If, that is, a strong candidate could be found to run against him. That's why I invoke George H.W. Bush as a model: during 1991, his approval ratings were so strong that no prominent Democrat wanted to challenge him, but when diamond-in-the-rough Bill Clinton actually ran the campaign, he found Bush's strength dissipating and the incumbent highly vulnerable. I sort of think the 1992 campaign should stand as a cautionary tale to ambitious politicians, telling them not to let outlandish popularity numbers for the incumbent in the wake of some Event from which they've received substantial good press scare them away.
But, in this case, I imagine the relevant parties won't listen. With the presumptively-going-to-open-up Senate seat in 2014, it just doesn't make sense as the place to direct your efforts, if you're a Democratic prospect looking for higher office. Which means that we'll probably end up having to nominate some sacrificial lamb-type candidate, who'll run a bit of a mediocre campaign and get slaughtered. Oh well.
Friday, November 16, 2012
How Not To Analyze Miguel Cabrera's MVP Win
As indeed I might have predicted in advance, I'm not entirely sure what to think about the American League Most Valuable Player race. I think I would have voted for Miguel Cabrera, who won, so I should be happy, but on the other hand, since I recognize that Mike Trout deserved the award at least as much as Cabrera, I'd've liked to see it a wee bit closer. But I do know some things that I definitely do not think about the race, and many of them are exemplified by this article on Slate, whose thesis is that, like Mitt Romney, Miguel Cabrera was the candidate of old white men, but unlike Romney, his electorate consisted mostly of that group, so he won while Romney lost.
Problems abound. First of all, Miguel Cabrera is himself Hispanic, while Mike Trout is rather distinctly white. Furthermore, as admitted in the article itself, all three of the not-white-men who got to vote for AL MVP voted for, uh, Cabrera. So it looks like race isn't the main factor here, although there is a more plausible statistical link with age. But my more fundamental problem is the way the article frames the arguments behind supporting Cabrera: as unthinking, reactionary gibberish combined with a healthy dose of you-kids-get-off-my-lawn-ism. The evidence for this point seems to be one guy who wrote a column that has exactly these traits, and from this single datum it is inferred that this is the only argument which can be made for Trout. My argument, on the other hand, is simple and, I think, reasonable: yes, Trout was clearly the better player this past season, but Miguel Cabrera won the frickin' Triple Crown, and that's just a trump card. I admit openly that this is what one might call an irrational argument, or at least a non-rational argument. But because I admit it, because I say openly that I think the award ought to go to player X despite the fact that player Y had a better season of baseball, I'm not being ignorant or reactionary or acting in knee-jerk opposition to modern statistical analysis.
This sentence in particular bothers me:
Now, I do agree with the article's actual proposal, though it's a proposal that's never really made explicitly. The BBWAA's voting system does empower people with relatively traditionalist and non-statistical approaches to these issues, and thereby loses out on what the sabermetric types have to offer. It would be nice if this were different, not particularly because the statheads are right (although they are pretty clearly right on the facts and, I think, more often than not right in their interpretations of those facts) but because everyone should benefit from broadening the set of voices which are amplified and empowered. But this problem doesn't mean that the Cabrera for MVP cause was absurd, or that supporting it makes you a reactionary and a fool, or that it makes you equivalent to the old white men who supported Mitt Romney.
Problems abound. First of all, Miguel Cabrera is himself Hispanic, while Mike Trout is rather distinctly white. Furthermore, as admitted in the article itself, all three of the not-white-men who got to vote for AL MVP voted for, uh, Cabrera. So it looks like race isn't the main factor here, although there is a more plausible statistical link with age. But my more fundamental problem is the way the article frames the arguments behind supporting Cabrera: as unthinking, reactionary gibberish combined with a healthy dose of you-kids-get-off-my-lawn-ism. The evidence for this point seems to be one guy who wrote a column that has exactly these traits, and from this single datum it is inferred that this is the only argument which can be made for Trout. My argument, on the other hand, is simple and, I think, reasonable: yes, Trout was clearly the better player this past season, but Miguel Cabrera won the frickin' Triple Crown, and that's just a trump card. I admit openly that this is what one might call an irrational argument, or at least a non-rational argument. But because I admit it, because I say openly that I think the award ought to go to player X despite the fact that player Y had a better season of baseball, I'm not being ignorant or reactionary or acting in knee-jerk opposition to modern statistical analysis.
This sentence in particular bothers me:
Miguel Cabrera’s voters are ink-stained traditionalists who long for a time before nerds ruined baseball by explaining how it worked.Now, this might be descriptively true, although to be sure you'd need to look at the roughly two-dozen individuals who did vote for Cabrera and ask them why they voted the way they did. But it doesn't have to be true. It's perfectly possible, for example, to be perfectly aware of "how baseball works," as this author rather condescendingly puts it, and therefore to know that, in very meaningful senses, Cabrera just didn't come close to having as good a season as Trout, and yet to think that this does not settle the MVP case. Wins Above Replacement can claim, or at least come close to claiming, a rather natural monopoly on being the appropriate subject of analysis from the General Manager's vantage-point, i.e. in asking, which player will increase my team's win total by the most next year? But there's no particular reason to think that the GM mindset is the implicit criterion for the Most Valuable Player Award. And while I don't think it makes sense, for instance, to deny a pitcher the Cy Young Award because, while you cannot deny that their results were the best in the league, you dislike aesthetically their style of pitching, I do think it reasonable to say that the Triple Crown has a certain magic to it, that it constitutes a valid "intangible" which justifies, under the standard of reasonableness, a vote for Cabrera over Trout.
Now, I do agree with the article's actual proposal, though it's a proposal that's never really made explicitly. The BBWAA's voting system does empower people with relatively traditionalist and non-statistical approaches to these issues, and thereby loses out on what the sabermetric types have to offer. It would be nice if this were different, not particularly because the statheads are right (although they are pretty clearly right on the facts and, I think, more often than not right in their interpretations of those facts) but because everyone should benefit from broadening the set of voices which are amplified and empowered. But this problem doesn't mean that the Cabrera for MVP cause was absurd, or that supporting it makes you a reactionary and a fool, or that it makes you equivalent to the old white men who supported Mitt Romney.
Friday, November 9, 2012
Gerrymandering: Constitutional, but Needs to Stop
(Apologies for the lack of a comprehensive election-reaction post, as yet anyway. Long story short, woohoo, let's reform the filibuster and ram a bunch of judges through the Senate, and I really hope something happens on climate-y issues in the next four years, but I'm not optimistic. And now for more miscellaneous posting, though most of it will probably still be election-focused for quite some time.)
It has long been my position that, while I heartily endorse Baker v. Carr and the series of cases that came out of it establishing the nationally-enforced principle of "one person, one vote" in legislative districting, and while I do believe racial gerrymanders, or theoretically gerrymanders on the basis of innate demographic factors other than race although it's tougher to see how that happens, can be unconstitutional in certain circumstances, I do not think that pure political gerrymandering can be struck down by the courts. Some of my reasons for this opinion include the idea that there's no constitutional right to live in a swing district, that no one individual's vote is likely to determine the outcome of an election even in a very competitive district so there's no categorical individual difference between swing and safe districts in that regard, and that, since partisanship and voting habits are not innate traits, unlike race, the notion that such-and-such a district will vote in such-and-such a way is a bit speculative. Voters, if they are severely displeased by having been gerrymander'd up, have the power to just vote for someone else. It's just not a denial of the equal protection of the laws, or of a republican form of government.
But that's just my constitutional opinion. On the policy merits, my god gerrymandering has got to go. I've just been reading a thing about how Jon Husted, Ohio's Republican Secretary of State, wants his state to award its electoral votes by Congressional district instead of winner-take-all. A similar scheme was floated in Pennsylvania last year, and failed miserably. Maine and Nebraska already do this, though it rarely comes into play. (Obama's 2008 win of Omaha's single electoral vote, from the Second District of Nebraska, is the only time I can think of that it's mattered.) The problem here isn't just that implementing this system piecemeal in a handful of large states that tend to vote Democratic in Presidential elections would simply amount to a removal of some Democratic electors, though that's also true and very problematic. In Ohio, Obama (who won the state, no matter what Karl Rove might say) only won 4 or 5 of the state's 16 districts. Yeah. That's pretty bad. Republicans carried the remainder, of course, and so would have walked away with a solid majority of Ohio's electoral votes, despite losing the state. How is this possible, you ask? Well, because the Ohio state government, entirely under Republican control at the time of redistricting, passed a really aggressive gerrymander, packing every Democrat it could find into as few districts as possible and then trying to make the remaining Republican districts as evenly uncompetitive as possible. And it worked, and stuff like this is most of why John Boehner is still Speaker of the House. Democratic Congressional candidates got more votes than Republican ones this cycle, after all, but barely gained back any seats, because of really aggressive incumbent-protection redistricting by the largely-Republican state legislatures elected in 2010.
In our current system of gerrymanders, in other words, if a party happens to do anomalously well in the decade elections at the local level, it gets to bake in a Congressional advantage for the next ten years. Sure, Democrats do it too, and they're perfectly justified in doing it so long as Republicans are doing it in the states they control. Actually, there's nothing except an informal norm stopping a party that takes over a state government mid-decade from redistricting again in a way that's more friendly to their party's interests. But it's pretty damn apparent that there's nothing legitimate or desirable about this way of doing things. What we should do is have every state in the nation pass a state constitutional amendment setting up an independent redistricting committee. It happened in California, and it greatly increased the number of competitive seats. Or just tell a computer to come up with a map; I can't see any reason why that wouldn't be possible. Part of the problem, I guess, is that you will inevitably get a pattern of unilateral disarmament, so perhaps it should be structured as an interstate compact that will take effect when every other state has signed on as well. One way or another, this needs to be made to stop.
Oh, and yes, I consider this part of my tally of issues on which I don't think my policy position is required by the Constitution.
It has long been my position that, while I heartily endorse Baker v. Carr and the series of cases that came out of it establishing the nationally-enforced principle of "one person, one vote" in legislative districting, and while I do believe racial gerrymanders, or theoretically gerrymanders on the basis of innate demographic factors other than race although it's tougher to see how that happens, can be unconstitutional in certain circumstances, I do not think that pure political gerrymandering can be struck down by the courts. Some of my reasons for this opinion include the idea that there's no constitutional right to live in a swing district, that no one individual's vote is likely to determine the outcome of an election even in a very competitive district so there's no categorical individual difference between swing and safe districts in that regard, and that, since partisanship and voting habits are not innate traits, unlike race, the notion that such-and-such a district will vote in such-and-such a way is a bit speculative. Voters, if they are severely displeased by having been gerrymander'd up, have the power to just vote for someone else. It's just not a denial of the equal protection of the laws, or of a republican form of government.
