FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right

Republicans -- Not Obama -- More Often on Wrong Side of Public Opinion

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:23:00 +0000

One of the more commonplace assertions among pundits on the center-right -- made rather carelessly by Victor Davis Hanson and more thoughtfully by Jay Cost, is that agenda put forward by Obama and the Democrats is overwhelmingly unpopular and that Democrats are simply getting their comeuppance for having pushed such a liberal set of reforms forward. These claims, however, rely on selective evidence, invariably citing policies like health care and the GM bailouts which are indeed unpopular (strongly so, in some cases), while ignoring many other issues on which Obama has been on the right side of public opinion.

In fact, a more objective and equivocal evaluation of public opinion on more than two dozen specific issues finds that the Republican Congress has far more often been on the wrong side of it. Attempting to be as comprehensive as possible, I've identified 25 issues that Obama and the Democrats have made an affirmative effort to push forward since taking office a year ago, and summarized public opinion on each of them. Most of the numbers that I've cited come from PollingReport.com.

Afghanistan Troop Escalation. An average of seven polls taken since President Obama's speech on Afghanistan in December show a 54-41 majority of the public in favor of escalating troop commitments. However, Obama appeared to get a bump from his speech, as an average of four polls conducted in November, prior to the speech, had shown a 49-46 plurality opposed to greater troop commitments.

Bank Tax. An NPR poll found a 57-39 majority in favor of the bank tax proposal, which the Congress has yet to consider, after being read arguments both for and against the program. (An ABC/Post poll found a 73-26 majority in favor of taxing financial sector bonuses over $1 million dollars, although the White House has not advocated for that measure.)

Ben Bernanke. The only poll on Ben Bernanke, from NBC/WSJ, found a 37-34 plurality opposed to his reappointment; Bernanke was approved by 22 of 40 Senate Republicans and 48 of 60 Senate Democrats.

Bush Tax Cuts. Although this polling is somewhat out of date, a CBS/NYT poll in April found 74 percent in favor, and 23 percent opposed, to raising taxes on those making more than $250,000 per year, as Obama's budget would do. A Newsweek poll in March, with somewhat different phrasing, found 49 percent in favor of letting the tax cuts on the wealthy expire and 42 percent opposed.

Campaign Finance. The only poll to have asked directly about the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision is from FOX News, which found voters disapproving of the decision 53-27. A Gallup poll conducted last month found that, while most Americans consider campaign finance to be a form of free speech, they nevertheless by a 52-41 margin felt that the ability to place limits on political contributions was the higher priority.

Cap-and-Trade. The last five organizations to release polls on cap-and-trade (AP/Stanford, ABC/Post, CNN, Pew, Rasmussen) actually show it favored by the public by a 51-40 margin, on average. It is likely that a significant fraction of the public does not understand what cap-and-trade is; nevertheless most of these polls provided descriptions of the bill's contents. Eight House Republicans voted for the climate bill in June; the Senate has yet to consider the measure.

Cash-for-Clunkers. The only organization to poll on this was Rasmussen, which found voters opposed to the program 35-54 in June, but a 44-38 plurality favoring the program in retrospect after it had been implemented.

Credit Card Protections. 77 percent of respondents favored the Credit Card Protection Act, according to a poll by Open Congress. The bill was approved 90-5 by the Senate in May, as well as by a 105-69 majority of House Republicans.

D.C. Voting Rights. 58 percent of the public favored, and 35 percent opposed, giving an a House seat to D.C. in a nationwide Washington Post poll conducted last February. The Senate approved D.C. voting rights by a 61-37 margin last February, with 6 Republicans voting in favor and 2 Democrats voting against, although the measure subsequently died in the House.

Fair Pay. Congress approved the Liddy Ledbetter Fair Pay Act last January; it received the support of 3 Republicans in the House and 5 in the Senate. A Rasmussen poll conducted shortly after the legislation passed found that Americans by a 66-24 majority do not believe that women earn equal pay for equal work, although it did not ask about the legislation specifically.

Financial Regulation. A Time/SRBI poll in October found that 59 percent of the public favors more regulation of Wall Street versus 13 percent favoring less and 22 percent the same amount. A CNN poll two weeks ago found 62 percent in favor of greater regulations and 35 percent opposed. House Republicans opposed the financial regulation bill unanimously.

Gays in the Military. Four organizations -- FOX, Gallup, Quinnipiac, and CNN -- have released polls on Don't Ask Don't Tell since Obama's inauguration. They show an average of 58 percent saying that Don't Ask Don't Tell should be repealed and that gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly in the military, and 35 percent opposed. No votes have yet occurred on DADT in either the House or the Senate, although the House's repeal legislation has just one Republican co-sponsor.

GM/Chrysler Bailout. Quite unpopular: an NBC/WSJ poll in early June showed 39 percent of the public in favor and 52 percent opposed to the bailout, and a CNN poll in April found that 22 percent of the public favored additional assistance to GM and Chrysler while 76 percent would have preferred to let them go bankrupt. (There was no specific vote on GM in this Congress; instead, its funds came by way of the TARP program.)

Guantanamo Bay. Four organizations to release polls on Gutantanamo Bay between last February and last June found an average 55 percent of Americans opposed to closing the detention facility and 39 percent in favor, with the number of those opposed tending to increase over time.

Hate Crimes. Although there have been no recent polls on the subject, a Gallup survey in May 2007 found a 68-27 majority in favor of expanding hate crimes statues to include sexual and gender identity. The Matthew Shepard act, a hate crimes measure, passed the Congress last year, receiving the support of 18 House Republicans and 5 Senate Republicans.

Health Care. It has clearly become unpopular; the latest Pollster.com trendlines show 38 percent in favor of the bill and 55 percent opposed. One Republican voted for the health care bill in the House and none did in the Senate.

Jobs Bill. A CNN poll in December found 74 percent thought Obama should concentrate on creating more jobs "even if it means less deficit reduction." A Bloomberg/Selzer poll, also in December, asked about specific measures that might be undertaken as part of a jobs bill and found 68 percent in favor (and 28 percent opposed) to tax credits, and 66 percent in favor (versus 32 percent opposed) of spending on public works projects, although just 48 percent were in favor of additional assistance to state and local governments. House Republicans unanimously opposed a $100 billion jobs bill in December.

Mortgage Relief. Senate Republican unanimously voted against the Durbin Amendment to provide mortgage relief in April, as did 12 Senate Democrats. However, four organizations which polled on mortgage relief in February through April found an average of 60 percent of Americans in support of additional assistance versus 34 percent opposed.

PAYGO. There is no specific polling on Congressional pay-go rules, which Senate Republicans recently voted against 40-0., but in the abstract moves toward balancing the budget are almost always popular, such as a CNN poll in November which found 67 percent preferring balanced budgets to deficits "even when the country is in a recession and is at war."

SCHIP. Although there have been no recent polls on SCHIP (children's health care), an ABC/Post poll in September, 2007 found it supported 72-25 by the public, and a CNN poll in October, 2007 found that the public wanted by a 61-35 margin for the Congress to override President Bush's veto of the program. Nine Republican Senators voted to extend SCHIP in February as did 40 House Republicans.

Sonia Sotomayor. The last five polls to be released on Sonia Sotmayor in advance of her confirmation showed 52 percent in favor of her confirmation and 30 percent opposed, on average. Senate Republicans opposed her confirmation 31-9.

Stimulus. The stimulus has become somewhat unpopular now -- although most individual elements of the program remain popular. However, the stimulus was somewhat popular at the time of its passage. An average of the last five organizations to release polls in advance of the Senate's vote on the stimulus on 2/9/09 showed 50 percent in favor of the bill and 38 percent opposed. House Republicans opposed the stimulus unanimously; Senate Republicans gave it 3 votes.

TARP. The TARP program began under Bush and was extended before Obama took office, but Obama nevertheless actively lobbied Democrats for its extension. TARP was unpopular from the get-go, and Americans opposed its extension 56-32 last January, according to a poll then from Diageo/Hotline. All but 6 Senate Republicans voted not to extend TARP.

Terrorist Trials. An average of two recent polls from Rasmussen and CBS had 38 percent of the public in favor of terror trials in civilian courts, but 55 percent opposed.

Torture Memos and Investigations. Four polls conducted in April showed an average of 43 percent of Americans in favor and 51 percent opposed into an investigation of Bush-era torture policies. The only poll to ask about the release of the Bush torture memos, from ABC/Post, found 53 percent in favor and 44 percent opposed.

*-*

Of these 25 issues, Obama's position appears to be on the right side of public opinion on 14: the bank tax, repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, campaign finance, the credit card bill, D.C. voting rights, fair pay, financial regulation, gays in the military, hate crimes, the jobs bill, mortgage relief, PAYGO, SCHIP, and Sotomayor. It would appear to be on the wrong side of public opinion on five issues: the GM/Chrysler bailout, Guantanamo Bay, health care, the extension of the TARP program, and terrorist trials. On the other six issues, the polling is probably too ambiguous to render a clear verdict.

Republicans, on the other hand, have been overwhelmingly opposed to almost all of these measures with the exception of Ben Bernanke and Afghanistan troops, both of which poll ambiguously, and the credit card bill, which polled well.

Obviously, this analysis is superficial in certain ways. All issues are by no means created equal, and health care in particular, which is unpopular, has weighed heavily upon the public's perception of the Democrats. In addition, there is probably another layer of 'meta-argument' that goes beyond specific issues, and at which the GOP has tended to excel.

Nevertheless, it runs in contrast to the objective evidence when one asserts, as Hanson does, that "On every issue ... the Obama position polls 5-15 points below 50 percent." Rather, the votes taken by the Republican Congress have far more often been out of step with those of the median voter.

This is not to give a mulligan to the White House or to the Democrats -- as I've written before, their meta-strategy has necessarily had to be somewhat terrible so as to take what has been a fairly popular and centrist agenda and have it regarded as overwhelmingly contentious and partisan by so much of the public.

EDIT: What about EFCA/card check? I didn't forget about it; rather, I excluded it because it's something which the Democrats abandoned early on and which the White House never lifted a finger for. Obviously, there are a lot of policies that the Democrats theoretically have in their arsenal -- card check, legalizing pot, gay marriage, nationalizing the banks, a radically more progressive tax code, etc. -- which are both quite liberal and (with one or two possible exceptions) quite unpopular. But the Congressional Democrats didn't spend much of any effort on those issues, and the White House spent essentially none. The agenda they've spent their political capital on, rather, has been quite centrist -- which is sort of the whole point of this article.

If you did include card check, by the way, the verdict would be rather ambiguous. Ignoring some amazingly crappy (and contradictory) partisan polling on both sides of the topic, the closest we have to a neutral poll is this one from Gallup, which shows 53 percent in favor of a "new law that would make it easier for labor unions to organize workers" but which is probably too vague to be useful. To be clear, my hunch is that card check would indeed prove to become unpopular if it were debated more vigorously -- but that's just a hunch, and we're trying to rely on the objective evidence for this exercise.

Is It The Process, Stupid?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Schaller) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:39:00 +0000

Because it was Super Bowl week--and I happened to be watching a rebroadcast of the New York Giants' amazing Super Bowl victory over the New England Patriots, in which his son Zack made the tackle on the final kickoff of the game--I checked in with Steve DeOssie, an acquaintance of mine who also won a Super Bowl ring for the New York Giants, back in 1991. Steve is very politically active and astute, and although we don’t see eye-to-eye on many issues, I respect him a lot and his opinions.

DeOssie and his former Patriots teammate Fred Smerlas co-own a steakhouse in Providence, Rhode Island. They are sports media celebrities in New England akin to Curt Schilling. They also happen to be friends and political supporters of none other than new Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, and were on hand at Brown’s election night victory party. (For non-football fans, in the picture that's Fred on the left and Steve on the right.)

When I asked Steve what he thought about the Brown victory, he told me that most of the national media misinterpreted what happened in Massachusetts. So I asked Steve what the real message of Brown’s victory is. Here is what he emailed me, verbatim and unedited:

Much of the media seems to be missing the point or the cause of the election. On the right they want to believe it was anti-Obama or anti-healthcare. On the left they try to spin the idea that it was just about the poor performance of Coakley. Having been to at least 20 of Scott's campaign events I can tell you it was none of those reasons. The most consistent attitude was that people wanted to slow down the process. There was a natural reaction even in the most liberal of states to not want anything forced on them the way the healthcare seemed to be. People up here were not anti anything except the healthcare process. They saw it as sneaky and underhanded. Even in Massachusetts, people did not want something that unknown forced on the country. Either way I am glad the process will slow down some but I will not put even a good friend like Scott on that political pedestal like some people are trying to do.

Note Steve's use of the word process three separate times. Now, the most consistent complaints one heard from conservative politicians, pundits and activists about the process of healthcare reform were that Obama held some closed-door meetings; that the backroom deals with senators like Ben Nelson and especially Mary Landrieu looked shady; and, in general, that reform was being sped through Congress without sufficient time for citizens to figure out what the policy reforms would mean for them individually or for the nation in terms of entitlement obligations or overall spending.

Let me take each of these three complaints in order.

