My Election Prediction

'Tis the season, so I suppose I'll give my official prediction for the election tomorrow night. I think Obama will win, and I think he will win 332 electoral votes, meaning a loss of just Indiana and North Carolina from his 2008 map. Florida's really the only out-on-a-limb here, and the reason I think Obama will win it is because I would expect the evidently-a-real-thing hurricane bounce Obama is currently enjoying to have an above-average impact there, since Florida is basically the most hurricane-ish state in the nation. I'm not terribly confident about my Florida prediction, though, and if I'm wrong I will be extremely suspicious that the state's vote suppression efforts will be to blame.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

It's Really, "Are We Better Off Now?"

"Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" is Ronald Reagan's famous campaign line from 1980, attacking incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter over the state of the economy. Of course, the answer was "yes," real per capita GDP had gone up during Carter's Presidency, though it was in a period of decline right around the election and the line probably helped Reagan win that election. Sensing that Barack Obama's greatest weakness is the continued mediocrity of the economy, Mitt Romney has taken to using the same line. The assumption seems to be that if you are better off than you were four years ago, you should vote for the incumbent, but if you're not better off, you should vote the incumbent out. Now, as I've seen Matt Yglesias point out in various posts and/or Tweets, that's a curious framework through which to view partisan electoral politics. Most of the most important aspects of individual-level well-being are not even plausibly under the control or influence of the President, or even the government, really, like romantic success or the lack thereof. Even when we narrow things down to economic well-being, there are vast amounts of idiosyncrasy and serendipity involved at the individual level. Whether I get hired, fired, promoted, or what depends at least as much on my own personal circumstances, choices, and attributes as it does the general macroeconomic climate. If I happen to have been promoted at my job because I'm really good at it, or because the guy in front of me got caught in a scandal or something, does it really make sense to interpret that as evidence that I should vote for the incumbent President?

In that light, I found this post from Dave Weigel interesting. First, as he points out, people's views of whether they're better off or not don't seem to be particularly objective or independent of partisan politics, since non-whites seem to think they are better off, whereas actual economic data begs rather strongly to differ. But what interests me is the gender gap in this question. Men split pretty damn evenly on whether or not they're better off, while a huge plurality of women say they're worse off than four years ago. I'm not entirely sure what the data are on that, though I think I remember hearing that the initial burst of recession was especially bad for men but that the recovery has helped women less than it's helped men. I'd just like to point out that women will be supporting the incumbent President in this election much, much more than men. So, something isn't working the way Romney thinks it ought to; shouldn't these women, who feel like things have gotten worse for them, be his natural constituency? I mean, it's not like the Romney campaign hasn't made that very argument on numerous occasions.

I think what's going on is that the more sensible way to interact with this question, as a matter of partisan electoral politics, is to ask whether we, as a nation, are better off now than we were four years ago. And it looks like people know it. This goes beyond the gender gap; looking at the regional data, one sees that the least happy regions are the West and the Northeast, while the South is feeling pretty good about itself. But, uh, the South ain't voting for Obama. I bet that if you asked people whether they think the country is doing better overall than it was four years ago, you'd see some rather different patterns here, and that that question would have more predictive power of people's voting intentions. Of course, one can bring a boatload of skepticism to the idea that answers to that question would be independent of people's partisan allegiances, and rightfully so. One way or another, though, it looks like voters are not taking up the Romney campaign's call to vote against Obama if your life has been rough over the last four years. Good for them.

WTF? No seriously, WTF?

I've just been watching Ezra Klein hosting The Ed Show on MSNBC, discussing the recent Egypt/Libya crisis. The segment that just finished featured two guests, one, Lawrence Kolb, basically from the left, and the other, Michael Medved, basically from the right. One thing Medved, a talk radio host, said shocked me so much that I've felt the necessity of writing a post about it despite its being 11:49 p.m. the night before my 9 a.m. class tomorrow. Specifically, in response to having had a bevy of instances of the Bush Administration issuing straight-up apologies for various things that offended Muslims, he said, basically, that those actions hadn't made the country safer. Indeed, he said, then-Senator Barack Obama was very critical of how the Bush Administration had caused America's image in the Muslim world to deteriorate!

