Despite what you might read on the internet, its actually quite easy to demonstrate that Nate Silver's election models where very possibly flawed.
According to Silver, September was a disastrous month for Romney. He started September down 47.9% to 50.9% to in the popular vote and a 26.9% chances of winning, and he ended it down 47.4% to 51.5%, and only 14.3%. Yet according to exit polls September was a fantastic month for Romney. He won the 8.7% of voters who decided in September 53% - 45.3%. In contrast, Obama won the 68.8% of voters who decided before 52.6% - 46.3%, and the 20.7% who decided after 49.7% - 46.3%. The last cohort, of course, includes some number of people who thought they had decided in September and then changed their minds, increasing Romney's implied September surge.
It may be that exit polls should be taken with a grain of salt or that masses of people mistakenly remembered the first debate as having taken place in September. But, at the very least, they call Silver's model into question.
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
The Next Four Years
As the parallels between 2004 and 2012 are striking and informative, it is worth recalling the Democrat's successful strategy.
They escalated, not moderated, their vocal criticism of the Iraq war, but did not block -- as they could have -- Bush's courageous and eventually successful "surge". At the same time they adopted positions -- on the deficit and corruption -- that Republicans once championed. One might say, on policy, they outflanked, rather than moderated. On the other hand, in 2006, they made a calculated effort to run moderate congressional candidates.
A similar G.O.P strategy would side-step the "big" issues like taxes and healthcare. The G.O.P. has no self-interest in negotiating Obama out of his job-killing gambits as they once did for Clinton. Instead, they would be well advised to focus on issues of government transparency and effectiveness and wait while core Democratic constituencies make it impossible for Democrats to deliver on their promises of good government (there is, in the end, a reason Mike Bloomberg ran as a Republican/Independent). A savvy G.O.P. might demand Obama propose a concrete deficit reduction plan, and then adopt it wholesale in exchange for a basket of items like ending baseline budgeting, closing campaign finance loopholes Obama exploited, auditing the Fed, requiring government adherence to standard, instead of Enron, accounting practices, an independent investigation into the shocking lack of criminal prosecutions following the financial meltdown, and constitutional amendments limiting debt-to-gdp in the long term to under 90% and banning future state bailouts.
On the other hand, what was new about 2012 should not be ignored either. In particular, the Obama campaign's retail organization. While our founding fathers may have envisioned a politics in which reason displaced passion, the reality is that voting choices are more more often driven by social dynamics than rational reflection. Obama's neighborhood campaign offices served as hubs for Obama-voting communities. If the G.O.P. wants to compete for minority votes, it will not be enough to, simply, communicate shared beliefs. Republicans must plant their own community centers in minority neighborhoods.
They escalated, not moderated, their vocal criticism of the Iraq war, but did not block -- as they could have -- Bush's courageous and eventually successful "surge". At the same time they adopted positions -- on the deficit and corruption -- that Republicans once championed. One might say, on policy, they outflanked, rather than moderated. On the other hand, in 2006, they made a calculated effort to run moderate congressional candidates.
A similar G.O.P strategy would side-step the "big" issues like taxes and healthcare. The G.O.P. has no self-interest in negotiating Obama out of his job-killing gambits as they once did for Clinton. Instead, they would be well advised to focus on issues of government transparency and effectiveness and wait while core Democratic constituencies make it impossible for Democrats to deliver on their promises of good government (there is, in the end, a reason Mike Bloomberg ran as a Republican/Independent). A savvy G.O.P. might demand Obama propose a concrete deficit reduction plan, and then adopt it wholesale in exchange for a basket of items like ending baseline budgeting, closing campaign finance loopholes Obama exploited, auditing the Fed, requiring government adherence to standard, instead of Enron, accounting practices, an independent investigation into the shocking lack of criminal prosecutions following the financial meltdown, and constitutional amendments limiting debt-to-gdp in the long term to under 90% and banning future state bailouts.