1. Closed meetings. From energy to wiretapping to Iraq, the Bush Administration was one of the least transparent presidencies in history, and Obama has surely been more transparent than his predecessor. But conservatives correctly respond to that by saying, “Hey, Obama ran as a guy who said he would change the way politics was conducted in Washington, and if he’s behaving not much differently from Dick Cheney, well, what was the point of electing him?” Though there is a double standard here, they’re right: Obama promised to be different. I think that this complaint is the strongest of the three. If you seem like you are hiding something, whether you are or not, voters become immediately suspicious--and with cause.

2. Congressional deal-making. The deals brokered with members of Congress seem less objectionable. Obama’s election did not obviate the U.S Congress, nor did it somehow eliminate self-interested behavior by pivotal members of Congress willing to prevent otherwise solid majorities--the Democrats, after all, had 60 seats and the states they represented accounted for even more than 60 percent of the country--from passing legislation by logrolling or stonewalling in order to gain their support. Moreover, neither Landrieu nor Nelson were holdouts resisting from the left side of the Democratic spectrum by publicly opposing the president and then negotiating concessions for more liberal versions of healthcare. Landrieu and Nelson are conservative Democrats, and Nelson’s resistance was predicated on his anti-abortion stance. Is it not a little hypocritical for conservatives and Republicans to complain about the Administration’s capitulation to people like Nelson? Had Obama publicly maligned Nelson for being a small-state senator who was manipulating the anti-majoritarian and often very secretive process of Senate holds so he could hold health care hostage in defense of the unborn, would the same conservatives who complained about shady practices have applauded the president for his forthright and transparent dressing down of a pro-life Democrats? I seriously doubt it.

And while we’re on the subject of congressional protocol and shady procedural practices, may I ask: Where were all these "procedural conservatives" back in 2004 complaining about the largest entitlement expansion of the past 40 years being "rammed" down America’s throat, no less their knowing manipulation of costs estimates for a bill that conservative economic Bruce Bartlett reminds us is costing the country MORE annually than the health care reform bill Democrats and Obama are proposing? I recognize that many budget-minded conservatives criticized George W. Bush for the cost of his anti-competitive, Big Pharma-giveaway, cater-to-the-senior-vote-and-the-budget-be-damned Medicare Plan D prescription drug legislation. But it was the House vote on that bill that was held open more than three hours (15 minutes is the standard time) and included what may well have been an illegal arm-twisting of Republican Congressman Nick Smith. Again, I’m not saying that just because the Bush Administration slipped an $800 billion prescription drug package through Congress literally in the middle of the night that the Obama Administration should do the same. But where was the outrage then?

3. Speed kills. Finally, there is the matter of the ramming down America’s throats of healthcare reform. I suppose in terms of the specific legislation in various forms that was working through Congress in 2009, one might say a year is too speedy a process. And there were so many bills it was hard to keep track of them, which was the downside of the Administration’s decision to let Congress take the lead rather than trying a Clinton-style approach by advancing an administration bill. Still, there was ample and many forums for debate. And, to be fair, the broader healthcare reform conservation in America hardly began on January 20, 2009: Both parties, and especially the Democrats, spent the better part of two years during the 2008 presidential cycle arguing about reform proposals. And if you want to take the longer view, the country has been arguing about how to reform our employer-based healthcare system since at least 1993, and really since the Truman Administration. Did we debate Medicare Part D as long? Not even close. But that's a benefit for seniors, who are older and whiter and vote more regularly than the poorer, darker and less insured people Obama is trying to cover. Haste is of the essence when legislating for the former, but patience is demanded when legislating for the latter. Are we to believe that is a coincidence?

Nor do I recall the procedural complaints about the speed with which we went to war in Iraq. Heck, people like Phil Donahue who so much as dared question the decision were mocked and shunted aside. (Mocking those who questioned the “process” back then made one a patriot; mocking and shunting aside Tea Partiers makes one an transparency-hating elitist, however.) Remember: The policy discussion prior to the Iraq decision—as Andrew Card conceded, the political rollout began on Labor Day weekend 2002—was at most six months; and if, in fact, President Bush actually decided privately—and yes, in a very non-transparent way—to invade Iraq in late December 2002 or early January 2003, that process was really only about four months. (Oh, and if Bush really decided well before Labor Day 2002, that means the decision was made *before* the process started.) And do we really need to revisit how much of the information during that national “debate” was manipulated, hidden and misrepresented? If public policy professors are looking for a model of governmental non-transparency, it’s hard to top the Iraq war “debate.”

Steve DeOssie makes some great points, and I wish conservatives in Washington like Charles Krauthammer—who all-too-conveniently would have us believe that Scott Brown’s victory more or less vindicates, well, every idea or belief Charles Krauthammer has ever espoused—would listen a bit more closely at the very moment they are telling the Administration it has a listening problem. And while I appreciate their newfound insistence on government transparency generally and ending political logrolling specifically—a practice, by the way, that hardly began with Mary Landrieu and essentially dates back to the negotiations 223 years ago over the language of Constitution itself—the recent good-government conversions by some conservatives are a bit suspicious and, in some cases, appallingly disingenuous.

Meanwhile, Obama is now participating in a bi-partisan commission and publicly debated House Republicans live on television in their backyard--and without any notes written on his palm. These actions are unlike anything that was done by the Bush Administration, which had to be shamed by 9/11 victims into agreeing to even have a commission to investigate the pre-attack intelligence failures of our government, nor did Bush visit a caucus of House Democrats to defend the claims of Al Qaeda-Iraq connections or how exactly that yellowcake or mobile weapons labs on the back of 18-wheelers managed to get into Saddam's hands. So we will have greater transparency, and that’s a good thing as an end in itself. But does anyone want to bet that a highly-transparent policy process, and certainly one that departs dramatically from the politics of the past decade, will be sufficient to end conservative complaints?

I hope the president and his advisers take careful note of what Steve said above. And I'm also hoping that Scott Brown—who really does seem like an eminently thoughtful and reasonable person—will call out his fellow Republican partisans if and when, by some crazy chance, they ever happen to engage in anything less than good faith bargaining and virtuously transparent politics in Washington. If he does, I'll advocate for his re-election in 2012 to a full term. Of course, if Brown fails to call out non-transparent behavior and other procedural shenanigans, he'll be guilty of becoming corrupted by the very same Washington forces he and Obama both criticized in order to get elected.

Sarah Palin Needs Help

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:19:00 +0000

There's something which, if you've ever been in the business of trying to sell consulting services, you've probably grown accustomed to. It's what I call the "consulting paradox". Namely, it's the idea that the people who are most in need of help are often the least aware of it. Indeed, the range of potential clients who (i) aren't smart enough to solve all their own problems and (ii) are smart enough to know it ... is generally very narrow.

Sarah Palin needs help. So does almost every politician -- but Palin needs it more than most. She is young. She is inexperienced. She's not especially well connected. She's strong-willed and a little impulsive. And call me a hater, but the woman just ain't that bright.

Is it a big deal that Palin wrote some notes on her hand? No, not really. Lots of politicians carry notes with them (if not, as in Palin's case, literally on them). If this were Mitt Romney, it wouldn't have been a particularly big story. Nevertheless, politics is inherently contextual, and this was something that was bound to play into every negative caricature of Mrs. Palin. Somebody needed to take Palin aside and tell her: Honey, this is going to make you look ridiculous. Can't you write on a notecard instead?

Somebody needed to tell Palin that, you know what, it's OK to criticize Rush Limbaugh once in a while. Voters like moments that make candidates look big, mature, above the fray -- Palin took what could have been such a moment and instead backtracked and made herself look petty and hypocritical.

Somebody needed to tell Palin that, if she were hellbent on quitting as Alaska's governor, she at least needed to take the time to develop a competent exit strategy and a coherent farewell speech.

Somebody needed to tell Palin that it wasn't going to do any good to get into a he-said, she-said with an attention-starved 19-year-old who was getting ready to pose nude for Playgirl.

Somebody needed to sit down with Palin and consider whether, for a candidate who gets significant leverage out of the sense that she's been persecuted by the mainstream media, becoming a correspondent for one of the mainstream media networks was going to be helpful to her in the long run.

Somebody needed to make sure that Sarah Palin was ready for the Katie Couric interview, or needed to find some excuse to cancel it.

Somebody needed to tell Palin that using the term "death panels" was probably not going to help her personally at a time when she was trying to demonstrate to her critics that she could be credible about policy.

With the exception of the decision to quit as governor and perhaps the Couric interview, all of these were minor mistakes, at most. But they point toward a candidate who needs to surround herself with good people and has conspicuously refused to do so, instead relying on advice from her husband and her bush-league media spokeswoman, Meg Stapelton.

I've made the comparison before between Sarah Palin and George W. Bush. Neither of them are geniuses -- nor do they need to be. But Bush was at least smart enough to surround himself with a team of exceptionally competent strategists, advisers and consultants. He was smart enough to recognize that it takes a village to get oneself elected President, and ideally one a bit less isolated and insular than Wasilla. Palin hasn't figured that out yet; her ability to become the Republican nominee and have a fighting chance in the general election will depend on her ability to do so.

Go For It! Saints Understand Value of Aggressive Play-Calling

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:24:00 +0000

UPDATE: Congratulations to the Saints and the city of New Orleans! Although it was mostly about the talent on the field, this game could do a lot of good for smarter NFL strategery. Expect a lot more onside kicks next season!

---
Let's take a quick look at the Saints' decision to go for the touchdown on fourth down and about a yard-and-a-half with 1:55 to go in the first half. Although Pierre Thomas got stuffed, it was probably the best play by a wide margin.

How come? Because even if you miss, the Colts are pinned inside their own 2 yard line. This makes a lot of difference: having the ball on your own 1 or 2 is worth about -1.5 points, according to David Romer's seminal paper (that is to say, the value of possession is outweighed in this instance by your incredibly poor field position). Conversely, having the ball on the 20 or thereabouts after a made field goal and a kick-off is worth +0.5 points -- your opponent has a positive scoring expectation. (There's also the case of a missed field goal, in which the Colts would have the ball at about their own 9; that's worth -0.5 points.)

Overall, considering both the Saints would score on the play and what they'd do to the Colts' field position, their decision matrix looks something like this:

We say a touchdown is worth 6.5 points, for example, which is the value of the 7 points you score less the 0.5 points in expectation you lose by giving the ball back to your opponent on their 20. The other cells in the matrix are calculated in the same fashion.

Assume that you have a 98 percent chance to make the field goal from the 1-and-a-half. Using the matrix above, that means your expectation from kicking is a net of +2.46 points.

What if you go for it instead? How often would you have to score the touchdown in order to make going for it the right play? Only about 20 percent of the time -- the main reason being, again, that failing to score but sticking your opponent on their own 1 yard line is almost as good as converting the FG but giving the ball to the opponent on the 20.

Certainly, a consideration of the scoring margin (the Saints trailed by 4), the short clock, and the opponent (the Colts can move the ball in a hurry) also deserve consideration here. But those considerations cut both ways and would probably not outweigh the ample mathematical justification for going for the touchdown. Sean Payton made the right call.

UPDATE: How about that onside kick to start the second half?

Once again using the estimates from Romer's paper, giving yourself possession on your own 45 (if you recover the kick) is worth +2.0 points; giving your opponent possession on your 45 is worth about -2.3 points. Compare this with giving the opponent their ball on their 20 after a regular kickoff, which is worth -0.5 points ... although often they'll return the kick and wind up with slightly better field position than that, so let's call it -0.7.

Given those estimates, the onside kick breaks even if you convert it about 37 percent of the time. And according to Football Outsiders, "surprise" onside kicks are in fact recovered in the neighborhood of 55 percent of the time or so. So this, too, looks like a good call -- and probably something that teams should be doing a little bit more often than they do.

Super Bowl Thread: Take the Points

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:55:00 +0000

Depending on where you're betting, you can get the New Orleans Saints as anywhere from 4 to 6 points underdogs, although the average seems to have settled upon 4.5.

This makes for a fairly significant cushion. Between 1999 and 2008, 28 percent of NFL games were decided by 4 points or fewer, and 31 percent were decided by 5 or fewer (see below). So with the Saints side of this bet, you're basically getting them every time that they win as well as about 30 percent of the time that they lose:

Sure, caveats apply: 4.5 points isn't as many in a game between two high-scoring teams as it would be between defensively-oriented ones (and Super Bowls in particular tend to be high scoring.) Still, with anything greater than a 3 point spread, Vegas is rendering a pretty concrete judgement as to which it thinks is the better team: in this case, the Indianapolis Colts. But is this justified on the basis of the evidence?

From my point of view, I don't really see it. The Colts may be the better team and are probably the favorites today, but I don't see them as being definitively and demonstrably better. Throwing out the weeks when the teams weren't trying but counting the playoffs, the Saints have scored an average of 34 points per game and allowed 21; the Colts have scored an average of 28 and allowed 17 -- no clear edge there. The Colts played a somewhat better schedule, but systems which account for that -- see the 'PREDICTOR' version of the Sagarin ratings, for instance -- consider the teams to be about equal.

So do more sophisticated systems. Football Outsiders, who know their stuff as well as anyone, consider the game to be a toss-up. Accuscore thinks that the Colts will win about 55 percent of the time but that they should be just 2 or 3 point favorites, not 4.5 or 5. Meanwhile, computer models developed by the Wall Street Journal and Indiana University give the Saints a (very, very slight) edge.

