FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right

A Challenge to Climate Change Skeptics

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 20:16:00 +0000

John Hinderaker at the popular conservative blog PowerLine reports that it's been cold, cold, cold in his home town of Minneapolis, Minnesota, going to far as to compare it with "The Year Without a Summer", 1816, when global temperatures were abnormally low as a result of the eruption of Mount Tambora:

I don't think things are quite so bad this year, but if something doesn't change pretty soon 2009 may go down in history, in some parts of the U.S. at least, as another year with barely any summer. Here in Minnesota and across the Midwest, temperatures are abnormally cold. I don't know whether the phenomenon is world-wide--data that will answer this question have probably not been assembled, and may not be honestly reported--but the current low level of solar activity suggests that the cooling trend could indeed be universal.

Indeed, it's been pretty cool in Minneapolis for the past couple of days; the temperature hasn't hit 70 since midday Thursday. But has it been an unusually cool summer? No, not really. Since summer began on June 21st, high temperatures there have been above average 15 times and below average 13 times. The average high temperature there since summer began this year has been 82.4 degrees. The average historic high temperature over the same period is ... 82.4 degrees. It's been a completely typical summer in Minneapolis, although with one rather hot period in late June and one rather cool one now. (Note: actual high temperatures can be found here and historical averages can be found here.)

Selective memory is a powerful thing. I'm not particularly certain when pointing out the fact that it might be cool or rainy in your hometown one afternoon became subject for worthwhile blog material, but you have started to see this all the time on certain conservative blogs, probably led by the example of Matt Drudge.

Therefore, because I'd like to see more accountability on all sides of this debate and because I'm tired of people who don't understand statistics and because I'd like to make some money, I issue the following challenge.

You are eligible for this challenge if:

1. You live in the United States and provide me with your home address and telephone number (I will provide you with mine) and,
2. You are a regular (at least once weekly) contributor to a political, economics or science blog with an Alexa traffic global ranking of 50,000 or lower.

The reason for the latter requirement is because I want to be able to shame/humiliate you if you back out of the challenge or refuse to pay, as I'd assume you'd do the same with me.

The rules of the challenge are as follows:

1. For each day that the high temperature in your hometown is at least 1 degree Fahrenheit above average, as listed by Weather Underground, you owe me $25. For each day that it is at least 1 degree Fahrenheit below average, I owe you $25.
2. The challenge proceeds in monthly intervals, with the first month being August. At the end of each month, we'll tally up the winning and losing days and the loser writes the winner a check for the balance.
3. The challenge automatically rolls over to the next month until/unless: (i) one party informs the other by the 20th of the previous month that he would like to discontinue the challenge (that is, if you want to discontinue the challenge for September, you'd have to tell me this by August 20th), or (ii) the losing party has failed to pay the winning party in a timely fashion, in which case the challenge may be canceled at the sole discretion of the winning party.

Any takers? You can reach me by clicking the 'Contact' button at the top of the page.

EDIT: No takers yet. Eligibility will remain open through Monday (the 20th). Limit three contestants within any one 100-mile geographic radius.

And sorry for all the typos, etc. Been a long week.

On Health Care, Bipartisanship without Compromise?

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:24:00 +0000

My apologies that posting has been a little slow over the past couple of days. The bad part about working for myself is that I hate my boss. After scrambling like mad to meet a couple of deadlines earlier this week, Worker Nate basically decided to go on a sit-down strike against Boss Nate.

The big news of the day is the letter sent by a "gang" of six "bipartisan" senators (there was a sale on scare quotes at Target today) urging Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell (and by implication, the White House) that "taking additional time" on health care would be advisable. It's easy to read the letter cynically: "later" in senate speak quite often means "never". That might be particularly so on health care: odds are, frankly, that the Administration will continue to lose political capital until the unemployment rate improves, which even if a recovery in GDP growth is around the corner (which many economists think it is) is liable to take some time. Push this debate back to the autumn, and the effort could be being lead by a President whose approval ratings are in the low 50's or perhaps even the high 40's.

What's interesting, though, is who exactly is in this "gang". Five of the six are whom you'd expect: three conservative Democrats (Liberman, Landireu and Ben Nelson) and two liberal Republicans (Collins, Snowe). But then there's Oregon's Ron Wyden, who is not particularly conservative and in fact is usually thought of as being rather liberal.

Wyden, as you may know, has his own version of health care reform, which is entitled the Healthy Americans Act (HAA). The HAA is, in some ways, a more radical restructuring of the health insurance system than any of the other plans currently being contemplated by the Congress. It would completely remove the benefits tax exemption, create a national health insurance exchange (which would be open to everyone including those who opted out of their employer-provided coverage), and set some rather explicit cost-containment targets. I'm on record as being a fan, as are a lot of health care policy wonks like Ezra Klein. The interesting thing about Wyden's bill is that it has co-sponsors from all over the political spectrum: not just centrists but also fairly liberal Democrats like Jeff Merkley, Ted Kaufman and Daniel Inouye, and rather conservative Republicans like Idaho's Mike Crapo and Utah's Dick Bennett. If we plot the 100 senators from most liberal to most conservative (as determined from DW-NOMINATE scores), support for the HAA seems to be somewhat randomly distributed throughout the population:

It's very rare to see something like this and a reflection of the fact that Wyden's plan cannot easily be characterized as either liberal or conservative ... it's just different.

But what's this have to do with the letter that Wyden and his colleagues sent today? It's not immediately clear. While three of the six "gang" members (Wyden, Lieberman, Landrieu) are sponsors of Wyden's bill, the other three (Snowe, Collins, and Ben Nelson) are not.

My guess, though, is that Wyden wouldn't have signed onto this letter unless he thought there was a real chance to marshal support for his bill. And my guess is that the other five signatories probably understood that.

It's actually not completely clear that the Senate can't find 60 votes for the HELP Committee's bill once push comes to shove (much less 50). But those votes certainly won't be had easily, and Wyden's bill arguably represents an easier path. It begins with five Republican co-sponsors (Bennett, Crapo, Judd Gregg, Lamar Alexander and Linsday Graham) and would probably have little difficulty getting Snowe's and Collins's votes as well. The downside is that there might be a dozen or so Democrats who are extremely reluctant to touch the benefits tax exemption, which some of the AFL-CIO unions like AFSCME are very protective of. So the White House would either have to make some phone calls or find a few more Republicans to support the Wyden bill.

Ultimately, though, this presents an opportunity to find a bipartisan solution that doesn't have to be a compromise solution -- a lot of smart, progressive folks think Wyden's bill is better on its face than the "traditional" versions that have been drafted by the House and the Senate, much less what those versions will look like after they've been through the meat-grinder of the Senate floor. The White House doesn't need to take more time on health care: it may simply need more votes. Especially after this letter today, it ought to at least be actively considering whether Wyden's bill is the way to get them.

The Obama Effect Considered

noreply@blogger.com (Renard Sexton) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:33:00 +0000

President Obama has been described as many things - a Rorschach inkblot; a movement; a new America; a fraud; a demagogue. For whatever it is that he ultimately represents to the world -- the United States living up to its ideals, perhaps -- he is incredibly popular.

Among major world leaders, he polls by far the best among the global community* :

Among countries where the United States has a very poor image, for example among six Arab states in the Middle East, Obama widely outperforms.

What still is not clear, however, is how much of Obama's popularity is due to his own efforts, or those of his predecessor. For many in the global (and U.S.) community, a considerable portion of his charm is simply not being George W. Bush. Whether softening the US rhetoric on Iran, Cuba and Russia, making highly public statements about reducing civilians casualities in Afghanistan, or committing to less interventionism in Latin America, popular opinion is that the foreign policy of the Obama administration is a huge turnaround on the Bush years.

The analysis of some observers, however, has suggested the Obama foreign policy approach is largely identical to Bush's, just packaged in a much more friendly fashion. By quantitative measures of foreign policy, limited as they are in their explanatory power, does tend to support this stance. By examining the two major financial investments that a government makes in its foreign policy application -- military spending and development aid -- we can roughly look at the application of hard and soft power in the implementation of foreign policy priorities.

For the last twenty years, the US approach to foreign policy application has changed little, by this measure, although the intensity of its application has. From the late 1980s through the Clinton administration, the drawdown from the Cold War meant a reduced engagement with many parts of the world. The more interventionist Bush policies pushed both spending areas back up through the 2000s. But throughout, each type of spending generally maintained its proportion of foreign policy outlays. The following chart illustrates this, showing development aid (ODA) and military spending (MIL) as percentage above or below their twenty-year average.

In fact, military spending between 2004 and 2007 is actually understated here, because the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were funded off-budget through “emergency” appropriations bill. The low 1989 figures for ODA are due to the US’s record 79% UN budget arrears in George H.W. Bush’s first year in office.

While the specific policy foreign priorities of the three Presidents included in this period (Soviet/post-Soviet transition & Gulf War; NATO driven actions & reduced spending in order to focus domestically; Aggressive intervention in select countries & aid to Africa) were quite different, their underlying spending strategies of high military spending and relatively low development aid were very much in unison.

As it turns out, the Obama plan is actually strongly in keeping with the US strategy of the last twenty years, with regards to military spending and development aid. In addition, in keeping with the George W. Bush administration’s escalation of spending in both areas following 9/11, Obama’s budget calls for increases in both military spending and development aid. This includes a more robust focus on multilateral diplomatic institutions (e.g. Susan Rice’s now cabinet-level post), but an even greater focus on the role of military allies in the U.S. strategy regarding Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and continued military spending increases, even adjusting for the Bush off-budget moves.

While he is shifting the application of the strategy between locations and priorities, the overall Obama strategy reflects the more fundamental American idea of how to successfully deploy foreign policy ideas, which remains heavy on the military intervention, and light on the permission-asking. Indeed, the global public still see the U.S. foreign policy as a largely force-driven operation*.

The Obama team seems to be focused on ensuring that these aggressive military activities are now complemented with a robust and well-considered plan of discussion and dialogue, rather than unilateral action. And the Obama effect of acting also as bridge-builder-in-chief has mean that suddenly, the activities are being marketed to the world in a way that builds confidence more than resentment. Both based on identity, charisma, and downright shrewdness, Obama has been able to re-market the U.S. in an exciting, and likely more accurate, fashion.
-----

*These polls evaluated the aggregate popularity of world leaders and opinions in the following countries: China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Mexico, Germany, Great Britain, France, Poland, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Kenya, Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, the Palestinian territories, and South Korea. The score from each leader's home country was excluded from the average shown.

note: Thanks to commenters for pointing out several typos.

"Conservative Activist Judge" is NOT an Oxymoron

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Schaller) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:01:00 +0000

One of the great successes of the legal wing of the conservative movement is the widespread connection in the mind of many citizens and pundits of "liberal" judicial philosophy with "activism," and "conservatism" with "strict constructionism." They'd have us believe that "liberal activist" and "conservative constructionist" are basically redundancies, and that there simply is no such thing as a conservative activist. This is patently untrue.

There is a very simple explanation for why a conservative may be activist and a liberal statist--the state of the law. The Warren Court wanted to overturn precedents, and so it ruled laws passed by Congress and (especially) state legislatures unconstitutional. And as the Court of that era slowly and sometimes not-so-slowly changed the law, the justices by definition needed to be less activist as the state of the law became more amenable to their views--precisely because they had changed the law.

But guess what? The Rehnquist Court did the same thing, as Republican-appointed justices found the laws passed by state legislatures and (especially) Congress during the years of the Great Society and thereafter to be out of line with the political and judicial philosophies they brought to the bench. Accordingly, they ruled to change the law too. Or--if we can pause a moment to act like adults and not be cowed by scary phrases devised by Federalist Society types to be used incessantly during hearings like the one presently underway to confirm Sonia Sotomayor--the Rehnquist Court trafficked heavily in "judge-made law."

The two figures in this post are created from data compiled by Syracuse University political scientist Thomas Keck for his book, The Most Activist Supreme Court in History.

That most activist Court? A: The Late Rehnquist Court, which in terms of the annual average number of federal statutes overturned by the Court ranks first. Though I only show data from the Roosevelt Court forward, Late Rehnquist has the highest score of any Court era going back to the days of John Jay. So much for modern conservatives' deference to legislatures and the disdain for "judge-made" law.