But that's just my constitutional opinion. On the policy merits, my god gerrymandering has got to go. I've just been reading a thing about how Jon Husted, Ohio's Republican Secretary of State, wants his state to award its electoral votes by Congressional district instead of winner-take-all. A similar scheme was floated in Pennsylvania last year, and failed miserably. Maine and Nebraska already do this, though it rarely comes into play. (Obama's 2008 win of Omaha's single electoral vote, from the Second District of Nebraska, is the only time I can think of that it's mattered.) The problem here isn't just that implementing this system piecemeal in a handful of large states that tend to vote Democratic in Presidential elections would simply amount to a removal of some Democratic electors, though that's also true and very problematic. In Ohio, Obama (who won the state, no matter what Karl Rove might say) only won 4 or 5 of the state's 16 districts. Yeah. That's pretty bad. Republicans carried the remainder, of course, and so would have walked away with a solid majority of Ohio's electoral votes, despite losing the state. How is this possible, you ask? Well, because the Ohio state government, entirely under Republican control at the time of redistricting, passed a really aggressive gerrymander, packing every Democrat it could find into as few districts as possible and then trying to make the remaining Republican districts as evenly uncompetitive as possible. And it worked, and stuff like this is most of why John Boehner is still Speaker of the House. Democratic Congressional candidates got more votes than Republican ones this cycle, after all, but barely gained back any seats, because of really aggressive incumbent-protection redistricting by the largely-Republican state legislatures elected in 2010.
In our current system of gerrymanders, in other words, if a party happens to do anomalously well in the decade elections at the local level, it gets to bake in a Congressional advantage for the next ten years. Sure, Democrats do it too, and they're perfectly justified in doing it so long as Republicans are doing it in the states they control. Actually, there's nothing except an informal norm stopping a party that takes over a state government mid-decade from redistricting again in a way that's more friendly to their party's interests. But it's pretty damn apparent that there's nothing legitimate or desirable about this way of doing things. What we should do is have every state in the nation pass a state constitutional amendment setting up an independent redistricting committee. It happened in California, and it greatly increased the number of competitive seats. Or just tell a computer to come up with a map; I can't see any reason why that wouldn't be possible. Part of the problem, I guess, is that you will inevitably get a pattern of unilateral disarmament, so perhaps it should be structured as an interstate compact that will take effect when every other state has signed on as well. One way or another, this needs to be made to stop.
Oh, and yes, I consider this part of my tally of issues on which I don't think my policy position is required by the Constitution.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
My Election Predictions: They Were Pretty Awesome
I made a prediction in all 51 Presidential state-level contests and all 33 Senate contests that were held last night. Of those 84 races, I was correct in 82 of them, including going 51-for-51 at the Presidential level. I correctly called 332 Obama, 206 Romney as the final electoral tally, with Obama winning all his 2008 states except Indiana, North Carolina, and Omaha's single elector, but winning everything else, including Florida. I also correctly predicted 55 Democratic Senators, assuming Angus King does the obvious thing regarding caucus choice. My only errors were in North Dakota, where I was honestly a bit surprised that Heidi Heitkamp managed to pull it out, and Nevada, where I thought the legendary Democratic turnout machine would deliver a victory for Shelley Berkley. I was wrong as to both of those, but they canceled out in terms of overall partisan balance.
My predictions compare very well to Nate Silver's. Like me, he nailed the Presidential race, even having Florida as pretty much a tie with Obama the narrow victor. Like me, he got two Senate races wrong, both in the west. Unlike me, however, he did not call the final Senate balance of power correctly, because his errors did not cancel out; he had Heitkamp losing in ND, but also had Jon Tester losing re-election in Montana. I had observed a while back that ND and MT were two very sparsely-polled Senate contests, and the FiveThirtyEight model was giving an awful lot of weight to the "state fundamentals" in them. In other words, Nate's model was assuming that the state partisan gravity would assert itself rather strongly against polling that suggested really close races. I was always a bit skeptical that it would, and indeed it didn't. In fact, the reason for thinking Berkley would win in NV was that the state's partisan gravity would outweigh the rather substantial volume of polling in that state. I'm a bit embarrassed, in retrospect, to have bought into that, although the fact that it has happened before in that state makes it a bit more understandable. Overall, however, Nate and I and really anyone who was willing to take the polls at face value did really well in forecasting the state-level contests.
One thing to mention, by way of tooting my own horn, is that I've been saying for at least ten or eleven months now that I thought the Senate races would go very well. Specifically, since Olympia Snowe's retirement I've been pretty damn confident we'd hold the Senate, and even before than I thought it was pretty likely. So I've been correctly predicting what happened last night since a time when pretty much everyone thought we were going to lose control of the chamber. I don't remember if I wrote a blog post to that effect, but I definitely have been saying it in person to my friends and family. Part of why is that the Republican tendency to throw away multiple winnable races per cycle has just become, in my opinion, predictable at this point, so I was always sort of assuming from the start that stuff like that which occurred in Indiana and Missouri would happen somewhere. And I enter the 2014 prediction season, which I admit is looking to be a bloodbath at the Senate level, with that same assumption in mind. I don't know where the Republicans will cough up winnable seats, but I'm pretty sure that they will do it somewhere.
Another thing I'd say is that my method seems to have been pretty well vindicated. That method, specifically, is to get all my polling data from looking at what PublicPolicyPolling says, and what FiveThirtyEight says. Both sources aced the election; many other sources bungled it rather badly. PPP are just clearly the best in the polling game right now, and Nate does the best job I know of at taking the vast bulk of less-awesome polling data and turning it into a useful commodity. I plan on continuing this method going forward, and I expect to continue being vindicated in it.
As for the House...? Well, I'm a bit surprised that Democratic gains were that meager, or maybe disappointed is a better word than surprised, because this was always what people were saying. It looks right now like we might get circa 200 seats when all's said and done, leaving us with a further 18 to take back the House in future elections.
But on the whole, given that my predictions were pretty good ones, it's good to be right.
Forthcoming later today will be a piece of general reactions to the election, and then a piece previewing the next couple of years, both of which could be very long. It's snowing right now, just the perfect little icing (literally!) on the cake of the past 24 hours, so I might not get to them for a while; staring out the window at the snow takes precedence. But they will get written.
My predictions compare very well to Nate Silver's. Like me, he nailed the Presidential race, even having Florida as pretty much a tie with Obama the narrow victor. Like me, he got two Senate races wrong, both in the west. Unlike me, however, he did not call the final Senate balance of power correctly, because his errors did not cancel out; he had Heitkamp losing in ND, but also had Jon Tester losing re-election in Montana. I had observed a while back that ND and MT were two very sparsely-polled Senate contests, and the FiveThirtyEight model was giving an awful lot of weight to the "state fundamentals" in them. In other words, Nate's model was assuming that the state partisan gravity would assert itself rather strongly against polling that suggested really close races. I was always a bit skeptical that it would, and indeed it didn't. In fact, the reason for thinking Berkley would win in NV was that the state's partisan gravity would outweigh the rather substantial volume of polling in that state. I'm a bit embarrassed, in retrospect, to have bought into that, although the fact that it has happened before in that state makes it a bit more understandable. Overall, however, Nate and I and really anyone who was willing to take the polls at face value did really well in forecasting the state-level contests.
One thing to mention, by way of tooting my own horn, is that I've been saying for at least ten or eleven months now that I thought the Senate races would go very well. Specifically, since Olympia Snowe's retirement I've been pretty damn confident we'd hold the Senate, and even before than I thought it was pretty likely. So I've been correctly predicting what happened last night since a time when pretty much everyone thought we were going to lose control of the chamber. I don't remember if I wrote a blog post to that effect, but I definitely have been saying it in person to my friends and family. Part of why is that the Republican tendency to throw away multiple winnable races per cycle has just become, in my opinion, predictable at this point, so I was always sort of assuming from the start that stuff like that which occurred in Indiana and Missouri would happen somewhere. And I enter the 2014 prediction season, which I admit is looking to be a bloodbath at the Senate level, with that same assumption in mind. I don't know where the Republicans will cough up winnable seats, but I'm pretty sure that they will do it somewhere.
Another thing I'd say is that my method seems to have been pretty well vindicated. That method, specifically, is to get all my polling data from looking at what PublicPolicyPolling says, and what FiveThirtyEight says. Both sources aced the election; many other sources bungled it rather badly. PPP are just clearly the best in the polling game right now, and Nate does the best job I know of at taking the vast bulk of less-awesome polling data and turning it into a useful commodity. I plan on continuing this method going forward, and I expect to continue being vindicated in it.
As for the House...? Well, I'm a bit surprised that Democratic gains were that meager, or maybe disappointed is a better word than surprised, because this was always what people were saying. It looks right now like we might get circa 200 seats when all's said and done, leaving us with a further 18 to take back the House in future elections.
But on the whole, given that my predictions were pretty good ones, it's good to be right.
Forthcoming later today will be a piece of general reactions to the election, and then a piece previewing the next couple of years, both of which could be very long. It's snowing right now, just the perfect little icing (literally!) on the cake of the past 24 hours, so I might not get to them for a while; staring out the window at the snow takes precedence. But they will get written.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Jim Cramer's Crazy Election Prediction
So, it has achieved a fair bit of notoriety that Jim Cramer predicted that Obama would win 440 electoral votes. This is pretty patently ridiculous. How ridiculous, you ask? Well, I've taken the 538 state popular vote estimates from a few days ago (when they provided a convenient chart of that figure for all 50 states in one place), and given Obama states in descending order of his margin in them until he hit 440. Here's what the map looks like:
That's, um, ridiculous. It's also 451 electoral votes, which is not 440. In fact, I can't see any good way to hit 440 on the dot. You could subtract an 11, like Arizona or Indiana, but c'mon, we're giving Obama Texas, there's no way AZ/IN are marginal states here. Or you could take away South Carolina and one of the 3's, probably one of the Dakotas, but that's -12, not -11, giving 439. I suppose you could add the next state on the list, West Virginia, which gives an extra 5, and then try to subtract 16, probably just by taking away Georgia. That's 440, but the world in which Obama wins WV but not GA is a really weird one.