A lot of the Vegas sentiment, undoubtedly, is because the Colts turned in a considerably more impressive performance against the New York Jets during Championship Week than the Saints did against the Vikings -- a game they were lucky to win. In general, however, it's a trusism that people overemphasize the most recent events when making predictions -- the Championship Game won't necessarily have a lot more predictive value than, say, Week 12. And the Colts' performance also came against the New York Jets, one of the weaker teams to have made the AFC Championship in some time. Had the Saints played the Jets, their performance might have been just as impressive. In fact, they beat the Jets 24-10 -- about the same margin as Indy's 30-17 win -- at home in Week 4.

The Saints and Colts actually have had five opponents in common this season, not counting the Colts' Week 16 and 17 games against the Jets and the Bills, respectively, when they weren't playing their regulars. The Saints won by the larger margin against 4 of the 5 teams -- and the tally would be 5 of 6 if we counted the Buffalo game -- although Indy makes up a lot of ground because they clobbered the lowly St. Louis Rams whereas the Saints had one of the worst games of their year against them:

And yes: I do watch a lot of football. At no point during the season did I think: Wow, Indy is clearly the best team in football (the closest I came to that feeling for any team this year was for the Saints, after they crushed the Patriots 38-17 in Week 12). I thought the Colts were a very, very good team, but were probably a bit fortunate to have gone 14-0.

Again, you can certainly argue that Indianapolis is the better team. Peyton Manning is an incredibly impressive football player, their defense is pretty clearly better, and they've been a bit more consistent from week to week. Were this a pick 'em, I'd probably go with the Colts. But if you're getting the Saints and 4.5 or even 5.5 points, you should take them.

My official prediction, just for fun: Colts 31, Saints 27.

What if Senators Represented People By Income or Race, Not By State?

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Gelman) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:04:00 +0000

Annie Lowrey speculates:

Based on Census Bureau data, five senators would represent Americans earning between $100,000 and $1 million individually per year, with [2/10 of a senator] working on behalf of the millionaires. Eight senators would represent Americans with no income. Sixteen would represent Americans who make less than $10,000 a year, an amount well below the federal poverty line for families. The bulk of the senators would work on behalf of the middle class, with 34 representing Americans making $30,000 to $80,000 per year. . . . Or how about if senators represented particular demographic groups, based on gender and race? White women would elect the biggest group of senators -- 37 of them, though only 38 women have ever served in the Senate.

I don't know how well all of this would work in practice--for one thing, I wouldn't want the senator who represents two-year-olds to be anywhere near the nuclear button--but I agree that ideas of fairness and political representation are subtle.

Along similar lines, here is my response to economists who complained that there were not enough economists in elective office:

I was curious about this so I looked up some statistics--not on Congress but on the workforce. According to the 2001 Statistical Abstract of the United States, there were 139,000 economists employed in the United States, which represented 0.1% of the employed population. 1% of 535 is about 1/2, so with at least two economists in Congress, the profession is hardly unrepresented.

139,000 is a crude estimate because it presumably represents the people whose job title is "economist" (and thus wouldn't include, for example, Matt Kahn, who originally raised the "not enough economists in Congress" issue and whose job title is "professor"). But, even throwing in all these economics professors and various other practicing economists, I still don't think it would add up to the half-million that would be necessary to reach 2/535 of the employed population.

This is not to debate the merits of the argument--perhaps Congress would indeed be better if it included more economists--but rather to note that people with this sort of job are a small minority in the U.S. (In contrast, there were 720,000 physicians, 170,000 dentists, and 2.1 million nurses, and 1.7 million health technicians in the U.S.)

To put it another way, without reference to economists (or to the 2.1 million "mathematical and computer scientists" out there): the Statistical Abstract has 260,000 psychologists. Certainly Congress would be better off with a few psychologists, who might understand how citizens might be expected to react to various policies.

I'm willing to believe that the country's 890,000 lawyers are being overrepresented, but what about the 114,000 biologists? A few of these in Congress might advance the understanding of public health. And then there are the 290,000 civil engineers--I'd like to have a few of them around also. I'd also like some of the 280,000 child care workers and 620,000 pre-K and kindergarten teachers to give their insight on deliberations on family policy. And the 1.1 million police officers and 340,000 prison guards will have their own perspectives on justice issues.

So I think that representation is a tricky issue. Most of us would probably like more "people like us" in Congress, but that's tough with only 535 seats to go around, and given that there are a lot of politicians already out there (many of whom are lawyers) who you'd be competing with.

Does it make a difference? Maybe so. In his article, "Does the Numerical Over-Representation of the Upper Class in U.S. Legislatures Matter?", Nicholas Carnes finds:

Throughout America's history, most political decisionmakers have been highly-educated, wealthy individuals from prestigious, high-paying occupations. . . . On balance, this study's findings suggest that the numerical over-representation of affluent Americans in elected offices promotes more conservative economic policy outcomes, although not for the straightforward reasons that political observers have often suggested.

P.S. One suggestion that's come up from time to time is to form the Senate from a national random sample of adults. This would give you all the representativeness you'd want.

P.P.S. Apparently the House has four (former) blue-collar workers: Phil Hare of Illinois, Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, Mike Michaud of Maine, and Bob Brady of Pennsylvania. I don't know how many former nurses, police officers, or child care workers they have.

Instant Run-Off Proposed by Brown

noreply@blogger.com (Renard Sexton) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 16:00:00 +0000

In a move that is as blatantly political as it is overdue, Gordon Brown this week announced his support for a referendum on the so-called "Alternative Vote" proposal that has made its way around for the last few years.

Known to the rest of the world as the "Instant Run-Off," the proposed new system is far from the proportional representation system that dominates continental Europe. However, it is would have an important impact on the numbers game in UK politics, particularly in close elections like this one.

We will start with the figures about what would mean in an electoral context, understanding that, of course, it would not be in place for this election given the need for a referendum beforehand.

The main added-value of the AV (we'll use the British acronym for now) is that it allows voters to rank their choices, rather than just voting for one prospective MP. In effect, you can still cast that initial protest vote or two without losing the chance to cast your final lot with the lesser of the two remaining evils if your top choice candidate does not make it. In an American context, it would be like if in 2000 all the Ralph Nader voters in Florida could have had their votes switched to their second choice candidate in the case when no candidate reached a majority initially.

If enacted, this would likely have an important impact on quite a number of House of Commons constituencies.
In the last general election in the UK (2005), only 220 seats were won with a majority of the voter -- just barely above one-third of the House of Commons' 646 constituencies. Among the major parties, Labour fared the best, with almost 37 percent of their seats won by majority, while the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats had far fewer, along with the regional parties.

In some cases, mainly in places with strong regional parties, small parties can capitalize on the split vote to prevail. For example, in the "Bethnal Green and Bow" constituency of east London, the left-wing Respect party was able to beat out a safe Labour MP with just 35.9 percent of the vote to Labour's 34.0 percent.

However, in most cases it is the large parties (Tories and Labour) who profit from the current system, where the first past the post system casts a bit of a chilling effect on voters who would otherwise vote for third parties. For example, in the Ynys Mon constituency of Wales, the Labour MP prevailed with just 34.6 percent of the vote, followed by the regional Plaid Cymru party candidates 31.1 percent, an independent right-wing candidate with 14.7 percent, the Conservative Party's 11 percent and the Liberal Democrats 7 percent.

So what is the political imperative for Brown to push this proposition forward at this time? Quite simply, it is to appeal to the Liberal Democrats, with whom lie Labour's likely remaining chance at staying in government. In the case of a hung parliament, as we discussed a couple weeks back, the Lib Dems will hold an important swing position.

According to pollster Angus Reid, about 40 percent of Britons would vote in favor of the AV scenario if given the chance, as compared to 31 percent for the present system. At the same time, 6 percent said they would not vote at all and 23 answered "Don't know." However, a majority (52 percent) said that they would welcome a referendum on this issue, while just 20 percent said they would not (28 percent not sure). There was a slight regional variation on the vote, with Scottish, Welsh and English Midlands voters more in favor of the AV than the rest of voters (London, England South and England North).

This indicates good politics for Brown, though the media and most political elites see apparent pandering at play. And for the Lib Dems, who are the clear targets of the policy, this could mean important gains if enacted.

In 2005, there were 32 seats where the Liberal Democrat candidate was within 20 percentage points of the winner, who was either a Tory or from Labour, where the winner got 40 percent or less of the vote.

In each of these cases, the Lib Dems could win by taking half the votes from the losing major party candidate and be victorious (as long as there was no other competitive third party, like a regional party). For example, in Hampstead and Highgate (in north London), the Lib Dem candidate has performed successively better over the last three elections. An AV swing from either or both of the big parties toward the Lib Dem could result in a pickup.

Is it enough to get Nick Clegg and his team on board with Labour in the case of a hung parliament? Certainly not. But the joint draws of a slightly improved electoral landscape and the trapping of governing office may be hard to pass up. Is not the purpose of politicking to finally get to the levers of power?

Next up in our UK general election coverage: We will tackle the troublesome problem of translating national horserace numbers into actual MP totals, something that every observer of the election is trying to negotiate.
---
Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international affairs columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

President Rallies Fellow Democrats

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Schaller) — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 21:47:00 +0000

How snowed in is Washington right now? So much that the Democratic National Committee had to ship in local College Democrats to fill the seats vacated by DNC members who could not make it to town for the party's winter meetings. Despite the quiet streets outside and a mostly empty hotel, those who trudged over to the Capital Hilton--I live six blocks away, so it was a short trek--got a glimpse of President Obama in fired-up mode.

Speaking for about 20 minutes, Obama received strong applause for victory-lapping several accomplishments of the previous year: fighting for "equal pay for equal work" (Lily Ledbetter Act), expanding healthcare insurance to cover "four million more children"; the appointment of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor; and pushing to allow gays to serve in the military. (Full remarks not yet posted to White House website, but I'll try to update later once they are; the president did hit similar themes earlier during the Winter meetings at this fundraising dinner and fundraising reception.)

His biggest applause line, however, was not for an accomplishment but the promise to to continue fighting for his endangered healthcare reform plan. "Just in case there's any confusion out there, let me be clear: I'm not going to walk away from healthcare reform."

Obama continued to hit themes he's been stressing since the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts and during his recent State of the Union speech: his administration inherited a lot of pre-existing problems; change will be tough to come by, especially with special interests blocking reform; doing the right thing isn't always popular. "So if you look at a tally of the things we said we would do –- even in the midst of this extraordinarily challenging economy –- we’ve kept our promises," he said. "We’ve kept our commitments.".

He tried to calm the implicit worries many Democrats in the room no doubt harbor about the political situation facing the party:

I was talking to Michelle the other day–-Michelle is always a good barometer–-and, you know, the front page was, oh, what’s Obama going to do to get his poll numbers up, and, are the Democrats all in a tizzy and this and that. And she said, you know, listen, if you're the average family, if I'm a mom out there and I'm working and my husband is working but we’re worried about losing our jobs, our hours have been cut back, the cost of our health care premium just went up 30 percent, the credit card company just jacked up our interest rates 39 percent, and our home value has gone down by $100,000, our 401(k) is all banged up –- and suddenly somebody calls up and says, "So, how do you think President Obama is doing right now?" What are they going to say? What are they going to say?

He talked about how rough things are for many Americans and what needs to be done to reverse the political and economic situation, saying this:

"But here's what everybody here has to remember: That's why I ran for President. That's why you worked so hard to elect a Democratic Congress. We knew this stuff was tough. But we stepped up because we decided we were going to take the responsibility of changing it. And it may not be easy, but change is coming."

In explaining the slow pace of change and promising it's eventual arrival, Obama took some thinly-veiled shots across the partisan divide, too.

"Some of the steps we took were done without the help of the other party, which made a political decision all too often to jump in the backseat, let us do the driving and then critique whether we were taking the right turns," Obama said. "He also said people in Washington needed to worry "less about scoring political points and more about solving problems," and acknowledged that "sometimes we may be working against the prevailing winds--even a blizzard."

But the main theme was, to borrow a phrase from his predecessor, "stay the course." "I know we went through a tough year," said Obama. "But we've gone through tougher years," and proceeded to invoke Jefferson, FDR, John and Teddy Kennedy in a finishing flourish that brought DNC members to their feet.

It's clear that the White House's has changed its tone and posture in the weeks since Brown's victory. The president is more aggressive about pointing to administration successes. There's a bit more finger-pointing and blaming of Republican obstructionism. There have been greater calls for bipartisanship and more promises to listen, but also a more aggressive interface with the minority opposition, such as Obama's visit to the House GOP last week. (With an whiff of triumph, the president also mentioned that visit during his DNC speech.) And, finally, there is a "fired up, ready to press forward" tenor to allay the fears of nervous fellow Democrats.

A Look At Employment

noreply@blogger.com (bonddad) — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 14:15:00 +0000

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the current employment situation report on Friday. As such, it seems appropriate to take an in-depth look at the overall employment situation in the U.S. Most of the information contained herein on the methods of collecting employment statistics is found here.