On the other hand, in the figure below we see that when it comes to rejecting state and local statutes, the late Warren Court was second most activist in American history. Here we see liberal activism, strongest in fact during the Great Society period and into the Burger period before fading as the (re)constituted Court slowly grows more favorable to the state of the law. But note that Early Rehnquist Court isn't far behind. Here we see the ideological back-and-forth of the modern Court as it reacted to new members. In perhaps the most concise summary of his findings, Keck writes in his book (p. 230), "[M]odern conservatives have tried to curtail the liberal activism they inherited from the Warren Court, while simultaneously seeking to develop a new conservative activism of their own."

Part of the sad kabuki dance of Supreme Court confirmations is the ritual denial by nominees that they will depart in any way from constitutional prerogatives, and that they will "respect the law" and venerate judicial precedents. Well, geez, if all the Court justices are reading the same Constitution, and the same laws passed by Congress and state legislatures, and the same judicial precedents, and never applying any judicial philosophy of their own, then the Court would never issue anything but unanimous decisions.

The whole point of the Court is to rule laws unconstitutional based on justices applying their philosophical interpretations of the Constitution, and to reverse bad precedents when they recognize them. And the point of presidents nominating justices of similar ideological ilk is to put them on the Court to do just that. If the standard really were that all precedents must be upheld, the Court might as well pack up and do nothing more than administer the judicial system and settle occasional disputes between the elected branches. (Oh, and the Chief Justice could still oversee presidential impeachments ... whooopee!) And, of course, by this same logic we'd still have Plessy v. Ferguson on the books, and no state-level protections for civil rights and liberties, and so on.

During confirmation hearings--whether for Sotomayor or John Roberts and Samuel Alito before her--the attempt to somehow disconnect what the justices actually do and what the nominees must promise they won't do is a magnificent farce that insults all of us.

RGA's Ayers Responds to 538 Readers

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Schaller) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 20:09:00 +0000

Some Fivethirtyeight.com readers said my recent interview with Republican Governors Association executive director Nick Ayers left them wanting more. To his credit, Mr. Ayers read your reactions and contacted me to say he’d happily do a follow-up. As you’ll see, I asked him to expand on some of the topics we covered the first time, added some questions suggested by readers, and asked a few new ones of my own.

Fivethirtyeight: I’m not going to ask you to criticize any of the Republican governors, but I would like to ask you to assess the impact of their decisions on the party and the GOP brand. Starting with Sarah Palin, do you think she’s of more value to the GOP as a governor or as a former governor who potentially morphs into a conservative movement leader or media personality?

Nick Ayers: I’m not entirely an objective person to ask, because running the governors association my personal preference is that she stay governor, for selfish reasons. She was a great ally of the RGA and to her colleagues around the country.

Saying that, when I try to look at it objectively I can absolutely see a scenario in which she is able to be more effective for our candidates and the conservative cause. She was facing so much head wind in Alaska as it related to local politics and people spinning her agenda for purely political reasons, that in her own outside-the-box thinking she felt like she could make a bigger impact putting that behind her and playing a larger national role.

I think it’s entirely up to her. I think it’s too early to say which direction she wants to go. If she wants to play a large role, she’s going to be able to irrespective of the mainstream media’s disdain for her.

538: Turning to Mark Sanford, he joins a growing list of socially-conservative Republicans who look hypocritical because of their own marital infidelities. How much damage do episodes like Sanford’s inflict on the Republican brand, and specifically the Republican boasts about being the so-called “family values” party?

NA: What Mark said in all the years I’ve known him, is that the party is exactly that—it’s a brand. It’s no different than John Deere or Caterpillar or Chik-fil-A. Those are the three examples he would give. He would go on to say that when people were buying those brands they knew what they were getting, and they knew it was worth paying the price for the quality they got in return.

There’s no question that under [Sanford’s] analogy, his actions have inflicted pain upon the brand. And those are his words, not mine. Saying that, because he’s a friend and because I serve the Republican governors, I’ve adopted the policy of our new chairman, Haley Barbour, and I’m not going to talk about people’s personal problems—other than to say it was a huge disappointment for us, both professionally in his capacity as a Republican governor, and personally, because a lot of us were dear friends and still are.

That said, my job is to focus on governors’ races. We’ve got two this year and 37 next year and I don’t think Sanford’s poor decision will affect one vote in Virginia and New Jersey. And that’s the good news. These governors’ races this year, the one in New Jersey is going to be about Jon Corzine’s record. It’s one of complete failure and one of breaking promises. And in the race in Virginia, it’s really going to come down to whose policies most closely align with Virginia’s, and I’m overwhelming positive and optimistic that that’s Bob McDonnell. He’s for more energy that’s cheaper. Craigh Deeds won’t talk about an energy policy. He wants to punt and say it’s a federal issue. People expect governors to make decisions, and that’s not what Craigh Deeds is doing. He says he’s not taking any tax increases off the table. Bob McDonnell’s plan is to run an effective government with low taxes. No one believes that raising taxes in a recession or these economic times is a good idea.

I could go down the list of why I think Bob is more closely aligned with voters than Creigh, but the point is that these two races are going to come down to our candidates, and in New Jersey to Gov. Corzine’s record. And that’s not something that Sanford’s poor decision-making will affect.

538: I presume fiscal responsibility is a subject Republican governors will raise this year and next year as a counter-narrative to the Obama Administration’s policies. But many states are in financial trouble, too. So how should Republican governors or gubernatorial candidates discuss fiscal issues during the current economic recession?

NA:I can’t speak for all of them. The thing about governors is that, unlike congressmen or senators, they don’t caucus. They don’t have to come to a consensus. What Jan Brewer is doing in Arizona may be different than what Haley Barbour does in Mississippi.

One of the reasons that I’m so optimistic and confident that the comeback for the party begins with our governors’ races next year is that I don’t think the Republican Party can be rebuilt based on a slogan or a mantra created out of DC. It’s going to have to be built based on a number of different ideas and solutions that come from within the states. And what our governors propose that work for the people in the Northeast—in states like Connecticut and Vermont, where we have Republican governors—might look very differently than what Sonny Perdue and Bob Reilly propose to do in Georgia and Alabama.

So I don’t think that there’s any one issue set on how to handle the economic times in the right way. I think it’s about getting principled conservative leaders elected, and being clear about how they will handle situations in their respective states and trusting them to do that.

538: Without identifying the seven states where you think Democratic incumbents are vulnerable in 2010, I’m wondering if you would comment specifically on two states, New York and Massachusetts, where black Democratic incumbents are lagging in popularity in very blue states that in the recent past boasted Republican governors. What kind of Republican candidates can win back those states?

NA: I think I owe your readers a more clear response than the last interview, and I’m comfortable talking about it, even in some detail.

You mention the Northeast, but I’ve got to tell you, just in general we are more bullish than usual in several states in the Northeast. Because you have a history of Democratic legislatures and/or governors in the Northeast there are policies of high taxes and high debt that have resulted in astounding job loss and economic decline. So whether it’s Maine, Pennsylvania, New York or Massachusetts, we feel like if we recruit the right candidate we can make Democrats compete in some places that are traditionally blue.

My belief is that a well-run governor’s race isn’t overtly partisan as much as it is about hiring the right CEO. And that’s especially true of the Northeast, where there’s more big business and people are very familiar with the roles of CEOs. We think if we can field better candidates who fit the job description of CEO and deal with a budget situation, that we’ll have a great opportunity in places like New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and even Maine.

A great example of that is a candidate who announced last week, Charlie Baker in Massachusetts. He’s a CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, has done a lot of nonprofit work in the healthcare, and is a brilliant business man and someone who I believe can cut beyond party and racial lines and say, “I’m willing to bring my experience from the private sector to help solve Massachusetts’ budget issues.” I think Charlie is the kind of ideal candidate that we’ve been looking for. We spent five months recruiting him, so we were very excited to see him get in the race there.

538: Let’s shift the regional focus a bit. You’re a southern white guy working for a southern white guy, Haley Barbour, in a party that’s retrenched significantly in the past two cycles to its southern, white base of support. How is the RGA working to combat the image that the Republicans are becoming a homogenized minority?

NA: I think my last answer deals with that, but look, I don’t discriminate against southern white guys. They’re an important part of the party, and we want to keep them and we want every one of them supporting us.

Saying that, we recognize that to build the coalition we need and win in the states we need, we need a lot more focus than just southern white guys, which is why we’ve spent a lot of time in our recruiting efforts in the Great Lakes, the Midwest and the Northeast. It would have been easier for us to say RGA’s stated goal is to hold our strength in the middle, really from Texas all the way to South Carolina, and we want to pickup Tennessee and hold Florida. But we haven’t said that. It is important that we hold those states and pickup Tennessee, but to us it’s more important that we expand our party’s boundaries in the West and Great Lakes and Northeast.

And I think the kind of candidates who we recruit will have more impact than even the enormous amount of money that folks like Gov. Barbour have raised. We’re 17 months out, and we’re not conceding any ground anywhere in America, and it’s because folks like Haley Barbour recognize that we need to expand our party’s boundaries. And I think we’ll do that in the 2009 and 2010 elections.

538: The minority party nationally tends to struggle with fundraising. For the 2010 cycle, how do you plan to stay competitive on the money front with the Democrats?

NA: I’m probably most proud of our financial focus. In the June 30 disclosures, when we had to disclose and the DGA (Democratic Governors Association) had to disclose. We outraised them, and we had $20.4 million cash on hand while they had just $12.5 million.

For the last two-and-a-half years, RGA has been operating on a four-year plan. Recognizing that our great opportunities would come in 2010, we wanted to avoid the temptation of splurging in the ’07, ‘08 and ’09 campaigns. So we have been very disciplined in our approaches to how we raise and spend money. Look, there’s no question with the DGA that right now, with both chambers of Congress and a supermajority of Democratic governors, you would have to assume their fundraising would improve. But I can only say that in the last two years I’ve been here—with folks like Haley Barbour, Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry, who signed onto this four-year plan—we’ve outraised them every reporting period for the past two-and-a-half years and have significantly more cash on hand.

538: If you win both the New Jersey and Virginia races this autumn, you and Gov. Barbour will rightly be able to point to those wins as signaling the start of the GOP comeback. I know it’s a hypothetical, but should you *lose* both, will the RGA have to rethink its strategy or messaging for 2010?

NA: It’s tough to predict hypotheticals. All I can tell you is Gov. Barbour, all of our governors, and our whole RGA staff wake up every day doing all we can to work toward victory in those states. Ultimately, it’s the voters in those states who will make that determination.

Since we began focusing on New Jersey and Virginia, we’ve said it was our responsibility to bring parity to these races from a resource perspective, and put our candidates in a position to win. That’s the most the national committee can effectively do. We’re not in charge of the candidates; we’re not running the actual campaigns. So I believe that a well-run national committee brings parity to the race from a resources perspective and puts candidates in a position to win. It’s not much different than a good crew chief for a NASCAR team: At the end of the day the driver’s going to drive that car across the finish line, but the pit crew and crew chief can put him in a position to win or not.

I don’t think anyone can make an argument that we haven’t effectively put our candidates in a position to win and bring a parity of resources to these races. And we’re going to continue to do that through Election Day. But ultimately it will come down to the campaigns that Jon Corzine and Chris Christie and Creigh Deeds and Bob McDonnell run.

538: Last question: Is there an up-and-coming young Republican politician—I don’t know, perhaps a county executive or state legislator—whom most of our readers have probably never heard of, but we ought to keep an eye on because he or she has the potential to become the next Bobby Jindal or Tim Pawlenty?

NA:Oh, boy. We have so many great candidates. Most are in primaries, and I’m respectful of the primary process. So the names I’m giving aren’t a reflection on their in-state competition. They’re just folks we think have gotten off to a good start in their primaries.

You’ve got to look at Charlie Baker in Massachusetts. You’ve got to look at a Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania, who I believe got about a third of a million more votes in 2008 than John McCain did, which is just incredible. You’ve got a guy named Josh Penry in Colorado who has created some enthusiasm there. He’s very young—only 32—and he’s running for governor. Newt Gingrich sent me an email last week just because he wanted to make sure Scott Walker was on our radar screen. He’s running for governor in Wisconsin, and Newt wanted to say how impressed he was with Scott.

Those are just four of the 40 or so great candidates we’ve got running for governor in 2010. And that’s what’s really exciting about the opportunity the RGA has. We’re blessed with the 22 governors that we have now. But what we’re really working toward is recruiting and electing the next generation of leaders for our party.