Although I suppose that's not such a disqualifier, since we're talking about a world in which he wins Texas, so "weird" is kind of a given. The point here is really that it's clear beyond a reasonable doubt that Jim Cramer did not have a map of states won and states lost in mind when he made his prediction. He couldn't have. Not only does the magnitude of his ridiculousness become apparent when you have to draw up a map, actually getting to that specific number is really, really hard. This is not so much a prediction, in other words, as a blancmange--no, wait, that's something different. Not so much a prediction as an expression of the sense that Obama is going to win, probably by a decent margin, but with no idea what that actually means.
I should add that there were times during this campaign when I thought a map like that one might be possible. If, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Herman Cain had been the nominee. Maybe if Newt had won the primary, though I'm a bit skeptical that such an enormous landslide would've materialized. In any event, we've had six close elections in a row now, with neither candidate getting 400 electoral votes unless Mr. Cramer knows something the rest of us really don't. That's weird. As best I can tell it's only happened once before that six consecutive elections have been highly competitive, in roughly the 1876 through 1896 period. I have a feeling it has to end eventually, though I'm not sure what will make that happen. But I think the above map is an interesting one to look at as a possible configuration of a latent Democratic landslide. It would be a really fun map.
Although I suppose that's not such a disqualifier, since we're talking about a world in which he wins Texas, so "weird" is kind of a given. The point here is really that it's clear beyond a reasonable doubt that Jim Cramer did not have a map of states won and states lost in mind when he made his prediction. He couldn't have. Not only does the magnitude of his ridiculousness become apparent when you have to draw up a map, actually getting to that specific number is really, really hard. This is not so much a prediction, in other words, as a blancmange--no, wait, that's something different. Not so much a prediction as an expression of the sense that Obama is going to win, probably by a decent margin, but with no idea what that actually means.
I should add that there were times during this campaign when I thought a map like that one might be possible. If, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Herman Cain had been the nominee. Maybe if Newt had won the primary, though I'm a bit skeptical that such an enormous landslide would've materialized. In any event, we've had six close elections in a row now, with neither candidate getting 400 electoral votes unless Mr. Cramer knows something the rest of us really don't. That's weird. As best I can tell it's only happened once before that six consecutive elections have been highly competitive, in roughly the 1876 through 1896 period. I have a feeling it has to end eventually, though I'm not sure what will make that happen. But I think the above map is an interesting one to look at as a possible configuration of a latent Democratic landslide. It would be a really fun map.
Monday, November 5, 2012
My Election Prediction
As far as the Senate, I predict the following winners: Angus King (I-ME), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Chris Murphy (D-CT), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Bob Casey (D-PA), Tom Carper (D-DE), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Joe Donnelly (D-IN), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Bob Corker (R-TN), Roger Wicker (R-MS), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Deb Fischer (R-NE), Rick Berg (R-ND), Jon Tester (D-MT), John Barrasso (R-WY), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Shelley Berkley (D-NV), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Mazie Hirono (D-HI). Democrats would lose seats in Nebraska and North Dakota, but would pick up seats in Maine (assuming, as I am, that King caucuses with the Democrats), Massachusetts, Indiana, and Nevada, for a net gain of two seats and 55 total seats after the election. Of these predictions, I'm on a bit of a limb in Nevada on the grounds that Harry Reid's people know what they're doing, I've declined to go out on a limb in North Dakota, and in Montana I'm being slightly optimistic but eminently reasonable, I'd say. Overall I'd be modestly surprised if the Democrats actually manage to lose net seats, and even holding our position will be an improvement since the caucus will get much more progressive.
As for the House, who the hell knows? My feeling is that the margin of error on any possible forecast at this point must be enormous, because there's just been so little public polling of House races all cycle. I will not be surprised if Democrats take back the House, but I also won't be surprised if they don't. I hear the median House district is R+3 by Cook Partisan Voting Index, but it's not impossible for Democrats to have a +3 kind of election. At the same time, if gains get blunted by Republican incumbent-protection redistricting, it will be depressing but not shocking. (On that subject, actually, I'm wondering why parties don't do new redistricting whenever they take over a state government mid-decade. There's nothing stopping them.)
So, we'll see if I'm right. If I am, I'll be very happy. And if not, well... I may decide to start liking alcohol.
Saturday, November 3, 2012
The Smallest Winning Map Ever
A few days ago, Matt Yglesias put up a blog post in which he came up with the smallest possible winning electoral college map under the current vote distribution. He calculated this by sorting the 51 voting areas (i.e., states plus D.C.) in descending order by population density, and tacking states onto the map in that order until he had 270 electoral votes. D.C. was first, obviously, followed by New Jersey and then various other states. In the end he got a map with 627,421 square miles making up exactly 270 electoral votes and beating out the 268 electoral votes of the other 3,166,662 square miles of the country, just 16.5% of the country's land mass constituting a winning coalition. Actually, Alaska all by itself is bigger than these states which constitute an electoral majority. It's a majority of the people, though, with 166,439,539 living in the Yglesias victor states against just 142,306,179 in the losing states. That's a population density of 265.3 people per square mile in the winning states, and 44.9 people per square mile in the losing states.
Okay, cool. But the American population is a good deal less clustered in the Northeast than it used to be, so I got to wondering whether the smallest winning map might have been even smaller in the past. Using the 1960 census apportionment figures, i.e. the first batch after the addition of Alaska and Hawaii, I was able to craft an even smaller winning map:
Those blue states take up just 559,605 square miles, with 3,234,478 square miles of red territory, and an exact 270-268 electoral margin. My calculation method was a bit different from Yglesias'; instead of calculating 1960 census population density, I simply calculated electoral vote population density, and added until I hit 270. California was the tipping-point state, and since it got me to 284 EV's, South Carolina and West Virginia, only slightly more vote-dense than California, were superfluous. Incidentally, using this same method for the 2010 figures got me to the same map as Yglesias, though through a slightly different method. Whereas he added on the densest states until he hit Michigan, and then had 282 EV's, took Michigan back out to get down to 266, and added on New Hampshire to hit 270, I added on the most vote-dense states until I hit North Carolina, which got me to 282 EVs, and then subtracted off South Carolina (9) and Vermont (3). Somewhat confusingly, it doesn't look to me like Michigan is even in consideration; unless I'm really missing something, it is not, as he says, the 18th most densely populated state.
That's as far back as you can go, obviously, with Alaska and Hawaii still included, and since one of those two states in particular changes the geographic footprint of this country quite substantially the direct comparisons sort of end there. But just for fun, let's also look at the figures using the 1920 census apportionment, the first after all 48 continental states were added to the rolls. Here, we can get 268 electoral votes (enough to win, since there were only 531) with just 481,569 square miles, with 2,638,247 square miles taking the other 263 votes (the total is smaller, because we're missing Alaska):
Frustratingly, if you swapped out South Carolina and Virginia for Missouri, which would remove a bit more than 5000 square miles, you'd end up with 265 electoral votes in the blue states, and 266 in the red states. So I think this is probably the smallest possible winning electoral map since the continental United States got itself filled out. For whatever that's worth.
Okay, cool. But the American population is a good deal less clustered in the Northeast than it used to be, so I got to wondering whether the smallest winning map might have been even smaller in the past. Using the 1960 census apportionment figures, i.e. the first batch after the addition of Alaska and Hawaii, I was able to craft an even smaller winning map:
That's as far back as you can go, obviously, with Alaska and Hawaii still included, and since one of those two states in particular changes the geographic footprint of this country quite substantially the direct comparisons sort of end there. But just for fun, let's also look at the figures using the 1920 census apportionment, the first after all 48 continental states were added to the rolls. Here, we can get 268 electoral votes (enough to win, since there were only 531) with just 481,569 square miles, with 2,638,247 square miles taking the other 263 votes (the total is smaller, because we're missing Alaska):
On Hurricanes and Nationhood
Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, had a comment a day or two ago about the question of federal storm relief for areas damaged by Hurricane Sandy. The gist of it was basically, sure I care about people who are suffering, but I want to make sure those naughty easterners won't just take the money and spend it frivolously before we agree to give it to them. This feels to me like it gets very deeply at the question that's kind of awkwardly at the center of American political history, "are we a nation?" For a lot of time, we kind of weren't really a nation. Nowadays, people tend to think that we are one. But consider, for example, Europe's current troubles. Europe, as it happens, is not a nation, but it has substantial governmental ties throughout the continent. And these days you've heard a lot from the wealthier German nations that they don't want to be on the hook for bailing out the naughty, irresponsible periphery countries that have gotten their economies in deep trouble after the creation of the Euro. Never mind that it really is more the fault of the Euro, the creation of European financial elites, than the periphery countries themselves. The point is, there's a feeling in Germany and Sweden and other such places that it's unfair for them to be forced to sacrifice to ease the suffering of less fortunate European nations.
Now, that's very similar to what Steve King said about disaster relief in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Iowa is virtuous, the East Coast is irresponsible and frivolous with their Gucci bags etc., why should we have to pay to help them? But note that, in this country, we have a massive system of permanent fiscal transfers from states to states, effected through the federal welfare system. That system is designed to send money from rich people to poor people, but it therefore also sends money from rich states to poor states. That tends to mean sending money from blue states, like Maryland or Connecticut or California, to red states like Kentucky or Mississippi or Arkansas. But we never discuss it in those terms. There are people who don't want the federal welfare system to continue as strong as it currently is, there are people who want it stronger than it currently is, but it's not a geographic issue. It doesn't play out as Maryland vs. Kentucky, it plays out as, well, liberal people, many of whom are in Maryland, against conservative people, many of whom are in Kentucky. Because we're a nation, so we don't tend to view the transfer of money from a rich person in Maryland to a poor person in Kentucky as anything other than the transfer of money from a rich American to a poor American. Whereas in Europe, transferring money from a rich German to a poor Greek is not seen as a transfer from a rich European to a poor European; the nationalities are very much the thing, even more than the different socioeconomic statuses of the individual people.
But Steve King's comment does not reflect this nationhood. People from the great eastern Megalopolis are not just treated as Americans, and suffering Americans at that, for whose welfare we are all obviously responsible and to whose aid, in a time of crisis such as this one, we should all gladly come. They're not from where Steve King is from, and he mistrusts their culture, so he wants no part of their troubles. He does not want, in other words, to be part of a nation that includes New York City and its environs. This side has a very long history in American politics, with its most notable manifestation coming during the Civil War but with genuine influence at most other times. It's the wrong side of the question, and it needs to lose. The whole Tea Party phenomenon has kind of felt like it at least flirts with the idea that we should stop being a nation, and Steve King's comments definitely reflect a sense that we are not, quite, entirely a nation. I suppose it's probably too much to ask that King himself actually lose his seat next Tuesday, although the race is only "Leans Republican," but it's pretty important to see that the side he represents loses as badly as possible.
