Winning the Small States Would Give Obama Options

One interesting feature of the FiveThirtyEight model is that it doesn't just calculate a point estimate for the popular-vote margin in each state, it also calculates a margin of error for that estimate. And this isn't simply some assumption based on how far in the distance the election is; rather, it's derived from the data available in that state, with I think the most important component being the amount of polling available in each state. The intuition is fairly simple: if a state has been polled to death, we have a better sense of the state of play there, and ought be more confident in our predictions regarding that state, than if there have only been a handful of polls. Part of what that means for 2012 is that Ohio, which has been polled to death, has a rather small error bar around its forecast, as can be observed from the "Competitive State Summary" in this article.

The fact that, in particular, Ohio has a much more confident forecast than Iowa or New Hampshire means that the order of the states by Obama's likelihood of winning them is not the same as Obama's order of states by Obama's expected margin in them. So if you draw up a path-of-least-resistance map based on the 538 odds, you add in all the 90%+ states, and then Wisconsin, and then Nevada, and you're at 253 electoral votes, and then Ohio and you're at 271 and Obama wins. But if you construct a path of least resistance map based on the 538 margins instead, after Nevada's 253 you next toss in Iowa and New Hampshire, getting to 263. Now, since the next state on your list is Ohio, which would've been the tipping-point state anyway by the other method, Iowa and New Hampshire are redundant, and so the path of least resistance is probably  basically the same by this method: you add on Ohio, get up to 281, and then ditch Iowa and New Hampshire as superfluous.

But that doesn't mean the fact that Obama's margins in Iowa and New Hampshire are larger than that in Ohio couldn't be relevant. Consider this map:

The dark blue states are those Obama leads by at least 3 points on the current FiveThirtyEight forecast, which total 253 electoral votes. The light blue states are, well, Iowa and New Hampshire, the two other states Obama leads by more than he leads Ohio. The red states are those Romney leads in, and the purple states are those Obama leads in but not by more than in Ohio. If you only give Obama the dark blue states, then he must add Ohio or Colorado and Virginia in order to be victorious. But if you tack on Iowa and New Hampshire, giving him a base of 263, then Ohio or Colorado or Virginia would do it. Ohio would get him to the highly-superfluous 281, Virginia would get him to 276, in which case he could jettison one of IA and NH, and Colorado would put him at 272.

Winning these small states, which for whatever it's worth happen to be the two most important primary states, in other words, gives Obama an extra degree of flexibility. They would allow him to win with his Midwest firewall, his Southern firewall, or his Western firewall, any one of the three. So while Iowa and New Hampshire are superfluous for purely path-of-least-resistance purposes, they matter a great deal in terms of the number of relatively easy paths to victory available to Obama.

The Tyranny of Automatic Bipartisanship

The recent voting-rights controversy in Ohio hinged around a curious institutional feature. In each of the state's 88 counties, a local elections board determined county electoral policy. But these boards weren't just elected by the general county population. Instead, they had a predetermined equal number of Democrats and Republicans. So, when each county was considering whether or not to have early voting in this year's Presidential election, a curious dynamic started up. Democrats, who favor voting rights generally, supported early voting everywhere. In most counties, their Republican counterparts also supported early voting. The exception, of course, was the handful of urban counties where Ohio Democrats rack up big margins to stay competitive statewide. In those counties, every Republican voted against early voting, creating a tie. The Ohio Secretary of State got to break those ties, and sided with the Republicans, preventing early voting. Net result? More generous voting provisions in Republican-leaning counties than Democratic-leaning ones.

Now, fortunately, a federal judge has put a stop to this whole regime, thanks to a quirk of the law permitting the roll-back of early voting in Ohio that exempted the military, and therefore ran afoul of the Equal Protection Clause. But I'd like to point out a different aspect of the whole affair, namely the dangers and, in a sense, tyranny of requiring everything to be bipartisan. Because the problem here was only that Republicans held genuine policymaking power in the Democratic-dominated areas. If, in Cuyahoga County where Obama won more than two-thirds of the vote, two-thirds of these board members were Democrats, they'd've just voted to continue early voting, and no problem. In each county, if the boards reflected the political composition of their constituents, they would automatically have an interest in promoting their constituents' rights to vote. Instead, we had a system that gave people control over the political voices of their opponents.

Another way in which insistence upon bipartisanship leads to undemocratic results can be seen through the "grand bargain." If there's a culture that says all major legislation must have substantial support from both parties, and both parties' leadership, then it doesn't matter in the slightest who wins the elections. Policy gets made by the two caucuses together, and the people stop being allowed to choose which policies they prefer. It's a slightly different dynamic to the Ohio situation, but serves similarly to illustrate the problem. An a priori decision that everything must be bipartisan amounts to a decision to reserve power for the losers of elections. It means you don't need to win an election to hold substantial political power. That is, almost tautologically, undemocratic. And the result is what we saw in Ohio.

Good thing we've got the countermajoritarian judiciary to police these things.

One Political Rule to Rule Them All

Harry Enten had a column in the Guardian recently about political "rules." You know, like "incumbents never win re-election with approval ratings below 50%." Until, of course, they do. The basic conclusion of the article is the very sensible one, namely that, since in each election one can find scores of rules saying that both candidates simply must win, the rules are basically bunk. Like I said, this is basically sensible, but there's one rule of which I'm rather fond: no Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio. I like this because it makes sense, and it illustrates the one long-term constant of American partisan politics. Ohio is the state which, perhaps more than any other, embodies the business interest. Other industrial Northern states tend to contain bigger, denser cities, leading to more sympathy for the workers and liberalism in general; Southern and Western states typically have non-industrial concerns. But in Ohio, businessmen, business owners, and capitalists generally tend to be the dominant political group. And the only thing that's been a fixed point in the American political scene is that the Republican Party is pro-business. They were pro-business under Lincoln, pro-business under McKinley, pro-business under Coolidge and Hoover and Nixon and Reagan and Bush. It makes sense that if they couldn't even convince Ohio, the natural dwelling-place of their basic historical constituency, to vote for them, they wouldn't have much luck convincing the nation as a whole.