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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

"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.

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.

The Continuingly Narrow Focus of the Debates

So, that debate was a lot better than the previous one. The moderator, more or less, knew what she was doing, both candidates actually said things (okay, granted, one of them didn't say very many true things, but still...) and, most importantly, the Democrat is widely perceived to have won. You know this because the Republicans are saying, well, the moderator was biased and Biden was smiling too much, but Democrats are just saying, hey, we won big. As David Roberts put it, "the GOP complaint...is that Joe Biden smiled & laughed too much while kicking their candidate's ass."

But, but, but... I'm not completely happy. You see, we're now two debates in, and this one had no particular area of focus, it was just the two Vice Presidential candidates discussing the election at-large. And yet, we've basically only had questions on the "to warmonger, or not to warmonger?" part of foreign policy, taxes, health care, the budget, and "the economy" in the sense of whether or not the labor market has been good under President Obama. That's, um, a narrow set of issues. Okay, last night had one late question about abortion, by far the worst framed question of the debate (in that it didn't just ask the candidates about abortion policy or whatever, but framed it around some nonsense about the candidates' personal religious beliefs). But, here's some stuff we haven't yet had a debate question on:

• Immigration
• Climate Change
• Gay Rights
• Women's Issues
• Criminal Justice
• Poverty
• Medicaid (and, you know, Medicaid is a health-care entitlement, we spent a lot of time hearing about other health-care stuff and entitlements, but nothing on Medicaid)
• Affirmative Action, which is in the news these days
• Labor Issues
• Campaign Finance Reform

This stuff is important! It was important when the first Presidential debate, allegedly on domestic policy, didn't talk about any of it. It was still important when the Vice-Presidential debate, allegedly without limitations on subject matter, didn't talk about any of it. It will still be important next week, when Obama and Romney meet for a town-hall debate. I dearly hope we get something about some of this stuff, but I'm not remotely optimistic it will be more than a small percentage of the whole time. Probably we'll just keep rehashing the same old budget-y economics stuff. And then, this stuff will still be important the week after that, when the "foreign policy" debate won't really provide an opportunity to talk about any of this stuff.

And then it will still be important two weeks thereafter, on election night.

My 2012 MLB Awards Preferences

Obviously, I don't have a vote, so I'm not calling this my vote, but rather just my preferences. Here goes:

National League Rookie of the Year: Bryce Harper, WSN. Harper didn't have the outlandish year that people expect him to have, or that a certain other youngster had in the other league, but he was clearly the best hitter of the National League Rookies. Norichika Aoki is the next-best competition, and according to Fangraphs he was nearly 2 wins less useful than Harper. Harper led all NL rookies who don't play in Colorado in home runs and led all rookies in runs scored, all while playing great defense at multiple outfield positions including center field. The main competition on the pitching side is Wade Miley of the Diamondbacks, who gets a very similar WAR number to Harper from Fangraphs. However, to be honest I think the phrase "Rookie of the Year" legitimately includes some concept of most "impact" rookie, and I think it's hard to deny Harper had lots of impact. You can make an argument that he provided the Nationals with credibility and optimism, although I don't think that's necessary to give him the award.

American League Rookie of the Year: Mike Trout, LAA. If Mike Trout doesn't win this award unanimously, it will be an outrage. His closest competition is probably Yu Darvish of the Rangers, the Japanese import who struggled at times but ultimately had a fine season that justified his All-Star selection. But those words "struggled at times" are crucial; Trout didn't. Yoenis Cespedes of the Athletics is the next-best position-playing rookie, but, uh, the leadoff-hitting Trout had more runs batted in than the middle-of-the-order slugging Cespedes. This better be unanimous.

National League Cy Young Award: R.A. Dickey, NYM. Oh, come on, like I was ever going to say anything else. As if Dickey needed any extra justification on top of how he dominated the league to the tune of 20-6 (for a bad team!) by using a variety of power pitching that just happened to rely on knuckleballs, he pitched the whole year with a big ol' abdominal injury. None of the other starting pitchers is particularly close to Dickey, in my opinion. I have to say that I won't be outraged if Craig Kimbrel wins this instead, because he has been obscenely good this year and in general I think relief pitchers get too little respect especially from the statistically-advanced sabermetric types. However, I'm voting Dickey. He's just that awesome.