Now, that's very similar to what Steve King said about disaster relief in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Iowa is virtuous, the East Coast is irresponsible and frivolous with their Gucci bags etc., why should we have to pay to help them? But note that, in this country, we have a massive system of permanent fiscal transfers from states to states, effected through the federal welfare system. That system is designed to send money from rich people to poor people, but it therefore also sends money from rich states to poor states. That tends to mean sending money from blue states, like Maryland or Connecticut or California, to red states like Kentucky or Mississippi or Arkansas. But we never discuss it in those terms. There are people who don't want the federal welfare system to continue as strong as it currently is, there are people who want it stronger than it currently is, but it's not a geographic issue. It doesn't play out as Maryland vs. Kentucky, it plays out as, well, liberal people, many of whom are in Maryland, against conservative people, many of whom are in Kentucky. Because we're a nation, so we don't tend to view the transfer of money from a rich person in Maryland to a poor person in Kentucky as anything other than the transfer of money from a rich American to a poor American. Whereas in Europe, transferring money from a rich German to a poor Greek is not seen as a transfer from a rich European to a poor European; the nationalities are very much the thing, even more than the different socioeconomic statuses of the individual people.
But Steve King's comment does not reflect this nationhood. People from the great eastern Megalopolis are not just treated as Americans, and suffering Americans at that, for whose welfare we are all obviously responsible and to whose aid, in a time of crisis such as this one, we should all gladly come. They're not from where Steve King is from, and he mistrusts their culture, so he wants no part of their troubles. He does not want, in other words, to be part of a nation that includes New York City and its environs. This side has a very long history in American politics, with its most notable manifestation coming during the Civil War but with genuine influence at most other times. It's the wrong side of the question, and it needs to lose. The whole Tea Party phenomenon has kind of felt like it at least flirts with the idea that we should stop being a nation, and Steve King's comments definitely reflect a sense that we are not, quite, entirely a nation. I suppose it's probably too much to ask that King himself actually lose his seat next Tuesday, although the race is only "Leans Republican," but it's pretty important to see that the side he represents loses as badly as possible.
Republican Identity Politics, Internet Edition
I find this post from Ezra Klein about the Republicans' failed effort to improve their image among young voters through aggressive internet and social media outreach very interesting in that it ties into a long-standing theory of mine. The basic idea is that Republicans, faced with their massive deficits with all non-white voters, and the fact that non-white voters are rapidly becoming a larger and larger part of the electorate, and therefore faced with the consequence of those two facts, that unless they stop losing non-whites so badly they will shortly stop being able to win, respond by looking around for candidates to run who belong to the demographic group in question. They don't look at their policies and ask why no minority voters seem to like them, and then consider changing those policies. They go for the token candidate. So, they run Alan Keyes against Obama in Illinois in 2004, and there's a whole crop of new Hispanic Republican candidates. Except the thing is, it doesn't work. A Romney/Rubio ticket would not have done materially better among Hispanics than Romney/Ryan, as best we can tell from the polling. Mutatis mutandis for women, or any other major Democratic-leaning demographic group.
My understanding of what causes Republicans to adopt this flawed strategy is that they honestly can't figure out why Democrats win these groups so consistently. Identity politics, they're convinced, is entirely a matter of identity. Democrats make black people or Hispanic people or women or whatever convinced that their identity makes them special, and so they vote for Democrats. Democrats are people like them, in other words, and Republicans are people not like them. This is somewhat similar to nineteenth-century ethnic politics, which does appear to have had a large element of real identity politics to it: the Democrats were the party of ethnic groups X, Y, and Z, while the Republicans were the party of ethnic groups A, B, and C. Except this isn't what explains modern Democratic dominance with various traditionally downtrodden groups; rather, Democrats owe that advantage to their support of policies that would improve the lives of the traditionally-downtrodden as a class, and would make them less downtrodden going forward. Republicans oppose such policies. It's very simple: a substantial chunk of the American electorate has traditionally been hit with factional policies against their interests, and so they vote factionally for the party that takes their side in the factional war over policy.* Republicans misunderstand this, at their peril, and so they try to counter it through identity politics rather than by moderating their factional policies.
Thus with the internet-based struggle for young voters. Republicans see Democrats leading among the young, they see the young being very heavily involved with this "internet" thing, so they naturally assume that Democrats must be winning youngsters because they're more tech-savvy. The solution, apparently, is Chuck Grassley's Twitter feed. (No, wait, actually that's the best thing ever and should never, ever go away.) But they're wrong; the key to winning young voters is to adopt policies young voters like better. This isn't exactly the same as the racial or gender case, because factional policies, i.e. those that attempt to take resources from one group and reapportion them to the group making the laws, aren't as big a component of the generation gap. There's some stuff, to be sure; I think you could call the Republican approach to entitlements one of these, although of course they always try to frame their deficit hysteria as a pro-young-people policy, and there's education stuff etc. But mostly it's just that we youngsters don't share previous generations' prejudices very much, and Republicans being the party of those prejudices, we tend to dislike them. And no amount of tech savvy or social media outreach will ever change that.
So, Republicans set out to convert the young through the internet, but ended up turning the internet into just another medium through which to reach their original constituency of middle-aged and old people. Surprise, surprise. If they ever want different results, rather than doing the same thing over and over again and expecting it to work on this group, finally, they should consider adopting some less hateful policies. The results might surprise them.
*Okay, so, there was a fair amount of factional policy-making going on even among various white ethnic groups, with all sorts of anti-immigration laws and such, in the nineteenth century. But it's my impression that pure identity politics, where a certain group voted for one party or the other simply because that's how that group voted, was a pretty real thing back there, and I really don't think that has much relevance for Democratic dominance of all the not-white-straight-Christians groups today.
My understanding of what causes Republicans to adopt this flawed strategy is that they honestly can't figure out why Democrats win these groups so consistently. Identity politics, they're convinced, is entirely a matter of identity. Democrats make black people or Hispanic people or women or whatever convinced that their identity makes them special, and so they vote for Democrats. Democrats are people like them, in other words, and Republicans are people not like them. This is somewhat similar to nineteenth-century ethnic politics, which does appear to have had a large element of real identity politics to it: the Democrats were the party of ethnic groups X, Y, and Z, while the Republicans were the party of ethnic groups A, B, and C. Except this isn't what explains modern Democratic dominance with various traditionally downtrodden groups; rather, Democrats owe that advantage to their support of policies that would improve the lives of the traditionally-downtrodden as a class, and would make them less downtrodden going forward. Republicans oppose such policies. It's very simple: a substantial chunk of the American electorate has traditionally been hit with factional policies against their interests, and so they vote factionally for the party that takes their side in the factional war over policy.* Republicans misunderstand this, at their peril, and so they try to counter it through identity politics rather than by moderating their factional policies.
Thus with the internet-based struggle for young voters. Republicans see Democrats leading among the young, they see the young being very heavily involved with this "internet" thing, so they naturally assume that Democrats must be winning youngsters because they're more tech-savvy. The solution, apparently, is Chuck Grassley's Twitter feed. (No, wait, actually that's the best thing ever and should never, ever go away.) But they're wrong; the key to winning young voters is to adopt policies young voters like better. This isn't exactly the same as the racial or gender case, because factional policies, i.e. those that attempt to take resources from one group and reapportion them to the group making the laws, aren't as big a component of the generation gap. There's some stuff, to be sure; I think you could call the Republican approach to entitlements one of these, although of course they always try to frame their deficit hysteria as a pro-young-people policy, and there's education stuff etc. But mostly it's just that we youngsters don't share previous generations' prejudices very much, and Republicans being the party of those prejudices, we tend to dislike them. And no amount of tech savvy or social media outreach will ever change that.
So, Republicans set out to convert the young through the internet, but ended up turning the internet into just another medium through which to reach their original constituency of middle-aged and old people. Surprise, surprise. If they ever want different results, rather than doing the same thing over and over again and expecting it to work on this group, finally, they should consider adopting some less hateful policies. The results might surprise them.
*Okay, so, there was a fair amount of factional policy-making going on even among various white ethnic groups, with all sorts of anti-immigration laws and such, in the nineteenth century. But it's my impression that pure identity politics, where a certain group voted for one party or the other simply because that's how that group voted, was a pretty real thing back there, and I really don't think that has much relevance for Democratic dominance of all the not-white-straight-Christians groups today.
Lingering Effects of First Debate Almost Gone
According to tonight's FiveThirtyEight forecast, or the most recent version of it in any case, Barack Obama has an 83.7% chance of winning Tuesday's Presidential election. The last day on which he had a higher chance of victory was October 5th, at 84.9%, a very similar state of affairs. The day before that, October 4th, was Obama's highest odds of victory ever, at 87.1%. The day before that, October 3rd, was the date of the first Presidential debate in Denver, Colorado, which essentially everyone thought Obama lost. Obviously, the October 4th forecast didn't yet reflect Obama's decline, as the polls released that day didn't include any post-Denver interviews. But starting on the Fifth, Obama plummeted, dropping all the way down to a measly 61.1% chance of winning on October 12th. But the Vice Presidential Debate, on October 11th, was seen as a win for Obama's running mate, Joe Biden, and Obama won the second and third Presidential debates rather handily, and ever since the 12th of October he's been inching his way back up in the forecast. For a while this had looked like basically a point a day, though it's accelerated of late. Long story short, Obama has clawed his way back to roughly the same odds of victory that he had after Romney's debate victory had only been processed by the polls for a single day. One more good day of polling tomorrow could easily get him back to his highest victory odds yet.
Of course, that's just the "percent chance to win" forecast. Since we've gotten a lot closer to Election Day, the implicit margin of error in the forecast has gone way down, so the actual margin that's giving Obama these same odds of winning as on October 5th is much smaller than the margin he held on that date. Specifically, right now he's projected to win 305.3 electoral votes, and to win the popular vote by 2.2%, numbers which shift just slightly to 306.3 and 2.3% if you switch from the forecast to the now-cast. On October 5th, Obama was forecast with 317.7 electoral votes and a 3.9% popular-vote margin, and had a 4.7% lead that equated to an average of 327.7 electoral votes in the October 5th now-cast. So Obama's margin has been declining in more or less lock-step with what I like to think of as the cone of declining uncertainty. (Visualize the lines from any point on the electoral-vote or popular-vote forecast graphs at date X to the point that would, if it were the November 6th forecast, give the same odds of victory. If you do this for the leading and the trailing candidate from the same date, it's a cone.)
Still, the fact remains that Mitt Romney is very close to having failed to increase his odds of winning this election over the last month, including what was by far the best night of his political life.
