Shut Up, Bernie

So, last week Bernie Sanders said some things. Things like this:

But the bottom line is that when only half of the American people have participated in the political process, when some of the larger states in this country, people in those states have not yet been able to voice their opinion on who should be the Democratic nominee, I think it's absurd for anybody to suggest that those people not have a right to cast a vote. 

And like this:

We think if we come into the convention in July in Philadelphia, having won a whole lot of delegates, having a whole lot of momentum behind us, and most importantly perhaps being the candidate who is most likely to defeat Donald Trump, we think that some of these super delegates who have now supported Hillary Clinton can come over to us. Rachel, in almost every poll, not every poll, but almost every national matchup poll between Sanders and Trump, Clinton and Trump, we do better than Hillary Clinton and sometimes by large numbers. We get a lot more of the independent vote than she gets. And, frankly and very honestly, I think I am a stronger candidate to defeat Trump than Secretary Clinton is and I think many secretary -- many of the super delegates understand that.

 Okay, so, a few thoughts.

A Reality Check on the Democratic Primary

It's Tuesday. Specifically, it's Tuesday, March 15th, the Ides of March, and a key turning point in both presidential primaries. But who cares about the Republicans; this post is about the Democrats. One week ago, on Tuesday, March 8th (a.k.a. International Women's Day), the soon-to-be first female President suffered a really shocking defeat in Michigan, where polls had her up by over 20 points. Bernie ended up winning, just barely, by about 1.5%. It was shocking, and made us reconsider everything we thought we knew about how the race is going. Today (well, tomorrow, really, since it's only just barely Tuesday as I'm writing this), five big states will vote, the first and last time that will happen. It's Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Illinois, and Florida. And we'll see whether Michigan was a harbinger of things to come, in terms of polling error, or whether things will be basically back to normal. If the latter, we're looking at big Clinton wins in Florida and North Carolina, the last Southern states to vote, a more modest Clinton win in Ohio, a close race in Missouri, and... god knows what's going on in Illinois.

But it's worth taking stock of how things are going, because... they're going really well for Hillary. You can see how well using the FiveThirtyEight delegate targets. In almost every state, Hillary's meeting or beating her targets. And while Bernie does have a few states where he's beat his targets, they're tiny little victories. He netted one delegate versus his target in Oklahoma and Maine, two apiece in Vermont (by shutting Hillary out) and Colorado, and by five in Kansas. That's his biggest win. In Michigan, his great victory only amounted to holding Hillary to her targets. Meanwhile, Hillary has seven wins bigger than Bernie's biggest, in South Carolina (+7), Georgia (+9), Alabama (+9), Mississippi (+9), Virginia (+10), Tennessee (+11), and Texas (+22). Indeed, Tennessee all by itself is enough to cancel out all five of Bernie's wins. Put it all together and she's 88 delegates ahead of her targets, which means he's 88 delegates behind his targets. He doesn't just need to win going forward. He needs to win big. He needs to win big states by big margins. He needs to beat his targets by big margins in big states. And those targets include winning New York. Hillary's from New York.

And all this, having not delivered a single win of the sort he needs.

Here's another fact about tomorrow: it marks the half-way point of the campaign. 2006 delegates will have been awarded after tomorrow, with only 1946 to come (plus a handful here or there from non-state primaries). So after tomorrow, Bernie will need to win by the same margin he's lost by to date. Let's assume he manages to hold Hillary even in delegates. And let's also say he manages to hold her even in delegates between California and New York. All of that is generous to Bernie, I think. The 538 targets would have Hillary winning 723 of the 1413 delegates at stake in those seven states, and that has Bernie narrowly winning New York. So that would leave Bernie 223 delegates behind (as he is right now), with 1224 delegates left to be awarded. He'd need to win 724 of those delegates, or nearly 60%. Take Pennsylvania and New Jersey out of the mix, the two biggest states, where a combined delegate split also looks pretty generous for Bernie, and you're talking about only 909 delegates left. He'd need to win 557 of those. Here are the states where Bernie's won more than 60% of the delegates: Kansas and Vermont. That's his home state, and one other state. (EDIT: whoops, I forgot Maine. There's also Maine.)