Seriously, that's what he said. He then proceeded to confirm, in basically no uncertain terms, that in his opinion, that "apologetic tone" was responsible for poor American standing in Muslim areas. Not the two wars we were fighting in that part of the world at the time. He seemed to be oblivious to the idea that it wasn't the Bush Administration's occasional apologies for offensive cartoons or whatever that made Muslims dislike us, it was the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Seriously. It was one of the most unbelievable demonstrations of sheer amnesia about the past decade I've ever seen. I just couldn't let it slide.

WTF, Michael Medved?

Not Just Suggestability Making Republicans Credit Romney for Killing Bin Laden

So, PublicPolicyPolling continued its long trend of asking slightly oddball questions this past weekend by asking people in Ohio whether they think Barack Obama or Mitt Romney deserves more credit for the death of Osama bin Laden. The splashy headline is that 15% of Republicans say Romney, while just 38% gave credit to Obama. Their Twitter feed informed us that they asked this question to see if Republicans will give Obama credit for anything, and the answer seems to be no. Except, well, people will say anything if you prompt them to. Maybe they just credited Romney because the poll suggested that one might plausibly credit Romney?

But no, that's not it. Because, you see, they gave results for the two other partisan groups as well. Among Democrats, it's 86% Obama, 1% Romney. Among independents, it's 64% to 1%. It looks like raw suggestibility isn't enough to generate a non-trivial number of people saying Romney killed bin Laden. And, I mean, there are plenty of independents who don't much like Obama. But they're not trying to credit Romney, they're just slightly less willing to credit Obama than Democrats. It's just partisan Republicans who are even remotely willing to say Romney should get credit here.

So, the moral of the story is to be every bit as shocked and outraged as the headline numbers suggest you should be. It's not just suggestability, it's over-the-top partisanship.

Who Will Be America's (Next?) Next President?

Today the Republicans are, regrettably, partying on in Tampa. I don't want to write about it, because I don't want to pay attention to it beyond reading things that other people write about it, because I can't stand listening to Republican politicians. So, instead, let's gossip about 2016! Because, you see, the British betting site Ladbrokes is already offering odds on the identity of the winner of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. They're really expansive odds, going down to Karl Rove at 200/1. (There really needs to be a way to short the odds given by these bookmakers.) No one else is listed at worse than 100/1, where we find Julian Castro (D), the Mayor of San Antonio; Jon Huntsman (R), who lost badly in the 2012 primaries; Donald Trump (R?) who, well, you know who he is; Condoleeza Rice (R), the former Secretary of State; Rahm Emanuel (D), the Mayor of Chicago; and Ron Paul (R-ish), who'll be 81. Cory Booker (D), the Mayor of Newark and hopefully the Governor of New Jersey by that point, is the only person listed at 80/1. The 66/1 crowd includes Mike Huckabee (R), David Petraeus (R?), Sarah Palin (R), and Rand Paul (R). At 50/1 we find Deval Patrick (D), Eric Cantor (R), Michael Bloomberg (I), and Rick Santorum (R). Elizabeth Warren (D) clocks in at 40/1, and Bobby Jindal (R) and Chris Christie (R) are at 33/1. Martin O'Malley (D) and Andrew Cuomo (D) are at 25/1, while Jeb Bush (R), Marco Rubio (R), and Joe Biden (D) are at 20/1. Paul Ryan's got 14/1 odds. Then we get Hillary Clinton (D) at 6/1.