Of course, that's just the "percent chance to win" forecast. Since we've gotten a lot closer to Election Day, the implicit margin of error in the forecast has gone way down, so the actual margin that's giving Obama these same odds of winning as on October 5th is much smaller than the margin he held on that date. Specifically, right now he's projected to win 305.3 electoral votes, and to win the popular vote by 2.2%, numbers which shift just slightly to 306.3 and 2.3% if you switch from the forecast to the now-cast. On October 5th, Obama was forecast with 317.7 electoral votes and a 3.9% popular-vote margin, and had a 4.7% lead that equated to an average of 327.7 electoral votes in the October 5th now-cast. So Obama's margin has been declining in more or less lock-step with what I like to think of as the cone of declining uncertainty. (Visualize the lines from any point on the electoral-vote or popular-vote forecast graphs at date X to the point that would, if it were the November 6th forecast, give the same odds of victory. If you do this for the leading and the trailing candidate from the same date, it's a cone.)
Still, the fact remains that Mitt Romney is very close to having failed to increase his odds of winning this election over the last month, including what was by far the best night of his political life.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
On "Elementary"
As a fan of the BBC series Sherlock, which features Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman as Dr. John Watson and is set in modern-day Britain, I've always had a bit of what one might call a prejudice against the new CBS series Elementary, which is also supposed to be a modernized Sherlock Holmes, but set in New York. With Jonny Lee Miller playing Sherlock Holmes and Lucy Liu playing Joan Watson. Yes, Joan Watson. I say prejudice because I've never particularly seen it, and have been basically assuming it isn't any good, so it's a literal pre-judging, though also arguably a prejudice based on my liking of Sherlock, which it is widely seen as being derivative of. It's not entirely pre-judging, though, because I know what the concept is, and I have one particular problem with that concept: they didn't make Holmes female. This isn't a fatal flaw, because if you're going to make one of the characters female there's a 50% chance you'd hit Watson, but it feels a bit curious that they did make the sidekick the female one, not the hero.
Well, just now I got an actual little taste of Elementary, because when I turned my TV on looking for the golf (it's in Asia, and is therefore on in the middle of the night, which is brilliant) it started out on CBS, where Elementary was playing. And my reaction was as follows. Jonny Lee Miller, thankfully, is English, and has an English accent. Moreover, he seems perfectly competent at portraying the intelligent side of his character and the rude side of his character, though I didn't particularly see the eccentric side of the character in the few minutes I saw. The overall aesthetic, however, felt like a New York crime drama, not particularly Holmesian at all. And, as best I can tell, unlike Sherlock they're not drawing on the original Holmes stories for material.
On top of that, though, the more I think about the way they're portraying Watson the less I like it. Because it's not just that they're taking the Holmes-Watson "bromance," to use the modern, really, really unfortunate term, and making one of the parties to it female, and sort of daring the world to find it inappropriate. They haven't just taken John Watson, the war veteran who happens to find himself rooming with the insane genius, and changed his name to Joan and given him a sex change. They've invented a whole separate pretext! Joan Watson is apparently supposed to be Holmes' "sober companion," (a term which I cannot help but hear in terms of the "companions" from Doctor Who) who accompanies him after his rehab and makes sure he doesn't relapse. Because, you see, evidently they couldn't just make a female Watson, have her have the same non-romantic close friendship with the male Holmes, and make a point about how gender roles are rightfully more fluid now. In order to set up a woman becoming a close, non-sexual friend of Holmes', they need a pretext.
So in the end, the details of how they structure their Watson character ends up robbing it of most of its potentially feminist/gender-egalitarian power while simultaneously making the whole thing feel less like it's actually an interpretation of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. So one is somewhat inevitably left with the feeling that they've made Watson female, and indeed are calling the characters Holmes and Watson in the first place, just for attention. Whereas Sherlock is very plainly the same characters in a different setting, as becomes readily apparent by watching the first episode. There's just no comparison between the two.
(Which isn't surprising, really, given which of them is run by Steven Moffat.)
Well, just now I got an actual little taste of Elementary, because when I turned my TV on looking for the golf (it's in Asia, and is therefore on in the middle of the night, which is brilliant) it started out on CBS, where Elementary was playing. And my reaction was as follows. Jonny Lee Miller, thankfully, is English, and has an English accent. Moreover, he seems perfectly competent at portraying the intelligent side of his character and the rude side of his character, though I didn't particularly see the eccentric side of the character in the few minutes I saw. The overall aesthetic, however, felt like a New York crime drama, not particularly Holmesian at all. And, as best I can tell, unlike Sherlock they're not drawing on the original Holmes stories for material.
On top of that, though, the more I think about the way they're portraying Watson the less I like it. Because it's not just that they're taking the Holmes-Watson "bromance," to use the modern, really, really unfortunate term, and making one of the parties to it female, and sort of daring the world to find it inappropriate. They haven't just taken John Watson, the war veteran who happens to find himself rooming with the insane genius, and changed his name to Joan and given him a sex change. They've invented a whole separate pretext! Joan Watson is apparently supposed to be Holmes' "sober companion," (a term which I cannot help but hear in terms of the "companions" from Doctor Who) who accompanies him after his rehab and makes sure he doesn't relapse. Because, you see, evidently they couldn't just make a female Watson, have her have the same non-romantic close friendship with the male Holmes, and make a point about how gender roles are rightfully more fluid now. In order to set up a woman becoming a close, non-sexual friend of Holmes', they need a pretext.
So in the end, the details of how they structure their Watson character ends up robbing it of most of its potentially feminist/gender-egalitarian power while simultaneously making the whole thing feel less like it's actually an interpretation of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. So one is somewhat inevitably left with the feeling that they've made Watson female, and indeed are calling the characters Holmes and Watson in the first place, just for attention. Whereas Sherlock is very plainly the same characters in a different setting, as becomes readily apparent by watching the first episode. There's just no comparison between the two.
(Which isn't surprising, really, given which of them is run by Steven Moffat.)
Booker vs. Christie: Battle of the Disaster-Relief Kings
There has long been a sense that Cory Booker, Democratic Mayor of Newark and generally awesome dude, would be the best candidate to challenge Republican Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie. Among Booker's many awesome traits is the way he basically seems to turn into a superhero whenever there's a storm in town. He'll go around rescuing people from burning buildings or shoveling people's sidewalks after a snowstorm or, most recently, inviting people who had lost power as a result of Hurricane Sandy over to his house, which still had power.
Of course, another politician who has performed brilliantly during this storm has been Chris Christie, who has among other things very enjoyably spurned Mitt Romney's efforts to come into New Jersey for some nice disaster-porn photo-ops while fulsomely praising the incumbent, um, Democratic President. So if we do get Christie vs. Booker in 2013, it'll be one disaster-relieving candidate against another.
Now, I have to admit that Christie appears to have done a good job with this storm, and deserves credit for that. In fact I think there's a substantial amount of evidence that, unlike many of his fellow Republicans, he actually is interested in governing, not just in ruling. The fact remains, however, that he has some really awful ideas about how to govern. In fact, though it's not exactly on-topic for a 2013 gubernatorial re-election campaign, it'd be nice if someone would ask him whether he agrees with Romney about cutting FEMA or devolving it to the states. He certainly loves him some budget-cutting in general.
So, as someone devoted to the cause of a Christie defeat in 2013, let me just say this: yes, Christie handled this storm well, but remember who his opponent will (hopefully) be. It's not like Cory Booker wouldn't know how to kick some hurricane ass himself. And unlike Christie, he's not wicked or corrupt in general. Booker '13!
Of course, another politician who has performed brilliantly during this storm has been Chris Christie, who has among other things very enjoyably spurned Mitt Romney's efforts to come into New Jersey for some nice disaster-porn photo-ops while fulsomely praising the incumbent, um, Democratic President. So if we do get Christie vs. Booker in 2013, it'll be one disaster-relieving candidate against another.
Now, I have to admit that Christie appears to have done a good job with this storm, and deserves credit for that. In fact I think there's a substantial amount of evidence that, unlike many of his fellow Republicans, he actually is interested in governing, not just in ruling. The fact remains, however, that he has some really awful ideas about how to govern. In fact, though it's not exactly on-topic for a 2013 gubernatorial re-election campaign, it'd be nice if someone would ask him whether he agrees with Romney about cutting FEMA or devolving it to the states. He certainly loves him some budget-cutting in general.
So, as someone devoted to the cause of a Christie defeat in 2013, let me just say this: yes, Christie handled this storm well, but remember who his opponent will (hopefully) be. It's not like Cory Booker wouldn't know how to kick some hurricane ass himself. And unlike Christie, he's not wicked or corrupt in general. Booker '13!
Winning the Small States Would Give Obama Options
One interesting feature of the FiveThirtyEight model is that it doesn't just calculate a point estimate for the popular-vote margin in each state, it also calculates a margin of error for that estimate. And this isn't simply some assumption based on how far in the distance the election is; rather, it's derived from the data available in that state, with I think the most important component being the amount of polling available in each state. The intuition is fairly simple: if a state has been polled to death, we have a better sense of the state of play there, and ought be more confident in our predictions regarding that state, than if there have only been a handful of polls. Part of what that means for 2012 is that Ohio, which has been polled to death, has a rather small error bar around its forecast, as can be observed from the "Competitive State Summary" in this article.
The fact that, in particular, Ohio has a much more confident forecast than Iowa or New Hampshire means that the order of the states by Obama's likelihood of winning them is not the same as Obama's order of states by Obama's expected margin in them. So if you draw up a path-of-least-resistance map based on the 538 odds, you add in all the 90%+ states, and then Wisconsin, and then Nevada, and you're at 253 electoral votes, and then Ohio and you're at 271 and Obama wins. But if you construct a path of least resistance map based on the 538 margins instead, after Nevada's 253 you next toss in Iowa and New Hampshire, getting to 263. Now, since the next state on your list is Ohio, which would've been the tipping-point state anyway by the other method, Iowa and New Hampshire are redundant, and so the path of least resistance is probably basically the same by this method: you add on Ohio, get up to 281, and then ditch Iowa and New Hampshire as superfluous.
But that doesn't mean the fact that Obama's margins in Iowa and New Hampshire are larger than that in Ohio couldn't be relevant. Consider this map:
The dark blue states are those Obama leads by at least 3 points on the current FiveThirtyEight forecast, which total 253 electoral votes. The light blue states are, well, Iowa and New Hampshire, the two other states Obama leads by more than he leads Ohio. The red states are those Romney leads in, and the purple states are those Obama leads in but not by more than in Ohio. If you only give Obama the dark blue states, then he must add Ohio or Colorado and Virginia in order to be victorious. But if you tack on Iowa and New Hampshire, giving him a base of 263, then Ohio or Colorado or Virginia would do it. Ohio would get him to the highly-superfluous 281, Virginia would get him to 276, in which case he could jettison one of IA and NH, and Colorado would put him at 272.