If he can't win big tomorrow, bigger than it looks like he should, and if he can't win big in the four biggest states that will remain after tomorrow, his task is to win everywhere else as thoroughly as he won Kansas. (And Maine!)

That really doesn't seem very plausible. And that means that, 24 hours from now, it might start looking pretty much impossible for him to win. Unless we get another Michigan.

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!

Congratulations to Bernie Sanders on his First Good State Result!

Woohoo! He finally beat the 538 benchmarks in a state! And it'll almost certainly be two of them by night's end. His shocking 10-point victory in Oklahoma was six points ahead of his +4% benchmark, and he looks on pace to win Colorado by about six surplus points as well, with a 17-point win.

That is officially the end of the good news for Bernie Sanders tonight. Well, okay, a 73-point win in Vermont ain't bad, even if it falls short of the +83% benchmark. But his ~15-point win in Minnesota will fall short of a +21% benchmark. Meanwhile he's failing to win two states he should've won: Massachusetts, which he should've won by about 11% and will instead lose by 2% (which I think is brutal for his campaign), and Tennessee. Oh, Tennessee. 538 thinks it should've been a very competitive state. It had other ideas, joining its Southern neighbors in giving Hillary a landslide win at +37%. Taken all by itself that would imply a 39-point national lead for Hillary. Obviously that's ridiculous, but these benchmarks are just approximations and the real results would vary a little. Which is to say, the massive surplus in Tennessee for Clinton makes up for Bernie's good results in Colorado and Oklahoma.

And then we get to the rest of the South, where he was projected to lose big but actually lost bigger. In the current approximations of the final results, he's 16 points behind his benchmark in Georgia, 20 points behind in Texas, 24 points behind in Arkansas, and 28 points behind in Alabama.

Add it all together and Hillary's running about 15 points ahead of the benchmarks in the states that voted tonight. Add in the four early states and it's... still 15%. We're getting a fairly consistent view of the race, not so much state to state but when you add it all up. Sanders has run a great campaign, and his five state wins so far really are amazing given where he came from. But he's not there yet, and at this point, with the battle-lines hardening ever more, it really doesn't look like he can get there.

And even if he does, he'll need to make up for the big wins Hillary's already banked. Which looks basically impossible given the proportional delegate allocation.

Within a few weeks it's gonna start looking like Bernie shouldn't really be in the race anymore.

Candidate Quality Might Matter, Chris Christie Edition

A CNN poll conducted from January 31st to February 2nd found that Hillary Clinton led five named Republican candidates by amounts ranging from fifteen points to twenty points. That kind of makes it look like, if Hillary runs, she'll be President (given that her lead in the Democratic primary is big enough that, were her own polling figure replaced by her margin over her closest competitor, she would still be in better shape than she was at this point in the 2008 cycle), though obviously it's early and this is just one poll. But there's an interesting comparison with the last incarnation of this same poll, conducted from December 16th to 19th of 2013. In that poll, Hillary's largest lead over these same five men was twenty-one points, but her smallest lead was... negative two points. It looks, in other words, like the 2016 Presidential landscape changed dramatically over those six weeks. Except the thing is, virtually none of the numbers moved. The absolute difference between the December margin and the Groundhog Day margin for the five match-ups were one point, two points, five points, seven points, and... eighteen points. Okay, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan are doing a bit worse now than they were a couple months ago, but the story here is Chris Christie, who has spent those six weeks imploding like a black hole from which no political ambition can escape. And this, I think, is an interesting little case study for the political science concept that candidate quality is not an important variable in Presidential elections, that only the so-called "fundamentals" matter.

At first glance, the most obvious conclusion is that the Christie example strongly suggests that candidate quality does matter. In December, the Democrats and the Republicans had an equal number of high-quality candidates seen as serious contenders for the nomination, one. The match-up between the two of them suggested that the election could be something like a toss-up. Now, the Democrats outnumber the Republicans in quality candidates one-zip, and the poll suggests that the Republicans are in line to get slaughtered. Plus or minus one quality candidate could, it appears, alter American politics for the next decade more or less single-handedly. Thank you, Mayor of Fort Lee, in other words. And I think, on a certain level, this conclusion is absolutely correct. Candidate quality matters, a lot. Ask Senators Coons, Donnelly, Bennett, McCaskill, and Reid.