American League Cy Young Award: Fernando Rodney, TBR. To be honest, no one had an absurd campaign as a starting pitcher this year. Verlander was great, sure, as always, and people like David Price and King Felix were good as well, but nobody really stands out. Except Rodney, who just posted the lowest ERA of all time (for non-trivial innings pitched). 0.60 runs allowed per nine innings. He allowed five runs all year, across 76 games pitched. Like, actually. I don't know how he did it and I don't know why he did it, but to me, the phrase "best ERA ever" tells me you should win the Cy Young Award. And yes, I know, arguably Kimbrel's season was even more dominant by various advanced metrics, and yes, I may be voting Dickey out of pure Mets rooting/awareness of how awesome the Sun God of Queens is. Get over it.

National League Most Valuable Player Award: Yadier Molina, STL. I really, really, really wanted to be able to say "David Wright" in this spot, and by WAR he's right in the middle of the conversation. But, man, he really just didn't have a good approach all through the second half of the year and it really hurt his team. He should definitely win the Gold Glove, but not the MVP. And, honestly, I have a long experience with how annoying it is to play against the Cardinals because of Molina's defensive ability, so given his current status as a reasonably elite hitter I think he probably contributed more to his team than anyone else.

American League Most Valuable Player Award: Miguel Cabrera, DET. I know, I know, Mike Trout played better than Miguel Cabrera this year. He played a tougher position, he played it better, he ran the bases better, etc. He blew Miguel Cabrera out of the water in WAR. Hell, Cabrera wasn't even second in WAR. Hell, even if you just look at raw offensive performance they were basically neck-and-neck using even a modicum of advancedness about one's stats. And I will not complain if Mike Trout wins this award. He easily deserves it. But, look, Miguel Cabrera won the frickin' Triple Crown. That's, um, impressive. Perhaps close to a majority of this country is not old enough to remember the last time it happened. Yes, I'm ultimately making the argument that the Triple Crown should basically just be an automatic (the precedent of the two times Ted Williams was denied the MVP despite winning the Crown strike me as basically miscarriages of justice, so not of much weight). But I also think that the entirely valid and important (well, insofar as anything in sports is important) critique of over-reliance on traditional counting stats has bled into a hyper-rational denigration of those stats. By "hyper-rational" I mean sort of the view that anything non-rational must be irrational, and therefore wrong. No, Miguel Cabrera's performance did not add as many wins to his team as Mike Trout's, compared to if he hadn't existed and some replacement player had been used. And in general I do think that WAR is a pretty good guide to MVP voting. But a few weeks back I said that if Cabrera won the Triple Crown I would think he needed to win MVP, and otherwise I'd think Trout needed to. There's a kind of magic in the Triple Crown, there's a reason why it's so hard, and honestly in the end I just think the award should this year be given to the sentimental non-rational candidate rather than the candidate who undeniably played better baseball.

Like I said, I have zero problem with things if the BBWAA decides to give the award to Trout instead. He pretty clearly does deserve it. But personally, this is a time when I would allow myself to let the mystical intangible stuff play the deciding role. Besides, Trout is probably going to have occasion to win this award some time when nobody runs up a Triple Crown against him.

The Greatly-Leveraged Man Theory of History

I am currently taking a course on English history from 1529 to 1660 (approximately), and one of the main focuses has been on the path of the English Reformation. Right now I'm doing some research for an essay on that topic, in particular by reading about the Reformations in other European countries as points of comparison. And the overall impression I get is that, by and large, the political disposition of a given country followed the inclination of that country's monarch. There are exceptions: Protestantism flourishing in Scotland under Mary Stewart's reign and surviving in England through the bloody years of Mary Tudor, and conversely failing in Ireland despite having the support of the English overlords. But by and large it seems that the personal inclination of the actual monarch played an enormous role in determining the religious fate of each country, that just about everyone in 16th century Europe knew this, and that the exceptions to the rule tend to feature pretty substantial countervailing dynamics (e.g., in Ireland Protestantism became associated with conquest and imperialism, Catholicism with nationalism and resistance).