Winning these small states, which for whatever it's worth happen to be the two most important primary states, in other words, gives Obama an extra degree of flexibility. They would allow him to win with his Midwest firewall, his Southern firewall, or his Western firewall, any one of the three. So while Iowa and New Hampshire are superfluous for purely path-of-least-resistance purposes, they matter a great deal in terms of the number of relatively easy paths to victory available to Obama.
The fact that, in particular, Ohio has a much more confident forecast than Iowa or New Hampshire means that the order of the states by Obama's likelihood of winning them is not the same as Obama's order of states by Obama's expected margin in them. So if you draw up a path-of-least-resistance map based on the 538 odds, you add in all the 90%+ states, and then Wisconsin, and then Nevada, and you're at 253 electoral votes, and then Ohio and you're at 271 and Obama wins. But if you construct a path of least resistance map based on the 538 margins instead, after Nevada's 253 you next toss in Iowa and New Hampshire, getting to 263. Now, since the next state on your list is Ohio, which would've been the tipping-point state anyway by the other method, Iowa and New Hampshire are redundant, and so the path of least resistance is probably basically the same by this method: you add on Ohio, get up to 281, and then ditch Iowa and New Hampshire as superfluous.
But that doesn't mean the fact that Obama's margins in Iowa and New Hampshire are larger than that in Ohio couldn't be relevant. Consider this map:
Winning these small states, which for whatever it's worth happen to be the two most important primary states, in other words, gives Obama an extra degree of flexibility. They would allow him to win with his Midwest firewall, his Southern firewall, or his Western firewall, any one of the three. So while Iowa and New Hampshire are superfluous for purely path-of-least-resistance purposes, they matter a great deal in terms of the number of relatively easy paths to victory available to Obama.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Census Reapportionment Not Mattering in Obama/Romney Contest
In the last census, northeastern industrial states lost a bunch of electoral votes, and Sun Belt states gained a lot of electoral votes. Democrats tend to do better in the former than the latter. That's the kind of thing that can only matter in a close election, but we're in a close election, so the electoral math matters. Will this shift of electoral power from the left-leaning to the right-leaning parts of the country matter this time around? Well, I suppose we don't know what the actual map will look like just yet, but we can get a sense of how the states are lining up. If we make a "path of least resistance" map, i.e. assign states to each candidate in descending order of how likely (per 538's current forecast) they are to carry those states, we find that Ohio is the tipping-point state right now, i.e. for both the Obama and the Romney path-of-least-resistance winning map Ohio is the last state added to the tally. The map looks like this:
In this map, Obama has 253 electoral votes, Romney has 267, and Ohio's 18 are the tipping-point. If we give them to Romney, he wins 285-253, and if we give them to Obama, he wins 271-267. So the question is, would either scenario be changed by reverting to 2000 census figures?
Answer: no. Of the blue states on that map, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Illinois each lost a vote, while New York shed two electors and Nevada and Washington gained one apiece, for a net loss of 5 electors under the new figures. So Obama's 253 electoral votes in these states were 258 votes before the 2010 census; not enough for a victory. But, of course, if you tack on the 20 votes from Ohio, you've got 278, and an Obama win. So the path-of-least-resistance calculus would be identical with the 2000 numbers: if each candidate won every state that FiveThirtyEight currently considers them to be more likely to win than any state they do win (i.e., if each candidate takes a path of least resistance given the current 538 odds), it all comes down to Ohio.
We can monkey with this calculus a bit, however. Suppose Obama loses Ohio, but goes looking for backup options. His best bets are Iowa and New Hampshire, worth a combined 10 votes now and 11 votes last decade. Under the new lines, that gets him to 263, which is no good. Under the old lines, that would have been 269, good for a tie but then, almost certainly, a loss in the House of Representatives. Or what about Virginia? It's got 13 votes under both census counts, so adding Virginia to the blue states on that map gives 266 and a loss under the current lines, but 271 and a win under the old lines. Colorado's 9 votes under both censuses would get Obama to 262 or 267, neither of which is sufficient; however, under the old lines, Colorado plus New Hampshire would have done it.
Another wacky scenario would be if Obama were to win Florida, while losing some other states that look easier for him as of this instant. Tack Florida on to the map above and you get 282 electoral votes under the new lines, and 284 under the old lines--since Florida gained two votes, this reduces the difference. Obviously either would be enough for a win, but we can then peel off Obama's other marginal states: taking away Nevada gets us down to 276 new votes and 279 old votes, and then removing Wisconsin gets us 266 new votes, and a loss, and 269 old votes, and a loss-through-tie.
So in the scenario where Obama loses Ohio but makes up for it by winning either Colorado or Virginia, the 2010 census will have changed the result of the election, but in pretty much any other scenario, it won't have mattered.
Answer: no. Of the blue states on that map, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Illinois each lost a vote, while New York shed two electors and Nevada and Washington gained one apiece, for a net loss of 5 electors under the new figures. So Obama's 253 electoral votes in these states were 258 votes before the 2010 census; not enough for a victory. But, of course, if you tack on the 20 votes from Ohio, you've got 278, and an Obama win. So the path-of-least-resistance calculus would be identical with the 2000 numbers: if each candidate won every state that FiveThirtyEight currently considers them to be more likely to win than any state they do win (i.e., if each candidate takes a path of least resistance given the current 538 odds), it all comes down to Ohio.
We can monkey with this calculus a bit, however. Suppose Obama loses Ohio, but goes looking for backup options. His best bets are Iowa and New Hampshire, worth a combined 10 votes now and 11 votes last decade. Under the new lines, that gets him to 263, which is no good. Under the old lines, that would have been 269, good for a tie but then, almost certainly, a loss in the House of Representatives. Or what about Virginia? It's got 13 votes under both census counts, so adding Virginia to the blue states on that map gives 266 and a loss under the current lines, but 271 and a win under the old lines. Colorado's 9 votes under both censuses would get Obama to 262 or 267, neither of which is sufficient; however, under the old lines, Colorado plus New Hampshire would have done it.
Another wacky scenario would be if Obama were to win Florida, while losing some other states that look easier for him as of this instant. Tack Florida on to the map above and you get 282 electoral votes under the new lines, and 284 under the old lines--since Florida gained two votes, this reduces the difference. Obviously either would be enough for a win, but we can then peel off Obama's other marginal states: taking away Nevada gets us down to 276 new votes and 279 old votes, and then removing Wisconsin gets us 266 new votes, and a loss, and 269 old votes, and a loss-through-tie.
So in the scenario where Obama loses Ohio but makes up for it by winning either Colorado or Virginia, the 2010 census will have changed the result of the election, but in pretty much any other scenario, it won't have mattered.
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Eastern Sweep Propelling Senate Democrats to Victory
Over the last few months, it has become increasingly clear that Democrats are going to sweep the Senate contests in the eastern half of the country, modulo the Deep South. Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida were supposed to be competitive races with Democrats on the defensive, but really lousy Republican candidates has led to those races all being pretty easy holds (if one ignores the spate of recent polling from lousy Republican firms showing Tom Smith gaining on Bob Casey in Pennsylvania). Connecticut has been mysteriously competitive, but not quite competitive enough for wacky Linda McMahon to triumph. Olympia Snowe's retirement in Maine has led to the impending victory of Angus King, who'll probably caucus with the Democrats, creating a de facto pick-up. The blockbuster Massachusetts contest between Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown appears to have tilted Warren's way, for another pick-up. Likewise in headline toss-up-ish contests in Virginia and Wisconsin, except that the apparently impending victories by Tammy Baldwin and Tim Kaine will result in Democratic holds.
Most entertainingly, the really idiotic comments by Todd Akin (R-MO) and Richard Mourdock (R-IN) about rape (which were only occasioned by their really unpopular policy positions on abortion) seem like they may have delivered an unlikely hold in Missouri, and an even more unlikely pick-up in Indiana. The result is that it looks like the only Senate contests the Democrats seem likely to lose among those states adjoining or east of the Mississippi River are in Tennessee and Mississippi, which are sort of as expected. And we've got three pick-ups: Angus King replacing Olympia Snowe in Maine; Elizabeth Warren replacing Scott Brown in Massachusetts; and Joe Donnelly replacing Richard Lugar in Indiana.
Now, the Western half of the country is not likely to be as friendly. The Democrats can be pretty sure of contests in Hawaii, California, Washington, and New Mexico. They could lose every other race, though, which would include losing seats in Montana, North Dakota, and Nebraska. But even then, with three pick-ups in the East against three losses in the West, we're holding our position, with 53 Democratic Senators, and a more progressive caucus at that. And the North Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, and Arizona races all feel at least somewhat toss-up-ish, even if the general partisan gravity tells us Republicans kind of ought to win them.
Democratic strength in the Eastern Senate races, in other words, means that we get to play offense in the West. Any success there will give us a bigger majority than we entered the cycle with. And given how much ground we had to defend this cycle, that would be just plain fun.
Most entertainingly, the really idiotic comments by Todd Akin (R-MO) and Richard Mourdock (R-IN) about rape (which were only occasioned by their really unpopular policy positions on abortion) seem like they may have delivered an unlikely hold in Missouri, and an even more unlikely pick-up in Indiana. The result is that it looks like the only Senate contests the Democrats seem likely to lose among those states adjoining or east of the Mississippi River are in Tennessee and Mississippi, which are sort of as expected. And we've got three pick-ups: Angus King replacing Olympia Snowe in Maine; Elizabeth Warren replacing Scott Brown in Massachusetts; and Joe Donnelly replacing Richard Lugar in Indiana.
Now, the Western half of the country is not likely to be as friendly. The Democrats can be pretty sure of contests in Hawaii, California, Washington, and New Mexico. They could lose every other race, though, which would include losing seats in Montana, North Dakota, and Nebraska. But even then, with three pick-ups in the East against three losses in the West, we're holding our position, with 53 Democratic Senators, and a more progressive caucus at that. And the North Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, and Arizona races all feel at least somewhat toss-up-ish, even if the general partisan gravity tells us Republicans kind of ought to win them.
Democratic strength in the Eastern Senate races, in other words, means that we get to play offense in the West. Any success there will give us a bigger majority than we entered the cycle with. And given how much ground we had to defend this cycle, that would be just plain fun.