On the other hand, what was new about 2012 should not be ignored either. In particular, the Obama campaign's retail organization. While our founding fathers may have envisioned a politics in which reason displaced passion, the reality is that voting choices are more more often driven by social dynamics than rational reflection. Obama's neighborhood campaign offices served as hubs for Obama-voting communities. If the G.O.P. wants to compete for minority votes, it will not be enough to, simply, communicate shared beliefs. Republicans must plant their own community centers in minority neighborhoods.
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Very Good Debt to Have
Too much has been made of exit polls showing Obama won voters whose primary consideration was "cares about people like me" as that question is almost certainly a dog whistle for "will not vote for a white man".
More damning for Romney were exit polls showing voters believed Obama's economic policies, more than Romney's, benefited the middle class. For all the talk that the G.O.P. must moderate, this may indicate that a return to strong economically conservative policies that can demonstrate how progressive policies crush the middle class is now needed.
An illustrative case in point is the situation of recent middle-class college grads, entering a workforce with six figure debt, but without marketable skills or decent opportunities. Conservatives can convincingly argue that government subsidies have mostly served to increase middle-class indebtedness, while enriching college administrators who, in return, do their part for Democrats. A Conservative could point out that a college education is (alongside housing), the largest investment middle-class families make, and ought be treated as such: Colleges ought have the same basic fiduciary obligations to their student/clients and responsibilities to disclose/report (eg, on historical economic outcomes of students in particular majors or who have taken particular classes or Professors) that other financial service providers have. Democrats who would oppose this would plainly be selling out middle class families. In this light, the administration's assertion that this is "very good debt to have" could have been made toxic.
Similar avenues also resonate: Recent college grad's job-prospects are particularly sensitive to entrepreneur killing over-regulation and taxation, more than any other group of Americans, they understand the difference between making $250K one year and being a millionaire and, as Ron Paul has proven, they are receptive when one explains how inflation targets cloud their future.
But when asked, instead of drawing sharp distinctions, Romney rattled on about scholarships and Pell grants and allowed the President to draw him into a discussion of whether or not he wanted Detroit to go bankrupt and, perhaps, in that moment, lost the election.
More damning for Romney were exit polls showing voters believed Obama's economic policies, more than Romney's, benefited the middle class. For all the talk that the G.O.P. must moderate, this may indicate that a return to strong economically conservative policies that can demonstrate how progressive policies crush the middle class is now needed.
An illustrative case in point is the situation of recent middle-class college grads, entering a workforce with six figure debt, but without marketable skills or decent opportunities. Conservatives can convincingly argue that government subsidies have mostly served to increase middle-class indebtedness, while enriching college administrators who, in return, do their part for Democrats. A Conservative could point out that a college education is (alongside housing), the largest investment middle-class families make, and ought be treated as such: Colleges ought have the same basic fiduciary obligations to their student/clients and responsibilities to disclose/report (eg, on historical economic outcomes of students in particular majors or who have taken particular classes or Professors) that other financial service providers have. Democrats who would oppose this would plainly be selling out middle class families. In this light, the administration's assertion that this is "very good debt to have" could have been made toxic.
Similar avenues also resonate: Recent college grad's job-prospects are particularly sensitive to entrepreneur killing over-regulation and taxation, more than any other group of Americans, they understand the difference between making $250K one year and being a millionaire and, as Ron Paul has proven, they are receptive when one explains how inflation targets cloud their future.
But when asked, instead of drawing sharp distinctions, Romney rattled on about scholarships and Pell grants and allowed the President to draw him into a discussion of whether or not he wanted Detroit to go bankrupt and, perhaps, in that moment, lost the election.
Monday, November 12, 2012
Dependency Politics
Von Hayek taught that conservative principles are the tested product of an evolutionary social process. He taught that (libertarian) policies which support this trial-and-error progress serve society best. His teachings offer hope and direction to conservatives fearful that "dependency politics" are now permanently entrenched. In the end, truth can be counted on to prevail.
