No, not that George Bush. His father. The point is this PublicPolicyPolling survey, which shows Christie creaming anyone the Democrats could run against him, including Newark Mayor Cory Booker. Booker trails by 14 points, while Richard Codey, Steve Sweeney, and Barbara Buono, of whom I've never heard, trail by 22, 27, and 40 points. Bruce Springsteen even trails by 36 points, despite himself being quite popular. The reason is that Christie himself is very popular, with a 67%/25% approval rating, including a 56%/32% approval rating among, uh, Democrats. So it looks like I'm stuck with my odious Governor for another four years, right? (Yeah, I'm in the 25% of disapprovers.)
That's probably correct. However, there's a real chance, I think, that Christie's current popularity is basically a bump from the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and that it could fade substantially over the next year. New Jersey is, after all, a blue state, and during a campaign it should be pretty hard for Christie to retain his popularity with Democrats. If, that is, a strong candidate could be found to run against him. That's why I invoke George H.W. Bush as a model: during 1991, his approval ratings were so strong that no prominent Democrat wanted to challenge him, but when diamond-in-the-rough Bill Clinton actually ran the campaign, he found Bush's strength dissipating and the incumbent highly vulnerable. I sort of think the 1992 campaign should stand as a cautionary tale to ambitious politicians, telling them not to let outlandish popularity numbers for the incumbent in the wake of some Event from which they've received substantial good press scare them away.
But, in this case, I imagine the relevant parties won't listen. With the presumptively-going-to-open-up Senate seat in 2014, it just doesn't make sense as the place to direct your efforts, if you're a Democratic prospect looking for higher office. Which means that we'll probably end up having to nominate some sacrificial lamb-type candidate, who'll run a bit of a mediocre campaign and get slaughtered. Oh well.
Friday, November 30, 2012
Friday, November 16, 2012
How Not To Analyze Miguel Cabrera's MVP Win
As indeed I might have predicted in advance, I'm not entirely sure what to think about the American League Most Valuable Player race. I think I would have voted for Miguel Cabrera, who won, so I should be happy, but on the other hand, since I recognize that Mike Trout deserved the award at least as much as Cabrera, I'd've liked to see it a wee bit closer. But I do know some things that I definitely do not think about the race, and many of them are exemplified by this article on Slate, whose thesis is that, like Mitt Romney, Miguel Cabrera was the candidate of old white men, but unlike Romney, his electorate consisted mostly of that group, so he won while Romney lost.
Problems abound. First of all, Miguel Cabrera is himself Hispanic, while Mike Trout is rather distinctly white. Furthermore, as admitted in the article itself, all three of the not-white-men who got to vote for AL MVP voted for, uh, Cabrera. So it looks like race isn't the main factor here, although there is a more plausible statistical link with age. But my more fundamental problem is the way the article frames the arguments behind supporting Cabrera: as unthinking, reactionary gibberish combined with a healthy dose of you-kids-get-off-my-lawn-ism. The evidence for this point seems to be one guy who wrote a column that has exactly these traits, and from this single datum it is inferred that this is the only argument which can be made for Trout. My argument, on the other hand, is simple and, I think, reasonable: yes, Trout was clearly the better player this past season, but Miguel Cabrera won the frickin' Triple Crown, and that's just a trump card. I admit openly that this is what one might call an irrational argument, or at least a non-rational argument. But because I admit it, because I say openly that I think the award ought to go to player X despite the fact that player Y had a better season of baseball, I'm not being ignorant or reactionary or acting in knee-jerk opposition to modern statistical analysis.
This sentence in particular bothers me:
Now, I do agree with the article's actual proposal, though it's a proposal that's never really made explicitly. The BBWAA's voting system does empower people with relatively traditionalist and non-statistical approaches to these issues, and thereby loses out on what the sabermetric types have to offer. It would be nice if this were different, not particularly because the statheads are right (although they are pretty clearly right on the facts and, I think, more often than not right in their interpretations of those facts) but because everyone should benefit from broadening the set of voices which are amplified and empowered. But this problem doesn't mean that the Cabrera for MVP cause was absurd, or that supporting it makes you a reactionary and a fool, or that it makes you equivalent to the old white men who supported Mitt Romney.