First, there are two employment surveys -- the household and the establishment survey:

Data based on household interviews are obtained from the Current Population Survey (CPS), a sample survey of the population 16 years of age and over. The survey is conducted each month by the Bureau of the Census for the Bureau of Labor Statistics and provides comprehensive data on the labor force, the employed, and the unemployed, classified by such characteristics as age, sex, race, family relationship, marital status, occupation, and industry attachment. The survey also provides data on the characteristics and past work experience of those not in the labor force. The information is collected by trained interviewers from a sample of about 50,000 households located in 792 sample areas. These areas are chosen to represent all counties and independent cities in the U.S., with coverage in 50 States and the District of Columbia. The data collected are based on the activity or status reported for the calendar week including the 12th of the month.

Data based on establishment records are complied each month from mail questionnaires and telephone interviews by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in cooperation with State agencies. The Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey is designed to provide industry information on nonfarm wage and salary employment, average weekly hours, average hourly earnings, and average weekly earnings for the Nation, States, and metropolitan areas. The employment, hours, and earnings data are based on payroll reports from a sample of over 390,000 establishments employing over 47 million nonfarm wage and salary workers, full or part time, who receive pay during the payroll period which includes the 12th of the month. The household and establishment data complement one another, each providing significant types of information that the other cannot suitably supply. Population characteristics, for example, are obtained only from the household survey, whereas detailed industrial classifications are much more reliably derived from establishment reports

The household survey provides information on the unemployment number, which decreased from 10% to 9.7%. This was a very good number because of the following computation issues. The civilian labor force increased from 153,059,000 to 153,170,000 (or an increase of 111,000). This number is the denominator of the unemployment percentage calculation. The number of unemployed decreased from 15,267,000 to 14,837,000 (a decrease of 430,000). This means the unemployment rate actually decreased because the number of people unemployed actually decreased; in other words, the drop in the unemployment rate was not caused by computational issues. This is obviously a very good development.

Additionally, consider this chart of the unemployment rate from the report:

Since mid-Spring the unemployment rate has fluctuated between ~9.5% and 10.1%. While the overall level is not good, it does indicate the overall unemployment rate may be topping out.

The household survey also provides information about the amount of time people have been unemployed. Consider the following charts as a time series. First, people are laid-off. Then they are unemployed for a certain amount of time.

Let's start with the 4-week moving average of initial unemployment claims (this number is not from the household survey). This number has been dropping for most of the year. However, it rose to a very high level and is currently above levels associated with an expanding economy. In other words, the number of people entering the ranks of the unemployed is decreasing, but it is still at high levels.

The number of people unemployed for 5 weeks or less is decreasing, and has been for about half the last year. Also note this number is starting to approach the levels associated with an expanding economy (the levels seen between 2002-2008).

Once someone is unemployed for 5 weeks or longer, the odds are they will remain unemployed for a longer period of time. While this chart of the number of people unemployed for 5-14 weeks appears to be topping out it is still at high levels. Also note this number is far above levels associated with an expanding economy (by about 1 million to 1.2 million), indicating it will take some time to bring it back to healthy/normal levels.

While the number of people unemployed between 15 - 26 weeks appears to be topping out, it is also at high levels that will take some time (as in years) to bring back to normal levels.

And regrettably, the number of people unemployed for over 27 weeks is still increasing.

There are a few other data points from the household survey to highlight. First, consider the following unemployment rates by educational level achieved. The first number is for January 2009 and the second is for January 2010:

Less than high school diploma: 12.4%/15.2%
High School Graduates, no college: 8.1%/10.1%
Some college or associate degree: 6.4%/8.5%
Bachelor's degree or higher: 3.9%/4.9%

These unemployment figures paint a very interesting picture that has profound policy implications. Either the economy needs to start creating jobs for those with less than a college education (a highly unlikely development as will be explained below) or the workforce needs to increase the number of people with higher education.

Here are the same percentages (the unemployment rate for January 2009 and January 2010) of various age groups.

16 to 19: 20.9%/36.4%
20 to 24: 12.4%/15.8%
25 to 34: 8.1%/9.9%
35 to 44: 6.6%/8.5%
45 to 54: 5.9%/7.6%
55+: 5.3%/6.8%

Should the increase in the the unemployment rate for teenagers be a concern? I would argue no, largely because the primary "job" of a teenager is to be a student. The same argument could be made of the 20-24 crowd as they should also be in some type of educational situation. The increase to 9.9% in the 25 to 34 age group is disturbing, as is the increase to 8.5% in the 35 to 44 age group.

Finally, the number of people who were employed "part time for economic reasons" decreased from 9,165,000 to 8,316,000. This is another healthy development.

Let's turn our attention to the establishment survey.

Let's start with the total number of establishment jobs in the US (seasonally adjusted). The above graph illustrates two important and disturbing points. First, the US now has fewer jobs than the lowest point of the previous expansion. All the jobs gained during the last expansion have been wiped out. Secondly, the current total number of seasonally adjusted establishment jobs in the US is lower than the beginning of the decade.

Simply "eyeballing" the chart, we can see the US has lost over 8.2 million jobs in this recession (roughly 138,000,o00 to a little below 130,000,000).

Eyeballing this chart we have see the number of construction employees has dropped by about 2 million (approximately 7.6 to 5.6 million).

The manufacturing picture is very interesting. Notice that a large number of manufacturing jobs lost in the first recession of the decade were never replaced. Next, note manufacturers started to shed jobs in early/mid 2006. From this level manufacturing has lost about 4 million jobs (approximately 22 to 18 million).

Totaling construction and manufacturing jobs we get ~6 million. In other words, about 73% of the jobs lost during this recession came from two economic sectors -- construction and manufacturing.

Let's focus on manufacturing for just a moment. Manufacturing job losses account for a little under 50% of the total job losses (approximately 4 million of the 8.2 million jobs lost). Also note that after the first recession of the decade manufacturing jobs did not meaningfully increase. This is largely because of automation and technology replacing people. The same is true today -- perhaps more so. Assuming increased automation continues, the possibility of a large percentage of manufacturing jobs lost during the recession coming back is slim at best.

Combine the construction and manufacturing jobs lost data with the unemployment rate by educational achievement data from the household survey and you get a very interesting picture.

The great recession wiped out lower education/manual labor jobs. And the experience of the manufacturing sector after the last expansion indicates those jobs aren't coming back.

A Few Questions about #QuestionTime

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 02:32:00 +0000

As you may be aware, I've teamed up with a group of about 50 other thinkers, bloggers, insiders and outsiders to help promote the idea of Question Time -- a regularly held, televised and webcasted forum in which the President would take questions from Members of the Congress, much as President Obama did with the Republican House delegation on January 29th and members of the Democratic Senate yesterday. This is truly a bipartisan endeavor, with everyone from Markos Moulitsas to Grover Norquist on board.You can sign our petition to Demand Question Time here, and follow us on twitter here.

Just a brief word about why I've signed onto this cause: perhaps I'm an idealist, but I tend to think that the lack of open, unmediated, and honest dialog between members of Congress, between the Congress and the Executive, and between both Congress and the Executive and the public, is the greatest threat to the efficacy of our democracy today. While structural constraints like the filibuster certainly also play a large role, these structures are nothing new -- it's the ways that our political culture have evolved around them that may be more problematic. In particular, it seems to me that there is a need for conversations that are not staged, that are not reduced to 30-second soundbytes, and that are not filtered through the lens of the media. A Question Time period, if reasonably well structured, could be a significant step toward achieving that goal. Politics needn't always be zero-sum, particularly at the time when our country faces a number of threats -- from the economy, to Islamic and other forms of radicalism, to the aggregation of power by elites, to the the changing climate -- in which we will all sink or swim together. That's why you're seeing Democrats and Republicans, technocrats and populists all working together to agitate for Question Time.

Earlier today, I was forwarded a comprehensive report on Question Time periods written by Matthew Glassman, an analyst for the Congressional Research Service, which contextualizes them relative to both the experience in parliamentary systems, of which they are a common facet, and relative to the American experience. Calls for question time periods are not new and have been proposed periodically by members of both the Executive and Legislative branches, including William Howard Taft, Walter Mondale, Estes Kefauver, and candidate John McCain among others. But, obviously, they have yet to become a regular feature of American democracy. Our hope, then, is more to make the issue a little "stickier" in the eyes of both the public and our elected officials and less to advance some specific proposal.

Nevertheless, the details of the idea may matter -- from my vantage point, for example, President Obama's session with the House Republicans, which seemed more spontaneous, was considerably more constructive than his session with the Senate Democrats, which felt more staged. Therefore, I am going to address a handful of questions that Glassman raises in his report, as well as a couple of others that are salient to the conversation. The opinions expressed herein are mine alone and do not reflect an official position of the Demand Question Time coalition.

How Often Would Question Time Occur? In parliamentary systems, question time periods may occur weekly (the United Kingdom) or even daily (Canada), but the American appetite for consuming political news is perhaps somewhat more limited. In addition, we have a relatively strong Executive Branch which has many other duties and responsibilities, including international diplomacy which requires frequent travel. The right balance, it seems to me, is monthly sessions, probably lasting between 60-90 minutes. The Congress and the President would probably need some discretion on when to schedule these sessions within each month, but a prime time slot on a Sunday through Thursday night, when TV audiences are the largest, would probably be most desirable.

Which Executive Branch Officials would participate in Question Time? In most parliamentary systems, not only the Chief Executive but also members of his cabinet officials take regular questions from the legislature, either simultaneously or in separate sessions. The latter function, however, is arguably replicated to some extent by the Congressional Committee system, and would surely draw less public attention. My interest, then, is primarily on the President himself.

How Would Questions be Chosen? This is the one issue on which I feel most strongly: I think it is essential that the questions be chosen in some random order. Absent this, there is too much opportunity for questions which are less spontaneous and more staged, and for "back bench" members of the Congress -- whom are equal to any others in the eyes of the Constitution -- to play a subservient role to those who are more senior, more vocal, or (as unfortunately was the case in the session with the Senate Democrats) who might derive more electoral benefit from posing questions.

In particular, I would probably design a procedure something along the lines of the following. In advance of each session of Question Time, members of the Congress who were interested in posing a question would indicate as such to the Speaker of the House. They would not have to disclose their question in advance. A list of those members of the Congress who were interested in asking a question would be posted immediately in advance of the session on the Internet.

After that, the interested members would simply be selected in a random order to pose their questions, as is done in the United Kingdom, the lone constraint being that no party could ask more than three questions in a row (provided that there remained at least one question in the queue from the other party). Members of the Congress could not jump into our out of the queue once the session had begun.

Would a Question Period be Bicameral? It seems preferable to me to have Question Time be both bipartisan and bicameral. The larger the number of members of Congress who have the opportunity to pose questions at any given time, the less opportunity there would be for coordination, such as by leadership, that would serve to make the questions more self-serving and less spontaneous.

How Would a Question Time Period by Initiated? There are basically three options: formally via either Constitutional Amendment or via statute, or informally through custom. Of these, an informal structure clearly seems the best to me, at least initially. A Constitutional Amendment would require several years to implement, in the unlikely event that it could be implemented at all. A statue in the absence of an Amendment, meanwhile, might run into Constitutional problems, since it's not clear that the Congress can compel members of the Executive Branch to appear before them without violating separation of powers. Therefore, the hope would simply be that Question Time would become a regular and highly popular feature that would take on something of its own momentum. Indeed, I am optimistic that once the practice got started, it would be hard to undo, as the Executive would lose significant face if he refused to answer the Congress's questions.

What Rules Would Govern Floor Procedure? It's likely that at least some governing rules would need to be adopted by the House and the Senate, particularly if question time took the form of a formal session of Congress. Glassman's report suggests that it would probably be easier to adopt a new set of rules than to adapt ordinary Congressional procedure. I don't yet have an opinion about how strictly things like the time alloted to each question and answer would need to be constrained, as it is likely that the balance between informal etiquette and formal procedures would evolve somewhat organically over time. It seems desirable, however, that any procedures would tend to give less power than more to the floor leadership, and more power rather than less to the individual members who are elected directly by the public.

*-*

Time for me to get a late dinner, but please let me know what you think with your tweets and your comments, and don't forget to sign that petition.

Coats and Coons

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Schaller) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:30:00 +0000

New candidate or potential candidate developments in the Senate races in Delaware and Indiana: In Delaware, New Castle County Executive Chris Coons is in the race to challenge Mike Castle for VPOTUS Joe Biden's old seat, and in Indiana former U.S. senator Dan Coats is hinting strongly at making at run at incumbent Democrat Evan Bayh.

Delaware is the "First State," so we may as well start there. Coons is officially in, and as reported by The New Journal, issued a statement saying: "People here in Delaware are hurting, and Congress has failed to deliver the change we voted for in 2008. I’m running to bring new energy and a new approach to Washington." That's an interesting, almost cryptic statement from the two-term and term-limited county exec, given that he wants to be the state's new Democratic senator and the Democrats presently control Congress by wide margins. I suppose that Coons' statement might be interpreted to imply obstructionism by Senate Republicans, but it sound eerily like the message that Scott Brown rode to victory in Massachusetts. Given that, like Brown was at one point, Coons is about 30 points behind Castle, the state's popular at-large Congressman, perhaps Coons' bid to run for Congress by running against Congress ain't such a bad idea, however odd it may seem.

