Where We're At in the Democratic Primary

A few days ago, FiveThirtyEight published a very useful piece that essentially laid out the landscape for the 2016 Democratic primary. They used some polling data, fundraising, demographics, and Facebook popularity to figure out how we can expect each state to vote if Hillary is leading by twelve points, and alternately how we would expect them to vote if she's fallen into a tie with Bernie--i.e., the first projection shifted over by twelve points, plus or minus rounding errors. And what this lets us do is convert individual state results into an estimate of how the race stands nationally, both with actual results and with polls.

So, for example, they show Nevada as a pro-Hillary state, one that should go to her by about 3 points even if the race is tied. If in fact Nevada ends up as basically a tie tomorrow (and we have very little idea what will happen there; there have only been three polls, all low-quality ones, in recent weeks), that's a fantastic result for Bernie. Even if it comes out as Hillary +6%, the most pro-Hillary of the three recent polls, that's a very good result for him. Conversely, Hillary's got something like a 25-point lead in the South Carolina polling average, which would be even better than the +23% win they project for her with a national 12-point lead. It's to be expected that different states will give different signals, because these projections are by no means perfect. (It's like extrapolating election night results on the assumption of uniform swing: it's a good approximation but never quite holds.) Indeed it kind of looks like a decent guess for Nevada is the national-tie scenario, while a decent guess for South Carolina is the Clinton lead scenario.

One interesting thing, though, is that the two states that have voted so far both say the same thing about the race. Iowa was a tie, falling almost precisely between the two projections (+7% for Hillary if she's up big, +6% for Bernie if it's a tie). Meanwhile, though Sanders won big in New Hampshire, by 22%, he didn't win as big as he should have if the race is a tie, which would've been 29%. Both states, therefore, imply a Clinton lead of roughly 6 or 7 points nationwide. Which confirms my feeling that those results were decent for Clinton, even though they looked pretty lousy. To be sure it's remarkably that Sanders is within 6 or 7 points nationally, but that's still a pace that has Hillary winning. If that pace holds, we should see Hillary winning by nearly 10 points in Nevada and by 16 or 17 in South Carolina; more likely we'll see a similar average result between those two states but highly disparate individual signals.

In any case, it's just something to keep an eye on, as a guide to interpreting each state's results.

Someone Needs to Brush Up on Their MLK

This is kind of random, but I was just reading the Vox.com "cards" explaining the whole Nevada rancher controversy/standoff/thing and I saw that some Tea Party types have attempted to label the efforts of one Cliven Bundy to keep the federal government from seizing cattle he's been illegally grazing on federal lands for many years "civil disobedience." If you accept the basic premise that the federal government is wholly illegitimate, I guess that could almost make sense. Except there's a wee problem: it completely ignores everything political philosophers have worked out about the theory of civil disobedience. Because, see, there's a reason we have laws, and there's a reason you'd like to think that people have a moral obligation to follow laws, even if they think those laws are wrong. Everyone just acting according to their own view of what the law should be, rather than what the law is, would be, well, anarchy, or something very nearly resembling it. And yet it seems fairly obvious that, in the extreme case, one cannot be under an obligation to follow a truly unjust law. Reconciling the two requires limits on the manner of civil disobedience, as well as limits on when it is appropriate. To my mind the best single expression of the theory of civil disobedience comes, not surprisingly, from Martin Luther King, in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. And perhaps the best passage from that majestic tract is this:

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

The point is to break the law, and get arrested and punished for it. That's the whole point. Civil disobedience would be if Bundy had grazed his cattle on federal lands, gone around saying he thought federal ownership of those lands was illegitimate, and then let them confiscate his cattle and raised an almighty stink about it, attempting to rally public opinion. Any claim to immunity from punishment for one's act of disobedience is inconsistent with the theory Dr. King lays out. 

Of course, no one is bound to accept MLK's words as binding authority as to the limits of civil disobedience But you don't even need to bother reading Letter from a Birmingham Jail to realize that, of course, the single most defining characteristic of civil disobedience is that it be civil, i.e. nonviolent. What's happening in Arizona is described as an armed stand-off. That is, perforce and in and of itself with no possible counterargument, enough to defeat a claim to legitimate civil disobedience. If Bundy's actions are to be justified, they are to be justified as revolution, nothing more or less. It is quite possible to have a regime so unjust that violent revolution is eminently justified (see South Africa, circa 1948-1994), and of course there's been a disquietingly prominent proto-revolutionary strain in Tea Party politics. But there should be no confusion over what's going on here. Civil disobedience it ain't. Domestic terrorism it is, even if it's the justified kind, like that of Nelson Mandela against the apartheid government.

But, y'know, it isn't. It's just an idiot with some guns looking to get a whole lot of people killed for really no reason whatsoever. What a hero.