Problems abound. First of all, Miguel Cabrera is himself Hispanic, while Mike Trout is rather distinctly white. Furthermore, as admitted in the article itself, all three of the not-white-men who got to vote for AL MVP voted for, uh, Cabrera. So it looks like race isn't the main factor here, although there is a more plausible statistical link with age. But my more fundamental problem is the way the article frames the arguments behind supporting Cabrera: as unthinking, reactionary gibberish combined with a healthy dose of you-kids-get-off-my-lawn-ism. The evidence for this point seems to be one guy who wrote a column that has exactly these traits, and from this single datum it is inferred that this is the only argument which can be made for Trout. My argument, on the other hand, is simple and, I think, reasonable: yes, Trout was clearly the better player this past season, but Miguel Cabrera won the frickin' Triple Crown, and that's just a trump card. I admit openly that this is what one might call an irrational argument, or at least a non-rational argument. But because I admit it, because I say openly that I think the award ought to go to player X despite the fact that player Y had a better season of baseball, I'm not being ignorant or reactionary or acting in knee-jerk opposition to modern statistical analysis.
This sentence in particular bothers me:
Miguel Cabrera’s voters are ink-stained traditionalists who long for a time before nerds ruined baseball by explaining how it worked.Now, this might be descriptively true, although to be sure you'd need to look at the roughly two-dozen individuals who did vote for Cabrera and ask them why they voted the way they did. But it doesn't have to be true. It's perfectly possible, for example, to be perfectly aware of "how baseball works," as this author rather condescendingly puts it, and therefore to know that, in very meaningful senses, Cabrera just didn't come close to having as good a season as Trout, and yet to think that this does not settle the MVP case. Wins Above Replacement can claim, or at least come close to claiming, a rather natural monopoly on being the appropriate subject of analysis from the General Manager's vantage-point, i.e. in asking, which player will increase my team's win total by the most next year? But there's no particular reason to think that the GM mindset is the implicit criterion for the Most Valuable Player Award. And while I don't think it makes sense, for instance, to deny a pitcher the Cy Young Award because, while you cannot deny that their results were the best in the league, you dislike aesthetically their style of pitching, I do think it reasonable to say that the Triple Crown has a certain magic to it, that it constitutes a valid "intangible" which justifies, under the standard of reasonableness, a vote for Cabrera over Trout.
Now, I do agree with the article's actual proposal, though it's a proposal that's never really made explicitly. The BBWAA's voting system does empower people with relatively traditionalist and non-statistical approaches to these issues, and thereby loses out on what the sabermetric types have to offer. It would be nice if this were different, not particularly because the statheads are right (although they are pretty clearly right on the facts and, I think, more often than not right in their interpretations of those facts) but because everyone should benefit from broadening the set of voices which are amplified and empowered. But this problem doesn't mean that the Cabrera for MVP cause was absurd, or that supporting it makes you a reactionary and a fool, or that it makes you equivalent to the old white men who supported Mitt Romney.
Friday, November 9, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
My Election Predictions: They Were Pretty Awesome
I made a prediction in all 51 Presidential state-level contests and all 33 Senate contests that were held last night. Of those 84 races, I was correct in 82 of them, including going 51-for-51 at the Presidential level. I correctly called 332 Obama, 206 Romney as the final electoral tally, with Obama winning all his 2008 states except Indiana, North Carolina, and Omaha's single elector, but winning everything else, including Florida. I also correctly predicted 55 Democratic Senators, assuming Angus King does the obvious thing regarding caucus choice. My only errors were in North Dakota, where I was honestly a bit surprised that Heidi Heitkamp managed to pull it out, and Nevada, where I thought the legendary Democratic turnout machine would deliver a victory for Shelley Berkley. I was wrong as to both of those, but they canceled out in terms of overall partisan balance.
My predictions compare very well to Nate Silver's. Like me, he nailed the Presidential race, even having Florida as pretty much a tie with Obama the narrow victor. Like me, he got two Senate races wrong, both in the west. Unlike me, however, he did not call the final Senate balance of power correctly, because his errors did not cancel out; he had Heitkamp losing in ND, but also had Jon Tester losing re-election in Montana. I had observed a while back that ND and MT were two very sparsely-polled Senate contests, and the FiveThirtyEight model was giving an awful lot of weight to the "state fundamentals" in them. In other words, Nate's model was assuming that the state partisan gravity would assert itself rather strongly against polling that suggested really close races. I was always a bit skeptical that it would, and indeed it didn't. In fact, the reason for thinking Berkley would win in NV was that the state's partisan gravity would outweigh the rather substantial volume of polling in that state. I'm a bit embarrassed, in retrospect, to have bought into that, although the fact that it has happened before in that state makes it a bit more understandable. Overall, however, Nate and I and really anyone who was willing to take the polls at face value did really well in forecasting the state-level contests.