Turning to Indiana, the state that witnessed the most dramatic partisan turnaround between the 2004 and 2008 presidential cycles, the Coats' announcement signals that (a) the GOP smells blood in the water in the Hoosier State; and (b) there must be a sufficient amount of blood if the somewhat anemic Coats is going to jump in. I mean, this is a guy who rose to power on the political back of Dan Quayle. Coats may have some 'splaining to do, however, reports Politico's Ben Smith: The former senator is registered to vote in Virginia, not Indiana. Gonna be tough to run against Washington as an "outsider" when you live in the DC suburbs and have been voting there for about a decade.

Oh, and I cannot help but send a reminder to politically vulnerable Evan Bayh, who has been a partisan gadfly for the president and Harry Reid: Taking a posture against one's party in order to assert one's independence and moderation doesn't necessarily insulate you from attack by the other party. If Coats runs, watch how quickly he paints you as a lockstep liberal lackey for the Obama agenda, Senator.

McGOP: The Virtues and Vices of Sameness

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:30:00 +0000

I'm not going to comment too much on the topline findings of the Daily Kos / Research 2000 poll, of Republican identifiers, which many others have written about extensively. What I found more striking, actually, were the cross-tabs. On just about every question, the results showed essentially no difference based on age, gender, race, or geography -- once we've established that you're a Republican, these differences seem to be rendered moot.

Take, for instance, the statement that "Barack Obama is a socialist", which 63 percent of Republicans agreed with in the poll. How do the responses to this question break down by demographics? Well, they don't -- the percentage is just about the same for all groups.

How about the idea that Obama should be impeached? The same pattern holds:

About 36 percent of Republicans in the poll said they didn't think Obama was born in the United States (another 22 percent weren't sure.) We see a few regional differences on this item -- higher in the South and lower in other regions -- but otherwise the percentages are fairly constant.

Is Obama a racist? The roughly 11 percent of Republicans who are nonwhite were much less inclined to think so, but otherwise there are no real differences.

Moving on from Obama to some policy questions -- should openly gay people be allowed to serve in the military? Only some very slight age and regional differences on this one:

Sex-ed in public schools? Flat across the board.

Amnesty for illegal immigrants? Nonwhite Republicans are about twice as likely to think so, but otherwise there are no real differences.

Let's try an electoral question -- who has Sarah Palin as their first choice in 2012? Although once again nonwhites are out of step, none of the other differences are statistically significant.

This doesn't, by the way, mean that all Republicans are the same -- clearly there is some diversity of opinion within the party (although they're relatively small). What it does mean is that these ideological differences are just about all there are. If you take two Republican Congressional candidates and put them in the same primary, the outcome is liable to be the same whether that primary takes place in Alabama, Michigan, Idaho or Rhode Island, and whether the electorate is older or younger, more male or more female.

This accounts for what might be the Republicans' greatest strength as we head into the November midterms as well as their greatest liability. The strength is that they can somewhat comfortably adopt a nationalized, one-size-fits-all message. They don't have to worry about the constellation of constituencies that Democrats have: labor voters, Baby-boomer liberals, blacks, Hispanics, college-educated technocrats, libertarianish younger voters, etc. Their base is the same pretty much everywhere, and actuating a strategy that appeals to that base is not challenging.

The liability, meanwhile, is that while the Republican base might be the same pretty much everywhere, the rest of the electorate isn't. Some states and districts have different ratios of Republicans to Democratic and independent voters. Moreover, they have different types of Democratic and independent voters, some of whom may be amenable to the Republican message and others of whom won't be.

Thus, the Republicans are more likely to make suboptimal electoral decisions in individual districts -- we have a fresh example from last night, in fact, in IL-10, a D+6 district where the Republicans nominated the conservative Bob Dold rather than the moderate Beth Coulson. But the Democrats are likely to have a difficult time articulating an optimal national message -- and perhaps as a result a more difficult time governing.

Recount All But Assured in Illinois Gubernatorial Primary

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 07:36:00 +0000

As of this writing (1:31 AM Illinois time), Bill Brady has just a 546-vote lead on Kirk Dillard in the Illinois Republican gubernatorial primary.

And things are liable to get closer before the end of the night. How so? Because essentially all of the outstanding vote is in Cook County (Chicago), where Dillard is picking up 18 percent of the vote so far and Brady just 5 percent. If I project out the remaining Cook County precincts based on the previous ones, I show Dillard picking up another 800 votes and Brady another 225. That would make the statewide margin Dillard 154,876, and Brady 154,877 -- an advantage of literally one vote for Brady.

EDIT: In the Democratic gubernatorial primary, incumbent Pat Quinn is performing slightly better than his statewide numbers in Cook County and it looks like his ~7,000-vote advantage over Dan Hynes will expand rather than contract. There might be a recount but unless there are mass irregularities or whole stashes of ballots that haven't been counted yet, it is unlikely to change the outcome.

IL Primaries: Giannoulias v. Kirk, Both Gubernatorial Races Too Close to Call

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Schaller) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 05:37:00 +0000

At midnight EST, the big news from Illinois is that the two favorites to win their respective nominations for race to fill the US Senate seat formerly held by President Obama have won, but both primary contests for the IL governor's race are squeakers too close to call.

State treasurer Alexi Giannoulias bested four other contenders to win the Democratic nomination for Senate, with former Chicago inspector general David Hoffman finishing second by about five points, 39 percent to 34 percent, with 96 percent of precincts reported. On the Republican side, Congressman Mark Kirk captured 57 percent of the vote, trouncing his five opponents, none of whom got more than 20 percent.

The gubernatorial primaries are more interesting, as the margins in both races are less than 1 percent as of this writing. State senator Bill Brady has a slim lead of a little more than 1,000 votes over state senate colleague Kirk Dillard in the Republican contest; meanwhile, Democrat Pat Quinn, who succeeded scandal-plagued Rod Blagojevich one year ago this week, is hanging on for dear life against Comptroller Dan Hynes.

Short of winning Ted Kennedy's former seat (check), winning the president's former Senate seat carries significant symbolic value to Republicans. As Nate wrote recently, Giannoulias is expected to be a solid favorite over Kirk--but we've heard that story before. The question now is whether the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Republican donors around the country will risk committing resources to Illinois or target more promising races.

The Health Care Information Gap: More Information Needed

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:15:00 +0000

It's rare that I disagree with Gallup's straight-shooting Frank Newport, but I don't think the data he's citing in this blog post (from a Gallup survey conducted in November) does much at all to contradict the notion that a substantial amount of the opposition to health care reform is based on misinformation:

[Obama and Gibbs reinforce] the same talking point: The public’s lack of robust support for healthcare reform legislation is based on misunderstanding engendered by the debate, the process, and the strong forces arrayed against the bill.

We don’t necessarily see it in the data. When we ask Americans why they oppose healthcare legislation, the two dominant responses are: “cost” and “too much government involvement.” Neither of these objection categories reflect -- at least not directly -- a failure to understand the specifics of what is in the bill. Or personal self-interest. The objections appear to be more global in nature.

Here, again, is the survey that Newport refers to; it asked an open-ended question about what "concerns" people had about the health care bills and then broke those numbers down between those people who supported the bill and those who opposed it. I've reproduced their numbers below the fold.

There are relatively few items in this tally that unambiguously reflect either legitimate reasons for opposing the health care bill or unambiguously reflect false beliefs. The former category would probably include: "Overall costs to government, taxpayers" (7 percent of those opposed to the bill), increased taxes (5 percent), "how it will be paid for" (3 percent), and the individual mandate (3 percent). Perhaps also the public option belongs here (7 percent) -- it was still "alive" at the time Gallup's survey was conducted (although there are a lot of people who don't know exactly what the public option is). If we do count it, these probably legitimate concerns amount to about 25 percent of those opposed to the bill, or 12 percent of the country overall.

On the other hand, there are also relatively few concerns that unambiguously seemto point toward false information. "Coverage for illegal immigrants" (4 percent of those opposed to the bill) is probably one. Items like "ability to get needed care"/rationing/wait times (4 percent), "being able to see current doctors" (3 percent) and "effect on quality of care" (8 percent) most likely also fit into this category, although even here there is some ambiguity.

And in most other cases, there is a lot of ambiguity. The largest single reason for opposition that Gallup identifies -- 28 percent of those opposed to the bill -- is what they call "government-run healthcare / bureaucracy / socialized medicine / government takeover". Perhaps there are a few people in this group who have legitimate worries about the government's ability to effectively regulate insurers or believe that the imposition of additional rules and regulations may carry unintended or undesirable consequences. But phrases like "socalized medicine" and "government takeover" are talking points that more likely than not are symptomatic of incorrect beliefs about what the health care bill would actually do.

A lot of categories are like this. The category "effect on senior citizens/Medicare" (5 percent) for instance -- does this reflect legitimate concerns about the savings that the bill would try to achieve in Medicare, or people worried about death panels and the plug being pulled on granny?

Finally, there are quite a few people who don't know why they're opposed -- 9 percent of those opposed can't cite a reason at all, another 6 percent simply say they don't understand the bill, and a further 9 percent say "costs", but don't specify which type of costs they're concerned with.

This isn't really a criticism of Gallup's survey -- unlike the Kaiser poll that I've cited frequently, they weren't really trying to test people's knowledge about the bill. But also for that reason, it can't really be used to refute Kaiser's data. People, to use Newport's term, may have concerns which are "more global in nature" -- but why do they have those concerns? (If I ask you: "why do you oppose the health care bill" and you say "because it's bad", we haven't really learned anything.)

In a perfect world, indeed, what I'd like to see is a survey that even more explicitly related people's knowledge about the bill to their beliefs and overall impressions about it. You might ask a battery of questions related to:

-- Overall support/opposition to the bill.
-- Knowledge of bill contents.
-- General beliefs about the bill (e.g. effect on coverage, costs, premiums, etc.)
-- Self-rating of informedness (about the bill and about politics in general)
-- Change in support based after being read various descriptions of the bill.
-- Volume and type of news sources consumed.
-- General political ideology.
-- Demographics.

I'm not going to design a whole survey in a blog post, but you get the general picture. You'd need to design the survey fairly carefully, but you could probably get pretty close to an objective answer about how much of the opposition to the bill (and the support for it) was indeed based on false beliefs about its contents.

Better to be Strong and Wrong -- Especially When You're Actually Right

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:46:00 +0000

By no means do I think it a slam dunk that passage of health care reform would be a boon to the Democrats in November. My arguments are really geared more toward the long term, both in terms of the Democrats reminding their voters that their party still stands for something, and in terms of passing a policy which, if the experience with RomneyCare is any guide, will eventually turn out to be quite popular. And of course, there's the whole matter of the 30-some million uninsured people that the bill would cover and the lives that it would save.

Still, in making the near-term political case against passing health care reform, Megan McArdle in fact makes a point that argues strongly for "getting it done".

There is nothing good you can say about an actual bill that you couldn't say about a bill that you voted for, but didn't pass. It's true that this is going to make campaigns hard next fall. But at least now Democrats can say that they thought the better of it. What's their excuse if they pass it?

Thought better of it? Health care reform has been at the core of the Democratic agenda for literally the better part of a century. It has taken on different manifestation at different times, but it is really the one unbending constant.

So now you're going to say that in six months the Republicans -- who offered no serious alternative to health care reform and who (in some cases) helped deceive the public into believing that the bill does all sorts of things that it does not actually do -- have convinced you that this policy your party has been championing for decades was a bad idea? That one special election in Massachusetts changed your mind about a bill that you'd spent your whole life campaigning upon and probably in fact voted for for as recently as November or December?

Megan has a generally heterodox set of political viewpoints so perhaps this is more difficult for her to envision than for someone like me -- who votes for Democrats 90-95 percent of the time and whose views are fairly conventionally left-of-center on most issues. From my point of view, this is the equivalent of a Republican saying: "You know what, my opponent is right -- lower taxes are a bad idea on principle." It's a stake in the heart of the liberal/progressive value system.

But even for a voter who is less well-informed and is only picking up an impressionistic residue of each candidate's message, there's something to be said for Bill Clinton's statement that "When people are insecure, they'd rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than someone who's weak and right." If you've conceded that one of your ideas -- one of your most important ideas is a bad one -- why should the public trust any of the other ideas that you have? Instead, they're going to say: Well, thank you Mr. Blue Dog -- I'm glad you've come around to my way of thinking on this. Now I'm going to vote for the guy who didn't have the bad idea in the first place.

The one thing that Democrats categorically don't want to do is concede that their ideas on health care reform were wrong. Blame Republican obstructionism, blame the recession, blame Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman for gutting the bill of its core values. All of these arguments are ... unconvincing (particularly the bit about obstructionism -- Democrats still do have the votes to pass the bill on their own) ... but they're not actually dangerous to the future of the Democratic Party, as this argument will tend to be.

I'm picking on Megan a little bit here and perhaps using her as a bit of a strawwoman; she makes a number of good points in her article, which you should read in full. But the point is, if the Democrats don't pass health care reform will have to address the fundamental question that Megan brings up -- which is, why did you change your mind? And their potential answers to that question range from unpersuasive to suicidal.