Now, saying things like this, or for example "the English Reformation was caused by Henry VIII," sounds sort of like the "great man" theory of history, which glorifies (and/or vilifies) a handful of supposedly extremely important people who supposedly changed the course of everything simply by being so Great (or Terrible). The divide between this approach and the antithesis of its approach can be seen in the following analysis of the rise of the conservative Republican Party in America: "the conservative movement succeeded because it had such a formidable champion in Ronald Reagan" versus "the conservative movement was a decades-in-the-making cultural shift that would have found substantial success with any decently competent leader." And "great man" analysis is extremely unfashionable right now, and for basically sound reasons. I'd say in the case of the American political history analysis I just offered, the latter explanation is basically the correct one. It really isn't just kings and princes and Presidents who shape history, the great masses of not-in-power people are at least as important as the handful who rule.

But I also think that there is such a thing as power, and that some people throughout history have had a lot of power and have used it in unusually consequential ways not because they were particularly impressive people but because they happened to have power. Think of it as not being so much about the qualities of the person but about the situation they find themselves in. We can borrow a concept from baseball here, that of "leverage," or the relative importance of each situation to the overall outcome. If Randy Johnson started for the Diamondbacks against the Giants circa 2001, the at-bats in which he pitched to Barry Bonds would've featured arguably the "greatest" possible match-up possible in that year. But the game might have been determined by the Diamondback's weak-hitting shortstop facing some Giants middle reliever in the 8th inning with runners on base and a tie ballgame, or whatever. The cast of characters involved was more mediocre, and the result itself may have been eminently mediocre, an RBI groundout to score the winning run or something instead of a dominant strikeout or a majestic home run. But that result, because of the situation, would become leveraged into a far greater impact on the final victory or defeat than it, in a sense, deserved. But that doesn't mean it wasn't important! Modern statistical analysis of sports has helped de-emphasize the perception of some players as "clutch" just because they happened to do well in one or two extremely high-leverage situations, but that doesn't mean that what happens in those high-leverage situations doesn't tend to determine the game.

Suppose you have a country with a lot of people, each of whom has to choose between Catholicism and Protestantism, and one of whom is the king. We don't need to assume that the king is any different from any of his subjects to see that his decision might be a bit more importance. Certainly broad societal and structural factors play substantial roles even in influencing the monarch's own decision, but that doesn't mean the monarch is entirely constrained. If Queen Elizabeth had happened to die early in her reign, Mary, Queen of Scots would likely have inherited the English throne. And she was a Catholic. And she might well have lived as long as Elizabeth did or longer, and she might well have been able to do what Mary Tudor had failed at and properly restored Catholicism to England. Viewing history as contingent upon the quirks of who exactly happens to be in positions of power at particular times does not force upon us the view that these people were unusually great, or that they in any way deserved or earned their positions of historic influence. They may have done, or they may have been just fortunate to find themselves in their high-leverage situation.

Of course, one neat feature of the democratic age is that it blurs this distinction. Did the structure of American economic policy change forever in the 1930s because of a broad-based social movement, or because of the efforts of those in power? Both! The people in power were there because of the social movement supporting them! Franklin Roosevelt found himself placed in one of these highly leveraged situations because the people of America acting en mass felt it appropriate to place him there. Admittedly this is only of much use when the proposed "great man" is basically the President, or equivalent office; for instance, it doesn't help us resolve the debate over Reagan and the conservative movement. But in general the democratic identity of the government with its people ought to reduce the tension between observing the importance and, yes, in some cases greatness of individual leaders and paying proper respect to the power and importance of the people at large. Bill Clinton was a great leader and a great political talent, and the American people were pretty great in selecting him to lead them for eight years.

Elections as Arguments and the Debate

One way to view any electoral contest is as an argument. As to each candidate there are a number of different proposed reasons why they should be elected and a number of different proposed reasons why they should not be. These reasons can relate to the candidates' policy platforms, what kinds of judges they'd appoint, their moral character, their appearance, whatever. They can, in other words, be good reasons or bad reasons. And then you see how all the various reasons weigh with the polity, and what balance they eventually reach. Of course, the balance within the polity is really just the aggregated sum of all the balances in each member of the polity, each of whom can have their own individual weighting scheme among the various lines of argument.