And then there's Mitt Romney. He's the favorite, of course, and the odds on him are 5/1. Aside from the existence of these odds in the first place, that's really the point of my post, because that strikes me as an incredibly bearish number for Romney. Let's do the math, shall we? 5/1 odds mean that for every time the event occurs, it would not occur 5 times, so it equates to a prediction that the event in question will occur 1 in 6 times, or about 16.6% of the time. Now, in order to win the 2016 election, Mitt Romney basically needs to win the 2012 election first, and then win re-election four years later. If you assume that the odds of Romney winning each election are the same as each other, if he gets to them, that's an implicit 40.8% chance of winning each election. Now, I don't know about you, but I feel like Romney's a lot more likely to win the 2016 election conditional on his having won in 2012 than he is to win in 2012 right now. Among other things, incumbents win most of the time, and we're sort of slated for a decent patch of economic growth over the next four years, although I'd be the first to tell you that four years of Republican governance isn't the best thing for the trajectory of the economy. So I'd say the implicit odds here are a bit worse than 40% that Romney wins this election.

Okay, that's not particularly bearish, is it? I suppose the FiveThirtyEight numbers give him worse odds right now. But consider the following: bookmakers set their odds so that they get to keep a bit of money, on average. That means overstating the probability of everything. In other words, if they actually though Romney had a 16.6% chance of winning the 2016 election, they wouldn't give him 5/1 odds, they'd give him 4/1, or maybe 7/2 or something. So the 5/1 odds actually give us a slightly lower estimate of that percentage, which in turn gives us a lower estimate of Romney's odds of winning each election separately. Which in turn gives an estimate of the state of play for 2012 that's very similar to the 538 numbers, which are pretty lousy for Romney. So, yet another sign that, as of today, Obama's winning.

No, Seniors Don't Prefer Romney on Medicare

Another interesting tidbit from the recent Washington Times poll. They asked whether people thought Romney and the Republicans or Obama and the Democrats were more likely to try to cut Medicare, and broke down the results by age. Overall, 46% said Romney was more likely, 27% said Obama, 19% said neither, and 8% were unsure. That's a +19 disadvantage for Romney here, since a higher number is presumptively worse. Among voters under 30, Romney's net disadvantage was +23%. Among voters aged 30 through 49, that figure was +22%. Among voters 50 to 64 years old, the gap shrunk to 15%. Among those 65 or older, the gap was 17%. So, okay, Romney does a little less badly among the elderly, but he's still losing the issue. A lot.

Here's one interesting thing of note, though: the percent saying "neither" is really strongly correlated with age. By age group, in ascending order, those figures were 21%, 25%, 16%, and 9%. If one lumps "unsure" in with "neither," which might or might not be valid, it's 33%, 30%, 25%, 17%. Seniors, in other words, are really scared everyone's trying to cut their Medicare.

But they're still more scared of Romney than of Obama.

You Don't "Build" a Company, Anyway

(Apologies for how late this post is relative to the original controversy. I'm pretty sure that this is a post I had meant to write some evening a few weeks ago, but never got around to it, and then only remembered what I had meant to write a few minutes ago.)

The conservative take on Barack Obama's "you didn't build that" line, which was of course in reality a slightly awkward of phrasing the general liberal idea that every successful business enterprise can only succeed because of a general environment of well-maintained infrastructure, a stable legal regime protecting property rights etc. that's created by the government, is that he instead alleged that small business owners did not genuinely deserve credit for the success of their businesses. This was always a stretch, for a lot of reasons one of which is that it's clearly not what Obama was saying. Moreover, many of the businesspeople that the Romney campaign has trotted out with big "WE DID BUILD IT" banners have demonstrably taken lots of government support for their businesses, which is nice and embarrassing.

But the way you know that the whole thing is nonsense, even without bothering to go back and look at the full text of Obama's speech and see that, yep, obviously the antecedent for "that" was roads and bridges and stuff, is by reading those banners. They sound ridiculous. Seriously, read that banner again. "We did build it"? "You did built that"? It just sounds absurd, on a purely linguistic level. Part of the problem is the use of the dangling pronoun, which only serves to highlight the fact that the entire Republican interpretation hinges on a flagrantly wrong reading of the original pronoun. Another part of the problem, I think, is the use of the word "build." Obama, of course, was using the word "build" in a purely literal sense. He was talking about roads and bridges, things which are built, as in constructed, and he was making the accurate observation that very few small business owners are responsible in any meaningful way (except tax dollars!) for the construction of the general infrastructure.