In Illinois, Both Sides Exaggerate Electability Arguments

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 05:20:00 +0000

On Tuesday, Illinois will become the first state to hold its primaries for the 2010 elections. Three of the four key races -- the Senate nomination on the Democratic side and the gubernatorial nomination for both parties -- are reasonably close and should provide for a fairly exciting night of return-watching. But it's the Senate primary, featuring Illinois State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, former Chicago Inspector General David Hoffman, and Chicago Urban League President Cheryle Jackson, which has drawn the most attention.

The race is for all intents and purposes between Giannoulias and Hoffman; Jackson, a former communications spokeswoman for Rod Blagojevich, will probably be limited to 15-20 percent of the vote, mostly coming from Chicago's predominately Afrian-American South Side. Hoffman, however, has gradually been creeping up on Giannoulias, the front-runner.

As there is relatively little policy daylight between the two leading candidates -- although Giannoulias has the endorsement of the unions and is regarded by most observers as being a hair to Hoffman's left -- the issue of "electability" has loomed large, as Democrats are understandably nervous about dropping yet another blue-state Senate seat to the formidable Republican nominee Mark Kirk. And both sides are making electability arguments that are, to my mind, somewhat superficial.

The case for Giannoluias rests in the polling. An average of the two most recent polls, from PPP and Rasmussen Reports, shows Giannoulias leading Kirk by a margin of 42-36.5 (+5.5 points), but Hoffman trailing him 37-39.5 (-2.5 points).

I've suggested before that Giannoulias looks as though he would have a better chance in a general election. This is based on a relatively unsophisticated evaluation of the polling and the fact that Giannoulias has held elected statewide office before (a factor which has some predictive value).

To repeat myself again: this is a very simplistic analysis. Giannoulias has better statewide name recognition than Hoffman, and it's often the case that the candidate who is less well-known (in this case, Hoffman) has more room for growth in his numbers. At the same time, Hoffman has not just been faring worse against Kirk on a marginal basis but also in an absolute one: between the two polls Kirk gets 39.5 percent of the vote against Hoffman, but 36.5 against Giannoulias. This is different than in, say, Pennsylvania, where Joe Sestak fares slightly worse on a marginal basis against Pat Toomey than Arlen Specter, but also limits Toomey to a smaller fraction of the vote (with more voters going into the undecided column) -- a pattern that is more commonly associated with a name recognition gap.

In sum, I think the Giannoulias people can make a reasonable argument on the basis of the numbers, but it's hardly a definitive one.

The Hoffman argument, on the other hand, is based not on the numbers but rather on the perception that Giannoulias is tainted. Indeed, for some weeks now, Hoffman has been running "Alexi the Unelectable" ads on FiveThirtyEight and on other websites which are widely read by opinion-makers. (Full disclosure: FiveThirtyEight uses two external buyers to handle its advertising; I do not vet individual ads, either before or after the fact, unless they are grossly offensive or fraudulent or endorse a cause which I find profoundly morally objectionable.)

In recent days, these arguments have escalated, and indeed have been voiced emphatically by some liberal blogs, because of the news that Broadway Bank, a Chicago-based institution in which the Giannoulias family has a substantial ownership stake, is struggling financially and has been told by the FDIC that it must raise additional capital and meet certain other requirements or may risk being taken over and put into receivership. The regulatory action post-dates both the PPP and Rasmussen polls. Giannoulias, who maintains a 3.6 percent ownership stake in the bank and formerly worked as its Vice President, has somewhat awkwardly avoided questions about the regulators' requirements.

Although these things may be problematic for Giannoulias, let's be very clear here: there is no "scandal" involving Broadway Bank, either proven or alleged, and to suggest otherwise is disingenuous. Broadway is a relatively small and fairly conventional community bank which like many other banks (both small and large) is now struggling financially. The regulatory action is fairly commonplace and reflects concerns over the bank's solvency but not about the legitimacy of its business.

Certainly, one can reasonably argue that whether or not there is any actual scandal involving Broadway Bank, it's a bad environment in which to be associated with a bank of any kind and particularly one which has made some poor loans and which is struggling financially. One can also reasonably argue that, although there is no actual scandal involving Broadway Bank yet, perhaps there is some statistically elevated likelihood of one going forward. Nevertheless, certain of the anti-Giannoulas arguments are not a whole lot more sophisticated than Bank! Rawwwwr! Bad! and are far more conjectural than their dramatic headlines would suggest.

FiveThirtyEight does not endorse candidates. And I'm no longer a resident of Illinois, so I haven't given the first thought to who I would vote for in this race. Nevertheless, if you're a (Democratic) voter in Illinois, please resist skin-deep arguments about electability. On the one hand, although Giannoulias has fared better in the general election polling, such polls have fairly limited predictive value so far in advance of a general election, may be somewhat out of date, and could easily be outweighed by other evidence. On the other hand, Hoffman's electability arguments, particularly those involving the recent regulatory actions on Broadway Bank, have also been overstated in many cases and do not warrant the panicked reaction that some Democrats are now having about the race.

Enough is Enough

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Schaller) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 19:54:00 +0000

By now, you've heard or at least heard about the Lecture Heard 'Round Washington: President Barack Obama, before a live C-Span televised audience, took the House Republicans Caucus head-on during their Baltimore party retreat.

Obama did a quite a few things in just an hour to begin to reverse some of the problems of his first year.

Correcting the record. Continuing his clarification of what went wrong and when/on whose watch, Obama reminded Republicans chirping about high unemployment that massive job losses didn't began well before any of his term commenced or his policies were in place. "[W]e can score political points on the basis of the fact that we underestimated how severe the job losses were going to be, but those job losses took place before any stimulus, whether it was the ones that you guys have proposed or the ones that we proposed, could have ever taken to effect."

My bipartisanship is bigger than your bipartisanship. Howard Baker, Bob Dole and Tom Daschle are "not a radical bunch." To listen to the debate, he said, "you'd think this was a Bolshevik revolt." Then he dropped this: "We have to close the gap between the rhetoric and the reality." Translation, to borrow from a famous Dole line: "Stop lying about my proposal." More to the point, you Republicans aren't like the old Republicans who could negotiate in good faith.

Attribute in full bloom. Obama's fellow Illinoisan Pete Roskam voiced a regular complaint heard from the House GOP, namely, that Speaker Pelosi and the Democrats have shut them out. I would have liked to hear the president remind the GOP of its 3-hour House roll call vote on Medicare Part D, or how they dropped bills in Democrats' laps at the last minute, and other exclusionary and dismissive behaviors during last decade. He called for a "tone of civility, instead of slash-and-burn" and complained about the media. He reminded them that they and Democrats have to be careful with all the nasty inter-party language because eventually citizens start to believe it, when in fact a lot of it is just normal Washington talking-point politics. The "attribute in full bloom" Roskam remembers from Obama's days as a state senator--his open-mindedness and willing to work all serious persons, regardless of party--was in full bloom Saturday in Baltimore.

Hensarling's $8 trillion amnesia smackdown. Obama was at full steam by the end when Jeb Hensarling of Texas tried to paint the administration's proposals as reckless, deficit-exploding policies.

[W]e came in already with a $1.3 trillion deficit before I had passed any law. What is true is we came in with $8 trillion worth of debt over the next decade -- had nothing to do with anything that we had done. It had to do with the fact that in 2000 when there was a budget surplus of $200 billion, you had a Republican administration and a Republican Congress, and we had two tax cuts that weren't paid for.

You had a prescription drug plan -- the biggest entitlement plan, by the way, in several decades -- that was passed without it being paid for. You had two wars that were done through supplementals. And then you had $3 trillion projected because of the lost revenue of this recession. That's $8 trillion.

Now, we increased it by a trillion dollars because of the spending that we had to make on the stimulus. I am happy to have any independent fact-checker out there take a look at your presentation versus mine in terms of the accuracy of what I just said.

Give the Republicans credit: During the past year they have successfully depicted the country's economic and fiscal ills as not merely Obama's inheritance but somehow his legacy. After a decade of Republican-sponsored free lunches, coupled with legitimate but insufficient proposals like earmark reform (which account for about 1 percent of federal spending) and tort reform (which would have a similarly small effect reducing overall health care costs), it's convenient to chastise the president for fiscal irresponsibility. Equally convenient is the memory hole politics conservatives play: Still blaming Jimmy Carter for the economy 32 years after he left Washington, yet insisting that the statute on Bush-blaming be no more than one year even if the reach of fiscal choices made during those eight years is and will be felt long into the Obama era.

What Obama did Saturday is take the fight to his detractors. It was a certifiable bully pulpit moment, and one that could signal a shift in political posture for the White House. Although the president stressed that he has read the GOP's proposals and taken into consideration their suggested alternatives, the broader message from the Baltimore meeting is the President is ready to fight. He promised to listen, and called for good faith negotiation; he kept his cool and was funny at key moments. But the subtext was clear: "Enough is enough from you guys."

An In-Depth Look at Fourth Quarter GDP

noreply@blogger.com (bonddad) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:54:00 +0000

On Friday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released the first estimate of the US' 4th quarter GDP. GDP increased at a 5.7% annual rate -- a very brisk rate of expansion. Below is an in-depth look at the report from my blog.

From the BEA:

Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- increased at an annual rate of 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, (that is, from the third quarter to the fourth quarter), according to the "advance" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the third quarter, real GDP increased 2.2 percent.

Let's look at the data in smaller parts. But first, here is the GDP equation:
C (consumer expenditures)
+ I (investment)
+ X (net exports)
+ G (government expenditures)
= GDP.

Let's break the data down into small parts.

Real personal consumption expenditures increased 2.0 percent in the fourth quarter, compared with an increase of 2.8 percent in the third. Durable goods decreased 0.9 percent, in contrast to an increase of 20.4 percent. Nondurable goods increased 4.3 percent, compared with an increase of 1.5 percent. Services increased 1.7 percent, compared with an increase of 0.8 percent.

The decrease in durable goods makes sense considering the increase caused by the cash for clunkers program in the third quarter. Also remember that durable goods is the smallest component of PCEs, totaling just 12% of total expenditures. The increase in non-durables is a pleasant surprise while the increase in services (the largest component of PCEs at 65.77%) is welcome as well.

Real nonresidential fixed investment increased 2.9 percent in the fourth quarter, in contrast to a decrease of 5.9 percent in the third. Nonresidential structures decreased 15.4 percent, compared with a decrease of 18.4 percent. Equipment and software increased 13.3 percent, compared with an increase of 1.5 percent. Real residential fixed investment increased 5.7 percent, compared with an increase of 18.9 percent.

The increase in equipment and software is very welcome, as it indicates business is starting to restock it's physical infrastructure. And an increase in residential investment is also a positive development.

Real exports of goods and services increased 18.1 percent in the fourth quarter, compared with an increase of 17.8 percent in the third. Real imports of goods and services increased 10.5 percent, compared with an increase of 21.3 percent.

The increase in exports plays into the "Asian economies leading the world out of the recession" theme (which is already happening). The inecrease in imports indicates the US demand is also increasing.

I expect a fair amount to be made about the effect of inventory building in the report. These account for almost 60% of the 5.7% growth rate. What you're seeing here is a ridicules attempt at saying "some growth is bad and some growth is good." The bottom line is inventory restocking is a legitimate economic activity that leads to growth. The argue otherwise is to let your prejudices color your analysis.

In addition, consider these charts from the St. Louis Federal Reserve:

Overall, inventories are at incredibly low levels. In addition,

The inventory to sales ratio is also at a very low level. Combined, these two graphs tell us that an inventory build could continue for a few more quarters.

Let's look at the various sub-parts of the report on a quarter to quarter basis. Lots of graphs follow. To get a bigger graph, right click and open in a new window.

Personal consumption expenditures -- PCEs -- account for about 70% of GDP growth. In addition, PCEs have three sub-parts -- service expenditures (about 66% of PCEs), non-durables (about 22% of PCEs) and durable expenditures (about 12% of expenditures). Here are the charts that show the percentage increase from the preceding quarter in real PCEs and its components from the largest to the smallest. Click on all images for a larger image

The percentage change from the preceding quarter in overall PCE growth is now larger than the three quarters that preceded the recession.

The pace of increase in service expenditures is increasing, as is

The pace of increase in non-durable PCEs.

Durable goods purchases are languishing still. But, remember that these only account for 12% of overall PCEs.

Let's continue by looking at the percentage change from the preceding quarter in real (inflation-adjusted) investment. Click on all images for a larger image

Total private investment increased smartly in the fourth quarter, although some of that increase is the result of a bungee like snapping back from a very low level.

Non-residential structures are still contracting. Considering the overall condition of the commercial real estate market (which is still healing) this will continue for the foreseeable future. However,

Software and equipment investment is also increasing. This indicates that businesses are starting to invest -- which is a very healthy development.
Investments in real residential investment are also increasing. This is a very good development. Notice that since the first quarter of 2006 real residential investment has been a net drag on overall growth.

Finally, let's take a look at exports and imports. Click on all images for a larger images.

Imports are increasing on a quarter to quarter basis.

As are exports.

The good news is in both areas. The increase in imports means consumption is increasing and the increase in exports indicates that other countries are growing. However, the overall trend is negative because imports are still larger than exports.

Finally, let's take a look at where the economy grew in the fourth quarter.

While inventories did account for the largest amount of growth, consumers accounted for 24% of growth and net exports accounted for 8.7%. Equipment and software investment accounted for 14%.