Early Returns on the Debate Look Good
The day or so after a major news event is a really frustrating time for poll-watchers. There's a sense that the event has probably shaken up the political landscape, but because all the polling being released was conducted before that event, it doesn't reflect it yet, not even one tiny bit. The first indications you start getting are the movements of tracking polls on the second day after the event, and even this is tricky because you have to try and guess at single-day samples from the trendlines. Still, since it's the first evidence you get, it's worth giving it a go until better evidence comes along.
So, with that in mind, Barack Obama gained two points on the margin over Mitt Romney in both the registered-voter and the likely-voter models of Gallup's tracking poll today. That would be the poll that's shown wildly better results for Romney than any other for a good long while. Obama's taken a 1-point lead in the RV model, while still trailing by 3 in the LV version, but it's two points of improvement on either end. Now, this is a seven-day tracking poll, which means among other things that getting into the weeds of the one-day samples is extra treacherous, but the simple math suggests that a 2-point shift from a new one-seventh part of the sample means a net 14-point improvement yesterday over the day it replaced, last Tuesday. That's, um, big. Even with the enormous error bars on that estimate, it's a really good sign.
Even better is the fact that Obama's net approval went up by 5 points today. Since that's a three-day tracking poll, unlike the head-to-head, the simple math suggests a 15-point improvement over the day being dropped. That's basically the same number. So we have two different data points suggesting a roughly 15-point improvement for Obama over the status quo ante. If the actual shift was one-quarter that size, it's a huge deal.
In other words, today's Gallup tracking poll results are a big deal, and they're massively bullish for Obama.
So, with that in mind, Barack Obama gained two points on the margin over Mitt Romney in both the registered-voter and the likely-voter models of Gallup's tracking poll today. That would be the poll that's shown wildly better results for Romney than any other for a good long while. Obama's taken a 1-point lead in the RV model, while still trailing by 3 in the LV version, but it's two points of improvement on either end. Now, this is a seven-day tracking poll, which means among other things that getting into the weeds of the one-day samples is extra treacherous, but the simple math suggests that a 2-point shift from a new one-seventh part of the sample means a net 14-point improvement yesterday over the day it replaced, last Tuesday. That's, um, big. Even with the enormous error bars on that estimate, it's a really good sign.
Even better is the fact that Obama's net approval went up by 5 points today. Since that's a three-day tracking poll, unlike the head-to-head, the simple math suggests a 15-point improvement over the day being dropped. That's basically the same number. So we have two different data points suggesting a roughly 15-point improvement for Obama over the status quo ante. If the actual shift was one-quarter that size, it's a huge deal.
In other words, today's Gallup tracking poll results are a big deal, and they're massively bullish for Obama.
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Lochner: Definitely Wrong, but for What Reason?
The Supreme Court's decision in Lochner v. New York (1905), as the representative of the various other cases in which the Court used a similar principle around the first third of the twentieth century, is one of those cases that everyone loves to criticize. In that case, the Court held that state maximum-hours laws for bakers were unconstitutional because they violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause. That involved, first, holding that the Due Process Clause includes substantive limitations on what kinds of laws legislatures can enact, and second holding that the life, liberty, and property interests protected by that Clause include some sort of protection against maximum-hours laws, typically referred to as the "right to contract." The Court used similar "substantive due process" logic to strike down a whole bunch of left-wing labor laws around the same time.
This "Lochner era" is really, really unpopular. Most people tend to criticize it on the grounds that the "right to contract" is a fiction, a bit of political ideology that the Justices at the time happened to like and decided to read into the Constitution where never it was truly to be found. A lot of people, quite rightly, deny that "substantive due process" is valid at all, although some of us who deny its validity argue that the Privileges or Immunities Clause, directly on the other side of a comma from the Due Process Clause, provides a perfectly legitimate vehicle for doing anything you might want to do under substantive due process. New Deal liberals, subsequently joined by a certain kind of conservative, argued that the problem with the Lochner Court was its activism and lack of restraint, its failure to show deference to popularly-elected legislatures. Liberals, who might not entirely reject the idea of the Court being activist and not particularly deferring to legislatures, might just say that the "right to contract" is just the wrong unenumerated substantive right, not that the whole business of finding such unenumerated rights is illegitimate.
But I wonder whether the truth isn't that the Court invented the right to contract but rather that it exaggerated it. Is it really plausible to say that there is no right to contract protected by the Constitution? If one accepts the logic that says that, yes, the Constitution offers protections for contracts, but it only protects existing contracts against being set aside by the states, and after all one cannot contract to do something which is illegal, then why shouldn't the state be able to pass a law against all contracts? That wouldn't impair the obligation of contracts, after all, only prevent new contracts being created. Or maybe just a law against one person agreeing to do work in exchange for another person's giving them money. Or a law against such labor contracts but only when it comes to, say, the medical profession?
I think it apparent that these laws would be invalid, on the grounds of a right to contract, protected under the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause. The reason I can say that without supporting Lochner is that these laws attack the very concept of being able to make contracts, while things like minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws are regulations created, among other things, to keep the people whose very rights are at issue here from getting screwed over, and also to stop their contracts from indirectly screwing everyone else over at the same time. So there is a right to contract, it just doesn't work to prevent any public regulation that limits the stuff you're allowed to make contracts to do. Lochner, therefore, is wrong in its interpretation of the very concept it stands for. It's right there in the decision, where they say that they can't imagine any reason for a law like the one at issue. A whole lot of people could have told them what the reasons were. Probably the lawyers in the case did tell them what those reasons are.
Incidentally, it's worth remembering that a "right to privacy" is sort of dominant vis-a-vis a "right to contract" or even a "right to property." By property, after all, we mean private property. Contracts are private arrangements between two mutually consenting people. Insofar as the Constitution has any sort of general notion of property rights, or contract rights, or what-have-you, it also has a notion of privacy rights. That doesn't prove by itself that the privacy right extends to areas of personal privacy, but I think it's an important connection to make.
This "Lochner era" is really, really unpopular. Most people tend to criticize it on the grounds that the "right to contract" is a fiction, a bit of political ideology that the Justices at the time happened to like and decided to read into the Constitution where never it was truly to be found. A lot of people, quite rightly, deny that "substantive due process" is valid at all, although some of us who deny its validity argue that the Privileges or Immunities Clause, directly on the other side of a comma from the Due Process Clause, provides a perfectly legitimate vehicle for doing anything you might want to do under substantive due process. New Deal liberals, subsequently joined by a certain kind of conservative, argued that the problem with the Lochner Court was its activism and lack of restraint, its failure to show deference to popularly-elected legislatures. Liberals, who might not entirely reject the idea of the Court being activist and not particularly deferring to legislatures, might just say that the "right to contract" is just the wrong unenumerated substantive right, not that the whole business of finding such unenumerated rights is illegitimate.
But I wonder whether the truth isn't that the Court invented the right to contract but rather that it exaggerated it. Is it really plausible to say that there is no right to contract protected by the Constitution? If one accepts the logic that says that, yes, the Constitution offers protections for contracts, but it only protects existing contracts against being set aside by the states, and after all one cannot contract to do something which is illegal, then why shouldn't the state be able to pass a law against all contracts? That wouldn't impair the obligation of contracts, after all, only prevent new contracts being created. Or maybe just a law against one person agreeing to do work in exchange for another person's giving them money. Or a law against such labor contracts but only when it comes to, say, the medical profession?
I think it apparent that these laws would be invalid, on the grounds of a right to contract, protected under the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause. The reason I can say that without supporting Lochner is that these laws attack the very concept of being able to make contracts, while things like minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws are regulations created, among other things, to keep the people whose very rights are at issue here from getting screwed over, and also to stop their contracts from indirectly screwing everyone else over at the same time. So there is a right to contract, it just doesn't work to prevent any public regulation that limits the stuff you're allowed to make contracts to do. Lochner, therefore, is wrong in its interpretation of the very concept it stands for. It's right there in the decision, where they say that they can't imagine any reason for a law like the one at issue. A whole lot of people could have told them what the reasons were. Probably the lawyers in the case did tell them what those reasons are.
Incidentally, it's worth remembering that a "right to privacy" is sort of dominant vis-a-vis a "right to contract" or even a "right to property." By property, after all, we mean private property. Contracts are private arrangements between two mutually consenting people. Insofar as the Constitution has any sort of general notion of property rights, or contract rights, or what-have-you, it also has a notion of privacy rights. That doesn't prove by itself that the privacy right extends to areas of personal privacy, but I think it's an important connection to make.
Monday, October 15, 2012
Context, Please
Just now I saw a headline on the Huffington Post that a Democratic Senate candidate said that his state wouldn't elect his opponent because "we're not that dumb." The article in question reveals that this was during the debate, and the line was used in a very particular context. Republican Richard Mourdock, a veeery right-wing candidate who Tea Party'd Dick Lugar in the primary, was trying to back off of statements he had made suggesting the unconstitutionality of Social Security and Medicare. Democrat Joe Donnelly said this:
So it's misleading to put just the "we're not that dumb" line in your headline. It could either be something really insulting that would probably deserve to damage a candidate (except that nothing except partisan affiliation actually matters, blah blah blah), or something completely innocuous like this.
"I may have been born at night, but I was not born last night. When you meet with the Madison Tea Party and you say to them, you show me where in the Constitution it allows Medicare, and you show me where in the Constitution it allows Social Security, we're not that dumb. We know what you are implying, and we know what you are driving at. You also said Medicare should be turned into a voucher system."This is pretty standard stuff, right? It's the idea that, look, you're trying to pull a fast one on the voters of this great state, but we're not idiots, you can't fool us. Now, if Donnelly had just said, apropos of nothing in particular, "I know Indiana won't elect Richard Mourdock because we're not that dumb," it would be a serious gaffe. It would be, among other things, deeply insulting to everyone in Indiana who planned on voting for Mourdock. This line isn't anything like that, however. He's not making any accusation against anyone based on their current intentions, just saying, look, if you think that line will work, think again, we're not that dumb.
So it's misleading to put just the "we're not that dumb" line in your headline. It could either be something really insulting that would probably deserve to damage a candidate (except that nothing except partisan affiliation actually matters, blah blah blah), or something completely innocuous like this.