Palin: All Tail, No Head

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:43:00 +0000

Sarah Palin's political action committee -- SarahPAC -- raised $733,000 in the first half of the year and is set to push past $1 million in the wake of the recent attention she's gotten herself. On the one hand, this isn't that impressive. Mitt Romney, for instance, has raised twice as much. Kay Bailey Huthcison, Palin's sometime rival who is now running for governor in Texas, raised nine times as much. For somebody with a political celebrity dwarfed only by Barack Obama's, that's just not all that much cashflow.

What is impressive about Palin's fundraising haul, however, is who it came from: the grassroots. Based on her FEC disclosures, I identified 406 donations worth $200 or more, which are worth a combined total of $289,932. That's nothing, really: Home Shopping Club can bring in that much in 15 minutes selling vacuums. That leaves, however, $443,608, or 60 percent of SarahPac's total, which came from small donors. That is a very high percentage -- higher than for any of the '08 presidential candidates but for Ron Paul -- as you can see from this chart where I've colored Palin's total in Misogynist Pink.

You don't wind up with a number like that unless two things are happening: you are raising a lot of money from small donors and you specifically are not raising a lot of money from large, establishment donors. That, in a nutshell, is Palin's story as she starts to compete against the GOP primary field. I'm not convinced that fundraising is actually going to be that much of a strength of hers in the primary: she's going to have too much of the country club money soaked up by Mitt Romney (the general election might be a different story). But as Barack Obama discovered, small donors have a way of turning into activists and, ultimately, voters.

Blue Dog Districts Need Health Care More than Most

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:24:00 +0000

One thing I don't understand is the equivalence, such as in this Roll Call article today, between the health care debate and the climate bill that was passed by the House a couple of weeks ago. There are 48 Congressional Districts that were won by John McCain and that currently have a Democratic Representative. Most of those districts are rural and blue-collar. On the climate change bill, this might give those Representatives ample reason to vote against the initiative: 38 of the 48 have per capita carbon output rates above the national median, and 36 of the 48 have an above-median concentration of jobs in the manufacturing and agricultural sectors. But something the opposite holds true on health care.

Throughout last year, Gallup included a module on health and well being in their standard tracking surveys. This meant they had tens of thousands of interviews between all 435 Congressional Districts. One of the questions on the well-being module was about whether or not people had health insurance. Eric Nielsen at Gallup was kind enough, a while back, to send me these results broken down by Congressional District.

The median Congressional District has an uninsured population of 14.6 percent, according to Gallup's data (the average is slightly higher at 15.5 percent). Of the 48 McCainocrat districts, 31 (roughly two-thirds) have an above-median number of uninsured. A complete list follows below (actual Blue Dogs are denoted in ... you guessed it ... blue):

The bottom line is that the health care bill, among other things, is designed to help out the poor and the uninsured, and somehow or another will tax the rich in order to do so. I can understand if, say, Jason Altmire from PA-4 wants to vote against the health care bill. His district is suburban and pretty well off, and almost everyone there has health insurance. But Mike Ross of the Arkansas 4th, where almost 22 percent of the population is uninsured? This is a bill designed to help districts like his. And the same goes for most of the other Blue Dogs. A lot of the time, these guys are stuck in a tough spot between their party and their constituents. Here, those interests are mostly aligned. If a lot of the people on the top half of this list are voting against health care, first check the lobbying numbers, and then check to see if they're still in office four years hence.

Will Kay Bailey Hutchison Play Texas Hold 'Em?

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 04:28:00 +0000

No, this is not a poker post.

Instead, it's one about Kay Bailey Hutchison, the Texas senator, who today announced that it's full speed ahead in her bid to challenge to Texas' incumbent governor, Rick Perry. The news comes to absolutely no one's surprise as Hutchison has been contemplating this race for years and long ago hired consultants and established a website toward her bid, while already having raised some $6.7 million dollars on behalf of it.

Hutchison once appeared to be the favorite in her primary fight against Perry, but it's not clear if that's any longer the case. The polling in this race has been a little bit sketchy, but seems to point toward momentum in Perry's direction. After trailing in the five previous polls of the race (including internal polls conducted by his campaign and by Hutchison's), Perry has pulled ahead in the last three:

Here's that same data in graph form:

This should be a fun race to follow -- especially if Sarah Palin, who seems to have a mutual grudge with Hutchison and has already endorsed Perry -- gets further involved.

Perhaps the more interesting question for our purposes however is when and if Hutchison will resign her seat in the Senate to concentrate on her pursuit of the governorship. This would trigger a special election in which Democrats could be quite competitive. We have been alert to this possibility for some time now, which is why you see Texas included on our list of potentially competitive Senate races.

Ironically, we had just downgraded the race on speculation that the turnaround in the polling might deter Hutchison from pursuing the governorship after all. Obviously, we were wrong about that. But the fact remains that there's nothing compelling Hutchison to resign her Senate seat until and unless she becomes governor. It's her decision when and whether she wants to resign.

The smart bet, though, is that the resignation is coming (to the great annoyance of Hutchison's colleague in the Senate, John Cornyn). For one thing, this is a pretty big prize that Hutchison is competing for: becoming governor of the nation's second-biggest state. If Texas were to secede, it would have a larger GDP than all but eleven countries (the U.S., Japan, China, Germany, France, the U.K., Italy, Russia, Spain, Brazil and Canada). Hutchison would also become one of the most powerful female governors in history. Of the country's five largest states, only Texas itself has ever had a woman governor (Ann Richards), and it's population was about 25 percent smaller then. And of course, being governor of Texas is an obvious jumping off point for anyone with presidential ambitions.

Also, if Hutchison is losing momentum to Perry, that could cut both ways in terms of her desire to remain in the Senate. On the one hand, she might have more to lose by failing to hedge her bets. On the other hand, it might be precisely that bet-hedging that is getting her into trouble. Perry has been able to grandstand by doing things like threatening to have Texas secede and refusing to take federal stimulus monies. It is harder to capture that sort of attention when you're one of 100 senators. And of course, Texans tend to be no fans of Washingtonians, which is how Hutchison might be perceived if she refused to give up her Senate seat.

Finally, even if Hutchison were to hold on to her Senate seat and win the governorship, she would not be able to punt the special election all the way until November 2012, when her Senate term naturally comes due. That is because Texas is one of a dozen states with a "fast" special elections law, meaning that an election in that case would be held in the Spring of 2011.

This does, however, give Hutchison some measure of control over the timing of the special election. If she were to resign soon, an election could be held this November. If she waited a little longer, it could instead be held in March. And if she kept her seat until the end of the year before resigning, the special election would be put off until November 2010. The conventional wisdom seems to be that the March timing would be most favorable to Republicans, since it would probably elicit the lowest turnout -- a boon to the party in a state where base voters are still very red. We would put our money on Hutchison going 'all-in' sometime this autumn.

Protestants, Catholics, and Jews on the Supreme Court

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Gelman) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 01:09:00 +0000

The New York Times had a fun feature today in which they asked "seven legal experts" the questions they would like to ask Sonia Sotomayor in her hearings. The experts included four law professors, one historian, and two former government officials. I liked most of the questions--they go beyond silly gotchas and empty questions of "judicial philosophy" and raise important issues. Actually, it would be interesting to hear what the current justices on the court think about these questions.

This being a blog, though, what I'm going to focus on is the silliest of the proposed questions, from Ann Althouse, a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin:

If a diverse array of justices is desirable, should we not be concerned that if you are confirmed, six out of the nine justices will be Roman Catholics, or is it somehow wrong to start paying attention to the extreme overrepresentation of Catholicism on the court at the moment when we have our first Hispanic nominee?

I'm guessing that this question is a joke, but just in case it's serious . . . My impression is that, for about 150 years, an overwhelming majority of Supreme Court justices have been Protestant. I can't imagine that, when, say, Charles Evans Hughes was being nominated for his Supreme Court seat, that somebody asked him: "Is it somehow wrong to start paying attention to the extreme overrepresentation of Protestantism on the court at the moment when we have our umpteenth white nominee?"

To do a quick check on the numbers, I did a quick Google search and found this page with the religious affiliation of all 109 Supreme Court justices up to this point.

We've had 12 Catholics, 7 Jews, 1 unaffiliated, and 89 Protestants (in decreasing order of frequency, Episcopalians, Presbyterian, Unitarians, Methodists, Baptists, a few others with one or two each, and a bunch of Protestants not further defined):

(As noted on the linked webpage, there's some ambiguity as to whether Episcopalians should be characterized as Protestant, but for the purpose of ethnicity, I think the label fits here.)

Most of the Catholics and almost all the Jews on the court were appointed since 1930. All the data are on the linked webpage, so feel free to make your own fun graphs.

P.S. In response to some of the early comments:

1. By making this graph, I'm not "defending reverse discrimination." I'm just pointing out that we've had about 200 years during which white Supreme Court nominees could've been asked, "Is it somehow wrong to start paying attention to the extreme overrepresentation of Protestantism on the court at the moment when we have our umpteenth white nominee?" It just seems a little silly to start asking this sort of question right now.

To put it another way, I agree that intellectual diversity of opinions is a good thing, but I think Althouse's "Is it somehow wrong" formulation is just silly. If you want to ask about diversity of opinions, you can do it directly without talking about "extreme overrepresentation" in a historically context-free way.

2. One commenter asked about other religions. They are shown on the chart above.

P.P.S. To get to a more interesting statistical question hinted at by Althouse, it is indeed impossible for any collection of 9 people to be truly diverse. Beyond the ethnic and religious dimensions already mentioned, there's the division between politicians and non-politicians, lawyers and non-lawyers, lawyers with and without business experience, and so on. As noted above, I think it's a bit odd to suddenly be bringing up overrepresentation of Catholics now, given the historical record, but some of these other questions of breadth could be relevant.

P.P.P.S. Commenter John S. at my other blog linked to this excellent news article by Robin Toner from a time two years ago when questions arose about there being five Catholics on the Supreme Court. Oddly enough, nobody was asking, "is it somehow wrong to start paying attention to the extreme overrepresentation of Catholicism on the court at the moment when we have our umpteenth white nominee?"

RGA Chief Had No Warning of Palin's Resignation

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Schaller) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:14:00 +0000

With two competitive governors races on tap this fall, and a slate of key, open-seat contests just around the corner in 2010, the Republican Governors Association finds itself in an unusual position: Holding a minority of governorships, but looked to by Republicans around the country as the place where the GOP can start a comeback. (The RGA's homepage uses theGOPcombeback.com as its address, where you can hear RGA chairman Haley Barbour talk about how it was Republican governors back in the early 1990s who pulled the GOP off the mat after Bill Clinton's 1992 victory.)

RGA executive director Nick Ayers was kind enough to chat with fivethirtyeight.com about what's in the works. Though playing it close to the vest on specific targets, and heeling the party line on questions about Sarah Palin and Bobby Jindal, Ayers has some not-to-be-missed, choice comments about the Virginia governor's race--especially the recently completed battle for the Democratic nomination. (Make sure you read what he says about Terry McAuliffe's failed bid....very ouch.)

Fivethirtyeight: First, please give our readers a bit of biographical background on yourself and how you came to be executive director of the Republican Governors Association.

Nick Ayers: I began my political career in Georgia during college by working for Sonny Perdue’s campaign against incumbent Roy Barnes. Governor Perdue upset Barnes to become the first Republican governor in the state since Reconstruction. I was Governor Perdue’s top political advisor during his first term and then managed his re-election campaign. Governor Perdue won 130 of 159 counties with 58 percent of the vote, defeating his opponent by nearly 20 points.

After the election, Governor Perdue was voted chairman of the Republican Governors Association and he asked me to serve as the executive director. At the RGA, we put together a four-year plan that would not only allow us to compete on a yearly basis but would also ensure we have the resources needed for 2010, when there will be 37 governors’ race. Part of that plan was to keep the same core political team in place.

538: There are two governors races this fall, and current polling indicates that both Republican candidates will be competitive. Let's start in the bluer of the two states, New Jersey. Can you talk about Chris Christie's chances and what it will take for him to win?

Ayers: In elections where a governor is seeking reelection, the races usually come down to one thing: the incumbent’s record. Jon Corzine’s record is the opposite of what he campaigned on in 2005. The number one issue in New Jersey is taxes, especially property taxes. But despite his previous campaign promises, Corzine raised the sales tax in his first budget and then hiked taxes by another $1 billion this year. Corzine knows there is nothing he can say or do to defend his record which is why he has already started attacking Chris Christie. As an incumbent, that’s not a position you want to be in.