Overall this is a very encouraging report. Growth came from a variety of areas. While inventories accounted for the largest percentage of growth, the low level of inventories and the inventory to sales ratio indicates inventory growth could continue for some time. Consumption expenditures are increasing and investment in residential structures, equipment and software is increasing. Exports are ramping up as well.

Democrats Need a Proactive Messaging Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:27:00 +0000

Polling in the last several days has carried some blunt reminders that the public isn't nearly as well-informed as the Beltway conventional wisdom might hold.

We've repeatedly highlighted Kaiser's health care polling, which revealed that only about half of the public knows about many of the key provisions that are in the Democrats' bill, such as coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Meanwhile, a Pew poll this week found that only 26 percent of Americans know that it takes 60 votes to overcome a Senate filibuster -- and only 32 percent know that Senate GOPers voted unanimously against the Democrats' health care plan. And a Rasmussen poll of likely voters found that only 21 percent of them believe that the Democrats have cut taxes for "95% of working families", a fact which is probably true.

I don't particularly blame the public for this. The number of politics "fans" probably numbers somewhere on the order of 10 or 20 million out of a country of 250 million adults. Most people have lives and have better things to do than to follow politics all the time. They pay quite a bit of attention during Presidential elections and, I would argue, make reasonably sophisticated decisions. But outside of that, most people aren't watching MSNBC or Fox News every evening or logging onto the Washington Post or FiveThirtyEight. They're developing impressions based on limited information, often gleaned from partisan news sources and politicians who have an incentive to tell them anything but the truth.

But right now it's Democrats who are behind the 8-ball -- and the extent to which voters are disengaged from each twist and turn of the news cycle is not liable to change any time soon. And what these semi-informed voters have mostly seen from the Democrats is a series of mixed messages.

On health care, between people attacking the policy from the right and from the left, very rarely have positive messages about the bill had the chance to penetrate through the media morass. On the economy, the Democrats have had to do a weird tapdance between highlighting, on the one hand, their sensitivity to the depth of our economic problems and the need for further stimulus, and on the other, the fact that many economic indicators (although not employment) do indeed show a recovery underway. On process issues, the public has mostly observed Democrats fighting with one another, and messages about Republican obstructionism were liable to fall flat when -- until about 10 days ago -- the Democrats had a 60-seat majority in the Senate, however dysfunctionally so. Lastly, the White House's meta-message about "post-partisanship" is a difficult one to maintain in the face of actual policy-making, since in a rather literal sense, Republicans can brand any policy as "partisan" simply by opposing it, however moderate it might in fact be.

In contrast to the vapid media narrative about the "perpetual campaign", the Democrats have perhaps not been sensitive enough to how their messaging might play with the sort of mainstream voters who might read a newspaper or turn on CNN once or twice a month, but not more often, or who consume news from only one or two sources, but not others -- descriptions that apply to most of the people that will turn out to vote in November.

What can Democrats do differently? Unfortunately, this is not such an easy question to answer. But from the White House's perspective, the most obvious solution would be to behave more decisively. Don't let policies like the public option twist in the wind: embrace them, or press forward without them, but either way, remind the House and the Senate that having a 3-month fight about the issue will leave the Democrats as a whole much worse off, regardless of how the dispute is resolved. Endorse some relatively specific version of financial reform, a policy that polls overwhelmingly well in the abstract but which the details of which are banal and which will easily bore and confuse the public.

And all Democrats need to realize, meanwhile, that sometimes the message isn't going to sink in until the sixth or seventh time that you repeat it. Before Tuesday's State of the Union, for instance, the White House had almost literally never mentioned that the stimulus contained a huge tax cut -- they shouldn't expect the public to believe it any more than Warner Brothers should expect a ton of people to go out and see their new movie if they only begin advertising it 48 hours beforehand.

Rather, the Democrats need to figure out what their November messages are now and begin planting seeds for them now. You want to run on Republican obstructionism? Well then, don't neglect the golden opportunities that the Republicans are providing you with today, such as when they voted unanimously in the Senate against re-imposing pay-go rules or unanimously in the House against a very centrist financial regulation package. How many people know that House Republicans voted 174-0 against a jobs bill? It's probably not even 20 percent or 30 percent -- more like 2 or 3 percent, at best. The DNC, DCCC, DSCC, and sympathetic groups like unions should be blasting out advertisements whenever the Republicans cast a vote like this.

With respect to the economy, the Democrats are still largely at the whim of the business cycle, since they may lack the political capital to pass policies through the Congress which could substantively impact the numbers by November. But if it were me, I would err a little bit less on the side of caution in highlighting numbers like, for instance, the 5.7 percent GDP growth that the country experienced in the 4Q. It's not that I expect these messages to be winners now; rather, it's that you want to plant the seed with the public for the fall. Otherwise, it may feel like too little too late when the employment numbers turn positive too, and the public may believe that the recovery occurred in spite of, not because of, the stimulus.

If Democrats have any skepticism about this, they need only look back to the year or two that have just elapsed. Republicans were crowing about socialism and government takeovers way back in the summer of 2008, and opposing virtually every policy that the Democrats put forth from the first meeting of the 111th Congress last January -- a time when Obama's approval had been in the high 60s. At first, those messages weren't working for them -- they were particularly ineffectual, for instance, for the McCain campaign, and there were lots of stories in the spring about the number of people who identified as Republican slipping to all-time lows. But the GOP stuck by their messaging strategy, and it has allowed them to frame everything that has come thereafter in ways that are more resonant with the public. Had the economy recovered sooner, perhaps this would have been a spectacular failure. But they at least did a very, very good job of poising themselves to take advantage of the downside case.

Now it's incumbent upon the Democrats to poise themselves to take advantage of the upside case. Political time is moving faster and faster, and it goes without saying that a lot could change between now and November. But precisely because the public is so bombarded with information, it may be all the more important to develop a proactive rather than reactive messaging strategy, and to implement it sooner rather than later.

What Killed Obama's Approval Numbers?

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:58:00 +0000

If we look back at the trajectory of Barack Obama's approval ratings, which began at about 65 at the time of his inauguration and have fallen to about 48 now, there were two periods that account for most of the decline. One was the period immediately following his inauguration until about the first week in March; Obama's ratings fell by about 5 points over this interval. The other was a longer period from the end of May through mid-August, during which time Obama's approval declined by 9 points or so. Those two periods collectively account for about 14 points of the roughly 17-point decline that Obama has experienced.

There's a fairly intuitive explanation for what was happening during that first period in February: the honeymoon was wearing off, as happens sooner or later for most Presidents -- and sooner, perhaps, for one who was attempting to push huge policy initiatives like the stimulus from his first day on the job. But its a bit less obvious what sent his numbers on such a sharp downward trajectory in that second, roughly 75-day stretch from late May through mid-August.

Was it the economy? Undoubtedly, the economy is a significant part of the story. The employment reports that came in during this period showed the economy losing about 300,000 jobs per month, which is really, really bad. Still, it wasn't as bad as the reports that came in during April and May, which had the economy losing 500-600K jobs per month, and during which time Obama's numbers were rather steady. (A more robust indicator, perhaps, is consumer confidence, which had a bit of a reversal in June and July before picking up again, but the correlation there is still fairly weak.)

Well then, perhaps it was the health care debate? I have a bit of a side project to track what the lead story is on any given day on the content aggregator Memeorandum. Some days are relatively newsless, in which case no story is assigned to that day, but most of the time it's clear enough what everyone is talking about. According to my tally, the health care debate was the lead story during the following dates:

June 11, 22
July 15-16, 18, 20-22, 26, 28-30
August 4, 6, 14, 16-17, 19-21
September 8-9, 14, 16, 18, 29
October 1, 13, 26-27, 29
November 7-8, 11, 21-22
December 8-9, 14-21, 24
January 22, 2010

Let's take that graph from before and plot these dates (as shown by the red shading) against the trajectory of Obama's approval numbers. I've also indicated the dates in January and February during which time the stimulus debate was the lead story, as indicated by the blue bands below:

The fit isn't as good as you might think. Health care didn't become the lead story on a consistent basis until July 15th or so. But Obama's approval ratings had already been on a 6- or 7-week downward trajectory by then. In addition, Obams' approval ratings weren't particularly impacted during other very intense periods of the health care debate, such as the second half of December. So it is not obvious how much blame we should lay at health care's feet.

What other stories were leading the news in June and early July, when Obama's approval ratings were steeply declining but before health care had crowded the other news out? From the period encompassing May 21st though July 14th, I have the Iranian elections being the lead story for 8 days, the SCOTUS vacancy and the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor being the lead for 9 days, and Sarah Palin (in particular, her decision to quit as Alaska's governor) being the lead for 11 days. Otherwise, we had a hodgepodge of stories like Mark Sanford and the CIA torture probes, but none controlled the headlines for more than about 24 hours at a time.

I'm going to take it for granted that Obama wasn't negatively impacted by Sarah Palin's having gone rogue and left Alaska's governorship. But could the other two stories -- Iran and Sotomayor -- have been bigger negatives than people think? On Iran, it seems extremely doubtful. The only poll released on Iran in conjunction with their disputed election was from CNN, and it showed just 15 percent of Americans saying that Obama had shown too little support for the protesters (versus 13 percent saying too much and 56 percent the right amount). Apart from a few Beltway pundits, there weren't too many people critiquing his response.

Sotomayor, too, generally polled somewhat favorably (although most people are fairly indifferent toward SCOTUS nominations). One interesting bit, though, taken from Gallup's weekly approval tracking by demographic groups. Sotomayor dominated the headlines from about May 26th through May 30th, in conjunction with her nomination. (Her actual confirmation several weeks later was something of an anti-climax.) In the week of May 18th-24th, just before Sotomayor's nomination, Obama's approval rating among men was 62 percent, according to Gallup. In the week just after her nomination, from June 1st-7th, his approval rating among men had fallen to 56 percent. So perhaps that nomination, while appealing to Obama's base, gave him some problems among men -- particularly white, independent men, an important swing demographic that has since turned against Obama. And there may have been something of an echo several weeks later when the Henry Louis Gates story hit on about July 23rd.

Another story that was taking place during this period, although it was playing out more in the background, was that Al Franken was in the process of becoming the Democrats' 60th vote. After a very drawn out process, the Minnesota Supreme Court declared Franken the winner on June 30th and he was seated on July 7th. As Mark Schmitt has argued, having 60 votes was in certain ways problematic for the Democrats; it helped to give rise to the narrative about their "ramming though" a partisan agenda, while at the same time those 60 votes included people like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson who weren't much easier to corral than a moderate Republican might have been. That 60th vote may have come at a high price, in other words, in terms of the way that Democrats came to be perceived by the electorate.

Unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to give you any one incredibly satisfying answer here. The most basic reason for the decline in Obama's numbers, almost certainly, is that people's expectations for what he ought to have been able to accomplish on the economy have accelerated faster than his ability to do so. But beyond that, things are a little murky. The periods that represent the steepest declines in Obama's approval ratings are only loosely related to the periods that provided the most disappointing economic news. Meanwhile, while I'm sure that the health care bill hasn't helped Obama any, the trajectory of that debate isn't a great fit for the trajectory of his approval numbers. Finally, factors like the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor and the seating of Al Franken may not have been terribly impactful unto themselves, but may have given rise to unhelpful narratives for Obama and the Democrats that contributed to their problems.

One takeaway here, I suppose, is that the deterioration of Barack Obama's political fortunes is not quite so easy to diagnose, even in retrospect. It sort of crept up on us -- until suddenly it became obvious with Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts last week. There's a role for Monday morning quarterbacking, and it's certainly fun to think about how the Democrats have become so unraveled and whether there's anything they might have done to prevent it. But many things that seem obvious now certainly weren't that way at the time.

Prime Minister's Questions: Iraq

noreply@blogger.com (Renard Sexton) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:30:00 +0000

In just a few minutes, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair will appear before the so-called Chilcot Inquiry, a special committee of inquiry into Britain's involvement in the Iraq War. Led by senior diplomat Sir John Chilcot, the committee has interviewed an impressive array of senior public officials from the Blair government and staff, the civil service and the military. Ranging from Sir Michael Wood, then the top legal advisor to the foreign office to former Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon and former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, the investigation has spared few senior people with a role in the war.

For the most part, the players have stuck to their scripts, with a few sound bites but little new specific evidence coming from the top people. That said, many influential, less public players have come onto the official record by way of the inquiry, triangulating and sometimes contradicting the well-spun storylines from the top.

Regardless of the content of the testimony given at the Inquiry, a key element is its broad mandate, public hearings* and strong ability to compell testimony from former senior officials on the subject of the Iraq war. Tony Blair, on the hot seat today, is the key witness for the investigation, and though it is unclear if new ground will be broken on the subject today, the fact that he is being held to account in public is certainly meaningful.

In the United States, no such public accounting has been undertaken nor is planned. Much like the contrast between the House of Commons' weekly interrogations of the Prime Minister and the annual polite speech given by the U.S. President to Congress, the American system conceives of accountability in a quite different context.

In the case of the 9/11 Commission, created by then President Bush and the U.S. Congress, the inquiry was completed through private interviews, with many of the most senior officials like Bush, Cheney, Clinton and Gore refusing to testify under oath. The two chairmen of the Commission, former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean (R) and former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton (D), wrote in 2006 that contradictory statements and "deliberate" obstacles from officials led them to believe that Bush administration officials in the Pentagon, the FAA and NORAD were engaging in purposeful "deception."