But I think there's an extra level of subtlety, and in the end this Christie datum suggests a refinement, albeit a substantial one, rather than a rejection of the idea that candidate quality is irrelevant.

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.

Gerrymandering: Constitutional, but Needs to Stop

(Apologies for the lack of a comprehensive election-reaction post, as yet anyway. Long story short, woohoo, let's reform the filibuster and ram a bunch of judges through the Senate, and I really hope something happens on climate-y issues in the next four years, but I'm not optimistic. And now for more miscellaneous posting, though most of it will probably still be election-focused for quite some time.)

It has long been my position that, while I heartily endorse Baker v. Carr and the series of cases that came out of it establishing the nationally-enforced principle of "one person, one vote" in legislative districting, and while I do believe racial gerrymanders, or theoretically gerrymanders on the basis of innate demographic factors other than race although it's tougher to see how that happens, can be unconstitutional in certain circumstances, I do not think that pure political gerrymandering can be struck down by the courts. Some of my reasons for this opinion include the idea that there's no constitutional right to live in a swing district, that no one individual's vote is likely to determine the outcome of an election even in a very competitive district so there's no categorical individual difference between swing and safe districts in that regard, and that, since partisanship and voting habits are not innate traits, unlike race, the notion that such-and-such a district will vote in such-and-such a way is a bit speculative. Voters, if they are severely displeased by having been gerrymander'd up, have the power to just vote for someone else. It's just not a denial of the equal protection of the laws, or of a republican form of government.

But that's just my constitutional opinion. On the policy merits, my god gerrymandering has got to go. I've just been reading a thing about how Jon Husted, Ohio's Republican Secretary of State, wants his state to award its electoral votes by Congressional district instead of winner-take-all. A similar scheme was floated in Pennsylvania last year, and failed miserably. Maine and Nebraska already do this, though it rarely comes into play. (Obama's 2008 win of Omaha's single electoral vote, from the Second District of Nebraska, is the only time I can think of that it's mattered.) The problem here isn't just that implementing this system piecemeal in a handful of large states that tend to vote Democratic in Presidential elections would simply amount to a removal of some Democratic electors, though that's also true and very problematic. In Ohio, Obama (who won the state, no matter what Karl Rove might say) only won 4 or 5 of the state's 16 districts. Yeah. That's pretty bad. Republicans carried the remainder, of course, and so would have walked away with a solid majority of Ohio's electoral votes, despite losing the state. How is this possible, you ask? Well, because the Ohio state government, entirely under Republican control at the time of redistricting, passed a really aggressive gerrymander, packing every Democrat it could find into as few districts as possible and then trying to make the remaining Republican districts as evenly uncompetitive as possible. And it worked, and stuff like this is most of why John Boehner is still Speaker of the House. Democratic Congressional candidates got more votes than Republican ones this cycle, after all, but barely gained back any seats, because of really aggressive incumbent-protection redistricting by the largely-Republican state legislatures elected in 2010.

In our current system of gerrymanders, in other words, if a party happens to do anomalously well in the decade elections at the local level, it gets to bake in a Congressional advantage for the next ten years. Sure, Democrats do it too, and they're perfectly justified in doing it so long as Republicans are doing it in the states they control. Actually, there's nothing except an informal norm stopping a party that takes over a state government mid-decade from redistricting again in a way that's more friendly to their party's interests. But it's pretty damn apparent that there's nothing legitimate or desirable about this way of doing things. What we should do is have every state in the nation pass a state constitutional amendment setting up an independent redistricting committee. It happened in California, and it greatly increased the number of competitive seats. Or just tell a computer to come up with a map; I can't see any reason why that wouldn't be possible. Part of the problem, I guess, is that you will inevitably get a pattern of unilateral disarmament, so perhaps it should be structured as an interstate compact that will take effect when every other state has signed on as well. One way or another, this needs to be made to stop.

Oh, and yes, I consider this part of my tally of issues on which I don't think my policy position is required by the Constitution.