538: Turning to Virginia, a state often cited as turning away from Republicans, the Democrats are trying to win the governors race for a third time in a row. How would you rate Bob McDonnell's candidacy thus far, and what will it take for him to prevent Craigh Deeds and the Democrats from posting a third consecutive win?

Ayers: This race is a rematch of the 2005 Attorney General’s race which McDonnell won by 323 votes so it’s no surprise that it’s been a tight race since the Democratic primary. The Democrats have already spent over $3 million trying to tear down McDonnell’s favorability rating and it’s been largely ineffective because of the quality campaign that McDonnell has run. As Virginia voters learn more about the two candidates, I think more and more will break towards McDonnell. McDonnell is fighting to keep Virginia’s right to work laws and keep Virginia business friendly. Creigh Deeds is a tax-and-spender who stands with Big Labor.

538: On a related note, were you surprised that Deeds won Virginia's Democratic primary over two candidates with bigger names and deeper pockets?

Ayers: Terry McAuliffe unquestionably hurt Brian Moran, who never seemed to put together a plan for how he could win. In regards to McAuliffe, while campaign money may be the mother’s milk of politics, it still can’t make an ugly baby pretty. The more voters saw of McAuliffe the less they liked him. That said, Deeds ran a great campaign.

538: A Minnesota blogger reported this week that some organization is apparently polling Minnesotans on the subject of a possible Norm Coleman run for governor. Would you care to comment on a possible Coleman bid for governor?

Ayers: What the PPP poll showed is that this will be a competitive race no matter who the candidates are, but it’s too early to speculate on who will be running on the Republican side.

538: Looking ahead to 2010, which open-seat states are the major RGA targets for possible pickups?

Ayers: All of them: Maine, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Michigan, Oklahoma, Kansas, Wyoming, New Mexico and Oregon.

538: Again for 2010, how about Democratic incumbents. Are there any you think are vulnerable enough to defeat?

Ayers: We don’t like to broadcast our strategy, but there are at least 7 incumbents who are vulnerable.

538: I have to ask about Sarah Palin. First, did the RGA have any advanced warning of her recent announcement that she would resign the governorship, and if not, were you surprised by her decision?

Ayers: We were informed about her decision to step down just before she announced it. I don’t think too many people were predicting it.

538: Although a rising star in the party, Bobby Jindals nationally-televised response to the presidents address earlier this year was widely panned, including by many conservative commentators. How much, if at all, do you think Jindal's rise as a national figure was set back by that speech?

Ayers: Over the long term, not at all. Governor Jindal is one of the brightest minds in our Party and has unlimited potential.

538: Having former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour as RGA chair must be a huge networking and fundraising asset. What are your thoughts on a potential presidential bid by Gov. Barbour?

Ayers: Gov. Barbour has repeatedly said that the only thing that matters is the 39 governors’ races that will take place between now and the end of 2010. That’s what all of us are focused on right now.

Senate Rankings, July 2009 Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 10:00:00 +0000

Races are ranked in order of their likelihood of changing parties (by November 2010, accounting for all factors such as potential retirements, primary challenges, and so forth).

Likelihood of party switch has increased since last month's rankings.
Likelihood of party switch has decreased since last month.

1. Missouri (R-Open)
Steady as she goes for all-but-assured Democratic nominee Robin Carnahan, who begins with a slight lead in the polls, while Republican Roy Blunt is facing a potentially nasty primary (EDIT: Although it now looks like Sarah Steelman may run for the House instead).

2. Kentucky (R-Bunning)
Attorney General Jack Conway has thus far outfundraised intraparty rival Daniel Mongiardo. That is arguably good news for the Democrats, since Conway has tested slightly stronger than Mongiardo against extremely vulnerable Republican incumbent Jim Bunning.

3. New Hampshire (R-Open)
Some big news for Republicans in the Granite State, where popular AG Kelly Ayoette appears poised to enter the Senate race, a big upgrade for Republicans over a retread like John Sununu or Charlie Bass. Ayoette polled somewhat better than either Sununu or Bass in the only public survey to feature her name to date and also had a small lead over Democratic nominee Paul Hodes. There are lots of undecideds in this notoriously late-deciding state, so expect it to remain a toss-up long into the future.

4. Connecticut (D-Dodd)
Leading GOP rival Rob Simmons, who hadn't reported any fundraising in the first quarter, now says he brought in $750K in the second, a number that rates at about par in a wealthy state like Connecticut. Meanwhile, Simmons is starting to get more competition for the Republican nomination, as businessman Tom Foley, the former Ambassador to Ireland, claims to have raised $500,000 in less than a month, and stockbroker and contrarian economist Peter Schiff, who advised Ron Paul's presidential campaign, is testing the waters with internal polling. I personally think the Republicans' fortunes will take a big hit if they nominate a plutocrat like Foley or Schiff rather than Simmons, who while a bit underwhelming on the stump, is a former Congressman and lifelong public servant. But this being Connecticut, there are no shortage of rich guys hoping to get in on the action.

5. Ohio (R-Open)
Races #3-5 are pretty much interchangable. There are several more polls out showing Democrats Jennifer Brunner and Lee Fisher with small leads over former OMB director Rob Portman, but as Portman's name recognition lags behind that of the Democrats, this race still continues to rate as more of a toss-up.

6. Delaware (D-Open)
Will Mike Castle run or won't he? People are reading the tea leaves both ways. Right now, we're pricing in about a 50-55 percent chance that Castle does decide to enter. If he's in, this race will shoot up the list to at least #3 and possibly higher. If he's out, it drops from the top 15.

7. Colorado (D-Bennet)
I'm not really sure why this race isn't attracting more attention -- both from some of the stronger potential Republican candidates and from possible intraparty challengers to Michael Bennet. While Bennet has done nothing in particular to offend Coloradans' sensibilities, he's also mostly unknown to them; a Republican internal poll, for instance, found that 63 percent of the state has no opinion of Bennet. As we've said before, this is effectively an open-seat race -- and usually open-seat races attract busy fields of candidates.

8. North Carolina (R-Burr)
Multiple polls have shown incumbent Richard Burr with extremely low approval ratings, which has led to the somewhat unorthodox decision by the Burr camp to start criticizing the pollsters. This happens all the time in campaigns, but not usually 16 months before the election when you don't yet have a declared opponent. I doth think Burr protesteth too much, even though he caught a break in May when Roy Cooper decided not to challenge him.

9. Illinois (D-Burris)
It looked on Wednesday that Mark Kirk was in the running for Barack Obama's former senate seat, then it looked like he was out, and now -- nobody's quite certain. I'm not sure why Kirk, who also waited months until Lisa Madigan declined enter the race before declaring his interest, is such a delicate little flower, but running for statewide office in Illinois takes elbows and Blagojevich balls, and if he's not fully vested in the race, I wonder if he's going to be as strong a candidate as the Republicans are hoping. Meanwhile, the Democratic field may be clearing up a bit, as Roland Burris is officially retiring and as it's not clear that Chris Kennedy will challenge Alexi Giannoulias. This race is in one of those interminable holding patterns above O'Hare Airport for now, but should break one way or the other soon.

10. Louisiana (R-Vitter)
Charlie Melancon, the only remaining Democratic Congressman from Louisiana, now seems poised to challenge David Vitter; he trailed Vitter by just 7 points in a Research 2000 poll in March in spite of much inferior statewide name recognition. If Melancon confirms his interest, this is a pretty big coup for the Democrats and at the very least will force Republicans to spend a lot of money to hold Vitter's seat.

11. Nevada (Sr.) (D-Reid)
Earlier, I claimed that the new senate rankings would contain five Democratic-held seats in the top ten. I'm now backing off that after evaluating the landscape more thoroughly in Nevada, where the few non-corrupt Republicans like Jon Porter and Dean Heller seem increasingly disinclined to challenge Harry Reid. And who can blame them, when the John Ensign scandal has proliferated enough that they will almost certainly have the shot at an open seat in 2012 -- if not sooner?

12. Texas (R-Open?)
I'm giving this race a slight nudge downward because Kay Bailey Hutchison has fallen behind incumbent governor Rick Perry in the polls and it wouldn't completely shock me if she decides that the Senate is a pretty comfy place instead. One interesting wrinkle if Hutchison does decide to run for governor (as is still probable): Texas would hold a nonpartisan blanket primary for her senate seat, with the two leading candidates squaring off in the run-off. It's not entirely out of the question that those two leading candidates could both be from the same party.

13. Pennsylvania (D-Specter)
Most of the action here is on the Democratic primary side, where Joe Sestak is slowly but steadily closing his gap with Arlen Specter. Pat Toomey remains nominally within striking distance of the Democrats in the general election, but I think his numbers will plateau as Pennsylvanians realize how conservative he is.

14. Florida (R-Open)
I know that the Marco Rubio people are increasingly excited about their prospects of knocking off Charlie Crist. For our purposes, though, I'm not sure how much it matters, because Rubio would still be at least even-money (and frankly probably the slight favorite) against probable Democratic nominee Kendrick Meek.

15. New York (Jr.) (D-Gillibrand)
Here's the last in our trifecta of races where the primary battle should be more pitched than the general election one. To this point, I don't see any reason to think that the prospect of George Pataki running is anything more than wishful thinking on Republicans' behalves. The Gillibrand people I've spoken with, for their part, seem more focused on the primary battle against Carolyn Maloney. Gillibrand's approval numbers seem to be inching upward as voters get to know her better, although her getting by Maloney is by no means a sure thing.

16. Nevada (Jr.) (R-Ensign?)
A new addition to our rankings. John Ensign has not yet resigned his seat and probably won't, but it's our job to evaluate these sorts of contingencies. If the scandal blows up any further, one wonders whether he won't become tempted to ride off into the Vegas sunset, particularly when Nevada has a Republican governor who could name a Republican replacement. If that happens, though, the race is subject to a special election in 2010, and Democrats like Shelley Berkley, who are already licking their chops for 2012, could decide to descend on the seat.

17. North Dakota (D-Dorgan)
News to me: popular incumbent governor John Hoeven seems to be considering a challenge to popular incumbent senator Byron Dorgan. Hoeven was well behind in the only public poll of the race and has two years left in his term. To me, this feels mostly like a bluff, designed to force Dorgan's hand on policies like cap-and-trade. But I'd expect this to ultimately become a single-digit race if Hoeven did decide to enter.

18. Arkansas (D-Lincoln)

19. California (D-Boxer)
Carly Fiorina has had a rough couple of years, first getting fired by Hewlett-Packard (her company's stock jumped 7 points that day) and then getting mothballed by the McCain campaign after criticizing her party's own VP nominee. But she's apparently poised to run against Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer. Boxer had a 30-point lead against Fiorina in a March poll and probably has no particular reason to fear her, but Fiorina is at least likely to be a good fundraiser, which should force Boxer to stay on her toes.

20. Iowa (R-Grassley)

21. Georgia (R-Isakson)

22. Arizona (R-McCain)
John McCain probably has nothing to fear from Republican wacko Chris Simcox, but what about this guy?

23. Hawaii (D-Inoyue)
There's actually a fresh poll of a prospective run by governor Linda Lingle against octogenarian incumbent Daniel Inouye (who won a Medal of Honor in World War II!) but it reveals the same thing that we knew before, which is that Lingle will probably have to wait for a retirement to have a real shot at a seat in Congress.

24. Wisconsin (D-Feingold)
Two new polls show Feingold with a double-digit lead over hypothetical Republican challenger Paul Ryan, who has denied any interest in the race and seems to be waiting for Herb Kohl to retire instead.

25. Oklahoma (R-Coburn)
After a few moments of doubt, the likes of which haven't gripped Oklahoma Barry Switzer announced he was leaving for the Cowboys, Tom Coburn declared he was officially running for re-election in 2010, and all was right with the world.

26. Alaska (R-Murkowski)
I'll take 50-1 that Sarah Palin somehow gets involved here and messes this thing up.

27. Kansas (R-Open)

28. Maryland (D-Mikulski)

29. South Carolina (R-DeMint)

30. Washington (D-Murray)

31. Alabama (R-Shelby)

32. South Dakota (R-Thune)
Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin, as expected, announced she'll run again for the Congress rather than challenging Thune or running for the open governor's seat.