I've had the feeling all throughout this election that political analysis pays insufficient attention to this argument-based model of an election, and treats elections more as some kind of point-scoring contest, where if X happens and X makes candidate A look good, then it adds points to candidate A's score, etc. So, for instance, we find the almost unanimous view that one of the few things that could materially damage Obama's rather robust lead at this point would be an economic collapse in Europe that spread to the United States. Why would this help Romney? Because political science literature suggests that the "vote for the incumbent because the economy is good" argument and the "vote for the challenger because the economy is bad" argument are among the strongest arguments out there, exerting disproportionate force over even those elections which are not viewed as being about the state of the economy. So, the thinking goes, anything that makes the economy worse is bad for the incumbent. In my view, it's harder to say.

In my view, that's a bit of a premature judgment. Sure, a new economic crisis might help Romney, if only because a new crisis should introduce greater variance and chaos into the whole process which will generically give the trailing candidate more of a chance than he had before. But the "European economic policy has screwed up in a truly massive way, so vote Romney" argument is pretty much incoherent on its face. At least, it's incoherent until and unless anyone develops a reason for thinking Romney would be better at dealing with the consequences of such a crisis, or until Obama displays poor judgment in his handling of the crisis. Either of those things could happen, but their opposites could just as easily happen. And if Romney reacted with a panic of the variety that affected the McCain campaign in September of 2008, the opposite probably would happen, and Obama probably would benefit politically. (Note that the "vote Obama '08 because of the financial crisis" argument is not incoherent, because that was a home-grown crisis that pretty much everyone felt was substantially the fault of the policies of the incumbent regime, and McCain was running on a platform virtually identical to Bush's.)

Now, the counterargument to my view is that I'm taking an overly charitable view of the electorate. I'm giving them too much credit for being smart, or for understanding the issues in some meaningful way that there's really no justification for. I don't mean to be. Remember what I said about how the arguments can be good ones or bad ones. Plenty of voters can give weight to silly arguments, like that one should vote for the candidate with the better speaking voice or whatever. But I do think that it's important to analyze events in the course of the campaign not just in terms of who looks better during them but in terms of how they reinforce existing arguments for or against each candidate or provide new such arguments.

About That CNN Snap Poll...

So, the main thing I'm happy to observe in the CNN snap poll about the recently-completed Presidential debate is that, though the respondents overwhelmingly said they thought Romney won the debate, the two candidates' favorability numbers didn't budge an inch between the initial round of calls before the debate and the follow-up after it. Specifically, Barack Obama went from 49% favorable, 50% unfavorable to a 49%/49% split, while Mitt Romney went from 54% favorable to 42% unfavorable before the debate to 56%-42% afterwards. So Obama gained one net point, and Romney gained two net points. Big effing deal.

But, uh, notice anything funny about those "before" numbers? They show Romney quite popular and Obama only sort of middling. That's not what any other poll has found for the general electorate these days. I'll let the pollster.com polling averages speak for themselves: Obama's got a 51.9% favorability rating in the aggregate, against just 44.0% unfavorable, while Romney's sporting just a 43.6% favorable score against 49.1% unfavorable. So in most polling heading into this debate, Obama is a net 13.4% more popularly perceived than Mitt Romney, but in the group of debate watchers in the CNN poll Romney was 13 points more popular than Obama. That's a skewed poll for you.

Now, that doesn't mean the poll is meaningless. Among people who watched the debate, most thought Romney won. But the poll is also telling us that "those who watched the debate" may well have been a Republican-leaning bunch. But that very fact is deeply informative, or should be anyway, of our analysis of the reaction to this debate. Regardless of who's more energized to vote this year, Republicans were far more energized about this debate. And this debate still doesn't seem to have changed very many people's minds about either of the candidates. So it looks to me like, while the debate was unquestionably a "win" for Romney, it may have been sort of a trivial one. And right now, he doesn't need trivial wins, he needs wins that he leverages into big swings in the polls. So far, it looks like he didn't get one. (Of course, that statement can neither be confirmed nor rebutted until about next Monday, when the first batch of post-debate polls will start coming in.)