Strauss taught concern with the fundamental alternative: That western culture is the product of centuries of cultivating human nature and that America is exceptional because of the unusual alignment of history and tradition with libertarian principles (and the unlikely marriage of Virtue and Democracy). The classics, according to Strauss, taught that the best regimes came into being only by chance and that history is cyclical not linear. These teachings animate conservative fears that we are close to a tipping point where the culture of too many hyphenated Americans undoes that exceptionalism.
This blog has argued: "to believe in Freedom is to see in American history ample evidence of how malleable and ever-changing "culture" can be and how people, left to their own devices, lift themselves up." It is helpful to remember that Political Conservatism was a minority view for much of the twentieth century. In the end, what Strauss suggested -- and Reagan demonstrated -- is that a Conservatism that that confidently appeals to individual dignity can never be permanently suppressed.
Strauss taught concern with the fundamental alternative: That western culture is the product of centuries of cultivating human nature and that America is exceptional because of the unusual alignment of history and tradition with libertarian principles (and the unlikely marriage of Virtue and Democracy). The classics, according to Strauss, taught that the best regimes came into being only by chance and that history is cyclical not linear. These teachings animate conservative fears that we are close to a tipping point where the culture of too many hyphenated Americans undoes that exceptionalism.
This blog has argued: "to believe in Freedom is to see in American history ample evidence of how malleable and ever-changing "culture" can be and how people, left to their own devices, lift themselves up." It is helpful to remember that Political Conservatism was a minority view for much of the twentieth century. In the end, what Strauss suggested -- and Reagan demonstrated -- is that a Conservatism that that confidently appeals to individual dignity can never be permanently suppressed.
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Political (Game) Theory
If one wanted to apply game theory to national politics, as a first pass one could roughly model it as a "board" with N "issues", each issue has 3 positions: conservative, moderate, progressive. Each position has a payoff that is a function of the opponents choices, the rest of the board, what we seem to call "branding", and the "focus" the candidate draws to that issue. Candidates have limited "focus" to spend, and how they spend it determines the election.
On immigration, for example, the conservative position is deport all illegals, the moderate position is to grant illegal immigrants extended, or permanent residency, and a "back-of-the-line" path to citizenship, but stop future illegal immigration, the progressive position would grant illegal immigrants a path to citizenship and do nothing effective to stop future illegal immigration. Romney's position "self-deportation" was understood by the electorate as, effectively, the conservative one, which was helpful in the primaries. In the general, taking the moderate position would not have cost Romney many conservative voters -- who had higher priorities -- and would have forced Obama to clarify better where he stood -- forcing him to alienate some of his own voters. While there is good reason to believe the direct payoff would have been small, there would have been indirect "branding" payoff had Obama, or other Democrats, been cornered into clearly taking the progressive position.
On abortion, Democratic politicians mostly believe abortion should be always and everywhere legal, most voters believe it should be sometimes, or in some places (=federalism) legal and many conservative Christian voters believe it should be always and everywhere illegal. The Obama campaign spent a great deal of its focus and was successful in making an issue of the conservative Christian position taken by two Senate candidates, severely impairing the Republican brand. Almost more than any other issue, this buried Romney.
Romney chose, instead, to spend his focus on Obama's partisan lack of leadership, his unwillingness reach across the aisle to get things done for America. This choice was undercut, fatally, by Sandy and Christie. While its impossible to prove one way or the other, from the polls and the post-election reactions of both candidates, the notion that Sandy/Christie turned the election is credible.
Finally, the results reflected that in spending focus on "branding", Obama helped downstream democrats. Romney's focus spent on Obama's personal failings (and his success, in contrast) offered no such help.
On immigration, for example, the conservative position is deport all illegals, the moderate position is to grant illegal immigrants extended, or permanent residency, and a "back-of-the-line" path to citizenship, but stop future illegal immigration, the progressive position would grant illegal immigrants a path to citizenship and do nothing effective to stop future illegal immigration. Romney's position "self-deportation" was understood by the electorate as, effectively, the conservative one, which was helpful in the primaries. In the general, taking the moderate position would not have cost Romney many conservative voters -- who had higher priorities -- and would have forced Obama to clarify better where he stood -- forcing him to alienate some of his own voters. While there is good reason to believe the direct payoff would have been small, there would have been indirect "branding" payoff had Obama, or other Democrats, been cornered into clearly taking the progressive position.