Now, people do use all sorts of wacky words to describe expansion and growth using transitive verbs in the economic context, most famously with the concept of "growing" the economy. I guess you might hear a person saying something like, "I built this business from the ground up," in which case they're very explicitly invoking a metaphor of physical construction. But to use the word as Romney is using it just strikes me as unnatural. You wouldn't say, "he built that business," again unless you added a modifier like "from the ground up" or "with his bare hands" to create a more specific metaphorical image. You might say "he created that business" or "he grew that business" or something. But the specific use of "build" in "we did build it" just sounds awkward and weird. And that's the very first thing about this whole bloody nonsense that should've tipped you off that it was nonsense.

No, Social Issues Are Not A "Distraction"

It's always really easy to make parallels between the current Presidential campaign and any ol' previous campaign, because there are usually lots of similarities between any two complex things and if you just ignore the non-similarities, well, there you go. Of course, it's easier to compare this election to some previous ones than others; I have a hard time seeing the 2012-1912 parallel, for instance. One previous cycle a lot of people have compared this year's election to is the 2004 race, often noting a supposedly ironic antiparallel. That year, the thinking goes, a Republican incumbent who had been presiding over a mediocre economy and had middling, polarized approval numbers faced a rich man from Massachusetts considered unlikeable by most. The opposition party felt that the only priority was to beat the incumbent. The incumbent party wanted to talk less about the disappointing state of the economy and more about cultural issues and national security. Flip the parties, and it sounds very similar.

One particular sub-genre of the 2004/2012 comparison is when people, typically moderate-ish pro-Romney types, I think, talk about how, well, in 2004 the Bush campaign was desperate not to talk about the economy, but instead to use gay marriage and abortion as "wedge issues," and now Obama's in the same position of trying to distract from the lousy economy with social issues. The Romney campaign, of course, makes the second half of that complaint explicit, and are very adamant that everything except the continued mediocrity of the unemployment figure is a distraction. So can I just say, for the record, that this is not the case? Yeah, proper macroeconomic management is important. A lot of other things are important, too. Public policy on sex ed/birth control, a category I consider to include the morning after pill and therefore the recent Akin controversy, is tremendously important to aggregate human happiness. So, of course, is the structure of the welfare state, as Republicans are often in a mood to keep reminding us. So, actually, are gay rights, a "fringe issue" in that they only directly affect the lives of a small-ish number of people but they affect those people's lives to a very comprehensive degree.

Now, there's a sense in which the major problem with American public policy right now is the poor macroeconomic management. Matt Yglesias loves to pound that theme, and I think he makes a persuasive case both that this mismanagement is inexcusable and that it does tremendous harm, both by causing immediate suffering and by lastingly impoverishing the future. So yes, maybe in a certain way "the economy" deserves to be the #1 issue of this campaign. But that doesn't mean it deserves to be the only issue, and if we didn't live in a world where one party happens to be more wrong than the other party about almost everything all at once, I could easily imagine voting for the candidate who I thought, on balance, would do a worse job of managing the economy, if I also thought that they had a clearly better policy platform in general. The Romney campaign wants to convince people that this is wrong, and at times seems to me to be making an odd jump from political science literature suggesting that people typically vote against the incumbent if the economy is poor to the idea that people ought to do this. You can make a good case, though, that the mechanistic "economic determinism" voting pattern political science claims to uncover is a bad thing, and that people ought instead give more weight to overall ideology and policy preferences.

So stop complaining about Obama trying to "distract" us from the economy. Maybe his campaign likes it when we talk about things that aren't one of its relative weaknesses, but there's nothing wrong with that, and there's no good reason for thinking that weakness is the only thing that matters just because we call it "the economy."