33. Indiana (D-Bayh)

34. Vermont (D-Leahy)

35. Oregon (D-Wyden)

36. Utah (R-Bennett)

37. New York (Sr.) (D-Schumer)

38. Idaho (R-Crapo)

Why Democrats Have No Time to Waste

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 21:33:00 +0000

The Wall Street Journal's has had its monthly economic forecasting panel attempt to predict what the unemployment rate will look like through the end of 2010. And the results are something that should make the Administration -- and Democrats in Congress -- a little nervous. The average forecast for the unemployment rate next December -- a year-and-a-half from now -- is 9.5 percent. That's no better than where unemployment is today. And only one economist out of 51 ventured a forecast below 7.6, which is what the unemployment rate was when Obama took office in January.

It's not that the Journal's forecasters are all that bearish overall. In fact the panel, which has a notoriously bullish track record, expects to see GDP turn positive quite soon: 70 percent expect the recession to end by the fall, and 90 percent by the end of the year.

The unemployment rate, however, has long been a lagging indicator, especially following recent recessions. Suppose that the recession ends in August. Perhaps six months from then -- in February or March -- the economy will actually have started to create jobs. But the employment picture will have gotten worse in the meantime; it will be creating jobs from a peak of, say, 9.9 percent if the administration is lucky, or say, 11.2 percent if it isn't. It will take some time to get the number back down to the 9.5 percent that it's at presently, much less to fall below the 7.6 percent number that would represent an overall gain of jobs during Obama's tenure.

The question is: how playable a hand would the Administration have at that point? They'll probably get some boost when (if?) the recession is declared over. But maybe not much of one. The Persian Gulf Recession officially ended in March 1991; George H.W. Bush was still suffering from the consequences of it 18 months later.

A more favorable precedent, perhaps, is that set by Ronald Reagan. His approval rating hit its trough in February, 1983, a mere three months after the 1981-1982 recession ended. Reagan, more than G.H.W. Bush, could claim to have inherited his recession from the previous administration. Although that recession started in July 1981, half a year into Reagan's term, it was in some ways a continuation of the January-July 1980 recession that began under Jimmy Carter. In this way, his situation is more analogous to Obama's, whom nobody can blame Obama for the start of the current recession -- although increasing numbers will become frustrated with him that it hasn't ended yet.

Reagan's Republicans nevertheless lost 26 seats in the House during the 1982 midterms. That is probably a reasonable over-under for the losses that Obama's Democrats might suffer. While on the one hand, Obama's timing may turn out to be somewhat better than Reagan's, on the other hand Republicans were losing ground from a much lower peak -- the only controlled 192 seats in the House before the midterms, whereas Obama's Democrats now have 257. I'd still take the under given that betting line, mostly because the GOP is poorly organized, both in terms of message and infrastructure. But anything from the Democrats gaining a few seats to losing their hold on the chamber is entirely possible.

The Democrats are in a much more fortunate position, at least, in the Senate, where even after a couple of recruiting coups, the GOP is playing more defense than offense. The over-under there may still even be in positive territory for the Democrats -- say a net gain of +/- half a seat. The Democrats are further fortunate that the Senate, not the House, is the legislative bottleneck right now. If hypothetically the Democrats lost 25 seats in the House, which would make their margin 232-203, but added one seat to improve to 61 in the Senate, it's not clear how much worse off they'd be, particularly if the losses in the House were mostly to conservative, Blue Dog seats.

Still, there is not much time for the Administration to lose in pushing forward the Democratic agenda. The recent sluggishness in the recovery reduces, if not altogether eliminates, the possibility that the Democrats will have some kind of golden window of opportunity prior to the next midterms. Suppose that the recession ends tomorrow, and that the jobs recovery begins sometime around the Holidays. That's pretty much the best reasonable case for the Democrats. But would you really want to be pushing, say, a climate bill in the summer of 2010, with unemployment still in the high 8's or low 9's and an election right around the corner? At that point, the better strategy might be to redouble the efforts to keep as many seats as possible in the House and gain a couple in the Senate.

These next couple of months -- the time just before and after the Senate recesses in August -- are precious for the Democrats. Sure, they'd probably have an easier go of things if the recession hadn't gotten quite so deep. But it's nevertheless likely to be their best time to play offense until the spring of 2011, and possibly much longer than that.

Taxing the Rich: The (Politically) Smart Way to Pay for Health Care

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 20:13:00 +0000

The big news on the health care front this weekend is that House Democrats are prepared to call for a tax increase on the highest-earning Americans in order to pay for expanded health insurance. Although accounts of the exact details differ slightly, it appears that the tax hike would take the form of a "surcharge" of 1 percent on incomes from $280,000 to $400,000, 1.5 percent on incomes of $400,000 to $800,000 and 3 percent on incomes of $800,000 and above. This means that someone making $500,000 would pay about an extra $2,700 in taxes each year, and someone making $1,000,000 would pay an extra $13,200. The burden, in other words, would fall disproportionately on those who earn not just in the six figures, but rather in the seven figures, for whom much more of their income would become subject to the 3 percent rate.

I applaud the House for recognizing that the world doesn't end at $250,000 or $357,700 (the beginning of the top marginal income tax bracket as of last year). Throughout most of American history before Reagan, the top tax bracket kicked in at figures much higher than $357,700 in today's income: the equivalent of about $75 million in today's dollars, for example, during portions of FDR's presidency.

I also think the House has probably found the path of least resistance in terms of marshaling public support for financing health care. In June, the Kaiser Health Tracking Poll asked Americans about seven different mechanisms to pay for health care. The one solution that Kaiser missed was that of a national sales tax, so for that I use data from Rasmussen Reports instead, who ran a May poll indicating that 40 percent of Americans would support a national sales tax if it paid for health insurance. Increasing taxes on incomes of $250,000+ was supported by 68 percent of Americans in the Kaiser poll, tying it with increased cigarette and booze taxes for the most popular option:

Why pick the income tax hike rather than higher cigarette and alcohol taxes, which are just as popular? For one thing, it's not clear that higher cigarette and alcohol taxes alone would be enough to finance health care; they were generally being considered along with other funding mechanisms. For another, alcohol and particularly cigarette taxes would be quite regressive. For a third, we have to consider the political fallout from a tax once it actually hits taxpayers, and not just when it's in the proposal phase. Joe Six Pack might not think it's a horrible idea in the abstract to increase the price of beer, but when he's actually paying extra for his case of Michelob Ultra, he might not be so happy about it.

We should point out that raising taxes on the wealthy is probably not the most economically sound way to pay for health care, which would be to limit or remove the benefits tax exemption and tax benefits like all other types of earned income. This alternative, however, is considerably less popular and is opposed by many unions, who have generally negotiated very attractive benefits programs for their employees. In a perfect world, of course, these things wouldn't be mutually exclusive: you could remove the benefits tax exemption and make the tax code more progressive. But practically speaking, trying to do both those things might just give more people a reason to be unhappy. The surcharge proposed by Charlie Rangel and the House Democrats at least has the benefit of being simple.

The one thing the Democrats ought to be aware of, however, is that if this proposal is passed, it will probably become more difficult later on to repeal the Bush tax cuts for high-income earners. Raising taxes is always difficult, and I'm not sure the Democrats will get more than one bite at the apple, at least until/unless Barack Obama is re-elected in 2012 and has some fresh political capital. But this proposal, overall, is probably more attractive than repealing the Bush tax cuts, since it focuses more of the burden on $800K+ earners.

I'd expect the Republicans to begin arguing more vociferously that the right way to pay for health care is indeed to remove the benefits tax exemption. As I mentioned, they are on somewhat solid economic grounds for doing so. In reality, however, removing the benefits tax exemption is more of a political poison pill, a fairly unpopular policy which the Democrats would probably be blamed for later on.

Whether the Democrats can get enough Blue Dog votes to pass health insurance is another matter. The Blue Dogs tend to be split into two camps: the populist Blue Dogs, who usually hail from rural areas, and who are generally somewhat socially conservative but more economically liberal; they will probably have no great problems with this. Then there are the corporatist Blue Dogs, who tend to represent wealthier, suburban districts and are more libertarian in their ideology. Some resistance from that latter group is likely, although that would probably be the case regardless of what mechanism was selected to finance health care.

The bottom line is that the House wants to pay for health care in a way that almost 7 in 10 Americans can live with. That doesn't mean its passage is going to be easy -- but the bill won't fail for its lack of public popularity.

Obama Leading Pawlenty by 11 Points in His Own Back Yard

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Schaller) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:15:00 +0000

Minnesota continues to make news this week. Following word from Ohio that Barack Obama's approval numbers have edged down into mere mortal range, a new survey from Public Policy Polling of Minnesotans--those lucky souls now boasting a full contingent of two US senators--shows Obama beating Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty in a potential head-to-head presidential matchup, 51 percent to 40 percent. Obama beat John McCain in Minnesota last year by 10 points, carrying 45 counties.

Speaking of governors in the news, in the same poll Obama bests soon-to-be-former Gov. Sarah Palin in a hypothetical 2012 presidential matchup by an even wider margin, 56 percent to 35 percent. The fuller poll results show that Palin receives lower net approval from Minnesota women (34 percent approving, 56 percent disapproving) than men (44 percent, 49 percent).

The bad news for Obama is that his overall approval in the state has dipped; in fact, his approval/disapproval margin in Minnesota is just half (54 percent to 39 percent, net 15) what it was in April (60 percent to 30 percent). Independents approve of the president by just an 8-point margin, 49 percent to 41 percent. Like many Americans, Minnesotans are growing impatient.

PPP also polled respondents on Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar. She has a solid approval/disapproval margin of 26 points (56 percent approving, 30 disapproving), on the strength of 68 percent to 18 percent edge among self-described moderates.

UPDATE: Our own Ed Kilgore posted some thoughts of his own about this poll over at his home site, The Democratic Strategist. Worth a look.

In Illinois, Dems Dodge Bullet; GOP Shoots Selves in Foot

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:05:00 +0000

Friday afternoons seem to be bringing good news for Democrats.

Just when it looked like Republicans had some momentum in their battle to gain ground in the 2010 United States Senate elections comes word from the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza that Mark Kirk, a moderate Republican who represents Illinois' 10th Congressional District in Suburban Chicago, will not vacate his House seat to run for the Senate:

Illinois Rep. Mark Kirk (R) will not run for the open seat of Sen. Roland Burris (D) in 2010, a stunning reversal from just 48 hours ago when Kirk signaled to National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn (Texas) that he would make the race.

Kirk's decision [...] followed a meeting of the Illinois Republican congressional delegation on Thursday in which his colleagues refused to back Kirk in a primary against Illinois Republican Party Chairman Andy McKenna due, in large part, to his vote in favor of President Barack Obama's climate change bill.

Kirk had polled about evenly against Alexi Giannoulias, the most likely Democratic nominee, in an April survey conducted by Public Policy Polling. As I've stated before, I think Kirk would ultimately be a slight underdog in that race, as most of the undecideds in that poll were Democrats or independents and as Giannoulias is a reasonably formidable candidate. But clearly, Kirk would have at least a significant chance of claiming Barack Obama's old seat for Republicans, whereas a generic Republican like McKenna would seem to have almost none. If Kirk is out -- and Cillizza cautions that there are efforts being made to get him to reconsider -- the Republicans' chances of winning the seat goes from perhaps 35-40 percent to 5-10 percent.

Kirk has split his vote on the two most important measures that the the House has considered to date, voting against Barack Obama's stimulus package (as, of course, every House Republican did) but for Henry Waxman's climate bill. He is a moderate Republican, and he probably has to be given the parameters of his district, which has a PVI of D+6. While that PVI number slightly overstates the difficulty that Republicans face in this district -- wealthy, suburban districts like IL-10 tend to be relatively more red in Congressional elections than in Presidential ones -- this is not someone who can afford to be a bible-thumping, party-line conservative, especially if he goes on to represent the entire state of Illinois, which is three points more liberal than Kirk's district alone.

By no means is it always the case that every time a party is sacrificing electability for ideological fealty, it is making a mistake. In Florida, for instance, I have argued that Republicans supporting Marco Rubio rather than Charlie Crist are taking a perfectly justifiable risk: the ideological distance between the candidates is large, and Florida is conservative enough that Rubio would probably still be at least even-money to get elected against a frankly fairly weak Democratic field. Illinois, though, is 10 points to Florida's left, and the Democratic nominee there should ultimately be pretty strong.

