So, the Republicans are Running the 1836 Whig Play, huh?

It looks like, in the wake of Super Tuesday, the anti-Trump forces within the Republican Party, decreasingly a.k.a. the Republican Party, have recognized that Trump will "win" the primaries, in the sense of getting the most votes, winning the most states, and having the most delegates pledged to him at the convention. Their goal is to keep his delegate count below the 50% threshold so they can get to a second ballot and then ignore him and nominate someone less, y'know, Trump. And this means jettisoning the old anti-Trump strategy of consolidating around a single champion. Now they want Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich to all stay in for the long haul, each performing well in different areas of the country and collectively denying Trump a majority even though no one opponent will have anything like his overall support.

If that strategy sounds familiar, well, it shouldn't, unless you're familiar with the 1836 election. There, Martin Van Buren was running to succeed Andrew Jackson, and the anti-Jacksonian Whigs ran this exact same play. William Henry Harrison was their real candidate, but he wasn't on the ballot in every state. Instead, they ran Daniel Webster in Massachusetts, Willie Person Mangum in South Carolina, and Hugh L. White throughout much of the South, with Harrison as their northern and midwestern candidate. The plan was to deny Van Buren a majority in the electoral college and thereby throw the election to the House of Representatives, which the Whigs controlled. It was a fascinating moment in American politics: had the Whigs succeeded, they might have made this multiple regional candidates strategy the norm in American politics for the party that controlled the House.

They, uh, didn't succeed. Van Buren won 15 states and 170 electoral votes, compared to 7 and 73 for Harrison, 2 and 26 for White, one (Massachusetts) and 14 for Webster, and one (South Carolina) and 11 for Mangum. That's 170 for Van Buren, 124 for the various Whigs: a majority for Van Buren, and a third term for the Jacksonians. Four thousand votes in Pennsylvania could've swung that state for Harrison, taking its 30 EVs out of Van Buren's column and making the Whigs' gambit work. But they didn't, and it didn't, and the strategy has never been tried again.

Until now.

We'll see how it goes. I mean, it won't go well, that's for sure: if it "fails" it means they nominate Trump, and if it "works" it means they deny the guy who won their primaries the nomination and he probably storms out and runs as an independent and throw the election to Hillary and the party humiliates itself. But as between those two, we'll see how it goes. Good luck!

A Modest Defense of Democratic Filibuster Hypocrisy

In 2005, Democrats filibustered a few George W. Bush judicial nominees, who they thought were particularly radical. For a while, at least. Then Majority Leader Bill Frist (yeah, remember that guy?) threatened to use the "nuclear option" to change the rules of the Senate while it was in session.* Democrats backed down. A bunch of moderate Senators crafted a deal in which Republicans agreed not to destroy the filibuster and Democrats agreed to stop filibustering. The nominees got confirmed, and hey, guess what? They're particularly radical. During the whole controversy, of course, lots of Democrats said a lot of stuff about how great the filibuster is, and lots of Republicans said lots of stuff about how terrible it is.

On November 21st, 2013, one day before the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination and two days before the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, the Democratic Senate majority used the "nuclear option" to prevent the minority from obstructing executive nominees or judicial nominees other than to the Supreme Court. This isn't the first time we've had tons of Democrats now saying stuff about how horrible the filibuster is and Republicans writing paeans to it, in a bit of entertaining "everyone's a hypocrite!" theater. There's these two pieces, for example, by Slate's Emma Roller, showing the flip-flops of both President Obama and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Mostly I think it's true that everyone's a hypocrite on this, or more specifically that this is a prime example of my long-time theory that no one has any actual beliefs about procedure except as they relate to substance. Republicans, for instance, tend to favor a small federal government because most of what the feds do these days is somewhat progressive economic stuff, regulation and redistribution and all that, but when the feds are criminalizing marijuana, suddenly Democrats love federalism. Except, and I know this is easy to mock coming from a hard-core Democratic partisan, I honestly think the combination of the two Democratic positions, from 2005 and 2013, is a lot more defensible than the combination of the Republican positions, for mostly kind of happenstance reasons.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.