Risk is Risky

As Nate Silver explained shortly after the pick was announced, there's a pretty good reason why Mitt Romney's pick of Paul Ryan makes at least a certain kind of sense: Romney is currently losing. He's been losing very steadily for months, and there's no particular reason to think that will change. That, therefore, makes it more sensible than it would otherwise be for him to do something risky, and picking Ryan is definitely risky. So, in a sense, good for Romney in recognizing that he needed not to just go with the boring ol' Senator from a swing state, hoping to gain some modest advantage in Ohio or Florida or wherever. (Although another way for Romney to take a risk would've been to pick a moderate(ish) Republican like Nevada's Brian Sandoval, which arguably would have been a better risk.)

But while one can recognize the need for Romney to do something risky and shake up the current "Obama narrowly but very clearly and very steadily in front" dynamic, that doesn't mean that the risk will pay off. And if it doesn't pay off, it's quite likely that it will not pay off in a big way. Specifically, I'm thinking that the odds of an Obama landslide, by at least as big a margin as last time around, is much bigger now than it was last Friday. I suppose it's possible that the new plan will work for Romney, although it doesn't look like it to me and the private despair of many Republican strategists has me feeling pretty confident about that. But it's at least as likely that the plan will go horribly wrong, that the decision to switch the election over to a grand ideological struggle in which you're clearly on the unpopular side will go about as well as it sounds like it should, and that Obama will rack up close to a double-digit margin of victory. Maybe win all his 2008 states, perhaps minus Indiana, and plus, say, Missouri and Arizona? Something satisfying, anyway.

A while ago I noticed that being re-elected with a smaller Electoral College margin of victory that your initial election is really rare. Madison did it in 1812, but that was before the popular-vote era. Woodrow Wilson did it in 1916, but his first election was a wacky three-way contest with Taft and Roosevelt that allowed him to rack up an electoral landslide despite getting 42% of the popular vote. So it's rare. Obviously, Presidents lose re-election all the time, but when they win they tend to extend their margins. For the past many months it's looked like Obama was going to win re-election but with a narrower margin than 2008. I'd say the Ryan pick has made the alternative much more likely.

Romney's Advisors Knew Ryan Was a Bad Choice

So, the initial reaction to the selection of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI01) as Mitt Romney's running-mate has been kind of curious. Republicans are elated. So are Democrats. Electoral politics is a zero-sum game, so this is weird. Now, to be fair, there's arguably a tactical advantage in appearing publicly to think that things are going great for your side, so maybe this isn't so weird. But the fact remains that at most one side can be right in their elation over the Ryan pick. Which one?

Well, obviously, being a Democrat I tend to think that the Democrats are right, and that Ryan will turn out to have been a giant mistake. But here's a piece of evidence that makes me much more confident in that thought, and much less scared of the idea that there's some secret plan that will make Ryan a genius pick. Specifically, I've seen a few stories recently saying that all of Romney's advisers were dead-set against picking Ryan. The impetus to choose him came entirely from the candidate. The great thing about this is that there's no particular reason to think that Mitt Romney, himself, has a perfect grasp of all the relevant evidence about whether Ryan would be strategically advantageous for the ticket. There is a reason to think his various advisers have such a grasp, however, namely that it's their job. It's not the candidate's job. So the fact that all of the people in the campaign whose job it is to know what decisions will make strategic sense for the campaign didn't want to pick Paul Ryan is tremendous news. It suggests that they agree, in their heart of hearts, with the Democratic reaction to the Ryan pick.

Now, these stories could be wrong. But if they're not, they make me feel a lot better about feeling good about Paul Ryan as the Vice Presidential nominee.

Oh Yes, Please, Nominate Paul Ryan for VP, Please

Apparently there's an increasing pressure building from the right wing of the Republican Party for Mitt Romney to choose Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District as his Vice Presidential nominee. The thought of this makes me kind of giddy. Here's why.