"State Fundamentals" And the 2012 Senate Contest
According to the forecast from FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver's famous election forecasting site, Democrats are currently expected to hold 52.4 Senate seats after this election on average, a decline of just 0.6 Senators from their current position, and are given 86.4% odds of retaining the chamber. Those are some nice numbers for a year when Democrats were expected to get pretty well hammered. They've got Democrats leading solidly in MA, RI, NY, NJ, PA, DE, MD, OH, WV, MI, MN, CA, and WA, with rather robust leads in HI, NM, MO, WI, VA, CT, and FL, plus a tiny lead in IN. Republicans have modest leads in MT, ND, NV, and AZ, with a stronger lead in NE and locked-down leads in TX, UT, WY, TN, and MS. Independent candidates are projected to win in Vermont and Maine, both rather solidly. If you were to just "call" each state according to who's favored to win it, however slightly, you'd get 53 Democrats, including Bernie Sanders and Angus King, maintaining the status quo in overall caucus membership.
But digging into the numbers a bit, we find that there are a lot of important states where FiveThirtyEight is assuming that partisan gravity will play a really substantial role. In Arizona, for instance, the "adjusted polling average" has Republican Jeff Flake leading Democrat Richard Carmona by just 0.4%, but the "state fundamentals" say it's an R+8.3% state, so overall they've got Flake winning by 1.9%, and sporting a 62% chance of victory. In Connecticut, Democrat Chris Murphy's lead over Republican Linda McMahon is just 1.7% in the adjusted polling, but the +19.1% Democratic fundamentals number turns the whole race into Murphy +4.4%, 74% chance of victory. Indiana adjusted polling gives Democrat Joe Donnelly a 2.7% lead, but the fundamentals say it's Republican Richard Mourdock by 1%, so Donnelly's lead is just 0.3% in the forecast, and just a 52% chance of winning. In Montana, Democratic Senator Jon Tester holds an 0.6% lead in the adjusted polling, but Republican Denny Rehberg is favored by the state fundamentals by 8%, giving him a 1.6% lead overall, and Tester just a 38% chance of holding his seat. In North Dakota, adjusted polling shows a tied race between Republican Rick Berg and Democrat Heidi Heitkamp, but Berg takes a 4.9% lead in the forecast on the strength of a 10.5% lead in the fundamentals, and Berg is given 78% odds of victory.
That's a lot of key Senate contests being very heavily affected by our a priori assumptions of the race. That's not to say that FiveThirtyEight is doing anything wrong by adjusting for state fundamentals, and we can see that states with more robust polling are giving less weight to the fundamentals. But it is interesting to observe. As I read the landscape, the battle for control of the Senate is being fought on Democratic terrain in the East and Midwest, in Wisconsin, Missouri, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. But the battleground in which Democrats will seek to expand their majority is Western Republican terrain: Montana, North Dakota, Nevada, Arizona (okay, and let's give Indiana a special exemption, even though it's not western). If you're a believer in partisan gravity, then you would expect Democrats to squeak through the one blue-state defensive contest where the polling's been a bit scary, namely Connecticut, and to pull through the toss-up races, but not to pick up the Republican-held seats out west. If partisan gravity fails to show up, though, Connecticut will be very close, although probably will still go for the Democrat, but Montana, North Dakota, and Arizona become very interesting. Tack on those three states, plus a slightly more solid lead in Indiana, and Democrats could get to 56 seats without even winning in one of the more Hispanic states in the nation, Nevada.
In one way it will be an interesting test of modelling assumptions. In another, it's a demonstration of the need for more polling. These Senate contests in small states with non-competitive Presidential contests are important. People need to be polling them. That they are not doing so is not okay.
But digging into the numbers a bit, we find that there are a lot of important states where FiveThirtyEight is assuming that partisan gravity will play a really substantial role. In Arizona, for instance, the "adjusted polling average" has Republican Jeff Flake leading Democrat Richard Carmona by just 0.4%, but the "state fundamentals" say it's an R+8.3% state, so overall they've got Flake winning by 1.9%, and sporting a 62% chance of victory. In Connecticut, Democrat Chris Murphy's lead over Republican Linda McMahon is just 1.7% in the adjusted polling, but the +19.1% Democratic fundamentals number turns the whole race into Murphy +4.4%, 74% chance of victory. Indiana adjusted polling gives Democrat Joe Donnelly a 2.7% lead, but the fundamentals say it's Republican Richard Mourdock by 1%, so Donnelly's lead is just 0.3% in the forecast, and just a 52% chance of winning. In Montana, Democratic Senator Jon Tester holds an 0.6% lead in the adjusted polling, but Republican Denny Rehberg is favored by the state fundamentals by 8%, giving him a 1.6% lead overall, and Tester just a 38% chance of holding his seat. In North Dakota, adjusted polling shows a tied race between Republican Rick Berg and Democrat Heidi Heitkamp, but Berg takes a 4.9% lead in the forecast on the strength of a 10.5% lead in the fundamentals, and Berg is given 78% odds of victory.
That's a lot of key Senate contests being very heavily affected by our a priori assumptions of the race. That's not to say that FiveThirtyEight is doing anything wrong by adjusting for state fundamentals, and we can see that states with more robust polling are giving less weight to the fundamentals. But it is interesting to observe. As I read the landscape, the battle for control of the Senate is being fought on Democratic terrain in the East and Midwest, in Wisconsin, Missouri, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. But the battleground in which Democrats will seek to expand their majority is Western Republican terrain: Montana, North Dakota, Nevada, Arizona (okay, and let's give Indiana a special exemption, even though it's not western). If you're a believer in partisan gravity, then you would expect Democrats to squeak through the one blue-state defensive contest where the polling's been a bit scary, namely Connecticut, and to pull through the toss-up races, but not to pick up the Republican-held seats out west. If partisan gravity fails to show up, though, Connecticut will be very close, although probably will still go for the Democrat, but Montana, North Dakota, and Arizona become very interesting. Tack on those three states, plus a slightly more solid lead in Indiana, and Democrats could get to 56 seats without even winning in one of the more Hispanic states in the nation, Nevada.
In one way it will be an interesting test of modelling assumptions. In another, it's a demonstration of the need for more polling. These Senate contests in small states with non-competitive Presidential contests are important. People need to be polling them. That they are not doing so is not okay.
Ron Paul Will Save The Day!
...or not.
There's an article on the Huffington Post about how hilarious, though admittedly awful, an Electoral College tie would be. It's a scarily plausible scenario, honestly, because this is a really plausible map:
That's basically the Kerry states plus New Mexico, which is looking like a virtual lock at this point, and Ohio, where Obama's numbers have held up really well. It feels like this is an actual stopping-point on a uniform-swing analysis, where you shift the margin in each state by the same amount at the same time. In other words, this could happen, on an admittedly pretty bad night for Obama. And it's a 269-all tie ballgame map. Which is scary, because Republicans are almost certain to control a majority of the House of Representatives delegations next year, even if they don't control the House which, if we've had a tied Presidential election, let's be honest, they will.
Now, one quirky thing about this is that even in a tied Presidential race year, the Democrats could actually hold onto the Senate, or at least keep at least 50 votes in it. And it's the Senate, not the House, that picks the Vice President in case of a tie. And, well, that would get us a Romney-Biden Administration, possibly with Joe Biden getting to cast the deciding vote in his own favor. But, well, the VP has no formal legal responsibilities, so except insofar as he would give the Democrats a half-vote's extra maneuvering room in trying to block Romney in the Senate, it wouldn't matter much.
But the thing I found most hilarious about that article is the fact that some Republican electors are, apparently, Ron Paul devotees, and are seriously considering acting as "faithless electors" and voting Ron Paul instead of Mitt Romney. The rhetoric about how the Founders didn't design the Electoral College to just mimic a popular-vote contest is pretty delicious as well. So we could get Obama 269, Romney 267, Ron Paul 2, or some such. Except the problem is, as amazing as it would be for faithless Ron Paul elector to hand Obama the elector, it doesn't work like that. If Ron Paul were actually running in the election and managed to pick off a few EV's, say by winning Alaska, and make it 269-266-3, we'd still go to the House, and they would still be able to do whatever they wanted, namely elect Romney. You need to get an outright majority. If Ron Paul were running and, miracle of miracles, gobbled up a whole bunch of states, so that it was something like 250 Obama, 200 Romney, 88 Ron Paul, it would be the same story. Once Obama doesn't win 270 EV's outright, the only thing that can save him is a sufficient number of faithless electors swapping from Romney to Obama himself. And, uh, I haven't heard any suggest that that's going to happen. If Romney wins 270 or 271 EVs on Election Night, however, Ron Paul's forces of darkness could turn it into a no-outright-majority scenario and send us to the House and the Senate, but that would probably only result in Joe Biden getting to stand around doing nothing for a while.
A pity, because the world in which this was how Obama won the election would just be such an awesome world to live in.
There's an article on the Huffington Post about how hilarious, though admittedly awful, an Electoral College tie would be. It's a scarily plausible scenario, honestly, because this is a really plausible map:
Now, one quirky thing about this is that even in a tied Presidential race year, the Democrats could actually hold onto the Senate, or at least keep at least 50 votes in it. And it's the Senate, not the House, that picks the Vice President in case of a tie. And, well, that would get us a Romney-Biden Administration, possibly with Joe Biden getting to cast the deciding vote in his own favor. But, well, the VP has no formal legal responsibilities, so except insofar as he would give the Democrats a half-vote's extra maneuvering room in trying to block Romney in the Senate, it wouldn't matter much.
But the thing I found most hilarious about that article is the fact that some Republican electors are, apparently, Ron Paul devotees, and are seriously considering acting as "faithless electors" and voting Ron Paul instead of Mitt Romney. The rhetoric about how the Founders didn't design the Electoral College to just mimic a popular-vote contest is pretty delicious as well. So we could get Obama 269, Romney 267, Ron Paul 2, or some such. Except the problem is, as amazing as it would be for faithless Ron Paul elector to hand Obama the elector, it doesn't work like that. If Ron Paul were actually running in the election and managed to pick off a few EV's, say by winning Alaska, and make it 269-266-3, we'd still go to the House, and they would still be able to do whatever they wanted, namely elect Romney. You need to get an outright majority. If Ron Paul were running and, miracle of miracles, gobbled up a whole bunch of states, so that it was something like 250 Obama, 200 Romney, 88 Ron Paul, it would be the same story. Once Obama doesn't win 270 EV's outright, the only thing that can save him is a sufficient number of faithless electors swapping from Romney to Obama himself. And, uh, I haven't heard any suggest that that's going to happen. If Romney wins 270 or 271 EVs on Election Night, however, Ron Paul's forces of darkness could turn it into a no-outright-majority scenario and send us to the House and the Senate, but that would probably only result in Joe Biden getting to stand around doing nothing for a while.
A pity, because the world in which this was how Obama won the election would just be such an awesome world to live in.
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