There's More to Domestic Policy than the Economy

The "domestic policy" debate just concluded, and in my opinion, forgetting for a moment the question of who won it, is was just a stupid as hell debate. The biggest reason for that is that the entire debate was about what are considered in political contexts "economic issues." Nothing about the environment, gay rights, women's issues, immigration, etc. "Domestic policy" means "the economy." Now, okay, sure, the economy is important. It's probably the main issue in this election. But that doesn't make it the only issue. All those other things matter! A lot! Taken in the aggregate "domestic policy but not the economy" is probably as important for the welfare of the United States of America than "economic policy" by itself. Honestly I'm kind of offended that the people putting this debate on considered taxes and budgets and deficits and "the role of government" by which they mean the economic role of government the only meaningful domestic policy issues in this election. And not just because it's an enormous softball to Romney, given that Obama is an incumbent presiding over a mediocre economy. Because it buys into the view of life that denies the importance of anything besides money, that considers material goods the only goods that matter.

I think I'll close this blog post with Robert F. Kennedy's famous quote about the failings of the Gross National Product:

"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."

Lying with Large Numbers, Gangnam Style

So, okay, I myself have no remote interest in this "gangnam style" thing that's been making the rounds. But I just noticed a column blurb on Huffington Post about how much time everyone "wastes" on the Internet titled something like "We have watched 2100 years of 'Gangnam Style'" That's supposed to sound like a lot. And, well, 2100 years is a lot of time. Except this isn't linear time, of course, it's time that's been folded and crunched wibbly-wobbly style into a couple of actual weeks. They're person-hours, in other words, X people watching for Y hours. And doing a bit of math we find that, on average, each of the 7 billion humans on earth has watched approximately 9.5 seconds of this video, if the 2100 years figure is correct.

In other words: there are a lot of people on this planet. A billion is a very big number. If you collected one cent from everyone on the planet you'd be filthy rich. And, likewise, if everyone on earth did something for an average of ten seconds you'd get over two person-millennia. The mantra from my A.P. Chemistry class becomes relevant here: you can't know the significance of a number if you don't know its units. Person-hours are very different from actual hours.

Also, of course, one can object to the use of the word "wasting" here; if people enjoy watching Gangnam Style, then good on them. But, as I didn't read the article, I don't really feel like I should delve very far into that point.

Nobody Has Any Procedural Beliefs, Tudor Edition

Evidently during the 1550s, a whole lot of Protestants went about attacking the concept of female rule. They did this in quite ugly misogynistic terms. Why did they do this? Were they just a bunch of sexist bastards? Well, yeah, I suppose they were, just on general principles if nothing else. But there's another good explanation for this position: at the time, England was ruled by a Catholic woman, Mary Tudor, and Scotland was ruled by an absent Catholic woman, Mary Stewart, and a Catholic female governor, Mary of Guise. "Catholic" was probably a lot more important than "woman" in making people like John Knox hate them. So, of course they inveighed against female rule. It suited their partisan agenda at the time. Then, oops, we've got a Protestant woman on the English throne, for, oh hey, forty years. And she remembers that John Knox et al. spent the last decade railing against female rule, and she naturally doesn't like him very much. But he'd like to like her, because hey, she's on his side!

This is a nice example of my idea that nobody has any very firm beliefs about structural or procedural issues. It's just so damn easy to adopt whichever belief on such an issue aligns with the immediate circumstances of your partisan or ideological cause. Republicans trash the filibuster as undemocratic in 2005, and then set records for use of the filibuster in 2010. And, yes, Democrats including myself were on the opposite side of this issue at both times, although I still think there's a quasi-defensible justification for being pro-2005 filibusters and anti-2010 filibusters, namely that in 2005 the 45 Democrats represented more people than the 55 Republicans. We can see this a lot in constitutional law, where veeeery few people manage to hold consistent views across all federalism issues (including Scalia, see Gonzalez v. Raich) or separation-of-powers issues. It's just plain hard to hold fast to a belief about a distribution-of-power issue when your belief tells you to take the power away from the person who agrees with you and give it to the person who disagrees with you. And it always has been.