First of all, Ryan offers essentially no geographic advantage for Romney. Nate Silver's calculus showed that, while a Rob Portmann or Bob McDonnell or Brian Sandoval pick could boost Romney's odds of winning the Electoral College by close to 2% by providing a home-state bonus, Ryan would only add 0.1% to Romney's victory odds. That is to say, more or less nothing. That's because Ryan is not that popular in Wisconsin as a whole, since after all he only represents one of its eight Districts; his statewide net positive rating is just +4.9%. That translates, according to the FiveThirtyEight model, into an additional +0.7% in the Wisconsin popular vote tally, which translates into an extra 2.5% chance of winning Wisconsin, which translates into an extra 0.25 expected electoral votes. Which translates into an extra 0.1% chance of winning the electoral college. So in terms of geographical math, a Paul Ryan pick accomplishes nothing. So far, so good.

How Do You Tell if Mitt Romney's Lying?

Typically, when you ask of someone, "how can you tell if so-and-so's lying?" and the answer is supposed to be, "because their lips are moving," it's an exaggeration. The person tells an awful lot of lies, presumably, but it's not literally everything they say that's a lie. But, I dunno, I think in the case of Mitt Romney it might be pretty close to a literal statement of reality. In the past couple of weeks he's attacked Obama for saying something he literally didn't say, the whole "you didn't build that" nonsense; he's attacked Obama for suing to stop soldiers from getting to vote early in Ohio, whereas in fact Obama is suing to get everyone else to be allowed to vote early in Ohio, also; and just now he's attacking Obama for gutting the work requirement of the 1996 welfare reform, when in reality Obama is soliciting plans from the states to get welfare recipients jobs more efficiently. It's really astonishing how small a percentage of Romney's attacks are actually grounded in the slightest bit of factual evidence.

Meanwhile, Romney's favorability ratings continue to lag far behind Obama's. I wonder why? Hopefully people will be smart enough not to vote for the person they like worse.

Adventures in Weird: Romney Handicap Edition

Regular readers, if there are any, may recall my notion of the "Romney handicap," a figure calculated by subtracting President Obama's net job approval from his margin over Mitt Romney in a general election trial heat in any given poll. Well, here's an oddity. A recent CNN/ORC poll showed Obama with 48/47 approval numbers, for a +1 margin. They also show general election results of Obama 53%, Romney 41%. That's a +12 margin, for an 11-point Romney Handicap. But the weird thing is, that same poll showed Mitt Romney with 44/43 favorability numbers, an identical margin to Obama's approval rating. Weird, right? Why, if he's equally popular, is Mitt Romney giving Obama so much of a handicap?

Well, it's because this is an apples-to-oranges comparison, favorability versus approval. Obama's favorability numbers in this same poll are 56% favorable, 42% unfavorable. So he's got a +14 margin on favorability, Romney's got a +1 margin, and when you run them against each other Obama's got a +12 margin. Sounds about right. This makes me wonder whether the focus on approval rating might not be misplaced. Perhaps we should be looking at favorability ratings; after all, you can't have an approval rating for a challenger. Maybe the true rule isn't that Presidents need 50% approval to win re-election, but rather 50% favorability. Or maybe I'm just taking one slightly kooky poll result and drawing way too many conclusions from it. But it's a phenomenon to keep an eye on, if you like keeping an eye on esoteric polling phenomena.

Shoe-on-the-Other-Foot Syndrome

Over the past couple of years, all and sundry political commentators have pointed out that Barack Obama's re-election effort is in a bit of a tricky rhetorical position. The economy has basically felt sucky during those two years, and sucky economies are never good for incumbents. This means that Republicans get the extremely easy attack line, "The economy sucks and it's Obama's fault!" Obama, meanwhile, has nothing much to counter this attack with, except for the claim that yes, the economy sucks, but it would've sucked much worse were it not for his policies. This happens to be completely true, but it's also a very difficult political claim to make successfully. Obama might win anyway, but that would just be because people really do hate the Republicans so much on so many different levels; he would have a nearly impossible time convincing people he had actually been doing a good job.