It's also possible, of course, that there's something further behind this story. Kirk waffled for a long time on whether to enter the Senate race, only doing so earlier this week when Illinois AG Lisa Madigan said that she wouldn't. Perhaps he's worried about the risk he'd be taking in giving up his House seat to run for the Senate. Although there have been a few cases where a candidate won back his House seat after losing an election for the Senate -- Tennessee's Jim Cooper is one such example -- in most cases losing one's incumbency advantage plus being branded with the "loser" label has proven to be difficult to overcome, and running a losing race for the Senate is often a career-ender. It's also possible that Kirk wouldn't want to open up his personal and professional life to the sort of scrutiny it would face in a Senate run, as these things can get fairly nasty in Illinois.

The whole story, indeed, is a little bit strange. Why should Kirk particularly care what a lightweight like McKenna thinks about him when he'll presumably have the enthusiastic backing of John Cornyn and the NRSC? We'll simply have to wait and see whether there's anything more to develop. For the time being, however, this race looks like something of a casualty of the Republican leadership and tactical vacuum and would be a significant opportunity bypassed.

Third and Unfortunately Last Poker Update

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 02:53:00 +0000

Last poker post. I promise. Then it's back to "normal" around here.

I was eliminated from the World Series of Poker late yesterday evening after more than 15 hours of play over two days. The hand on which I managed to eliminate myself was oddly and almost emblematically reflective of the declaration I made earlier, which is that I was "willing to gamble chips in certain somewhat marginal situations that mostly boil down to luck." But first, a note on how I got there -- warning: nerdy, detailed poker content follows!

I started the second day with about 60,000 chips. I ran this total to as high as 105,000 about an hour or two after the start of play, as I picked up some decent hands early and won some medium-sized pots. But that number was grdually whittled down over the course of the afternoon -- not in any one particularly dramatic fashion, but rather via a number of hands where I might put 5,000 or 10,000 into the pot as the aggressor and ran into opponents who either caught some kind of hand or were willing to pretend that they did. I don't think I played these hands badly -- if you raise before the flop with KQ (king-queen), get a caller or two, and the flop comes down something "dry" like A82, it is usually correct to put at least one more bet into the pot when checked to. Your opponents will have a very difficult time continuing unless they have an ace or a set (three of a kind) of 8's or 2's, and you will win the pot right there against both better and worse hands.

But sometimes your opponent will in fact have a decent ace or something stronger and this "good" gamble will turn out badly -- this is just one of the hundreds of forms of bad luck in poker. Of course, matters can be complicated greatly if your opponents are willing to pretend that they have an ace even when they don't -- and I may have been running into a little bit of that too. From a 'meta' perspective, my play may have appeared to lack finesse and veer too much toward the tight and predictable side. This wasn't entirely the case -- in fact, I had in fact run a couple of moderately gutsy bluffs -- the problem was that they were successful so my opponents never saw my hand. I could have showed the bluffs after my opponents folded, of course, which is usually a beginners' move, but may have been correct in this instance. In any event, it's one thing to say in the abstract that, say, "against opponents who are capable of bluffing, you sometimes have to re-bluff the bluffer", and another thing to actually find the right time to apply that principle in any particular hand at the poker table -- and another thing still for that play to work to your advantage later in the afternoon.

In any event, by the time I got to the elimination hand, I was down to slightly under 50,000 chips. I think the number was closer to 45,000, in fact, but we'll call it 47,500 because it will make the math work out conveniently down below. I was not exactly a short stack, but was well below the average of about 80,000 chips and was going to be fairly happy to take an opportunity to gamble. This was especially so after a loose, extremely poor opponent to my right had been eliminated -- I had been playing somewhat conservatively before that because I knew there was a decent chance of getting all my chips in against him as a heavy favorite.

The hand that I picked up was pair of red 9's. A fairly loose opponent -- a young kid with hairy arms and sunglasses -- made a "standard" raise of about 2,500 chips ahead of me. I re-raised him to 7,500. I'd be happy to have this opponent either fold, in which case I'd pick up a few chips at no additional risk, or call, in which case I'd have position on him after the flop with a hand I felt pretty good about. The only thing I didn't want to see was a re-raise, because my stack was short enough that I'd probably be making a decision for all my chips.

But Hairy Arms didn't get a chance to re-raise. Instead a third opponent in late position did. This was not someone I wanted to see get involved in the hand -- he was a good, fairly tight, respectful player with a big stack in late position. Moreover, with two other players already involved in the hand, both of whom had raised, it was unlikely that he was making some sort of squeeze play. This was in all probability some kind of very good to outstanding hand, and the amount of the raise was large enough as to effectively put me all-in. The hairy-armed kid folded, which left the decision up to me.

I knew I was behind the good player's range of possible hands. The question was exactly how far behind, because the pot was offering me a bit of a discount. I had roughly 40,000 chips left. If I gambled those, I had a chance to win 60,000: the 47,500 the good player had committed to the pot, the 7,500 I'd bet earlier and could now only recover by remaining in the hand, the 2,500 that Hairy Arms had abandoned, and another roughly 2,500 in blinds and antes. That meant I only had to wind up with the best hand 40 percent of the time for a call to be correct from the standpoint of maximizing my chips.

Against a larger pair like kings, queens, or aces, I'd be a heavy underdog -- winning the pot only the 20 percent of the time or so that I pulled one of the two remaining 9's out of the deck (without his hand also improving). On the other hand, I was a slight (roughly 53-55 percent) favorite against any unpaired hand like ace-king, and it's a lot easier to have an unpaired hand than a paired one. There was also a slight -- although probably extremely slight -- chance that he'd make this re-raise with a smaller pair like 88, in which case I'd be the 4:1 favorite.

The question is exactly how tight the tight player was. About the tightest I could imagine him being in this spot would be to re-raise with AA, KK, QQ, AK, and half the time with JJ and AQs (a "suited" ace queen). Against that range, I was only about 35 percent to win the pot -- less than the 40 percent I needed. (You can run these numbers yourself by downloading this program). On the other hand, suppose that his range was just slightly looser, and consisted of all pairs 88 and higher, plus AK, AQ (whether suited or not) and a suited KQ. In that case, I'd win the hand 43 percent of the time and would probably want to continue with the hand.

I recognized immediately that the decision was very close -- I needed 40 percent of the pot to play on, and had somewhere between 35-43 percent. There were a couple of additional things that I thought about. First, there is some information in the fact that the hairy-armed kid had initially raised, and then folded. Odds are that did this with a hand consisting of two unpaired high cards -- like AJ or KQ. Suppose, for instance, that this player had flipped over AJ as he'd folded. This is excellent news for me -- it means that the good opponent was only half as likely to have AA and JJ, two of the hands that I didn't want to run into -- and also, that if he had AK, he'd be less likely to hit an ace on the board and improve to beat my pair. Of course, we don't know that the hairy-armed kid had *exactly* AJ. But overall, his range of hands is worth an extra point or two's worth of equity for me by deadening my opponent's cards.

The other, more important thing I started to think about was how much "life" in the tournament was worth to me. This isn't like a cash game, where if you go bust, you can reach into to your wallet and buy more chips. Once you go broke, you have to wait a year to play again.

There are a lot of good players that would never take this sort of gamble -- their philosophy is that so long as you have a chip and a chair, you have a chance to win, and that being good players, they'll find better spots to get their money in than what is essentially a breakeven decision. There are a couple of others -- Chris Ferguson, for instance -- that treat tournament chips almost exactly as they would cash game chips and aren't willing to sacrifice very much equity at all for survival.

If I folded and opted for guaranteed survival, I'd have 40,000 chips left -- not a cripplingly low amount, but enough that I'd probably have to make another all-in decision fairly soon. There has been very little work done on the relative values of different stack sizes -- is an 80,000-chip stack worth exactly twice as much as a 40,000-chip stack? Less than twice as much? More than twice as much? Most of the theory points toward the "less than" answer, and this is almost certainly the case late in a tournament once everyone is in the money. But we were far from the cash bubble, and there is a lot more work to be done on what it means at this stage. Having a smaller stack limits your options in certain ways, but there are also elements of zugzwang in poker where having a limited set of options is helpful.

What was a little more tangible is that if I folded the hand, it probably meant I'd have to come back on play on Friday (after an off-day today) since there was only half an hour to go before that evening's session ended. There is an opportunity cost to my being out here in Vegas -- the time I spend at the poker tables is time I can't spend working on the blog, working on my book, or doing consulting projects, all of which are very demanding on my time. Moreover, the fact of the matter is that even in my off-time, it's just harder for me to get work done here than it is back at home in New York. With roughly 40,000 in chips, which is what I'd have if I'd folded, I'd probably have to at least triple and probably quadruple my stack to get into the money at the end of Day 3 -- which meant that odds were I'd wind up staying for two additional days with little tangible return to show for it.

So let's say, for instance, that I'm 38.5 percent to win against my opponent's actual range of hands when I need 40.0 percent to continue; that means my decision would be incorrect by about 1,500 tournament chips. The cash value of 1,500 tournament chips is about $500. If folding means, say, 10 additional hours of lost productivity on average, that is worth quite a bit more to me than $500.

However, it's easy to poke holes in this logic. For one thing, playing in the tournament is fun -- otherwise I would not be doing it in the first place. And while I value my time highly, it is worth nowhere near as that of some top-flight professionals like Phil Ivey, who can make literally thousands of dollars an hour on average playing cash games. For the vast majority of players, both professional and amateur, playing the tournament is more of a lifestyle decision than a cash decision.

But for better or for worse, I was thinking about these things. If things had been just slightly different -- if I had another 10,000 chips (or 10,000 fewer!), if the bad player on my right hadn't busted on the previous hand, if my hand were tens rather than nines, I wouldn't have had to think about them -- my decision would be (comparatively) easy. Maybe I was thinking about them wrongly and maybe I shouldn't have been thinking about them. But I was.

After about two minutes of contemplation, I called and went all-in for my few remaining chips, instantly regretting it, hoping for the best but expecting the worst. My opponent flipped over pocket queens, the board bricked off, and I shook his hand and went to get a beer.

Democrats do Better Among the Most and Least Educated

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Gelman) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 01:18:00 +0000

This is not newsworthy, but I think it's good to have the numbers along with our vague impressions of how young/old people and more/less educated people are voting.

These are based on raw Pew data, reweighted to adjust for voter turnout by state, income, and ethnicity. No modeling of vote on age, education, and ethnicity. I think our future estimates based on the 9-way model will be better, but these are basically OK, I think. All but six of the dots in the graph are based on sample sizes greater than 30.

Coleman for Governor?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Schaller) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:07:00 +0000

Now that the endless recount battle between Al Franken and Norm Coleman for Minnesota's senate seat is over, Coleman is a private citizen. He's also, of course, eligible to run for governor next year. Might he?

Minnesota-based blogger Joe Bodell reports results from a new Public Policy Polling survey of Minnesotans that shows Coleman competitive against potential Democratic-Farmer-Labor gubernatorial nominees. He's trailing but within the margin of error in potential matchups against Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak and former senator Mark Dayton, and leading beyond the margin of error against House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher. But, given Coleman's name recognition, Bodell thinks the results ought to discourage Coleman from running.

Via email, Bodell told me: "This poll contains some really bad news for Norm Coleman. Universal name-recognition can be a blessing, but when a legal process gets stretched out as tortuously as the recount and court challenge did, Minnesotans start getting tired of the players really quickly -- especially those seen to be obstructing the People's business. Could Coleman overcome the bad taste left by his obstruction of Sen. Franken's seating? Probably. Eighteen months is a lifetime in politics. But losing to two of the three leading DFL candidates, including one who isn't yet tremendously well-known in Greater Minnesota, is a really bad sign for his chances at a political resurrection."

Indeed, according to PPP, 52 percent view Coleman negatively, just 38 percent positively. Moreover, 54 percent say the way Coleman handled the recount against Franken makes them less likely to vote for him in the future, more than twice the 26 percent who say it makes them more likely to do so.

For the record, although Minnesota has no constitutional term-limit provision for governor, Republican Tim Pawlenty has already announced he will not seek a third term. Coleman is out of work now, and he's not exactly an unknown in the state. Though he has to deal with those negatives, he might be Minnesota Republicans' best chance--if, that is, he's willing to risk the possibility of another close, or even not-so-close, but painful defeat.