One thing to mention, by way of tooting my own horn, is that I've been saying for at least ten or eleven months now that I thought the Senate races would go very well. Specifically, since Olympia Snowe's retirement I've been pretty damn confident we'd hold the Senate, and even before than I thought it was pretty likely. So I've been correctly predicting what happened last night since a time when pretty much everyone thought we were going to lose control of the chamber. I don't remember if I wrote a blog post to that effect, but I definitely have been saying it in person to my friends and family. Part of why is that the Republican tendency to throw away multiple winnable races per cycle has just become, in my opinion, predictable at this point, so I was always sort of assuming from the start that stuff like that which occurred in Indiana and Missouri would happen somewhere. And I enter the 2014 prediction season, which I admit is looking to be a bloodbath at the Senate level, with that same assumption in mind. I don't know where the Republicans will cough up winnable seats, but I'm pretty sure that they will do it somewhere.
Another thing I'd say is that my method seems to have been pretty well vindicated. That method, specifically, is to get all my polling data from looking at what PublicPolicyPolling says, and what FiveThirtyEight says. Both sources aced the election; many other sources bungled it rather badly. PPP are just clearly the best in the polling game right now, and Nate does the best job I know of at taking the vast bulk of less-awesome polling data and turning it into a useful commodity. I plan on continuing this method going forward, and I expect to continue being vindicated in it.
As for the House...? Well, I'm a bit surprised that Democratic gains were that meager, or maybe disappointed is a better word than surprised, because this was always what people were saying. It looks right now like we might get circa 200 seats when all's said and done, leaving us with a further 18 to take back the House in future elections.
But on the whole, given that my predictions were pretty good ones, it's good to be right.
Forthcoming later today will be a piece of general reactions to the election, and then a piece previewing the next couple of years, both of which could be very long. It's snowing right now, just the perfect little icing (literally!) on the cake of the past 24 hours, so I might not get to them for a while; staring out the window at the snow takes precedence. But they will get written.
My predictions compare very well to Nate Silver's. Like me, he nailed the Presidential race, even having Florida as pretty much a tie with Obama the narrow victor. Like me, he got two Senate races wrong, both in the west. Unlike me, however, he did not call the final Senate balance of power correctly, because his errors did not cancel out; he had Heitkamp losing in ND, but also had Jon Tester losing re-election in Montana. I had observed a while back that ND and MT were two very sparsely-polled Senate contests, and the FiveThirtyEight model was giving an awful lot of weight to the "state fundamentals" in them. In other words, Nate's model was assuming that the state partisan gravity would assert itself rather strongly against polling that suggested really close races. I was always a bit skeptical that it would, and indeed it didn't. In fact, the reason for thinking Berkley would win in NV was that the state's partisan gravity would outweigh the rather substantial volume of polling in that state. I'm a bit embarrassed, in retrospect, to have bought into that, although the fact that it has happened before in that state makes it a bit more understandable. Overall, however, Nate and I and really anyone who was willing to take the polls at face value did really well in forecasting the state-level contests.
One thing to mention, by way of tooting my own horn, is that I've been saying for at least ten or eleven months now that I thought the Senate races would go very well. Specifically, since Olympia Snowe's retirement I've been pretty damn confident we'd hold the Senate, and even before than I thought it was pretty likely. So I've been correctly predicting what happened last night since a time when pretty much everyone thought we were going to lose control of the chamber. I don't remember if I wrote a blog post to that effect, but I definitely have been saying it in person to my friends and family. Part of why is that the Republican tendency to throw away multiple winnable races per cycle has just become, in my opinion, predictable at this point, so I was always sort of assuming from the start that stuff like that which occurred in Indiana and Missouri would happen somewhere. And I enter the 2014 prediction season, which I admit is looking to be a bloodbath at the Senate level, with that same assumption in mind. I don't know where the Republicans will cough up winnable seats, but I'm pretty sure that they will do it somewhere.
Another thing I'd say is that my method seems to have been pretty well vindicated. That method, specifically, is to get all my polling data from looking at what PublicPolicyPolling says, and what FiveThirtyEight says. Both sources aced the election; many other sources bungled it rather badly. PPP are just clearly the best in the polling game right now, and Nate does the best job I know of at taking the vast bulk of less-awesome polling data and turning it into a useful commodity. I plan on continuing this method going forward, and I expect to continue being vindicated in it.
As for the House...? Well, I'm a bit surprised that Democratic gains were that meager, or maybe disappointed is a better word than surprised, because this was always what people were saying. It looks right now like we might get circa 200 seats when all's said and done, leaving us with a further 18 to take back the House in future elections.
But on the whole, given that my predictions were pretty good ones, it's good to be right.
Forthcoming later today will be a piece of general reactions to the election, and then a piece previewing the next couple of years, both of which could be very long. It's snowing right now, just the perfect little icing (literally!) on the cake of the past 24 hours, so I might not get to them for a while; staring out the window at the snow takes precedence. But they will get written.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
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.
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.
Monday, November 5, 2012
My Election Prediction
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.
Saturday, November 3, 2012
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.
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:
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):
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)