That's all very well and good for Republicans, but there's one great big problem with this strategy. The economy is now getting somewhat better. And, more importantly from a political perspective, people are starting to perceive the economy as getting better! And this has now forced the Republicans into the same rhetorical corner Obama was in earlier. Witness Mitt Romney saying that the economy is "coming back," and then trying to claim that, because of Obama's policies, it came back slower and weaker than it should have. The way he puts it (“Almost everything [Obama]’s done has made it harder for this economy to recover.”) is false, but it's perfectly true that the Obama Administration has not pursued an optimal strategy to foster recovery, and that it has failed to do so from Day One, when it called for woefully inadequate stimulus and pretended that it was just the right amount.

But look at what's happened. Whereas Obama was saying, "sure, the economy is lousy but if it weren't for me it would be much worse," Romney is now saying, "sure, the economy is recovering but if it weren't for him it would be much better." If Obama had a tough sell then, Romney has an equally tough sell now. And since he was already fighting an uphill battle on all the other fronts, because people really do prefer Democratic policies to Republican ones right now and because he's so laughably less personally likeable than Obama, it's really hard to see how he wins if the economy keeps getting steadily better and he has no better way to spin the recovery than, well, it should be going stronger. I continue to think that, if the world doesn't get substantially worse on a macro level between now and November, it's going to be tricky for Obama to lose.

The Sense in Which Republicans Do Favor Equality of Opportunity

Paul Krugman has a great column out today about how there's zero evidence that Mitt Romney actually does favor "equality of opportunity," and less than zero evidence that Congressional Republicans do. The main thrust of his case is that we have extravagantly unequal opportunity in this country, as seen in things like malnutrition among poor children (not to mention the hideously inegalitarian educational system). But there is a Republican response to make, along the lines of my post on this subject a little over a year ago. (Note that I don't think it's a good response, just a response.) The government programs Krugman is advocating, they might say, aren't about equality of opportunity, but rather about ensuring equal outcomes. WIC and other food-stamp programs aim at ensuring that poor people, equally with rich people, have enough to eat. That's an outcome, right? If we really want to focus exclusively on opportunity, then we should provide everyone with the opportunity to achieve the outcome "has enough to eat."

Now as I said, this is not a good response. The first enormous problem with it is that making sure everyone has enough to eat ought to have priority, purely on its own terms, over any kind of esoteric concern with "opportunity" versus "outcomes." Failing to accord it such demonstrates that right-wingers who would make the above statement are, to put it mildly, callous bastards. But as I mention in my previous post, there's another problem, at the esoteric philosophy level. Even if we concede that the right-wing vision provides "equality of opportunity" at the level of "do I have enough material goods to sustain myself?", it entirely annihilates anything resembling such equality when it comes to the higher reaches of human aspiration. No one will, for instance, become President if they have to spend their whole life working multiple minimum-wage jobs just to feed themselves and find shelter. If we actually cared about the democratic egalitarian notion that "anyone can grow up to be President," we should need to guarantee a sizable amount of outcome-equality at the "lower," more formative levels of life and society. Otherwise our society would become, in a sense, a series of competitions, arranged from "basic necessities" to "highest aspirations," where at every step along the way only the winners of one game would get to even play the next one. That might suit Mitt Romney just fine, since he's one of the people who has won at every stage of the game, but it doesn't really sound very much like equality of opportunity, in the truest sense, to me.

Romney Handicap vs. Generic Numbers

Typically in calculating the Romney Handicap I've used Obama's margin over Romney minus his net approval rating in PPP state and national polls. But here's a national AP-Gfk poll that asks, first, whether Obama deserves re-election (he does not, 52% to 43%) and second, whether people would vote for Obama or Romney (Obama 47%, Mitt 46%) and for Obama or Gingrich (Obama 51%, Newt 42%). That's a handicap of ten points for Mitt compared to the generic re-election numbers, and eighteen (!) for Newt. I'm pleased to see this, because those numbers are both very similar to the largest numbers I was getting from the PPP data, but for both candidates the gap has narrowed a wee bit over the past few surveys. In any event, neither of these guys are strong candidates. If the Republicans had a replacement-level candidate (which is admittedly not as low a bar as in baseball), they'd be leading by a whole frickin' lot right now.