Is Obama Improving America's Global Image?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Schaller) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:30:00 +0000

In 2008, Barack Obama presented himself as a fresh face on the scene not only to Americans but to citizens of the world. Given his racial identity and name, he certainly wasn't the kind of president people around the world expected to win the presidency. Traveling in four very different countries on behalf of the State Department last year to talk about the presidential election--Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and South Africa--most people I met expressed two sentiments: one, that they wanted Obama to win; and two, they were convinced Americans would never elect him.

Now that we have, has global opinion about Obama and the United States changed accordingly? According to a new poll of citizens from 20 countries (including the United States) by World Public Opinion.org, the respective answers are "yes" and "no": Obama is viewed mostly positively, but attitudes toward America generally are not improving much, if at all, in most countries.

Not surprisingly, views about the role the United States plays in the world are generally more favorable in the African and western European countries surveyed. Equally unsurprising is the fact that citizens in Muslim nations view us warily. Among non-Muslim countries in Asia, citizens in South Korean, Taiwan and India view America's role quite favorably, with the Chinese slightly unfavorable overall.

The report summary reads, in part:

Asked whether they have confidence in Barack Obama to "do the right thing regarding world affairs," for all nations (excluding the US) an average of 61 percent say they have some or a lot of confidence.

But asked how the US treats their government, few--on average just one in four--say it "treats us fairly," while two-thirds say that it "abuses its greater power to make us do what the US wants." Overall, these views are no better than they were in 2008. Only three countries diverged from this view (Kenya, Nigeria, and Germany).

In all nations polled, majorities say that the US "use(s) the threat of military force to gain advantages." Majorities range from 61 percent in India and Poland to 92 percent in South Korea and include America's close ally Great Britain (83%). On average, across all nations polled, 77 percent perceive the US as threatening. Even 71 percent of Americans agree.

Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org comments, "Most people around the world seem to have a positive view of the young new captain at the helm of the American ship of state, though many people see this huge ship as still carrying forward domineering policies."

Of course, a favorable view of the American president is neither necessary nor sufficient to creating a favorable view of the United States. But it doesn't hurt. And surely Obama cannot be expected to change global opinion in just six months. Considering how much damage George W. Bush did to global attitudes toward the United States, if there's any chance for these numbers to improve, Obama's global popularity is a start.

A Republican Hot Streak?

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:58:00 +0000

A full update to our Senate race rankings is going to have to wait another day or two, but for the first time since we started this project, five of the top ten races will consist of Democratic-held seats. That's because of the turn of events which has unfolded in Illinois, where Lisa Madigan now says she won't run for Senate (this isn't that surprising; that she won't run for governor either is) and IL-10 Republican Mark Kirk, who was none-to-subtly waiting for Madigan's decision, now says he will.

Kirk is probably still an underdog against the eventual Democratic nominee -- most likely State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, a 33-year-old friend of Barack Obama's who has considerable political upside. But the race is now going to be competitive, whereas if Madigan had run, or Kirk hadn't, it probably wouldn't have been. And this isn't the only recruitment coup that the Republicans have had of late. Earlier this weak, New Hampshire Attorney General Kelly Ayotte said she'd challenge Paul Hodes for Judd Gregg's seat in New Hampshire, which substantially improves the Republicans' chances of holding on. And of course, Charlie Crist is running in Florida (even if half of Republican establishment wish he weren't). Meanwhile Roy Cooper, the Democrats' preferred candidate in North Carolina, won't be running there.

By no means have Republicans batted 1.000. They missed a big opportunity in Pennsylvania when Tom Ridge declined to run. Meanwhile, it looks like they may get a serious race in Louisiana when they were hoping to avoid one, with U.S. Rep. Charlie Mealncon apparently set to challenge David Vitter.

Increasingly, however, the Republicans have a bit of momentum in the Senate picture. And the White House's decision to recruit both Janet Napolitano and Kathleen Sebelius into their cabinet -- two women who were uniquely qualified to mount competitive races in Arizona and Kansas, respectively -- is looking increasingly suspect.

Palin the Polarizer

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Schaller) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:10:00 +0000

The Obama campaign's response to John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his 2008 running mate was to argue that the Arizona senator had ruined his narrative of being the seasoned, experienced candidate by coupling himself with an unseasoned novice. An online article in Religion Dispatches written this week by Robert Jones and Daniel Cox confirms the Obama camp's assertion that McCain ruined his story, but suggests that it had less to do with the Arizona senator's experiential claims than his ability to present himself as a non-polarizing, post-partisan politician.

Using numbers from a post-election poll, Jones and Cox conclude that Palin damaged McCain's brand because her style evoked the kind of polarizing politics that Americans had grown sick of--and to which, not coincidentally, Barack Obama offered himself as an antidote.

Noting that her selection only had a net positive effect on support for the Republican ticket among white evangelicals, with a net negative effect among white Catholics and Independents (as depicted above), Jones and Cox ask:

So what explains the large gap for many between identifying with Palin’s values and supporting her as a candidate? Part of the explanation certainly has to be her many now-famous stumbles, public gaffes, and lack of knowledge about key policies. But there is another important explanation. There is mounting evidence that the American electorate is turning away from so-called “values voter” wedge politics that Palin represented (recall that Palin launched her career by using an anti-abortion rights hit piece against her opponent in the Wasilla mayoral race, an historically non-partisan position).

In our post-election survey, an overwhelming majority (73%) of American voters agreed that “people of faith should advocate for policies that protect the interests of all and promote the common good” compared to only 22% who preferred pursuing “policies that protect their values and way of life.” By a nearly 2-to-1 margin, those favoring a common good politics said Palin’s addition made them less likely to support the GOP ticket (27% less likely vs. 15% more likely).

One might quibble with these results on (at least) two grounds. First, the poll was taken after the election McCain-Palin had just lost, so it's possible that respondents overstated their negative views of her. The second thing that's hard to ignore is the fact that at least half the voters overall, and within each subgroup, say Palin made no difference to their decision. In short, she either didn't matter, or if she did Palin evoked a polarizing sentiment that, on balance, hurt McCain more than it helped him.

"The avalanche of coverage since Palin’s resignation indicates that pundits are likely to continue their conjectures about Palin’s motives and political future," write Jones and Cox. "But the numbers reveal her limitations as a national political figure, and her serious liabilities among virtually every religious and demographic group outside of the GOP base. Moreover, the numbers reveal that voters across the political spectrum are looking not only for candidates who share their values, but for candidates who can ably serve the common good."

As I said yesterday, whatever her plans, I think Palin's ambitions in presidential politics were significantly if not irrevocably damaged by the sudden announcement of her resignation. Her type of politics may sell in Alaska--though Jones and Cox note that Palin's approval numbers have plummeted at home, too--but she just doesn't sell nationally. She's not merely fighting the last war, but the last generation's war. And that generation and today's generation have largely grown tired of fighting.

But Palin will continue to serve as an icon for those still fighting those wars. Which is why I'm betting she will end up as a television or radio personality, a position ideally suited to her style of politics and her specific appeal to a small and shrinking, yet rabid and animated segment of the American public. Palin may not have a lot of governing experience, but she does have enough experience (and appetite) as a national polarizing agent, a role that seems to come to her naturally. Once Palin gets out of Alaska, does her book tour and, presumably, abandons her presidential ambitions--or even if she runs and fails miserably in 2012--she will be free to make the transformation into her truer, more natural political self.

Oh No, Ohio?

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:35:00 +0000

A Quinnipiac poll today has Barack Obama's approval rating tanking in Ohio: he's now at 49 percent approve and 44 percent disapprove in the Buckeye State, according to Quinnipiac, whereas back in May, they had him at a healthy 62-31.

Obama's approval ratings have declined nationwide by perhaps 3-5 points since early May. I have little doubt that this has mostly to do with the flagging economy. Each day, a few more voters are going to blame Obama for the economic troubles that we're in. If the economy seems to be showing some "green shoots", as it did in March and April, then Obama will be fine -- voters don't expect the economy to turn around overnight. But if the economy isn't showing any signs of life -- and most of the economic news for the past 45 days or so has been pretty grim -- he'll fail to keep pace with those modest, but ever-increasing, expectations, and his approval ratings will decline.

Ohio, of course, has suffered more than most states from the recession. It's employment rate, at 10.8 percent in May, is the eighth-highest in the nation, and has increased by 3.5 points (and counting) since Election Day:

States with Largest Increases in Unemployment Rate since November

What Ohio hasn't done, though, is suffer uniquely from the recession. It doesn't have it nearly as bad as its neighbor, my native state of Michigan, where unemployment is now at 14.1 percent. And what are Obama's approval ratings like in Michigan?

Not so bad. A Rasmussen poll in mid-June put Obama's approval there at 59-39, including 39 percent strongly approving (and remember, Rasmussen has tended to have very bearish numbers on Obama overall). An EPIC-MRA poll of Michigan in late May, meanwhile, had 61 percent rating his job performance as "excellent" or "pretty good".

The point is not that Obama's approval ratings aren't suffering because of the economy, nor that they might not be suffering more in states where the economy is worse. (Whoa, too many double-negatives there). I just doubt that there any problems Obama has that are so unique to Ohio that you wouldn't also see them manifested in Michigan or Pennsylvania (where Obama's approval numbers have also generally been fine). As such, I think the headlines this poll has generated have been a little overwritten. It's not that, "Oh no, Obama is going to lose Ohio in 2012!". It's more just another indication that voters won't have an infinite amount of patience with Obama on the economy, and if by 2012 the economy still hasn't improved (in which case, we'll be referring to the recession as "GD2"), or has double-dipped, or has improved sluggishly at the cost of a huge run-up in the national debt, Obama is going to be in trouble in Ohio as well as most of the other 49 states.

Poker Update: I'm #441

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:37:00 +0000

As you may know, I'm in Las Vegas right now for the World Series of Poker. It's actually been quite a productive trip: I've met a lot of extremely well-known poker players as well as Congressman Barney Frank, who was very impressive. More on those and other things, including the usual business of politics that we cover around here, later on. In the meantime, for of you who feel like indulging me, there's a bit more on my experience in the poker tournament below the fold.

* My experience yesterday can be broken down into three phases:

- In the first phase, I got poor cards but played pretty well, and made a little bit of money.
- In the second phase, I got poor cards and played poorly, and lost a fair bit of money.
- In the third phase, I got terrific cards and played well enough, and made a lot of money.

The bottom line is that things turned out pretty well. Everyone starts out the tournament with 30,000 chips. I finished the day with slightly over 61,000 chips -- fewer than Los Angeles Lakers point guard Jordan Farmar, who is apparently a very good poker player and was briefly among the chip leaders, but more than Ray Romano, who lost all his chips and busted out of the event. This means I'm currently in 441st place (or thereabouts) out of the 6,500 or so players who entered the tournament. Half the field continues play today; I have the day off and then resume tomorrow.

* Playing ten hours of poker -- with 2+ hours of breaks in between -- as I did yesterday, is absolutely exhausting. I'm not sure if that makes poker a "sport", but it's closer than you'd think. Physical stamina is more of a consideration in an event like the "Main Event" of World Series of Poker than is generally understood, the eventual winner of which will have played something like 90 hours or cards to claim his or her title.

* I know that I'm not the best player in the field of 6,500 or so that entered. I'm certainly not among the 100 best, and maybe not among the 1,000 best. My poker aptitude, mind you, is plenty high. But ability is the sum of aptitude and experience, and I just don't have very much experience at all in these live, big-money tournament settings. Nor is no limit hold 'em, the game played in this tournament, my best one; back when I was playing regularly, I made most of my money from another variant known as limit hold 'em, where all bets are of a fixed size.

But this is true in many aspects of life: the best player/person does not always win. What makes poker somewhat unique is that understanding one's limits can significantly affect (and improve) one's strategy. For instance, I'm willing to gamble chips in certain somewhat marginal situations that mostly boil down to luck, because those chips are less valuable to me than they might be to a world-class player who can find a better spot to deploy them. On the other hand, when I got myself in trouble yesterday, it was usually because I played my hand in such a way that forced me to try to "outplay" a top-level opponent. This doesn't mean that such confrontations can be entirely avoided -- in spite of what it might seem like if you watch the the (highly-edited) version of the tournament on ESPN, you can't win a tournament like this one just by pushing all-in every hand. And there are times when I feel like I definitely have an edge -- even against great players. But I have to be realistic about the fact that, when there is a point when a superior player and I each think we are outplaying one another, I'm going to be the one getting pwned more often than not.