On abortion, Democratic politicians mostly believe abortion should be always and everywhere legal, most voters believe it should be sometimes, or in some places (=federalism) legal and many conservative Christian voters believe it should be always and everywhere illegal. The Obama campaign spent a great deal of its focus and was successful in making an issue of the conservative Christian position taken by two Senate candidates, severely impairing the Republican brand. Almost more than any other issue, this buried Romney.
Romney chose, instead, to spend his focus on Obama's partisan lack of leadership, his unwillingness reach across the aisle to get things done for America. This choice was undercut, fatally, by Sandy and Christie. While its impossible to prove one way or the other, from the polls and the post-election reactions of both candidates, the notion that Sandy/Christie turned the election is credible.
Finally, the results reflected that in spending focus on "branding", Obama helped downstream democrats. Romney's focus spent on Obama's personal failings (and his success, in contrast) offered no such help.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Decisions
Depending on one's bubble, Romney is either
neck and neck or has, basically, no chance. People are going to be bitterly shocked tonight.
Republicans' primary causes for optimism -- Obama's inability to pass the 50% threshold in many swing state polls and Romney's upward trend -- seem dampened post-Sandy. The Romney campaign's decision to sit that out, rather than have surrogates (accurately) screaming "Staten Island is as bad as New Orleans", may haunt them. This reflects the general tenor of the campaign in which the President wildly portrayed Romney as being an evil, corrupt man, and Romney, with great discipline and respect, portrayed the President as like-able enough, but, not the right choice. These strategies reflected the reality of the President's like-ability, now largely spent. Should he win, he may wish, in trying to govern, that he had sacrificed it less.
Romney supporters' last hope lies in the idea that the pollsters demographic-adjustments and likely-voter models are biased. Its certainly true that pollsters (like universities) are more concerned with fairly representing "under-represented" democratic leaning demographics than others. But the more one reads of the sophistication of Obama's turnout operation, the less likely it seems Romney is going to win the "ground game". Obama seems closer to the future, where campaigns use big-data to micro-target swayable voters and leverage affinity networks (including families) to deliver their votes.
If Obama wins the election, Tea Party voters can take heart in this: Republicans have nominated the most moderate voice in the room two elections in a row now and lost to a President from the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." In 2016, Rubio or Christie may find themselves too moderate for Republican primary voters. How does "President Cruz" roll off the tongue?
Republicans' primary causes for optimism -- Obama's inability to pass the 50% threshold in many swing state polls and Romney's upward trend -- seem dampened post-Sandy. The Romney campaign's decision to sit that out, rather than have surrogates (accurately) screaming "Staten Island is as bad as New Orleans", may haunt them. This reflects the general tenor of the campaign in which the President wildly portrayed Romney as being an evil, corrupt man, and Romney, with great discipline and respect, portrayed the President as like-able enough, but, not the right choice. These strategies reflected the reality of the President's like-ability, now largely spent. Should he win, he may wish, in trying to govern, that he had sacrificed it less.
Romney supporters' last hope lies in the idea that the pollsters demographic-adjustments and likely-voter models are biased. Its certainly true that pollsters (like universities) are more concerned with fairly representing "under-represented" democratic leaning demographics than others. But the more one reads of the sophistication of Obama's turnout operation, the less likely it seems Romney is going to win the "ground game". Obama seems closer to the future, where campaigns use big-data to micro-target swayable voters and leverage affinity networks (including families) to deliver their votes.
If Obama wins the election, Tea Party voters can take heart in this: Republicans have nominated the most moderate voice in the room two elections in a row now and lost to a President from the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." In 2016, Rubio or Christie may find themselves too moderate for Republican primary voters. How does "President Cruz" roll off the tongue?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)