In the Iraq case, it was a 2006 U.S. Senate Intelligence Report that undertook the definitive review of the evidence that lead to the Iraq war decision, namely the suspected WMDs. Also called the Silberman-Robb Commission, the inquiry reflected only on the so-called "intelligence failures" made by various three-letter agencies, as opposed to the public decision-making that led to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Rather than public commissions of inquiry, it is instead the media in the U.S. who usually charged with pursuing accountability on issues of this sort. As such, books have been published by various public and private authors, including members of the 9/11 commission, members of the Iraq Study Group and officials from the Bush Administration.

President Obama made clear early in his administration that in the interests of political harmony, official inquiry into the subject, particularly regarding President Bush and Vice-President Cheney would not be undertaken. Indeed, is within the sphere of published media discourse that this argument regarding "who knew what" is taking place.

Perhaps it is simply a difference of political culture that lead the U.S. to take an informal, media-driven approach and the U.K. a more formalized public inquiry process. Certainly the tradition of the weekly Prime Minister's Questions shows that boisterous public debate -- often verging on simply an obnoxious weekly deployment of each party's talking points and 'zingers' -- in a formalized context is well within the political conscience.

Regardless, it is well understood in both the US and UK that the evidence given in justification of the war, regarding both weapons of mass destruction and the alledged link between Iraq and Al Qaida, were mistaken. The judgement of the leaders of both countries at the time has been called into serious question as a result, bolstered by evidence that the ensuing war was mishandled by leaders on both sides of the pond.

However, whether it would be in best interests of either public to drag its former leaders through the mud in punishment if certain criteria for deception were me remains an open question. Particularly during times of political polarization, perhaps the Obama approach of looking forward rather than back is an appropriate strategy. That said, a post-Iraq political strategy of "forget the past and move ahead on other issues" is likely to be a hard sell in either country.

---
Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international affairs columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

* The commission as envisioned by Gordon Brown would have done private hearings, but heavy pressure from the opposition parties and public opinion in support of a public hearing process quickly changed this.

UPDATE: Speaking of Prime Minister's Questions, President Obama spoke at the House GOP retreat today and took questions from some members.

Arlen Specter May Be Screwed, But He Probably Isn't THIS Screwed

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:44:00 +0000

After Massachusetts, I'm going to try to resist critiquing individual polls that contain pessimistic results for Democrats, particularly since we're transitioning into a more systematic and objective approach into forecasting the midterms. Nevertheless, I find this Franklin & Marshall poll that shows Arlen Specter 14 points behind Pat Toomey -- and Joe Sestak 23 points behind Toomey! -- to be a little dubious. Here is the key graphic from that poll:

Note that Specter and Toomey are tied (although with a huge number of undecideds) among registered voters; Toomey opens up his large lead only among likely voters.

Aren't likely voter polls more accurate than registered voter ones? The general consensus (see also Mark Blumenthal, who has written much more extensively about this) is that likely voter polls are better when you're close to an election but perhaps not any better when you're months away from one and few people are tuned into politics. Frankly, it's probably not a bad idea to have some mix of the two at this stage when compiling a polling average. But when a pollster offers a choice, as F&M did, our policy has been to use the registered voter version up through Labor Day of the election year and then the likely voter version thereafter.

The reason why I'm somewhat disinclined to look at the likely voter results in this particular instance is because Franklin & Marshall shows only 395 likely voters among a sample of 993 registered voters, i.e. a turnout rate of about 40 percent of registered voters. But turnout among registered voters in midterm elections typically averages between 65-70 percent, and will probably be toward the high end of that range in Pennsylvania with such a highly competitive Senate race. So whatever screen that F&M is using, they're kicking out a lot of people who almost certainly will vote in November.

There's also the issue that the number of undecideds is rather high -- 20 percent in the Specter-Toomey matchup (plus another 4 percent voting for 'other' candidates) and 37 percent for Sestak-Toomey. Some of this is because Franklin & Marshall, unlike most other pollsters, explicitly prompts for the option "or aren't you sure how you'd vote". Nevertheless, if they're kicking out 60 percent of voters for being "unlikely", you'd think they'd have a pretty knowledgeable and committed group among those they keep in -- and yet a lot of those folks don't yet know whom their going to vote for.

I wish that more pollsters would disclose exactly what likely voter screens they are using. But whatever they're doing, Franklin & Marshall is not winding up with a sample that accurately reflects what turnout will actually look like in November -- their subsample seems to be less a "likely voter" population and more of a "highly enthusiastic" voter population. Clearly the Republicans have an enthusiasm advantage this cycle and clearly that could be enormously consequential for Democrats -- they shouldn't comfort themselves too much by looking at registered voter polls which, if the enthusiasm gap persists, will tend to overestimate their performance. But this one is probably going a little too far.

Obama's SOTU: Clintonian, In a Good Way

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:53:00 +0000

Perhaps it is the low expectations established by what has been an exceedingly rough couple of weeks for Democrats, but I was pleasantly surprised by Barack Obama's State of the Union Address last night, which managed at once to recall why the majority of the electorate voted for him while at the same time demonstrating an awareness of the difficult situation in which the President now finds himself.

Nevertheless, subjective evaluations of Presidential speeches are notoriously useless. So let's instead attempt something a bit more rigorous, which is a word frequency analysis of the terms that President Obama used last night. What did President Obama focus his attention upon and how does this compare to his predecessors?

To investigate, we'll compare the President's speech to the State of the Union addresses delivered by each president since John F. Kennedy in 1962 in advance of their respective midterm elections. We'll also look at the address that Obama delivered -- not technically a State of the Union -- to the Congress in February, 2009.

I've highlighted a total of about 70 buzzwords from these speeches, which are broken down into six categories. The numbers you see below reflect the number of times that each President used term in his State of the Union address.

Process:

Obama engaged in a lot of process talk last night -- a relatively frank discussion of the nature of the relationship between the two parties, and the political constraints that operate upon him. Particularly unusual was his use of various forms of the world "politics" -- usually a no-no in speechmaking -- as well as the terms "Democrats" and "Republicans", which he's used essentially as often as all of his recent predecessors combined.

Values:

One reason that Obama's speeches may come across as a bit aloof is that they are quite devoid of values buzzwords and particularly the terms "free" or "freedom", which were among the more frequently employed words by most of his predecessors. He's also failed to make use of one of Bill Clinton's favorite hobbyhorses, which is the term "opportunity".

Domestic Policy:

What's striking here are not Obama's numbers but Bill Clinton's from 1994, in which he drilled down very deeply on several domestic policy initiatives. Under ordinary circumstances, it's unusual for a President to lobby so intensely such specific domestic policy programs during the State of the Union -- and at may not have served Clinton well considering the fate that the Democrats met in the 1994 midterms. Obama's speech was more balanced in this regard.

Foreign Policy:

Here, we see the obsession of LBJ and Richard Nixon with the terms "war" and "peace", almost always as related to the Vietnam War. Particularly in 1974 as the Watergate scandal was beginning to ensnare Nixon, his frequent repetition of the term "peace" reads almost like a plea for mercy. George W. Bush's obsession with terrorism is also obvious here, not just in 2002 when it was at the forefront of everyone's mind but also in 2006. Obama is more notable for his lack of emphasis on foreign policy and in particular his infrequent use of the terms "world" and "worldwide".

The Economy:

Rhetorically at least, Obama was exceptionally focused on jobs last night, using that term 29 separate times, and variations on the term "work" or "working" another 34 times. In this respect, he was quite similar to Bill Clinton, who also dealt less in abstractions about the economy and more in the question of jobs in particular.

Obama also used the term "business" or "businesses" unusually often during last night's speech. In about half of these cases, "business" was prefaced by the term "small" as in "small businesses" -- the term "small business" almost always polls well in focus groups.

Obama also used the term "tax" or "taxes" as often as any president since Reagan in 1982, mostly to point out (as I've argued was long overdue) that the stimulus package contained an enormous volume of tax cuts. Another obsession of the White House speechwriting department is the use of the terms "investing" and "investment", which Obama used very heavily last night as well as in his 2009 address.

Framing/Narrative:

One way in which Obama quite explicitly invokes Clinton is in his frequent use of the terms "family" and "families", which he used 20 times last night. He has yet to pick up on the Clintonian tic of using the term "community" constantly, on the other hand.

Contrary to popular belief, Obama does not talk about "hope" very often -- indeed, he seems to have been conspicuously avoiding the word since having become President. He did use the word "change" eight times last night, however. Obama has ratcheted down the use of the term "responsibility" since last year's address while increasing his use of less abstract (i.e. more emotionally impactful) words like fight/fighting and strength/strengthen.

*-*

One neat thing we can do here is to run a simple correlation on the 70 or so buzzwords that we've identified -- which speech is most like the others?

Unsurprisingly, this analysis finds that Obama's address last night was most similar to to his own speech from last year. But after that, it most invokes Bill Clinton's two addresses, as well as Jimmy Carter's in 1978:

Perhaps this is the wrong way to go about this, however, since a lot of these numberrs are context-sensitive, dependent upon the particular crises that a President faces and the particular policies that he's trying to advance. So let's remove everything in the domestic policy, foreign policy and economic categories, and re-run the analysis, focusing more explicitly on the enduring themes of a President's framing and rhetorical tics:

The correlation with Bill Clinton's speeches increases further when we do this. What's just as striking, however, is how dissimilar Obama's State of the Union was to any predecessor apart from Clinton. The combination of process talk and populist rhetoric was rather unusual; Obama managed to reflect Clintonian populism while at the same time still sounding like himself.

Indeed, I think Obama at least potentially succeeded in achieving the goal that I set out for him, which was to re-brand himself in a way that reminded voters of the better moments of his campaign while at the same time displaying a sensitivity to the challenges that both he and the country now face.

It was just a speech, however, and most State of the Unions have had a fleeting impact, at best. And were I evaluating the speech on policy grounds, I would evaluate it more skeptically.

Nevertheless, it was a strong speech that ought to lift Democratic morale in the near-term. And in the medium-term, it reminds us that the Republicans' recent momentum may not be the irresistible force that it seems. Their steadfast opposition to any and all policies -- whether popular or not -- carries its share of downside risk with such a rhetorically skilled President at the helm.

Did the Speech Work?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Schaller) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 04:26:00 +0000

Here are some immediate reflections on the politics and optics of the speech tonight. (I already commented below on the optics—quite literally—of the Republican response.)

1. Making nice. Obama continues to express his desire to mend Washington, work cooperatively with friend and foe alike, lead instead of bicker—the “deficit of trust” stuff. If that’s just rhetoric to put his Republican and conservative critics on their heels, fine. And I realize the president did give the Republicans the business for their obstinacy. But by now he must know that this makes for good rhetoric but is no way to govern if he hopes to get things done. Lesson 1 from Year 1: You’re going to have to this by yourself and with fellow Democrats, Mr. President.

2. Running to the hills. Good job calling out his fellow Dems and reminding them “not to run for the hills.” If he can say that publicly, he ought to say it far less politely in private.

3. Populism. Striking the populist tone worked to some degree, but I still think he has not properly explained (a) why any healthcare reform needs to happen simultaneously, no less before, doing jobs and stimulus; and (b) he seemed to fizzle as he got to the laundry-listing section in the middle, in terms of the investment programs and initiatives. On the other hand, attacking the banks seems to be quite popular, and working.

4. Tone. I can’t quite put my finger on it because his literal tone and volume seemed to change at different points, but he seemed less bellowing, less thundering tonight. Maybe I was too busy cutting-and-pasting clips in the liveblog post, but it just seemed quiet at moments—both Obama’s projection and the reactions in the chamber.

5. Throwaway. The military and foreign policy section was mostly a throwaway section at the end. You can’t give a SotU speech without mentioning defense and foreign policy, and there was nice stuff in there about vets. But the truth is that all the wind-up, focus and discussion in the weeks leading up to tonight led us to expect a mostly domestic-themed speech, and that’s what we got.

6. Educator-in-chief. It’s very, very hard to explain how budgeting works, how deficits and debts work, and it was nice to see Obama try to explain these things. He obviously did so with the intent of twisting the knife in Republican backs about the deficits they handed off to him. But if you are a president who claims to want to fix how politics works in Washington, you are going to have to educate the public about how politics isn’t working at present. People are familiar with partisan rancor and bickering, and they know we are spending more than we raise.

7. Healthcare. It’s hard to ignore the fact that the healthcare discussion was more or less shoved into the middle. He didn’t want to start or end with it. I continue to believe that healthcare cannot be sold to businesses and the insured by telling sad tales about the un/underinsured. I wish Obama would make a healthcare argument about American business productivity and efficiency, so I remain disappointed on this front—but this is my own pet peeve.

8. Follow-up. The president flies to Florida tomorrow for a visit. In Tampa he and VP Joe Biden “will announce $8 billion in Recovery Act awards to lay the groundwork for a nationwide high-speed rail system that will create jobs and transform travel in America.” So I suspect we are going to get a series of follow-on demonstrations and visuals to echo the jobs, jobs, jobs, recovery, recovery, recovery theme from tonight.