The point is, though, that of the 6,500 people who entered the tournament, I'd guess that as many as half of them really do think deep down that they're the best (or one of the best) poker players in the world. Of course, only one (or a few) of them can be right. But the rest are liable to take the wrong sorts of opportunities against the wrong sorts of opponents.

Sarah Palin (R, Asterisk)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Schaller) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:27:00 +0000

I really didn't want to spend the Fourth of July weekend thinking about the personal-slash-political saga of Sarah Palin. But the thing about Palin, whether you adore or despise her, is that she forces you to deal with her--which, when you think about it, is a quintessentially American trait.

The reasons for her resignation, whatever they turn out to be, will matter to the present and unfolding story, but not to her larger fate. The fact that Palin resigned now--no less the elliptical and sometimes eerie way she announced her intentions--likely signals the end of her career as a national politician to be taken seriously and the start of her transformation into a political novelty. Yet Palin's personal saga will continue to attract attention and garner headlines. Maybe she'll become a television personality, a career she pursued at one point in her life. So, yes, we may still have to deal with Sarah and all that she represents.

Why? What is it about Palin that we find so compelling, even fascinating? Why is her every move scrutinized? Why can we not look away?

The short answer may be that she is a late-stage warrior in a culture war that, while still ongoing, has diminished into something more of a skirmish. Abortion aside, many of the polarizing issues of the past two generations--Vietnam, race, sexual mores, feminism, popular culture--have lost a lot of their capacity to galvanize and divide us. For those still fighting that war, in 2008 Palin emerged as an icon and a vessel for restoration; for those who had grown tired of that war she was like a political burr, an uncomfortable reminder of a political time thought to be happily put behind us.

The longer answer has to do with the fact that she is young and a woman, which only magnifies sentiments on both sides of the Palin divide. It was easy to dismiss with a polite smile or a roll of the eyeballs the late-stage career grumblings of Jesse Helms or Strom Thurmond; you knew their days were numbered, that they were walking anachronisms slated to join other curiosities in the museum of post-war American politics.

Not so with Sarah. She is younger than Barack Obama, after all. She is attractive. (I stopped counting how many women have mentioned to me, unsolicited and unprompted, Palin's cheekbone structure.) And so we have in her a woman cheerily and cheekily railing against the Great Society even though she was still in diapers the day Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. As colleague Phil Klinkner and I have argued, the 2008 coalition that beat her and John McCain was in many ways LBJ's revenge for the politics that devoured his presidency by 1968 and set into motion the culture war that dominated American politics for the next 40 years. All of which makes Palin the oddest of political hybrids: the spritely scold, the young curmudgeon.

I don't like to talk about politics at social functions with family and friends, especially during holidays. But of course Palin's name was on many lips this weekend. Hearing people speak at length about her for the first time since last autumn, I was reminded just how strongly people feel about her. Other than perhaps Ted Kennedy, I cannot think of another living politician who generates such passionate, unambivalent opinions. (And yes, I include George W. Bush and Barack Obama in that accounting.) It's cliche to say so, but she really is a one-woman American political Rorschach test. And just as I find it painfully difficult to converse with Palinites, I can see them looking back at me like I'm some alien as I explain why she so offends me.

Palin's decision to resign may push her off the presidential election stage, but not out of our collective consciousness. She will soon become an asterisk in presidential politics, even as her grip on the national psyche persists.

How Can the Climate Bill Get to 60 Votes?

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Silver) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:11:00 +0000

Last week, we commissioned an analysis of voting on the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in the Senate, which was narrowly approved by the House with a relatively high amount of crossing of party lines: 44 Democratic nay votes, and 8 Republican yeas. The model used several variables, including lobbying contributions, per-capita carbon emissions in each state, and a Congressman's ideology, to attempt to explain/predict their vote on the climate bil. Today, we'll take that same analysis and apply it prospectively to the Senate.

But first, a few assumptions:

1. Al Franken has now jointed the Senate but we do not have any votes for him on which to form an ideology score. I am going to give him the numbes of his idol, Paul Wellsone. Does anybody really have a problem with my assuming that Franken, like Wellstone, is going to be very, very liberal? Didn't think so.
2. Lobbying contributions are scaled to reflect the fact that Senators raise more on average than Representatives do.
3. A more controversial assumption is that we're assuming that there won't be nay votes from the left, of which there were almost certainly three (DeFazio, Kucinich, Stark) in the House. In other words, the model as I've run it here treats those three as yea votes. The reason I'm making this assumption is because: (a) it's not so clear that DeFazio, Kucinih and Stark would have voted against the poll if their votes were needed for passage, and (b) this is just not something that seems to be in the gameplan of the progressives in the Senate; Russ Feingold of Wisconsin every once in a blue moon winds up being far enough to the left that he votes with the Republicans, but that's juts about it.

And a few caveats:

1. The Senate will be voting on a different bill than the House's version. The Senate's version might be more or less favorable to, say, farm-state interests than the House's, which could in turn alter the percentages.
2. The overall political tides may have shifted by the time the Senate considers the bill because of changes to the economy, Obama's approval rating, gas prices, and perhaps even the weather, etc.
3. The key vote in the Senate is not really the vote on final passage, which this model would seem to get at, but rather the vote on cloture, or breaking the filibuster, which would require 60 votes. It's not all that uncommon for a senator to vote for cloture and then against the underlying bill, or vice versa, although it seems to happen less often for major issues like climate change legislation.
4. These percentages are based on the relatively limited amount of knowledge embodied in the seven variables in the model; that should not be read to imply that there aren't other factors, both tangible and intangible, that wouldn't have a significant impact.

With all of that said, here are how the 100 senators rank in order of most to least likely to vote for the bill.

The only way any of these senators would vote against the climate bill is if they're opposing it from the left, a possibility which we're specifically ignoring for this analysis for the reasons described above. Diane Feinstein can be weird, I guess, but is unlikely to be so on climate legislation sponsored by her colleague Barbara Boxer -- plus California is a low-carbon state that already has some alternative-energy infrastructure in place and could be a big net beneficiary from this bill.

There are a few bullets for the Democrats to dodge here, but none of them would seem to be fatal:

* Joe Liberman is Joe Lieberman. But he also sponsored a cap-and-trade bill last year, takes no money from the coal industry, and lives in a deeply blue, low-carbon state.
* Tom Carper relies pretty heavily on corporate donations, but the coal industry isn't really one of his suitors and he usually falls into line on major Democratic policy priorities.
* Harry Reid takes a lot of coal money, although he also takes a lot of nuclear and alternative energy money and is, of course, the Majority Leader. And hard as it is to believe considering all the carbon that must be consumed to air-condition the Vegas Strip (it's 2 in the morning here and still 90 degrees outside), Nevada is not a particularly carbon-intensive state. So I don't think Reid's yea vote is in much doubt, but the one way he could be problematic is if he's unwilling to compromise on nuclear energy -- a big chip the Democrats have in their arsenal -- because of concerns over Yucca Mountain.

A much more serious concern for the Democrats is Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who voted against cloture on last year's bill. Brown's public statements have generally indicated lukewarm support for the bill, but also that he and the two senators from Michigan -- Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow -- are going to require some compromises to protect the auto industry. At the end of the day, a lot has already been done to assist the auto industry, and Brown, Levin and Stabenow are mainline liberal Democrats -- their votes can probably be whipped, and their demands for compromise probably revealed to be bluffs. But their votes on the climate bill aren't as certain as the analysis indicates.

Now we get into a set of Democrats who can occasionally be conservative, sometimes in order to protect corporate interests. But the overall combination that befalls each one breaks down in favorable enough ways that the Democrats probably have nothing really to worry about. Mark Warner, for instance, while taking a lot of money from coal, also takes some money from alt/nuclear and lives in a fairly low-carbon state.

These six votes would get the Democrats to 50, which would allow Joe Biden to break the tie -- if not for that whole filibuster thing. You're probably seeing some names here that you're a bit surprised to see. Montana consumes a fair amount of carbon, and Max Baucus is pretty conservative, which seems like a bad combination -- until you see how much money he's getting from alt/nuclear PACs -- the most of any senator on a per-cycle basis. Arlen Specter was generally thought to be sympathetic to cap-and-trade legislation -- and that was before he turned into a Democrat. North Carolina's economy is fairly low-carbon, which should help to prevent Kay Hagan from defecting. The other two senators on this list, however, could be more problematic for the Democrats, as Claire McCaskill has already tweeted her concerns about cap-and-trade, and as Tim Johnson voted against cloture last year -- although South Dakota's economy, for whatever reason, is much less carbon-intensive than North Dakota's.

These are three senators for whom the percentages tended to move quite a bit based on relatively small tweaks to the model. Snowe and Collins are almost certainly going to be necessary parts of any path to 60 votes and are almost certainly going to be easier gets than at least half a dozen Democrats. And I tend to think the model has erred a bit pessimistic on them here. But that doesn't mean their votes are assured.

Mark Begich, in Alaska, might be the more interesting case. Alaska is such an outlier in so many ways in terms of energy production that it's hard to know exactly how all the incentives line up, but Begich claimed on his campaign website that he was a support of cap-and-trade, and Alaska also has its doses of environmentalism. If the Democrats decide to pull some trigger to get Lisa Murkowski's vote -- ANWR drilling, for example, which is highly popular in Alaska -- they'll undoubtedly be safe on Begich by that point.

To this point, even if everything has gone perfectly for the Democrats, that would still only put them up to 53 out of the filibuster-breaking 60. They'd then need to find 7 votes out of this group of 9, none of which are going to be easy:

North Dakota, West Virginia and Louisiana rank 2nd through 4th in per-capita carbon emissions. Five of their six senators also happen to be Democrats. If the Democrats could swap, say, Rockefeller and Byrd for two seats in Arizona, the going would be significantly easier on this issue. Byrd in particular: let's face it -- it's not clear how many more votes Robert Byrd is going to cast in the Senate period, and at the end of the day, I don't see one of his final ones being something that could significantly impair the coal industry in West Virginia. The path of least resistance to 60 votes probably lies elsewhere. Rockefeller, though, voted aye on cloture on last year's bill and is probably attainable.

Mary Landireu and Byron Dorgan, on the other hand, voted 'no' on cloture last year. Dorgan chairs the Democratic Policy Committee and could perhaps be more vulnerable to peer pressure than certain other senators, but I don't know what you do with the more conservative Landireu, unless you can spin some offshore drilling compromise to her liking or persuade her of the linkage between global warming and hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. Then there's Ben Nelson, who's a problem for the Democrats on nearly everything, plus Evan Bayh, Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor, who can probably expect a few late-night phone calls from Rahm Emanuel.

One pattern we've seen this year, but which might be too recent to be picked up by DW-NOMINATE scores, is that the House Republicans seem to be sticking much more to the party line than the Senate Republicans. That could make these votes a bit more gettable than the numbers above indicate. Martinez voted 'yea' on cloture last year and Florida is a low-carbon state which might suffer significantly from a sea-level rise or an increase in Atlantic Hurricanes, but the fact that he's retiring may actually harm the Democrats, since I'd gather that cap-and-trade is reasonably popular down in Florida (which passed a statewide permutation on the policy last year). Speaking of which, I'd love to see some polling on cap-and-trade in New Hampshire, which is both pro-business and pro-environment. John McCain pushed for a cap-and-trade policy on the campaign trail but has since claimed Obama is going about doing it in the wrong way. Perhaps he could be persuaded to vote to break the filibuster even if he votes no on the underlying bill. The one case where the model seems to be pretty clearly out to lunch is that of Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who has already struck a highly skeptical tone about cap-and-trade.

The two names you sometimes hear mentioned from this list are Lindsay Graham and Lisa Murkowski. Graham has not been as "bipartisan" on core issues as he seems to want to make himself out to be, however, and lives in a state with very high unemployment. Perhaps you could get him if you added some offshore drilling provisions, which would probably benefit South Carolina, but I wouldn't expect it to be easy. Murkowski, likewise, sounds basically skeptical but perhaps open to a compromise; again, the permutations of the way the bill might refract onto Alaska's economy are complicated, and so I won't feign complete knowledge here.

* * *

Overall, this is a slightly better assessment than I expected. Although the model considers only 52 Senators to be more likely than not to vote for the bill, there are somewhere between 62-66 votes that are perhaps potentially in play. But Joe Mauer-like precision will be required in targeting the undecided, and further compromises would almost certainly be needed, some of them designed to placate as few as one senator. The question is how many ornaments the Democrats could place on the Christmas Tree before it starts to collapse under its own weight.